Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004) on Netflix
NR20042h 49mDocumentaryHistory
An essay film surveys how Hollywood movies have depicted Los Angeles, from its neighborhoods to the modernist homes regularly used for villains. In the 1930s the city also passed for Chicago.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb7.8/103,151 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Made almost entirely of clips from other movies and joined by narration, the essay examines how Los Angeles has been represented on screen. Hollywood's shadow, it argues, falls over the city itself, down to the habit of shortening its name. Early Hollywood used the city as a stand-in for bigger places such as Chicago, and cameras preserved immigrant enclaves that were cleared away for downtown towers in the 1960s and 1970s. The project grew out of a lecture that set out objections to L.A. Confidential, adapted from James Ellroy's novel. Screenings and shared copies carried it for years before an official release was arranged in 2014.
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself consists almost entirely of clips from other films plus narration, so it was not released commercially at first: it was seen only at screenings Andersen himself presented, at occasional American Cinematheque shows, and through copies shared by filesharing.
- Thom Andersen said the idea for the film came to him after a lecture he gave at the California Institute of the Arts, where he set out his objections to L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson's 1997 Oscar-winning neo-noir adapted from James Ellroy's novel about 1950s Los Angeles.
- Andersen's film inspired a run of video essays about how places are shown in movies, among them Vancouver Never Plays Itself from Tony Zhou's Every Frame a Painting series and Kansas Never Plays Itself by travel author Rolf Potts, who starts from The Wizard of Oz when examining how his home state was imagined on screen.
