Book Reviewed: Location Filming in Los Angeles by Karie Bible

Filming in Los Angeles For more than one hundred years, the Los Angeles area has been shaped and reshaped to accommodate filmmakers' visions. It has played everything, the old South, Africa, Switzerland, Rome, ancient Greece, the Middle East, and even outer space. The location images in this book capture a time, a place, and a culture. The book is by no means comprehensive, but it presents a survey of the filming locations from the 1910s through the mid-1970s. This is the result of a runaway production in Hollywood and greater Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce enticed filmmakers with sunshine that promised 350 days of sun. Film pioneers like Thomas Ince and David Wark Griffith found LA the best location. Griffith filmed his 1915 The Birth of a Nation at his studio on Sunset Boulevard and on location in the Hollywood area. In 1925, after a wasteful stint in Italy, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer brought its multimillion-dollar Ben Hur to Los Angeles and recreated Rome on a vacant lot at the intersection of Venice Boulevard and Brice Road (now La Cienega Boulevard). The show-stopping chariot race was one of many epic scenes staged by creative filmmakers in the Los Angeles basin. There are numerous black and white pictures of some of most successful movies of the golden age and early Hollywood. You get to see film locations around downtown, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Malibu, Long Beach, Culver City, and Beverly Hills. The pictures are absolutely adorable and bring back the glory of the old studio era and its efforts to become a major industry in entertainment. This book is a must have for anyone interested in the history of Hollywood.