(Oct. 24, 2009) -- LATimes.com's Steve Harvey has a nice piece on LB's moviemaking history with the silent-film era Balboa Studios at 7th/Alamitos. To view it, click here.
Switch reels to today...as Jack O'Halloran tries to create Long Beach Studios at the former LB Douglas/Boeing site at Lakewood/Conant...and is quoted in the piece to the effect that major moviemaking ended in LB because of oil.
Our view is somewhat different. By the silent era, L.A. already had multiple movie studios (while LB had only one). Some of L.A.'s were concentrated in the Hollywood/Echo Park area (among them Warner Bros/Sunset-Van Ness, Vitagraph, Keystone, Paramount, United Artists/Chaplin, Lubin/Essanay); others were in west L.A/Culver City (among them Fox, Roach, Ince, MGM and successors).
Beverly Blvd/La Cienega Blvd. was about midway between the two areas and became the center of a Thirty Mile Zone (TMZ) still used today to set movie industry pay rates for local filming. Long Beach Studios at Lakewood/Conant would be within the Thirty Mile Zone...with amenities that didn't exist in Buster Keaton's day. It would be next to the 405 freeway (major artery into WLA/SFV and (using La Cienega/La Brea) into Hollywood; next to an easy-in, easy-out Airport; a quick drive from world class LB hotels and restaurants (compared to frequent gridlock in parts of L.A.)
In our view, the Port of LB and its cargo industry interests did more to steer LB's development than oil. L.A. has oil too, from the Baldwin Hills across the Basin with working wells still in Beverly Hills.
In LB, Port interests helped install compliant politicians...who created a Port that's nominally part of the City but nearly law unto itself, governed by non-elected/non-recallable Harbor Commissioners. (That should be changed with a Charter Amendment, put on the ballot by the Council, in which voters could create elected/recallable Harbor Commissioners answerable to the public, as in Seatlle-Tacoma and Port Hueneme, CA).
When LB's priceless downtown beachfront collided with Port-desired expansion, the Port brought sprawling Pier J which killed LB's waves, diverted L.A. river flow and fouled LB water quality. Others applauded replacing LB's namesake downtown "long beach" with landfill, along with developments that blocked the sight of the ocean from downtown Ocean Blvd., produced the "Pike @ Rainbow Harbor," an Aquarium that deleted Long Beach's name and a fake roller-coaster bridge mocking the site where a world class attraction once stood.
We believe history has already begun to judge those who enabled these outcomes.
The cutting-edge Tesla Motors or game-changing Long Beach Studios would both be changes for the better...because either one could help steer LB away from the rusting, polluting, cargo fixated past that others dumped on LB decades ago...overdue for change now.
