Finding My Way Back: In which I Embark on my Quest to Rediscover, Recreate and Relive the Wonderland of Classic Los Angeles

 When the lights go down and the screen crackles to life, a surreal stillness overcomes me. I'm lost. I've entered the dream within and beyond the screen, in an alternate dimension of bygone beauty, like Norma Desmond cloistered in her palace of faded memories and distant dreams, a glamourous Hollywood version of Miss Havisham. 

No, there's nothing quite as wonderful or sensationally spectacular as the classic confections produced by the Hollywood Dream Factories in the "Golden Age"of cinema and Old Hollywood, from the early meteoric rise of the motion picture industry in the 1920s, through the middle decades of the 20th century, roughly from the 30s through the 60s. Unless, of course it's one of the other gorgeously gilded fabrications of that Golden Epoch of international cultural production in general that I will call the mid-century modern era.

This was a pivotal period of creative activity, not just in the movies, but in myriad media forms, from literature to visual art, from fashion to architecture, when incredible aesthetic and intellectual creations abounded in an assortment of shapes, sizes, characters and quality, but all of it - the pulp, the cream and everything in between - was infused with the same magical delight in decoration and symbolic spectacle, imaginary exoticism and an ineffible sense of charm, elegence and style. 

And while the mid-century modern era was defined by more than its aesthetic artifacts, they are what defined the age at the time of their conception and for the generations that have followed, as they were the outgrowth and embodied expressions of the profoundly provacative political, social and intellectual environment and events of the era. The kaleidoscopic carnival of styles - art deco, art nouveau, surrealism, psychedelia, beat, bohemian, googie, coffeeshop kitsch, mod, new wave, streamline moderne, populuxe, tiki tropical, renaissance, gothic and colonial revival, noir, ashcan and hardboiled, pop and op and so much more - that coalesced in the mid-century modern pop-culture pastiche influenced the fashions, fads, consumer confections, public amusements and popular preoccupations, social conventions, recreations and the like that comprised the wonderland of mid-century modern lifestyle. And those in turn were incarnations of the social currents, cultural movements, intellectual proclivities, and historical events that percolated throughout the epoch.

And oh, what an intoxicatingly beautiful cultural collage they created, depicting a time when jet-set parties lasted all night in skyscraper luxury penthouses, when speakeasys, seances, jazzy cabarets and smoky bohemian night clubs were all part of the social scene alongside family picnics and roadtrips down route 66. When coffee shops had naugahyde seats and paper cups, when cigarettes were an accessory as characteristically quintessential as your shade of lipstick or style of motorcyle. When bakelite made glamourous decorations and useful kitchenware, when cadillacs, vespas and vincent black shadows roamed the open road and mysterious figures in trenchcoats lurked in the inky corners of the urban jungle. When cowboys, detectives, gangsters and pressmen, vamps, show girls, secretaries and housewives all lived together in gloriously dischordant harmony.

True, this is an imaginary, popularly perpetuated, nostalgic vision of the wonderland of mid-century modern culture - a selective, historically inaccurate, idiosyncratic fabrication culled from the distorted delicacies, synesthetic artifacts and ingeneous images that were produced throughout the period and afterward by the self-serving, myth-making popular media. But it's alway difficult to judge the character of a civilization just by its remnants. It's akin to assuming the Romans were nothing but a bunch of debauched decadents based on the scandalous evidence of the murals left at their pleasure villas (not all of them were like that...). But, even if it is a skewed, nostalgic notion of that place in time, resembling only in its basic contours and in its impact on the behaviour of the contemporary public, the realities of life during the mid-twentieth century, it's an incredibly enticing image. Indeed, the version of Classic Modern life I (and I know many others) so love to recall may merely be a fabricated fantasy, but it’s an incredibly seductive one that satisfies my craving for beauty, romance, elegance and spectacle.

That Classic Modern style was most spectacularly and affectively captured in moving pictures. Films have an especially profound connection with their cultural and temporal contexts. They incarnate, animate and amplify our fantasies and fears, our desires and delights (illicit and otherwise), distilling them to their essential elements and then projecting them in the kind of grandiose, larger than life proportions that are the hallmark of Hollywood, especially in its grandly glamourous Golden Age. They are also stories, delightfully distorted, intriguingly intensified, and fabulously fabricated (enough aliteration yet?) visions of a time, a state of mind, a style of living and thinking that defined the cultural context and aesthetic atmosphere - the zeitgeist, or Spirit of the Age, if you will - that animated the multifarious material, social, cultural and psychological environments of the period in which they emerged. They were more than mirrors of their age; they were its products and its producers, interpreting, reconfiguring, distorting and intensifying the world around them through their fantastical stories and characters. The profundity of their influence can't be denied. The images they evoke are so vivid, so immersive, so alluring, they connect directly to the heart and the imagination.

Classic cinema and the Classic Hollywood milieu it derived from were both indelibly connected to the city that cultivated the motion picture industry and its pop-culture carnivalesque environment. Classic Los Angeles, the Empire of Illusions, was itself a manufacture of the Hollywood Dream Factories, as well as a piece of their marvelous machinery, extending and enlarging it into an entire wonderland of mid-century modern culture, Classic Los Angeles style.

My passionate affinity for the Golden Age of modern style, especially in its Classic Los Angeles, Old Hollywood incarnation was, I think, cosmically ordained. The stars aligned on June 1^st 1987, the auspicious day of my birth. Exactly 61 years earlier, one of the most glamorous icons of Classic style was also born that day. Me and Marilyn Monroe, we two women of the world, are inextricably linked by the astrological fates. I contend that her spirit has possessed my soul from the beginning, literally. (But hopefully my end won’t be quite as traumatic and controversial).

Indeed, I have been blessed and cursed with the malady of nostalgic romanticism, which I believe is the product of my particular upbringing (including my notable origins). With a middle name like Greer (A.K.A. Greer Garson), there wasn’t much hope of me avoiding becoming a classic movie cinephile. Add to this fatal concoction an upbringing by two incurably nostalgic dreamers of years gone by (there is a reason, after all, that my parents named me and my sister Jacquie Fay - as in Fay Wray of King Kong fame- after classic Hollywood starlets) and you've got a recipe for a time-travelling hopless romantic. They were responsible for instilling in me their passion for the fantasy world of classic cinema and the fabricated mid-century modern culture it evokes. 

I received an early education in all things classic modern, pop culture vintage and retro glamour from the considerable archives of popular media - film, literature, comic books, music, pop culture ephemera and so forth – art and artifacts my parents have collected and which now comprise the contents of their personal time capsules, which we like to call "Wayback Rooms." A Wayback Room is a sacred space of nostalgic delight where one can visit their favourite imaginary visions of bygogne eras and distant wonderlands that may or may not have existed in whole or in part, that you may remember from your own halcyon past, or which you've only been a part of in spirit, including the era of classic modern style and living. Not only physical, but also mental spaces, Wayback rooms are magical gateways to distant dimensions that provide us the Way Back to our favourite fables of a more beautiful, classic world.

Like my parents, I also have a Wayback Room adorned with my own collections of nostalgic talismans for which I've scavenged, accompanied by my mother and father, in the heaps of tarnished treasures at garage sales, antique and flea markets, used book stores, thrift shops and even my grandmother's basement.

We're also media scavengers with an insatiable craving for images and stories to animate our make-believe worlds of classic culture. When we watch our favourite films, indulge our fantasies with literature, art and pulpy ephemera, steep ourselves in musical landscapes or embark on our treasure hunts we are always motivated by the same things: our eccentric (and delightful) notions of a bygone imaginary era, our appreciation for the beauty, charm, quality and ineffable style that infuses all the vestiges of that classic lifestyle and our lament for the chronic lack of beauty, spectacle, craftsmanship and wonder in contemporary North American culture. These days (I sound as though I’m a decrepit old codger) the public seems to have lost its sense of aesthetic value, appreciation for ingenious design and concern for presentation and display that characterized social practices and cultural environments of times gone by, and especially in the classic era of mid-century modern style when making pretty pictures was of paramount importance in all endeavours, whether you were baking a cake or putting your hat on to go downtown. We no longer possess that self-conscious pride of production or stylistic sensibility. Our aesthetic environments and our every day lives are poorer for it. 

I have tried many methods of finding my Way Back to the classic lifestyle of mid-century modern era. Not only have I collected my own trove of nostalgic treasures for my cabinet of classic curiosities, I have even earned a degree in nostalgia, so to speak. My bachelor’s degree in history is not entirely useless, as it has made me a consummate researcher and collector of the stories and images of bygone eras, peoples and places. When researching and admiring are not enough, I'm also a passionate creator of my own fantastical images via the wonderful world of the film industry. Yes, I'm another one of those aspiring filmmakers with grandiose dreams. But my dreams aren't of fame and fortune (although those would be nice too); rather I dream of building inter-dimensional gateways onto imaginary worlds and times through the immersive art of production design. Meanwhile, I relax by steeping my senses in classic cinema and related forms of popular media (literature, comic books, music, sundry ephemera, etc., etc.), the iconic stories, characters and images of which are perfectly picturesque distillations of the essential contours and spirit of the classic mid-century modern era.

Sadly, you can only go so far constrained by the boundaries of projections, print and distant recordings. And frankly, I'm tired of chasing nostalgic dreams through vicarious encounters and faded fantasy fabrications. The time has come for a pilgrimage to my spiritual homeland, the Mecca of mid-century modern culture and the epicentre of Hollywood Dreamland. In short, I have determined to embark on an odyssey to Classic Los Angeles.

From the establishment of the Hollywood film colony and the first studios through Hollywood’s halcyon decades in the mid-twentieth century, the motion picture industry experienced a Golden Era. The multi-coloured, many-flavoured confections produced by the Hollywood Dream Factories during this period achieved an epitome of style and spectacle and possessed an uncanny ability to process and project the fantasies and fears of its audiences in the most seductive celluloid packaging. Responding to increasing public demands for more means of escape from the grindingly desolate realities of the period – the Great Depression, Prohibition, World Wars, regional wars, social upheaval, threats of nuclear destruction and so on – cinematic production reached a zenith, meanwhile Hollywood refined the film form, perfected its adaptations of archetypal genres, stories and characters and even gave birth to its own movie mythology.

Of course, with such a prolific output, the quality of the pictures produced could vary widely, but whether a piece of b-grade schlock or a classic masterpiece, all shared an ineffable sense of charm and elegance, a romantic spirit of adventure and melodrama, an alluring blend of mystery, sensuality and spectacular glamour coalesced and came to epitomize the Classic style, not only on screen, but off as well. Because the icons of Hollywood's Golden Era - the stars and their entourages, the entertainment elite, the notorious characters that manufactured and distributed the Dream Factories' precious commodities - were not isolated idols living their fantastical lifestyles in some imaginary other world; rather they were fabulously refined and elaborated renditions of the cultural, social and material context from which they emerged and on which they had a profound reciprocal influence far beyond the shadow of the Hollywood sign.

During Hollywood's Golden Era the modern metropolis of Los Angeles came under the influence of the motion picture industry with which it was and still is virtually synonymous. Not only does Classic describe the cinematic illusions Hollywood was churning out, it is also a perfect adjective for Los Angeles' particular incarnation of the mid-century modern style that shone in every facet of its social, cultural and material environment. 

Classic Los Angeles was a carnavelesque pop-culture collage, a grandiose amusement park of mid-century modern culture, where the shapes that defined the period's style were a little bolder, the colours a little more vibrant, the sounds a bit grander and the words that evoked it a bit sharper, all thanks to the unique impact of the motion picture industry at its urban heart.

Show business shaped every facet of life in Classic Los Angeles (and still does today). Its population included a significant proportion of show business elite – celebrities, media moguls, entertainment entrepreneurs and a healthy contingent of aspiring artists, performers and intellectuals whose penchant for showmanship, production, drama, spectacle and glamour dictated their stylistic tendencies when it came to fashioning their empires, i.e. their properties, possessions and lifestyles. Furthermore, they had the financial resources, the eccentric audacity and ability to attract creative geniuses to work for them so that they could live their lives (and die their deaths) in a grander fashion than would be possible for most average folk.

When they constructed and embellished their movie palaces, night clubs, and social venues; their studios, cultural centres and recreational facilities; their sanctum sanctorums and subsidiary businesses, they did so with the same aesthetic sensibilities with which they would approach the contrivance of a movie set: interpreting, distilling, reconfiguring, blending and elaborating multitudinous cultural forms and flights of stylized fancy. They even employed movie set designers to manifest their visions. The result is a cityscape built up to theatrically baroque proportions that showcased the most elegant and the most gaudy of modern design. The actual use of Los Angeles as a set piece for Hollywood contrivances of exotic culture and distant places also had a significant hand in shaping the urban landscape, while the illusory depictions of Los Angeles' urban reality via stylized cinematic stories that featured the city as itself had a profound impact on the public imagination and perspectives of the fabled City of Angels.

A similar penchant for spectacle and glamour informed the selection of wardrobes and accessories, modes of transportation, social activities, entertainments (both public and private) and the accoutrements of daily life amongst the notorious and general population of Classic Los Angeles. The best, worst, beautiful, bizarre and all that was quintessentially - classically - Modern style was on display on the bodies, in the activities and in the environments surrounding the diverse population of native and immigrant Angelenos. There was definitely a high ratio of the latter. Dreamers, avante garde outsiders, aspiring artists and seekers of fame and fortune from every background, all drawn to the Golden Promise of Los Angeles' sunny streets.

Along with the resident celebrity class, they were caricatures of the kaleidoscopic, often contradictory cultural environment of the mid-century modern era. And as icons of a time and a style, tastemakers for the fashionable followers across the country and around the world, they acted out their lives with an acute awareness that they were ever under the watchful eye of the entertainment media, the tabloids and fan mags, the gossip mongers and camera girls that evolved into their own media industry just by scavenging off the lives of their notorious subjects. Their depictions of Los Angeles culture and lifestyle embellished all the glamorous and scandalous, fascinating and sensational details of the population's private and public performances and presented marvelous magnifications of already fabulous realities, designed for the delight and vicarious pleasure of the popular masses. The pictures they painted in gaudy boldface type and lurid colours provide some of the most scintillating, if sensationalized, portraits of a fantastical place and time.

I’m not naïve. I understand that the Classic Hollywood version of Los Angeles has faded and been distorted by the constant ebb and flow of time. The Golden Era has been tarnished beneath the sediments of memory and the grandiose illusions of the city that were once projected onto Hollywood's silver screens have become legends without direct connections to reality. But the city has a memory. The vestiges of Classic Los Angeles are still there, engrained in the social, cultural and material fabric of the city - and alive in the hearts, minds and daily lives of its current inhabitants. 

The fabulous buildings, memorial monuments and auspicious streets still stand as signposts leading to a far away dreamland of modern style. You can walk through their corridors and down their long stretches, poke through their mysterious corners, smell the phantom scents wafting through the air, hear the distant music playing in another dimension, while you feel the lives and hear the stories engrained in their foundations. Artifacts of old Hollywood culture and Classic Los Angeles life, tangible and intangible, are hidden in abundance among the cacophony of contemporary culture, like treasures waiting to be discovered behind every doorway, in every museum, on the racks of every thrift store and in the piles of every flea market.

But Los Angeles is more than a ghost town filled with the phantoms of Hollywood's halcyon years. The Classic Los Angeles spirit lives on in the contemporary city where the vital stories, personal experiences and the passionate recovery efforts of kindred nostalgic souls preserve that iconic vintage version of  Los Angeles lifestyle I so long to resurrect, recreate and relive personally.

I have, therefore, determined that my pilgrimage to Los Angeles must be more than your average superficial tourist excursion. Through an act of self-conscious inter-dimensional travel, I will find my Way Back to Classic Los Angeles. Thus, I intend to embark on my career as an Existential Production Designer. The perameters of this profession are as follows:
1) Utilize the stories and images of classic film, literature, art, popular media and cultural production in general as a prototypical/archetypal guide to recreate and project myself into the iconic illusions of the Mid-century Modern Golden Era as they were manifest in the actual urban environment of movie-made Classic Los Angeles.
2)Play the roles of the iconic characters who populated both the fictions and the realities of Mid-century Modern life in Los Angeles by:
a) Donning the costumes,
b) Seeking out the sensations,
c) Partaking of the experiences and
d) Generally immersing myself in the vestigial essence and atmosphere of Classic Los Angeles, all within the remnants of the authentic built and natural environments that defined the era. I will thereby consciously absorb the history and spirit of Classic Los Angeles through my pores.
3) I will embark on a mission of pop-cultural archeology, a scavenger hunt into the soul of Classic Los Angeles by:
a) Seeking out the memories, stories and wisdom of living Angelenos and
b) Delving for buried treasure among the rubble of local flea markets, antique outlets, retro-outfitters, yard and garage sales if the opportunity arises and vintage shops.
Thus, I will collect an array of artifacts to cherish in my personal Way Back Room  in order not only to preserve the experience of this particular odyssey, but to provide me access to that fabled wonderland of Classic Los Angeles even from the cloister of home.
And, finally if you choose to go along for the ride,
4) I will in the process put the full spectrum of Classic Los Angeles life within the reach of your imagination.

Each day I - along with my nostalgic romantic of a time-travelling mother, who will be equally engaged in this mission - will visit one of the eccentricly enticing neighbourhoods that make up the modern Los Angeles metropolis. Each enclave has a very unique character having evolved from a particular interaction with the motion picture industry, the activities of its elite oligarchy and the contours of the collective socio-cultural environment it cultivated. To properly experience the subtle nuances and appreciate the rich Golden Era history embedded in its contemporary incarnations, one must remain within the boundaries of each unique community and partake of their individual experiences and attractions without diverting attention to other equally eccentric areas. After all, when sampling wonderful wines, you don't mix them all together in one flask; you savour each one separately and allow a moment to cleanse the palette before trying another.

Another crucial part of my travel manifesto is that, whenever possible, walking should be the primary form of transportation. Only when you’re walking do you truly appreciate your surroundings. Only then can you feel the asphalt beneath your feet and absorb the history through the soles of your shoes. When you’re walking you can travel of your own accord, making your path along whatever course you choose, taking detours on a whim (like the hidden, tram-era staircases tucked into the nooks and crannies all around Los Angeles) and discovering wonderful hidden delights in the process. You’re also moving slowly enough to really absorb your environment. You can stop at any time to savour a particular sight or sensation, to mingle with the locals or to discover some unexpected treasure. This is also another reason why remaining within one neighbourhood at a time is practical, as you would otherwise require more efficient forms of transportation and sometimes (often) "efficiency" is a dirty word. Of course I want to sample a variety of transportation methods that characterize the authentic Los Angeles life and iconic Classic style, including buses and metros, a picturesque boat ride in legendary echo park and a mythical journey through the Hollywood Hills on horse back. Alas, I have neither the license nor the money to rent a car, otherwise I would certainly rent a fabulous sea-foam green 50s Cadillac or a Dean-esque Porsche Spider to drive in style along the coast. Los Angeles was built to be driven at the height of the American automobile craze, but that will have to wait for another time.

With my trusty camera in hand, I will record my adventures, the artifacts I excavate and the locals I encounter and I will share it all with you in this epic travelogue along with the details of my daily exploits and the observations I collect in the process. So, follow me on my 12-day quest to create my personal version of Classic Movie-Made Los Angeles.

One caveat before we depart: This journey must ultimately be an entirely idiosyncratic, selective experience of what I think is the best, most fascinating and delightful of what I was able to recover and restore given the constraints of time, personal ignorance and availability I will have to contend with. I’m well aware that my odyssey into Classic Los Angeles will not and cannot be entirely complete or authentic, and that my Way Back will not be the one that everyone would take, but there is simply too much to do, to see, to experience in too little time and my genius for Existential Production Design can only do so much when the raw materials are particularly faded.

Whether or not I’m able to recreate the wonderland of Classic Los Angeles in its entirety or with perfect authenticity is not the point of this mission. Rather, it's the journey itself, the conscious act of seeking and exploring and the unexpected treasures and wisdom I discover along the way that are ultimately the most enriching and magical parts of the quest, not the achievement of some end goal. The Holy Grail, so to speak, is always just beyond our grasp. That's as it should be, so that we always have a reason to embark on another journey. And I can assure you, when this odyssey is over, I will already be planning the next excursion. and be looking for novel ways to find my Way Back.

*** This as but the first portion of an epic journey into the heart of Classic Los Angeles (and many other Classic Destinations around the world, eventually - I'm working on it) that will span a series of interconnected journeys. My Grand Tour will take me through many layers of time and space as I make my Way Back to Mid-Century Modern Wonderland, but this blog will remain the focal point of those wanderings, providing a continuous record of my search. (And I promise, I'll be making my corrsepondence from the road much more succinct. I'll be too preoccupied looking at and touching everything to spend too much time on the computer, I assure you). ***