LA Non-Confidential

Bageshree Vaze can’t stop bumping into Hollywood stars as she jaunts across Los Angeles

Come to Los Angeles. The sun shines bright, the beaches are wide and inviting, and the orange groves stretch as far as the eye can see. There are jobs aplenty, and land is cheap…you can have all this, and who knows, you can even be discovered, become a movie star, or at least see one. Life is good in Los Angeles. It’s paradise on earth. That’s what they tell you anyway, because they’re trying to sell an image.”

- ‘Sid Hudgeons,’ the character played by Danny DeVito in the 1997 film L.A. Confidential

When you think of Los Angeles, the first thing that comes to mind is the glamour and glitz of its movie industry. Sure, you’ve heard about the oranges and beaches, but Los Angeles is virtually synonymous with Hollywood, the international capital of filmmaking. While the area of Hollywood itself (located in northwestern Los Angeles) may not be the primary site of movie-making - many films are shot on location, or in Toronto or New York - Los Angeles is home to all the major American studios and movie production houses, and the concept of ‘Hollywood’ is more closely linked with Los Angeles than ‘Bollywood’ is associated with Mumbai. Tourists flock to Los Angeles more to get a glimpse of stars who are famous throughout the world, than for the sunny weather and beaches.

In the 1999 comedy Bowfinger, never-has-been movie director Bobby Bowfinger (portrayed by Steve Martin, also the film’s screenwriter) is convinced he can make an Oscar-winning film starring one of Hollywood’s biggest actors, Kit Ramsey (played by Eddie Murphy). The only problem is, Ramsey refuses to be in the picture. But in cutthroat Hollywood, that’s a minor detail, and Bowfinger succeeds in making his movie completely without Ramsey’s knowledge, by shooting outdoor sequences of the star in restaurants and shops around Los Angeles. Celebrating the idea that anything is possible in Hollywood, Bowfinger also reinforces the notion that the biggest stars in the world can be easily found in the most public of places around the city.

Before arriving in Los Angeles, I was sceptical it was quite so easy to see stars on any and every street corner, and I was convinced that anyone who had visited the city and told me they’d spotted Bruce Willis within minutes of arrival had just experienced dumb luck. But while shopping on Sunset Boulevard on my first night there, I saw someone whom I thought resembled Ethan Hawke walking past the boutique I was in. On closer look, I realised it was indeed the actor, if somewhat scruffier than in his movies. I brushed the incident off, but the next night, while in a martini bar further down the same street (Sunset Boulevard stretches throughout downtown and into the outskirts), Hawke walked in with fellow actor Vince Vaughn. As the stars took the table next to mine, I realised I was the only one gawking at them. I asked my waitress if this was a normal occurrence. Not only was it normal, she told me, but many struggling actors who worked as wait staff in Los Angeles often got breaks depending on which famous or influential person happened to be their customer.

Aptly nicknamed Tinseltown, what is commonly referred to as Los Angeles is actually Los Angeles County, comprised of 88 cities, of which Los Angeles is just one. Unlike other major metropolises, Los Angeles is linked by freeways, and the core downtown area, which includes Hollywood, is surrounded by the I-10, I-5 and the US 101. While Los Angeles has a public transportation system, it is primarily a culture of cars, and its composition of little cities linked by a web of freeways causes it to have less of a concentrated spirit than that of New York City. While four million people live in Los Angeles itself, there are almost 10 million in the entire county.

The city’s lack of cohesion has much to do with its history. Although it is a coastal city - the downtown area is located 19 km east of the Pacific Ocean - Los Angeles was not founded as a port for business like New York or San Francisco. Gabrieleño and Chumash aboriginals arrived in the desert region between 5000 and 6000 BC, but the first Europeans to visit the Los Angeles basin were the Portuguese in 1542. It was not until 1769 that there was interest to establish settlements, when the Spanish governor of California and Franciscan priest Junipero Serra stumbled upon the area in search of a place to set up Christian missions - 21 missions were founded, two of them in what would later become Greater Los Angeles. In 1781, a new town named El Pueblo de Nuestro Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio Porciùncula (the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Porciuncula River) was created, and with time the town came to be known as the Ciudad de Los Angeles (City of Angels), which evolved as a flourishing farming community. Spain ruled California until 1822 when Mexico took over the territory, but the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made California a United States territory, and the City of Los Angeles was incorporated on April 4, 1850.

Los Angeles had sketchy beginnings: the state of California fell into a depression by the mid-1850s, and it became a disorderly city of dirty streets, saloons, brothels and gambling houses. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 with service to San Francisco, which became California’s major metropolitan centre, and Los Angeles’ isolation made it an unattractive frontier. However, a line eventually reached it by 1876, and with the success of the orange-growing industry and the discovery of oil by the early 1900s, the population of Los Angeles began to rise exponentially, to that of two million by 1930. Aerospace plants were set up, and by World War Two, the aviation industry employed enough people to lift Los Angeles out of the Depression. A real estate boom brought capital into the area, which coincided with the massive surge in the motion picture industry.

While films were mostly made in the New York/New Jersey area for the first 20 years after the invention of the movie camera, Hollywood became the capital for filmmaking by 1918. At the time, films could be shot only in natural light, and Los Angeles’s 320 days of sunshine per year made it an attractive movie Mecca. The first studio was built in 1911, and by 1915, the industry employed 15,000 people, and capital investment exceeded US$ 500 million. The international popularity of Hollywood films has continued to grow throughout the 20th century and into the next millennium, and every March, the world’s eyes turn to Los Angeles when the Academy Awards for the best movies of the year are handed out. The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger – a European native but one of the most successful men in the American entertainment industry – as governor of California this past October is further testimony to the staying influence and power of Hollywood.

But apart from its movie-centrism, Los Angeles itself has evolved into a conglomerate of diverse and unique communities. East Los Angeles, a Hispanic-dominated area, is located on the edge of Downtown, and there are the African-American communities of South Central. To the west you can find the homes of the rich and famous in Bel Air, Brentwood and Beverly Hills, and to the north, the lush beachside areas of Malibu, Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica. South along the coast is Venice, and Orange County, home of Disneyland, extends to the southeast of Los Angeles County. The famous Hollywood Hills separate Los Angeles ‘proper’ from the San Fernando Valley, the northern boundary of Los Angeles County. Along with its unbeatable climate (two very important words come to mind: NO SNOW!), Los Angeles’s landscape includes mountains, lush greenery, beaches, desert country, and the nearby Pacific Ocean. Its ethnic composition is equally varied: 45 per cent of its citizens are Latino, 32 per cent are Caucasian, nine per cent are black, and almost 13 per cent are of Asian background.

Given the fact people migrate to the area for both the movie industry as well as the exceptional climate, it’s no wonder that Los Angeles boasts a vibrant and dynamic culture (and not just what you see on Baywatch). Sarala Dandekar moved to the city three years ago to find work in the film industry, and ended up purchasing property in Echo Park, an East L.A. area. “Probably half of the people you meet in Los Angeles work for the movie business, and as a result it is packed with some of the most creative, resilient people I’ve ever met,” says Dandekar. “I think the film industry rewards creative thinking in a way other corporate industries don’t, and almost everyone has some amazing talent in the arts that they practise, either on the side, or as a career. And since the work in L.A. is all freelance, it allows people to take time off for their own projects.”

As the primary residence to the stars, it’s not surprising that Los Angeles has a plethora of yoga studios, and some of the best instructors in the world (Madonna, one of the major proponents of the Indian art, portrays a Los Angeles yoga instructor in the 2000 movie The Next Best Thing). “Yoga is really in demand, and there are literally studios opening up on every corner,” says Hala Khouri, who studied yoga in India before moving to Los Angeles. “I have clients who can afford to pay me US$ 100 an hour, so I can really make a living while doing my seva.”

As a result of its freeway and car culture, some suggest there is more of a sense of community culture in the various Los Angeles cities. “There are so many worlds here - the glamourous Hollywood scene, the earthy beach scene, the funky Echo Park scene,” adds Khouri, who lives in Venice. “I feel like I have people around me who are my second family. In Los Angeles you can make any kind of life you want because it’s so diverse.”

And it hardly ever rains. All its virtues make Los Angeles seem like ‘paradise on earth,’ but with its merits come a number of drawbacks. Ethnic tensions have dated back to 1943, and 1965 saw one of America’s worst race riots in the primarily black district of Watts, when there were six days of looting and fires. South Central experienced riots in 1979, and in 1992, the famous Rodney King beatings - a reaction to white cops being acquitted for assaulting the black King - cost 51 lives and US$ 1 billion in property damage, mostly to Korean shopkeepers.

And then there are the earthquakes. While the area has not experienced any major activity since 1994, there have been predictions by various scientists that Los Angeles is a potential time bomb given its geology, even though it is difficult to predict when and how serious any activity may be. Also, Los Angeles is notorious for its smog; the natural elements of sun, heat, fog and mountains join to produce a brown haze above the city. The combination of ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’ apparently predates automobiles, when even Father Junipero Serra, remarked on the haze surrounding the Los Angeles area.

Some stars such as Russell Crowe refuse to make their homes in Los Angeles, despite the fact that they spend so much time working there. And much like the rivalry between New Delhi and Mumbai, there is a sense of competition between Los Angeles and New York City. While New York City may have cold weather and snow, its superior public transportation system and urban planning make it more attractive an American metropolis to many. “In New York, you get a clear sense of what’s happening around,” says Yannick Kassum, a student at Columbia University in New York City, who has spent a lot of time with friends in Los Angeles. “In Los Angeles, you often get the feeling that things are happening behind closed doors, and you have to know the right people and be in the right circles to know about them.”

Also, the rat race of the film industry doesn’t make for the best social scene. “I know a lot of people in their 30s who have left for San Francisco,” says Dandekar, who met her husband while on vacation in Fiji. “People in L.A. spend so much time in their cars and often work too long hours to party.”

Still, there is an energy to Los Angeles which can be infectious, and its assets make it as ideal a place to live in or visit as any other city. Stroll down the cobblestone streets of Pasadena, and you almost feel like you’re in Spain, surrounded by Spanish-style villa architecture. Go to Venice Beach to gaze at babes in bikinis (or be one yourself!) and get your belly button pierced. And if you’re a film buff, a walk along Sunset Boulevard and a glimpse of a celebrity are all the reason you need to visit this city. The surrounding palm trees provide an aura of paradise, and you can find tourists at any time of the year.

With all its luminary qualities, Los Angeles is more of a dreamland than an actual city, and you can get the sense of being in a fictitious world (no wonder it’s the home of Disneyland). As I observed Ethan Hawke and Vince Vaughn drink down martini after martini, I felt like I was in a movie myself. But when they began to flirt with a couple of scantily clad women walking by, I suddenly realised that these stars were also just men. So maybe Hollywood is all about image, an illusion promoted by its movies and persona, and less about the harsh facts of reality. But whatever the case, it’s a fantasy worth checking out.

Shopping

There are any number of trendy shopping areas in Los Angeles, depending on your budget, what you're looking for, and how far you're willing to drive (always a consideration in Los Angeles). If you want sophisticated image and designer labels, the famous Rodeo Drive (2 Rodeo Drive, 310-247-7040) is your destination, where you can choose from classic names such as Versace, Tiffany, Cartier, Ralph Lauren and Prada. Hollywood and Highland (Hollywood Boulevard, 323-960-2331) houses about 60 retail outlets including designer names, but also chain stores such as Banana Republic and Planet Funk. For names like Kenneth Cole, Nicole Miller and Dolce & Gabbana, you can stroll down Sunset Boulevard, where you'll also find vintage wear stores. For more bohemian styles and antique shops, you can check out Melrose Avenue. Most stores are open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., although many stay open until 9 p.m., and in most areas, shops are open at least in the afternoon on Sundays.

Fact File

Climate The average temperature in July is approximately 21 degrees Celsius, but smog-plagued days can see the heat rise to more than 32 degrees Celsius. In January the average temperature is around 12 degrees Celsius. While Los Angeles experiences no snow, the most temperate seasons are spring and autumn Currency The American dollar Languages Primarily English, but also Spanish in many areas Banking hours Working hours are 9-5 Monday to Friday, but some banks may close earlier National holidays They are generally the Christian holidays, such as Christmas, but also New Year’s Day (January 1), Independence Day (July 4) Labor Day (early September) and Thanksgiving Day (November)

Getting There

Located 30 km southwest of downtown, Los Angeles International Airport - commonly known by its three-letter code, LAX - is the third busiest airport in the world. Thai Airways, Malaysian Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Korean Airlines, and All Nippon Airways provide service from Mumbai via the Pacific, while Lufthansa and KLM/Northwest can take you there via Europe. Air-India flies through the Pacific, as a connector through Malaysian or Singapore Airlines

Restaurants

While they may be great places for star-gazing, a vast number of fine restaurants are also popular for their cuisine. You can get a panoramic view of the city while tasting signature seafood dishes (Maine lobster and salmon with caviar chive sauce are some dishes) at Fenix (8358 Sunset Boulevard, 323-848-6677), or try nuevo Latino cuisine at Mojo (930 Hilgard Avenue, 310-443-7820). For a nice selection of sushi, there's U-Zen (11951 Santa Monica Boulevard, 310- 477-1390), or savoury Indian food at Bombay Café (12113 Santa Monica Boulevard, 310-820-2070), where the menu changes daily. You can try eclectic Pan-Asian cuisine in a Feng Shui-designed setting at Buddha's Belly (7475 Beverly Boulevard, 323-931-8588), and for fine Chinese food, there's Empress Pavilion (988 N. Hill Street, 213-617-9898), which boasts the best Peking Duck in town. The Palms Thai (5273 Hollywood Boulevard, 323-462-5073) features not only great Thai fare, but also a Thai Elvis Presley impersonator. Paru's Indian Vegetarian Restaurant (5140 Sunset Boulevard, 323-661-7600) offers South Indian food in a garden-like setting, and you can also get great vegetarian dishes at Nyala Ethiopian Cuisine (1076 S. Fairfax Avenue, 323-936-5918). Sisley Italian Kitchen (10800 West Pico Boulevard, 310-446-3030) has a nice selection of pasta, and if you're in the mood for typical American food and live rock music, check out House of Blues (8430 Sunset Boulevard, 323-848-5100).

Nightlife

While Angelenos may work long hours on sets or in editing studios, they do manage to hit clubs, and have some of the most diverse and eclectic joints to choose from. For great Brazilian music and salsa dancing on Thursday nights, check out Zambumba (10717 Venice Boulevard, 310-841-6525). For great DJ music, Sunday nights are the best at the Temple Bar (1026 Silshire Boulevard, 310-393-6611), and Mercury (2941 Main Street, 310-396-6658) boasts the largest dance floor on the westside. The Downbeat Café (1202 N. Alvarado Street, 213-483-3955) has great Wednesday night jazz (featuring an electric ukulele!), and The West End (1301 Fifth Street, 310-313-3293) features both live rock and reggae, as well as ‘70s, ‘80s, and trance music. Formerly known as The Playroom, A.D. (836 N. Highland Avenue, 323-460-6630) has the decor of a medieval cathedral, complete with bartenders in Catholic uniforms and stained-glass windows.

Getting There

Located 30 km southwest of downtown, Los Angeles International Airport - commonly known by its three-letter code, LAX - is the third busiest airport in the world. Thai Airways, Malaysian Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Korean Airlines, and All Nippon Airways provide service from Mumbai via the Pacific, while Lufthansa and KLM/Northwest can take you there via Europe. Air-India flies through the Pacific, as a connector through Malaysian or Singapore Airlines