“The Artist” Sings L.A.’s Praises

It’s a curious year when the Best Picture Oscar – Hollywood’s highest honor – goes to a low-budget black-and-white silent film made by a creative team from France. But Oscar host Billy Crystal pointed up an interesting irony: The Artist was the only one of the nine Best Picture nominees that was shot entirely in the city of Los Angeles. In paying tribute to the early days of the motion picture industry, The Artist also paid tribute to the city where that industry took root as it has done nowhere else in the world.

The growth of the L.A. metropolis has always been intertwined with the making of movies. Reading Cari Beauchamp’s Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood, I got a vivid picture of the dawn of L.A.’s film industry. Circa 1912-14, long before the big studios had come into being, you could find cameras cranking, men with megaphones shouting, and costumed actors emoting all over the streets of L.A. Writes Beauchamp, “Fire or police chases of any kind were fair game to be used as backdrops, as were horse races, sporting events, and parades.” In the words of Agnes de Mille, choreographer and niece of Cecil B. DeMille, “The Keystone cops would take over a street and do what they had to do before the real police arrived.”

At first the shenanigans of movie folks were barely tolerated by the upstanding citizens of L.A. Soon, however, it became clear that there was good money to be made from this new local industry, and that everyone stood to benefit. I was reminded of this fact recently while on a tour of historic L.A. landmarks. So many local buildings have become movie icons, starting with L.A.’s distinctive City Hall tower. It was destroyed on-screen in 1953’s War of the Worlds, but survived to appear as the Daily Planet headquarters in the early TV series Adventures of Superman. Sharp-eyed visitors to L.A. can also spot less obvious movie locations. My tour bus cruised down Carroll Avenue, a street of nicely-restored Victorians in an old L.A. residential neighborhood called Angelino Heights. Our guide noted that the facades of some of these houses were featured in A Nightmare on Elm Street and loomed large in Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video.

We also passed the Wilshire Blvd. Temple (1929), home congregation of most of Hollywood’s early movie moguls. Among its treasures are the Bible-themed murals commissioned by the brothers Warner and painted by studio artisans. A far less opulent place is the wood-paneled Welsh Presbyterian Church on Valencia Street in midtown L.A. It too was first built as a synagogue, but has been lovingly tended by parishioners of Welsh descent since 1925. The Welsh traditionally love to sing, and current congregants still take pride in the fact that their choir was featured on the soundtrack of How Green Was My Valley, a poignant Welsh saga that beat out Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon as the Best Picture of 1941.

With the advent of location shooting, today’s Los Angeles has far less need to be ready for its closeup. If Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese wants to show Paris, he goes to Paris. But L.A. continues to spawn unique film-industry types, like the professional seat-filler who was saluted by Billy Crystal at this year’s Oscar ceremony. Meanwhile, young guerrilla filmmakers of the Roger Corman school are still out on L.A. streets, filming crowd scenes and chases without permits. If their chaotic presence prompts a traffic accident, they’ll shoot that too. Hey! It’s show biz.

This post is dedicated to Stuart Bernstein, who encouraged me to find my voice and start this blog. Stuart is one of those rare souls born on February 29, so tomorrow is his first birthday in four years. That’s one way to stay forever young!

The Artist: Silence is Golden

For all the joy it brings, the best film of the year may be The Artist. At least, this was the movie that gave me the most personal pleasure. I regard The Artist as a splendid holiday gift, reminding me of the delights of the motion picture medium.

So old it’s new, The Artist uses tricks from cinema’s early days to tell a familiar story, one that melds the romance-between-unequals from A Star is Born to Singin’ in the Rain’s fascination with the impact of talkies on the silent film industry. Cleverly, The Artist does all this by calling upon the conventions of silent film: the actors’ broad gestures; the black-and-white cinematography; the carefully-worded title cards; the musical score that clues us in on the emotions behind the matters at hand. In its way, The Artist is saluting the whole history of film. It’s no accident that Jean Dujardin, who plays silent-movie star George Valentin, is almost a dead-ringer for Hollywood legend Gene Kelly. Though we first see Valentin emulating a Douglas Fairbanks-type swashbuckler, the expansive way he flirts with his adoring public closely parallels Kelly’s style as a similar character in Singin’ in the Rain. No surprise, then, that -- for Valentin as for Kelly’s Don Lockwood – the divide between silents and talkies is finally bridged when the dueling cavalier becomes the dancing cavalier.

In fact, famous film moments abound throughout The Artist. The increasingly strained relationship between George and his wife is wordlessly conveyed through a series of breakfast-table scenes that reminded me of Citizen Kane. Then there’s a loyal manservant, a breathless chase to the rescue, and a heroic little dog. And, yes, I’m sure there are specific references I missed, at least on first viewing. I do know that the score is a brilliant pastiche of riffs from classic films of many eras. This is a movie I definitely hope to savor more than once.

I don’t want to spoil any surprises, but two examples of Michel Hazanavicius’s filmmaking smarts linger in my mind. One is from the very beginning of the film, where we are drawn from watching the silent-movie-within-the-movie into the realization that even when off-screen these performers will not be speaking aloud. It’s a graceful segue, designed to soothe modern viewers who expect that their movie tickets will buy dialogue and noisy sound effects. Then, at the film’s dramatic climax, Hazanavicius allows an ambiguous title card to fool us into momentarily reaching the wrong conclusion. When the truth was revealed, the audience who shared the film with me let out an audible gasp, a tribute to the power of the written word to manipulate our emotions.

In fact, though this is a silent film, language can be regarded as one of its central subjects. Although The Artist has a Belgian pedigree, and its two headliners are French-speakers, an American audience can enjoy it without language barriers getting in the way. It’s proof, if proof be needed, that cinema is truly a universal language.

A final note: it’s a pleasure to see a movie that treats vintage Los Angeles with such affection. Movie palaces like the Orpheum Theatre and architectural gems like the Bradbury Building are displayed with loving care. I especially enjoyed the glimpses of Fremont Place, a once-exclusive gated community which gained notoriety in the 1950s because singer Nat “King” Cole was not white enough to take up residence. In the era depicted in The Artist, it bore no such obvious stigma, and I loved seeing it looking so ready for its closeup.