Lovely write-up, Doug. I especially like the experiential contrast between the Morris and Anderson screenings. I love the mention of Nava's "El Norte", which is in my top ten list of favorite movies of all time. Most recently "Wassup Rockers" and "Quinceneara" (especially) provided a focus on one of your city's patchworks: the Latino neighborhoods. "Quinceneara", in its stern eye on gentrification, aptly portrayed the death throes of neighborhoods in flux and transformation.

And I admire that you live in Los Angeles without a car!! I live in San Francisco without a car. The value of this is underscored each time I'm given a lift and taken away from the rich diversity of the streets into the homogenized expediency of the freeways.

Thanks, Michael. One correction: I lived in Los Angeles without car, but I do currently have one. ;)

Thanks for your title recommendations; someone else just mentioned Quinceneara to me as well, and I've been kicking myself for having missed its recent free screening at the Los Angeles Film Festival. I'll keep an eye out for it.

For great Los Angeles locations during the 70's (this includes a bunch of the now-demolished, classic googie and art deco clubs, diners and bars), as well as cringe-inducing LA styles of dress and slang (rich and poor) check out the recently released 'Rockford Files' dvds! James Garner plays Rockford as a blend of the John Wayne and Dean Martin characters from 'Rio Bravo' and does it as well as both of them. As a bonus, Sopranos creator David Chase was one of the main writing/plotting minds on the show.
Oh, and Rockford makes living in a trailor look cool.
Cooler than Eminem did, anyway.

Hey, Doug--Very nice post!
And an interesting contrast.

Good detective work on unearthing the narration for the Andersen film! Didn't realize it was available on-line.

Oh, and let me link to the interesting essay Andersen wrote in Cinema-Scope as a sort of update after he made the film.

Doug: I almost stood up and cheered too when I read your account of that double feature and the audience reaction when Andersen's film began. Nice essay! I've seen Los Angeles Plays Itself twice, once in L.A.-- excuse me, Los Angeles-- and once in San Francisco, and I thought that some of Andersen's notions might be greeted with a little less reverence in the Bay Area. (I guess I was expecting some sort of manifestation of the Dodgers-Giants rivalry or something!) But the film was greeted with as much enthusiasm as it was when I saw it here, and with a measurable decrease in that knowing laughter that even a film like this engenders in an audience of "insiders," the insiders here being not industry hotshots but anyone who's lived in this city for any number of years. And you're right-- it badly needs a DVD release, but considering the way the film was pieced together-- without regard to rights issues for the over 200 clips Andersen uses-- it would be a miracle indeed if it ever found its way into general distribution.

Thanks, too, to Girish, for that link.

Well, Hollywood studios should help Mr Andersen on the copyright issues. LAPIS is love letter to this usually misunderstood city. I saw the film two years ago and, as time goes by, Mr Andersen film grows inside me. It's an instant classic from this lovely cinephile' subgenre, film-essays-about-film.

Thanks, everyone, for your comments. Yeah Girish, I like the Cinema Scope article and Andersen's comments on Lynch and Mann.

The screenings I've attended of the film here in Los Angeles have indeed been pretty boisterous, with lots of laughter and extended Q&A's: Andersen usually attends and is the quintessential laidback Angeleno, who generally seems more inclined to let the film speak for itself. And he's undoubtedly tired of fielding "Why didn't you include film X?" questions, which tend to dominate post-screening discussions.

The good news is that he has mentioned more than once that he's entertaining the notion of writing a book on the subject...let's keep our fingers crossed.

When I first saw the film, now two years ago, Andersen sounded optimistic about an eventual DVD release, saying that the various key studio players who would have to okay such a release had seen and liked the film. Perhaps the situation has drastically changed?

As someone who has little affection or real interest in LA, I went reluctantly to see the large art exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris of Los Angeles (1955-1985) and was pleasantly surprised by the vast range of imaginative works on display. This was another revelatory side of LA, a city done to death by the movies.

I visited the Cinematheque Ontario last April, and James Quandt told me how surprised he was at the multicultural richness of Los Angeles when he recently visited here on a trip. He said he met some of the most knowledgeable and passionate cinephiles (of course, I believed he hobnobbed with the folks at UCLA Archive), which wasn't at all what he had expected.