Starting Line

Bumpy Road ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Sylvia Townsend
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
The World ◽  
Waiting For Godot ◽  
History Of ◽  
Movie Star ◽  
Road Movies ◽  
Line P

In this chapter, which details pre-production, the eccentric, socialite producer Michael Laughlin, married to movie star Leslie Caron, hires cerebral hippy director Monte Hellman to make Two-Lane Blacktop, written by television actor/director Will Corry. Hellman has acquired a small cult following for his films for Roger Corman, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind.Hellman’s friend, actor Martin Landau, recalls Hellman had run a theater in Los Angeles, where he directed a production of Waiting for Godot. Cult author Rudy Wurlitzer writes a jazzy, existentialist script about two young hot rodders adrift in the world who race a fancy guy across country west to east. Wurlitzer models the character of the Girl on Hellman’s girlfriend, Laurie Bird. The chapter includes a history of hot rodding, and a history of road movies, and details how Two-Lane largely ignores road-movie conventions.

scholarly journals Razabilly Boogie

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas F. Centino
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Primary Producers ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Los Angeles is the home to one of the largest and most vibrant scenes for rockabilly enthusiasts in the world. Since the turn of this century, the Los Angeles rockabilly scene has transformed to meet the desires of the Chicana/os and Latina/os who now make up the scene’s primary producers and consumers. Drawing on their own cultural genealogies, Los Angeles Chicana/os and Latina/os have not only claimed the scene for themselves, but have also rewrote themselves into the history of Los Angeles, and rewrote Los Angeles into the history of rock & roll.

From Bahianas to the King of Pop …

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cross
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Line ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Brazilian Music ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bossa Nova ◽  
The City

This chapter traces the history of Brazilian music in Los Angeles, covering the journey of the collation of rhythms known as samba into the rest of the Americas, to the emergence of bossa nova as a major cultural force, to the post-bossa Brazilian sound in the United States. It argues that as music moves, it operates according to its own logic. Influences are fluid: a bossa nova rhythm can morph easily into a second line, a two step can slide into a samba, and writing music is, thankfully, a far more interesting way to write history than history writing. But it is undeniable that, since the late 1930s, the language, swing, and palette of Brazilian music have influenced the world and changed music in the city of Los Angeles profoundly, while very few of us noticed.

Blue and Green

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott L. Cummings
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Global Supply Chain ◽  
Truck Drivers ◽  
Long Beach ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Environmental Groups ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This book is about the struggle over the future of work and the environment on the edge of the global economy. It traces the history of conflict in an industry that is not widely known, but sits at the epicentre for the global supply chain: short-haul trucking responsible for moving the mass of imports from enormous cargo ships to warehouses and retailers around the country. The book’s specific focus is on the largest and most important campaign at the nation’s largest and most important port complex, which straddles the border of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. Over nearly two decades, labor and environmental groups—bound together in a pivotal “blue-green” alliance—carried forward a monumental campaign to transform working conditions for drivers and environmental conditions for communities. At bottom, the book tells a story of the unceasing resolve of courageous people seeking to make lives better for some of the most marginalized members of society: immigrant truck drivers barely scrapping by as they deliver goods to be sold by some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world; residents of neighbourhoods whose poverty consigns them to inhale the noxious residue of global trade. How law serves as a tool in their struggle is the book’s central question.

Going for the Burn: Medical Preparedness in Early Cold War America

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-53
Author(s):  
Susan E. Lederer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Atomic Weapons ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Billy Graham ◽  
History Of

On September 23, 1949, President Harry Truman announced that the Soviet Union had successfully detonated an atomic bomb. The news that the Soviet Union had done this came as little surprise to a number of American scientists and to some members of the intelligence community who had predicted that the Soviets would quickly acquire this advanced weapons technology. But for many Americans this news was disturbing. Truman’s announcement was taken up by, among others, a young Baptist evangelist named Billy Graham. Opening a tent revival in Los Angeles just two days after the President’s report, Graham preached how the news of the Soviet bomb test had “startled the world” and launched an “arms race unprecedented in the history of the world.” President Truman, he informed his listeners, said that we “must be prepared for any eventuality at any hour….” Perhaps even more ominously he asked the crowd, “Do you know the area that is marked out for the enemy’s first atomic bomb? New York! Secondly, Chicago; and thirdly, the city of Los Angeles!” It was not only evangelical preachers who foresaw catastrophic implications from a growing arsenal of atomic weapons.

Hard-Boiled Hollywood

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Real Thing ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Movie Star ◽  
Marilyn Monroe ◽  
The Many ◽  
Second World

The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn Monroe, the studio era’s last real movie star, discovered dead at her home in August 1962. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood’s awkward adolescence during which the company town’s many competing subcultures -- celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients – came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War.

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