The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles
✒️ Author: Gary Krist |. 📖 Published: 2018 | 🗓 Read: April 19, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 432
Summary
Little more than a century ago, the southern coast of California was sleepy semi-desert farmland. Then, as if overnight, one of the world's largest and most iconic cities emerged. At the heart of the seemingly impossible, meteoric rise of Los Angeles were the visions of three ingenious but deeply flawed people. William Mulholland, an immigrant ditch-digger turned self-taught engineer, designed the massive aqueduct that would make urban life possible in this water-starved corner of the country. D.W. Griffith, who virtually invented the basic grammar of moviemaking, would give Los Angeles the industry it needed to grow. And Aimee Semple McPherson, a young evangelist, faith healer, and radio preacher, would provide the city with its identity as a worldwide center for spiritual realization and reinvention.
They were all masters of their craft--and each would self-destruct in spectacular fashion.
Why You Should Read
The history of Los Angeles is fascinating. Aimee Semple McPherson’s story alone could be the entire book.
Notable Highlights
The pivotal period from 1900 to 1930 would witness, most notably, the realization of one of the largest and most controversial public works projects in history, second in magnitude only to the Panama Canal at the time; the invention of an entirely new form of entertainment—and of a new kind of industry to produce and sell it; and the flowering of a seductive urban ethos—arguably the birth of the whole idea of a “lifestyle”—based on utopian notions of leisure, physical wellness, and spiritual fulfillment.
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Every city can be regarded as an artificial construct, an audacious projection of human will, imagination, and vanity onto the natural landscape; but none was more artificial—or more audacious—than this one.
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William Mulholland (the engineer) was L.A.’s fabled water czar, whose wildly ambitious vision of a 233-mile aqueduct brought water to the desert and allowed the city to grow far beyond its natural capacity to support urban life.
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David Wark Griffith (the artist) was the seminal film director of the silent era, the man who almost single-handedly transformed the motion picture from a vaudeville-house novelty into a major creative (and fabulously lucrative) industry, important enough to help build a city.
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Aimee Semple McPherson (the evangelist) was the charismatic faith healer and pioneering radio preacher who, courting both scandal and fanatical devotion, founded her own religion and cemented southern California’s reputation as a national hub for seekers of unorthodox spirituality and self-realization. “Alas, my code of ethics fell before the onslaught of Capital,” Bosworth admitted. “The prostitution of art began then. I was the first to fall.”
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That bland entry notwithstanding, Bosworth had actually just made cinema history. In the Sultan’s Power is now regarded as one of the first narrative films to be shot entirely in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It would not be the last.
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Movies remained a pastime of the inner-city working class—often immigrants who couldn’t afford a ticket to the legitimate theater and for whom silent films presented no language barrier.
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So-called respectable people didn’t go to see them, and movies soon became the target of sanctimonious reformers eager to point out the moral and even medical harm they caused, especially to impressionable children susceptible to the movies’ alleged glorification of sex, crime, and violence. Even stage actors and playwrights—not very high on the respectability scale themselves—were reluctant to enter the new field, applying for work at film studios only when financial desperation set in.
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Bitzer, a rather pudgy, cigar-chewing problem-solver, grabbed a nearby laundry cardboard and wrote down all the parts of the story that would have to be dramatized, putting each under one of five categories: “Heart Interest, Drama, Danger, Comedy, and Rescue.” Griffith never mentioned this episode in his autobiography, but it’s hard not to think of it as a seminal moment in cinema history. Bitzer was outlining for the future Father of Film the five basic elements of visual storytelling that would inform every movie he was to make.
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“Now Griffith was able to express thought visually. He had also destroyed for all time the idea that a shot and a scene were synonymous. The shot was now the basic film unit, and a scene…might consist of an unlimited number of shots.”
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The emphasis was always on Los Angeles as an atypical urban bastion of solid “American” (i.e., white, second-generation northern European) values.
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