In the 1920s, a decade in which the film industry rose to prominence and sound began to appear in theaters across the nation, four major motion pictures were set in Los Angeles, California. You read that right, four. In an era when seemingly countless films take place along the coastline of Southern California, the thought that only four would take place there, particularly in the formative years of the industry, a time when on-location shooting in exotic places was far less feasible, seems inconceivable. Los Angeles, though, was chosen not for its distinctive features, but rather for its indistinctiveness. The ocean, forests, mountains, and deserts all within a two-hour drive from the city offered stand-ins for a variety of settings, and cinematic pioneers were enthralled with Southern California’s sound reached the screen, however, film began to demonstrate its ability to document, celebrate, and criticize its center. Early efforts focused on the industry itself. Such films included What Price Hollywood? 1932 and It Happened in Hollywood 1937, both of which centered on stories of success in motion pictures and the dreams of a new generation who grew up with the medium. These films aside, though, the overwhelming majority of movies were still set outside of the entertainment capital of the world, and the thought that an independently Californian or Angeleno tradition of storytelling could arise seemed implausible in the 1930s. Then came film was the first truly Southern Californian genre of literature and cinema, having been forged on the streets of an evolving city by novelists and popular fiction authors. More than a set of crime stories about detectives and dalliances, noir represented a unique manner of viewing Los Angeles and its society, one defined by an exposure of corruption, both moral and political, and yet also by a celebration of an inherent, inalterable humanity set in even the coldest hearts. Austrian-born writer-director Billy Wilder, an immigrant to Southern California, was the first to harness noir in the context of his adopted home. Double Indemnity 1944 was revolutionary in many senses, but perhaps it is the film’s placement of Los Angeles at its center which was most impactful. In one of the first major motion pictures to depict the lives of Angelenos unaffiliated with the entertainment industry, Wilder explored human nature and interrogated universal The Big Sleep 1946, Bogart and Bacall brought Los Angeles-based noir even further into the mainstream. Just as New England had transcendentalism in the 19th Century, and New York had its litany of literary movements, Southern California now had a unique movement of its own. At the dawn of the 1950s, Billy Wilder returned to noir to combine the nascent form of Southern Californian narrative fiction with what he called “A Hollywood Story,” writing and directing the transformational masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard 1950. Sunset Boulevard combined the Hollywood-centered stories of the early sound era with the noir tradition and provided a simultaneously cynical and hopeful statement about cinema and its production during the age of the monopolistic studios. Provocative as it was, Sunset Boulevard was one of the most influential products of the camera turning inward on Los the city changed, so did its depiction in cinema. The development of new suburban communities in the Los Angeles area in the 1950s paralleled suburbanization across America, and was most powerfully given screen time in a film which documented the experiences of an emerging group in American society, adolescents. Rebel Without a Cause 1955 imagined Los Angeles in an entirely new way, picturing a city whose residents were unique by virtue of their residency and a place where new identities, such as that of the teenager, were being forged. Los Angeles was made iconic in films like Rebel Without a Cause. Sites from Griffith Observatory to Santa Monica were given starring roles, and with these roles came a recognition of the beauty and serenity of Southern one could learn by watching a pillar of film’s most recent style of depicting Los Angeles, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 2019, the industry went through a tremendous transformation in the 1960s, and the noir conventions of depicting Los Angeles which predominated decades earlier were replaced by a current of Los Angeles-centered filmmaking which resembled the manner in which Rebel Without a Cause depicted a story enhanced by, but not necessarily about, the city. The Graduate 1967 is undoubtedly the most influential example of film enriched by its setting, but one which tells a story separate from the entertainment industry or other Southern California institutions. Furthermore, The Graduate succeeded in further enshrining Los Angeles as a national ideal and icon through its own iconic return to film noir, though, would be the next transformation in the way in which Los Angeles was depicted in film. Chinatown 1974 was the ignition point for a wave of neo-noir which arose out of the post-Watergate and Vietnam War climate, but again centered in Los Angeles. Chinatown is a story which self-identifies in setting and tone with the films noir of earlier decades, but it also brought a fresh characterization of Los Angeles by highlighting its ethnic diversity and immigrant communities, albeit in a truly disappointing concluding line which sees the Anglo-American leads depart the eponymous Chinatown after determining themselves strangers there. Neo-noir would continue to feature Los Angeles prominently, and from Blade Runner 1982 to Confidential 1997, the city was redefined and reimagined in past and future settings, some foregrounding the entertainment industry, others the diverse population of Southern California set outside of tension between films about the industry and films about the city continues to this day. In the 1990s, Los Angeles began to be a setting for new genres of film, particularly for romance film. Story 1991 is an early entry in this tradition, and films such as 500 Days of Summer 2009 and Crazy, Stupid, Love 2011 are heirs to it. One of the most profound innovations in cinema set in Los Angeles came with Boyz n the Hood 1991, which put South Central Los Angeles on film for a wide audience. John Singleton’s work had a tremendous cultural impact and inspired African-American filmmakers to document and narrate their experiences in film. Similarly, the independent film Real Women Have Curves 2002, was an essential depiction of the Hispanic experience in East Los Angeles, and helped to launch stories about minority communities across Southern concurrent to the increasing number of films documenting minority experiences were innovations by a new generation of directors. Pulp Fiction 1994 is certainly worthy of mention in this regard, as is Mulholland Drive 2001, a truly innovative film which drew on both the noir tradition and the long history of films about Hollywood. Independent films like Real Women Have Curves allowed young filmmakers to document Los Angeles as it never had been before, and social media provided a platform for a new generation of media personalities to move to Los Angeles and adopt the city, which many influencers are doing the 2010s dawned, a new interest in the revival of Classic Hollywood on film through nostalgia and stories set in the 20th Century produced some of the most influential films of the decade. The Artist 2011 became the first black-and-white film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture since Billy Wilder’s The Apartment 1960, and depicted a similar struggle in adapting to the sound era to the one Sunset Boulevard had put on screen sixty years prior. The fact that The Artist was a silent film was even more nostalgically compelling and the industry’s image from the Golden Age of Hollywood was reaccessed and placed back on screens across America. La La Land 2016 was the next entry in this romanticization and revival of classical filmmaking. The film is unique in that it is set in the present day and shoots Los Angeles in one of the most beautiful and compelling ways it has ever been depicted. The film rekindled a dreaming passion for Los Angeles, and yet is undeniably a film about Hollywood as much as one about the city most recent entrant into this trend of Los Angeles nostalgia is of course Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which takes on a different cinematic period as its subject and yet continues the tradition of the The Artist and films like the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar 2016 in portraying the film industry at different periods in its history through the medium of fictional characters. Amidst the nostalgia-driven Hollywood retrospectives of the 2010s, however, there have also been numerous films of all genres, from intense dramas to romantic comedies, set in Los Angeles. More films were set in the city in the year 2010 than in the entirety of the 1920s, proving how much the city has developed, evolved, and taken center stage in its own art form in the past importance of that central place Los Angeles and Southern California occupy in film is precisely because of the fact that Los Angeles is the center of cinema. Art made about the place where art is made is fascinating and compelling in a unique way, and when the camera turned on Los Angeles beginning earnestly in the 1940s with film noir, the world, and more importantly Angelenos themselves, gained a better understanding of the unique character of Southern California. When films began to be produced on this most beautiful part of the Pacific Coast, there was not much of a city to accompany them. In the past century, a city and an identity have emerged, and people from Santa Barbara to San Diego identify with a uniquely Southern Californian ethos. That this ethos is reflected in the art form which is so uniquely Southern Californian is essential, and to those of us who call the region home, profoundly gratifying.