The Decline of L.A. Film Production--and Hollywood's Mystique With It

Looking at the place of film in contemporary culture few would deny that it is less central than it was a few decades ago in what some call "the age of movies," all as Hollywood would seem to have lost something of its romance, something of its glamour. Certainly part of this has been the advent of television and its implications, from the decline of the "theatrical experience," to the collapse of the old studio system "dream factories" with their larger-than-life bosses and "last tycoon" underlings and their More Stars Than in the Heavens and the whole world-within-a-world they seemed to constitute. (Just ask yourself this: can you picture any filmmaker of today doing with the Hollywood of a quarter of a century earlier--the Hollywood of 2000 A.D.--what the great Billy Wilder did with the then-quarter-of-a-century-older Hollywood of Sunset Boulevard? I doubt even the most stubborn contrarian out there would actually try to argue on behalf of a "Yes" answer--while considering this it seems no coincidence that even the makers of new movies about Hollywood are drawn to that earlier period, as Damien Chazelle clearly was in his tale of silent-era Hollywood of a couple of years ago, Babylon.)

That romance and glamour didn't all vanish at once, and indeed hasn't vanished completely even now. (Thus do some still argue over whether the movie star still exists, properly speaking--as many find some amusement in playing "armchair movie executive.") Still, the trend has long been clear, and it can seem to me that other developments have added to it--not least, the decline of Hollywood as a place, and one might add, the romance of that place's location. The idea that this magical world-within-a-world overspread some forty square miles or so of golden Southern California when "California" and "Los Angeles" had been names to conjure with in a way less the case today--that here was where it all happened, with the bosses having their offices here, and the movies shot on the studio lots, and the stars and everyone else involved living and working and playing here--seems to have added to its fascination, with even darker or more satirical portraits of the place (like Nathanael West's Day of the Locust or B.P. Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?) paying tribute to that fascination in their way. In recent decades, with production venturing to places like Vancouver or Atlanta to exploit ill-conceived corporate welfare schemes that in rather on the nose fashion underline just how much politics is "Showbusiness for ugly people," that sense of American filmmaking as in some way an enchanted world of its own is going--and if that is a small thing next to the livelihoods upended as many workers in the field find themselves forced to relocate if they are to go on working in their jobs at all, and a deindustrialized Southland suffers yet another blow to its economy, it still remains the case that this dispersal is also taking another part of the industry's long-fading glamour, most likely for good.