Something I've been working on

Finally finished. Watch it in "high quality" for the full effect. I learned so much editing this.

Famous LA commuters II

On the one hand, many of these stars' homes from the fascinating Image-Archeology.com are quite modest by today's standards. Shirley Temple's, especially, looks remarkably pedestrian -- by the standards of the nicer parts of Los Angeles, that is. And that's fitting, because I realized as I looked at the postcards that these movie stars were just commuters. They lived in L.A. because that's where their industry was based and where their jobs were. Most of the Golden Age stars were essentially employees of the studios, and that's where they worked. Though some shooting took place on location, most of it was on soundstages and backlots.

The other thing that makes these homes seem somewhat prosaic is that the geographically absurd blend of architectural styles (though some houses, like Temple's, are quite at home in L.A.) was not exclusive to movie stars' residences. People all over Southern California have homes that belong in Europe or Connecticut or the Antebellum South. Yet I have to wonder how much that tradition stems from the local industry of make-believe. Perhaps the most striking of these homes is Cary Grant's Santa Monica beach house, an English country cottage jutting aggressively onto pure sand next to the Pacific. It looks like a movie set, destined to be buried in the sands of time. (Grant, born Archibald Alexander Leach in Bristol, England, came home one day at age 9 to find his mother gone and was told she had gone to a seaside resort, a cover for the fact that she was in a mental institution.)

But it's the form of the images, not the content, that tells us something about the people who created and bought them, and about their time. Postcards are souvenirs. They tell a friend or relative something about the place one is visiting. Today, you might take a digital photo and upload it to your Flickr account while still in L.A. But when these were created -- generally speaking, the mid-20th century -- mass-produced images of stars' homes were prettified. The cheery hand coloring flattens these pictures like storybook illustrations. Poor Jimmy Stewart's house, the only one reproduced in a conventional photo, looks quite sad alongside the rest: dead leaves on the lawn, trees that could use a trim, the beating sun of an (August? September?) L.A. noon. Compared to the rest, this shot is candid. Postcards portrayed stars' homes the way movie magazines and the classic studio photographers portrayed the stars themselves, in an idealized light. While they may have been more like commuting workers, the stars in those days didn't have to endure the base assault of the paparazzi and gossip-mongers the way they do now.

Which brings us to what's missing from these digital artifacts of an analog age: the addresses. What I'd like them for is to find out how many of these homes are still there. That would be easily accomplished with Google Maps Street View; in fact, this collection of postcards is something like a vintage Street View. Those well-fed photo editors at the GooglePlex don't hand-color the pictures that their monstrous-looking Priuses robotically snap and transmit, but they do now blur out human figures accidentally caught in the frame, for legal reasons. Both views are timeless in their absence of human life, but both vividly convey the surrounding human world that created them.

Famous LA commuters

Considering it's been 18 days since my last post, I guess I've been slacking. One of the many things I've been doing all this time will soon produce something I can show you. But in the meantime, a circuitous journey through the World Wide Web via my telephone and my computing machine has taken me from silent comedy star Ben Turpin (birthday yesterday) to the strangely contemporary-looking gaze of Charlie Chaplin (center) to vintage postcards of movie stars' homes. (Followed, like the tip of an ice-plant-berg, by a bunch of other vintage LA pictures, which would lead me down a whole other path.) On the one hand, it's appalling that there were actual postcards of these people's houses. But on the other hand, I'm glad these were made because they're a perfect mesh of time, subject, and medium. More on this later.

Quick take: Stop-Loss

Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce's drama about soldiers being re-deployed to Iraq after multiple tours of duty, is about a very worthy and serious subject. The problem is, it never really moves beyond being about that. I wanted to care about the characters and their individual predicaments, but too often I was distracted by obvious issue-y speeches. On the positive side, I admire Peirce and co-writer Mark Richard for managing to criticize the war without either idealizing or condemning the troops. That must not have been easy. And I liked the rare inclusion of a young, attractive woman as a friend of the male protagonist, with no sexual tension. The performances also are generally strong. But most of the time, Stop-Loss felt like an exceptionally sophisticated TV movie-of-the-week.