Remembering Kate Johnson, Visual Artist, Teacher and Editor of All My Films

Kate Johnson and Me at the 2009 premiere of “Under the Hollywood Sign”/Hope Anderson Productions

I first met Kate Johnson in 1999, shortly after I returned from Thailand with the raw footage for my first two documentaries–a suitcase full of BetaSP tapes that logged in at more than seventy hours. Documentaries are made in the editing room, and the time spent editing far exceeds the time spent shooting, writing and researching. Thus over the next sixteen years we spent countless days working side by side, and the resulting films were a collaborative effort. Weaving together interviews, footage, archival film and stills, music, sound effects and graphics is like making a giant tapestry, and Kate always kept track of the thousands of strands.

Kate edited both “Jim Thompson, Silk King” and its companion piece, “The Jim Thompson House and Art Collection.” Then came “Under the Hollywood Sign,” and its short feature, “Peg Entwistle’s Last Walk,” which I later spun off into a separate film. Our last project was the reissue of of “Jim Thompson, Silk King,” which by 2014 had to be remastered because the original software was obsolete. For the new version, I filled the gaps in the score with new music that Kate composed and performed; it complemented the Thai classical music seamlessly. I also made two new shorts as DVD extras: one on Jim Thompson’s pre-Thailand architectural career and the other on developments on his disappearance since the release of the original documentary in 2002.  

Throughout our time together, Kate was an invaluable source of ideas and guidance, providing the critical eye I needed. The fact that she was the only editor I’ve worked with says a great deal about her immense talent and range. Since she did it all, I never needed a sound editor, graphic artist or visual effects person, and only once did I use an outside composer.

In addition to editing my work and that of others, Kate was a filmmaker in her own right, and in 2015 won an Emmy for “Mia: A Dancer’s Journey.” Somehow she also found time to be a professor of Digital Media at Otis College of Art and Design, passing on her skills to a new generation of visual artists.

Because most of what I do is solitary, I found in Kate Johnson the longest and most significant working relationship of my career. My struggle to accept her passing includes the stark realization that I will never have a comparable collaboration, either in importance or duration. Brilliant and unique, she was also, for me, irreplaceable.

Under the Hollywood Sign, Ten Years On

Interviewing Anita Gordon at the Bronson Caves, November 2006. l-r: Tjardus Greidanus, Hope Anderson, Anita Gordon, Ken Pries/Hope Anderson Productions

This week marks the tenth anniversary of this blog, which I started to promote my third documentary feature film, Under the Hollywood Sign. At that point, UTHS was in post-production, and my editor Kate Johnson and I were shaping scores of interviews, around eighty hours of footage and hundreds of archival images into a cultural history of Beachwood Canyon.

Wanting to explore the film’s many topics in greater depth, I wrote about the Theosophists, film stars and oddball characters who populated the Canyon in the early 20th century. I described Beachwood’s natural beauty and wildlife, and the California holly that blooms in the hills each December. I detailed the creation of Hollywoodland, California’s oldest hillside planned community, from its granite walls, gates and stairs to its most famous features: the Hollywood Sign and Lake Hollywood.

After exhausting Beachwood Canyon’s history, I moved on to present-day matters. By then neighborhood was becoming a mecca for GPS-guided tourism, and between 2010 and 2015 the number of visitors in search of the Hollywood Sign surged. Crowds overwhelmed the narrow streets, eroded the trails and drove the wildlife back into Griffith Park. Hollywoodland’s narrow streets, tricky to navigate in the best conditions, became chaotic and frequently gridlocked. Until permit parking was instituted a couple of years ago, residents were frequently trapped in or out of their houses by vehicular and pedestrian traffic that also blocked emergency vehicles. Writing about these issues brought me a slew of hostile comments, the gist of which was our right to use your neighborhood for recreation trumps your right to live here. Long after I stopped writing about local issues, angry and even threatening letters continued to roll in.

These days I write mostly about film–not mine but other people’s. I also write about Japan, where I grew up and whose history and culture I’ve studied for most of my life. As for documentary filmmaking, I’ve stopped. I’ll explain why in my next post.

On Unexpectedly Meeting My Favorite Living Architect

The Thom Mayne House in Los Angeles/Hope Anderson Productions

I’m the opposite of star-struck, yet in the nearly 28 years I’ve lived in Los Angeles I’ve encountered celebrities without trying to, usually in the least interesting places. Dry cleaners, hardware stores and doctors’ offices are the hot spots where I’ve run into Faye Dunaway, William Macy, Jeff Goldblum and Tracey Ullman. I’ve gone to dog training school with Henry Winkler and chatted with John Malkovich as we walked around Windsor Square, our former neighborhood. Recently I exchanged pleasantries with Gustavo Dudamel at the counter of my favorite pizza place while pretending not to know who he was. Though most of these people were nice, Winkler and Malkovich especially, until Sunday the only celebrity who ever thrilled me was Joni Mitchell, who once passed me on a sidewalk in Beverly Hills and was never seen again.

On Sunday my architect friend Steven Corley Randel was visiting me from Palm Springs. We had listened to KCRW’s “DNA” and been intrigued by the segment on the new house that Thom Mayne designed for himself and his wife, so we decided to drive over and take a look. (Though its location was given on the show, I won’t repeat it here.) After seeing what we could of the house from outside the fence, we stood on the sidewalk and talked about it. A man pulled up in a car and got out, at which point we realized it was the architect and homeowner himself. Steve and I introduced ourselves, complimented the design and were soon taking an exclusive tour. I still don’t know why Thom Mayne let us into his home, or why he spent half an hour showing us around, but he couldn’t have been more gracious.

Though I loved the house and said so, I couldn’t bring myself tell Mayne how much his architecture has meant to me. Before he won the Pritzker Prize and designed major projects for the Federal government, Caltrans and other big clients, he designed 72 Market Street, a restaurant in Venice I discovered as a visitor to Los Angeles in the late 80’s. Though the restaurant closed long ago and I have no memories of the food, I still remember the architecture: a soaring, modern space of great beauty and power. I also remember how I felt each time I was there: transformed into my best self.

Mayne also designed two other restaurants that I frequented after I moved to town: Kate Mantilini and Angeli, both of which have closed in recent years. Angeli was where my son grew up; we started eating there when he was five and went regularly for the next twenty years. Like Mayne’s other restaurants, Angeli remained fresh and modern looking throughout its lifetime, and was as attractive in daylight as it was at night. Nothing about the design detracted from the food; on the contrary, it enhanced it.

Great architecture elevates everyone and everything it touches, which is why Thom Mayne’s work is celebrated. I’ll never forget meeting him and seeing his house, and I’m grateful and still more than a little amazed that it happened.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Died Here

1443 N. Hayworth Avenue/Hope Anderson Productions

Several years ago I met a man who lived at the bizarrely named Chateau Alto Nido, an old apartment building on Ivar Avenue in Hollywood. Though the Alto Nido (“High Nest” in Spanish, presumably because Le Haut Nid was too hard to pronounce) has seen better days, its fame is undiminished: it’s where the doomed screenwriter Joe Gillis lived in “Sunset Boulevard.” Its sign and Spanish Colonial enormity are immortalized in the film’s establishing shots.

When I visited the Alto Nido, hummingbirds were flying in and out of the windows, the only charming touch in a dwelling that seemed to be both an abandoned DIY renovation and the lair of a mid-level hoarder. The place was on the Franklin side and thus not Gillis’s Ivar side apartment; still, I enjoyed its proximity to hallowed cinematic ground. That is, until the man said, “Guess who died here?–the guy who wrote The Great Gatsby.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, but he was serious.

“Yeah, right here,” he insisted, pointing to an alcove.

I knew this couldn’t be true: if F. Scott Fitzgerald had keeled over at the Alto Nido, someone would have written about it, and no one had. Also, I was pretty sure the location was off the Sunset Strip. As far as the Alto Nido man’s delusions were concerned, this turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. I got out fast.

The following year I met a normal-seeming man who lived in an old building on Hayworth Avenue in West Hollywood. Much to my relief, his apartment showed no signs of chaos or hoarding; in fact, it was clean and neat. My first visit went well until he said, “You want to see where F. Scott Fitzgerald died?”

Please don’t say “in my apartment,” I thought fervently.

He pointed to a building up the street. “It’s that one.”

And people say Los Angeles isn’t literary.

He was right about the location, of course. He’d even read Fitzgerald, though not much as I had. But that’s beside the point, which is: what are the chances of my meeting two completely different men in consecutive years whose hook was Fitzgerald’s death spot?

Both men are long gone from my life, mercifully, but I still wonder about it.

Related Post:https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/f-scott-fitzgerald-lived-and-wrote-here/

F. Scott Fitzgerald Lived (and Wrote) Here

The F. Scott Fitzgerald House in St. Paul, MN/Photos by Hope Anderson Productions

While visiting the Twin Cities for a wedding over Labor Day weekend, I squeezed in some sightseeing. One of my destinations was the F. Scott Fitzgerald house on St. Paul’s Summit Avenue, a street notable for its grand Victorian houses and large lots. Though Summit is St. Paul’s Millionaire’s Row, the houses on it include apartment buildings, at least one former boarding house, and row houses, including Fitzgerald’s. Always keenly aware of money and social standing, he referred to his family’s house as “a house below the average on a street above the average,” though it is attractive and substantial. Rented by Fitzgerald’s parents while he was at Princeton, it was the home Fitzgerald returned to after leaving college for the Army and a stint in advertising in New York City. In 1919, he wrote This Side of Paradise, his first novel, in his bedroom, taking cigarette breaks on the balcony because he wasn’t allowed to smoke indoors. When This Side of Paradise was accepted for publication, Fitzgerald ran up and down Summit Avenue, spreading the good news to drivers of passing cars.

Today the Fitzgerald House is on the National Register of Historic Places. (It’s also for sale: $625,000 for 4 bedrooms, 2 baths and 2 half-baths.) As I gazed at it, I was struck by the contrast between the place where Fitzgerald’s career began and the nondescript West Hollywood apartment house where it ended only two decades later. Between those residences were a great many other Fitzgerald residences, including the estate on Long Island where he wroteThe Great Gatsby, apartments in Paris and Rome, a villa in the South of France, and a grand hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, near the sanitorium where his wife Zelda was institutionalized.

As he moved from house to house, Fitzgerald’s career soared and foundered. At the start the Depression in 1929, Fitzgerald’s short story rate at the Saturday Evening Post was $4,000–$40,000 in today’s dollars. He spent as fast as he earned, however, and by 1937 he was laboring in Hollywood as an unsuccessful, albeit highly paid, screenwriter. In 1940, while writing his comeback novel, The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald was felled by his third heart attack in the ground floor apartment of the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, his last companion. He was only forty-four but had lived in more houses than most centenarians.

Next time: F. Scott Fitzgerald Died Here

Sources: Matthew J. Bruccoli: “A Brief Life of Fitzgerald,” 1994.
“F. Scott Fitzgerald Walking Tour of St. Paul, MN” http://wcaudle.com/fscotwlk.htm

All About Jim Thompson (In Print and on Video)

Jim Thompson in the Living Room of his Bangkok House, circa 1967/Courtesy Jim Thompson Thai Silk Company

A while ago I was interviewed by Martine Azoulai for her excellent article in Vanity Fair France on Jim Thompson, the subject of my first two documentaries. You can read it here: http://www.hopeandersonproductions.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/CO_JimThompson.pdf

If you’d like learn about this fascinating American in English, both “Jim Thompson, Silk King” and “The Jim Thompson House and Art Collection” are available on DVD on my website http://www.hopeandersonproductions.com/dvds/
“Jim Thompson, Silk King” is also available as a digital download http://www.hopeandersonproductions.com/downloads/

Related articles:

https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/jim-thompsons-life-after-death/
https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2015/07/29/jim-thompson-silk-king-newly-remastered-with-dvd-extras-is-for-sale/

Two Cinematic Tours of Los Angeles: “Knight of Cups” and “City of Gold”

At the Stahl House in “Knight of Cups”

Downtown Los Angeles in “City of Gold”

Since the early 20th century, Los Angeles has been the city that outsiders have loved to hate, usually based on fleeting touristic impressions. But no matter what the haters say, indignant reactions from the home crowd are few and far between. There are two reasons for this: 1) Angelenos don’t care what outsiders think of Los Angeles. 2) The last thing Angelenos want for people to move here, so all deterrents are welcome.

In L.A.-bashing, as in most matters, context is crucial. When Woody Allen wrote that L.A.’s “only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light,” he was a non-driving visitor to Beverly Hills and the Sunset Strip. How could he know about either local culture or driving? And when David Bowie said, “The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the Earth,” he was referring to his near-fatal cocaine abuse in Los Angeles. (Never mind that his addiction began years earlier, in London.) Ironically, Bowie spent a fair amount of time in Los Angeles over the course of his long career, making movies, collecting awards, appearing on talk shows and recording one of his best albums, “Station to Station,” in Hollywood. Yet he clung to the opinions he formed while high in the back of limos and darkened hotel rooms.

I was thinking about all of this as I watched the new Terrence Malick film, “Knight of Cups.” The plot, such as it is, concerns Rick (Christian Bale), an improbably attractive screenwriter who meanders around Los Angeles (with side trips to Death Valley and Las Vegas), his mind veering back and forth in time. Rick covers a lot of miles, yet he never writes a word. In fact, the closest he comes to working is meeting up with his agents, twice at CAA (Century City) and once at (I think) the Warner Bros. back lot (Burbank). But who has time for writing when there are so many women to recall? Apart from Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, most of Rick’s paramours are young models who wear filmy dresses (or less) and extremely high heels. (FYI, Terrence Malick: real L.A. women favor pants and shoes they can walk in.)

Fortunately, the places in the movie are decidedly real. Even the most over-the-top party (hosted by Antonio Banderas, though for me the highlight was the appearance of Joe Lo Truglio) takes place in well-known location: a massive Versailles-like mansion in Beverly Hills. Rick goes downtown (Broadway, the Bonaventure, etc), to the beach (constantly), to LACMA (Mid-Wilshire) and the Huntington Gardens (San Marino). He lives in a well-known industrial-looking apartment (the Gallery Lofts in Marina Del Rey), although I’m pretty sure that no one has seen a naked woman in six-inch heels talking on the phone on the balcony. Among the many visual highs are a twilight photo shoot at the Stahl House (Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22), gorgeous shots of Venice and PCH, and footage of the L.A. River and the tracks at Union Station. In short, it’s a film is by Emanuel Lubeski, with tiny amounts of dialogue and large amounts of voiceover written by Malick.

As the film washed over me, I was surprised at how many of the locations I had visited, not only architectural gems like the Broadway Theaters, the Stahl House and the Annenberg Beach House but a street in Hancock Park three blocks from where I used to live. For outsiders, “Knight of Cups” is a dream-like look at a great swath of Los Angeles–at least the rich, white, show biz side of it. But for those of us who live here, it’s much more: a trippy, deluxe home movie shot by three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer.

Coincidentally, I saw “Knight of Cups” on the same weekend as “City of Gold,” the new documentary about the Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold. Like the Malick film, “City of Gold” provides a beautiful, in-depth tour of Los Angeles, though a less rarefied one–e.g., no naked women in towering designer shoes and many ordinary people, all of whom have jobs. Gold is a native Angeleno whose knowledge of L.A. is profound and inclusive. Intrepid and expert in most of the world’s cuisines, he takes us to a wide variety of notable restaurants, two of which happen to be food trucks. The wonderful street scenes in “City of Gold” show the real Los Angeles: a multi-racial, multi-cultural vibrant megacity. The documentary also contains this truth: Los Angeles is beyond the grasp of those who, in Gold’s words, “come for a couple of weeks, stay in a hotel in Beverly Hills, take in what they can get to within ten minutes in their rented car and [then] explain to you what Los Angeles is.”

Paper Houses: On Writing About Japanese Architecture

The Teahouse and Garden of the Nezu Museum/Hope Anderson Productions

Inside Kengo Kuma’s Nezu Museum in Tokyo/Hope Anderson Productions

Although I started Under the Hollywood Sign to write about film, both the ones I’ve made and those I admire, from time to time I’ve written about architecture, particularly that of Los Angeles as seen in “Blade Runner,” “500 Days of Summer” and “Mad Men.” Recently I finished a novel whose protagonists are both architects. And this month I’ve been writing about Japanese architecture for the online design magazine HOUZZ (www.houzz.com).

Although I have no formal training in architecture, I’ve been studying it my entire adult life. I also had the good fortune to grow up in an architecturally significant mid-century house in Tokyo. Designed by the French-Czech architect Antonin Raymond, the house was a hybrid, a mostly western-style house that contained such Japanese features as a genkan (step-up entryway) a tokonoma (display alcove) and tsuboniwa (courtyard gardens). It was the only house I knew and I loved every inch of it, but it didn’t belong to my family. After we left Japan, it was torn down and replaced by an apartment building, which was later torn down and replaced by a much larger apartment building that obliterated what remained of the garden. Today the only reminder of my childhood home is its driveway. Yet the house lives on in my mind, indelible though it was demolished forty years ago.

During our years in Tokyo, my family made biannual visits to the United States. Each time someone would ask me, “Do you live in a paper house?” No matter how strenuously I said no, that person would insist, “we learned it in school–Japanese houses are made of wood and paper.” Somehow shoji, the wood and paper room dividers of traditional Japanese houses, were interpreted as structural materials to generations of American children.

While it’s been a long time since anyone has asked me whether I lived in a paper house, today I’m constantly confronted by “zen.” Used in English to describe anything even vaguely Japanese or minimalist, the term is as wrong as it is ubiquitous. Zen is an esoteric sect of Buddhism, and its use beyond specific temples and gardens is as discordant as “Jewish” and “Christian” would be if they were used to describe architecture and interior design.

Of course I realize the odds against my stopping the misuse of Zen. But in writing about real Japanese architecture–as opposed to “japanese-y” architecture–I can at least try.

Links to my first two articles for HOUZZ:

12 Elements of the Traditional Japanese Home

East Meets West in 3 Modern Japanese Homes

Other writing on architecture:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/BLADE-RUNNER–FOUR-ESSAYS?keyword=BLADE+RUNNER%3A+FOUR+ESSAYS&store=ebook
https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/500-days-of-summer-and-its-real-star-downtown-los-angeles/
https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/the-jet-set-house-frank-sinatras-glass-hideaway-in-chatsworth/https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/marie-russak-hotchenor-and-moorcrest-the-theosophist-opera-singer-and-her-architectural-fantasia/

“Jim Thompson, Silk King,” Newly Remastered with DVD Extras, Is For Sale

“Jim Thompson, Silk King”/Copyright 2015 Hope Anderson Productions

It was my first film, the culmination of years of planning and research as well as my reason for becoming a documentary filmmaker. “Jim Thompson, Silk King” is the story of an American architect-turned military officer who found himself in Thailand at the end of World War II and stayed. Within four years, he made an industry out of Thai Silk, transforming a local handicraft into an international success that lifted 10,000 or so impoverished weavers into prosperity. At the same time, he put Southeast Asian art on the world map by amassing a superb collection of sculpture, paintings, bronzes and china. A few years later, he rescued Thai vernacular architecture from extinction by designing a landmark house in the Bankrua section of Bangkok. (Today the Jim Thompson House is a museum, the second-most visited tourist destination in the Thai capital.) Thompson’s two decades of non-stop achievement in Thailand ended abruptly in 1967, when he vanished without a trace while walking in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. It’s an unsolved mystery that remains potent and troubling nearly fifty years later.

The 2015 edition of “Jim Thompson, Silk King” has new music and narration as well as two new DVD extras, one about Jim Thompson’s pre-war architecture in America and the other about my experiences since finishing the original version in 2001. Also included is my 2004 interview with his friend Catherine Bodenstein, a conversation that sheds considerable light on his disappearance.

To order the DVD, please go to http://hopeandersonproductions.com/?page_id=3361

Imagine A Great City: Gabriel Kahane’s Los Angeles

Gabriel Kahane

During the 1990’s, I was a board member of the Junior Arts Center (now Barnsdall Arts), an organization formed to provide art education to Los Angeles children after art classes were all but dropped from the LAUSD curriculum in the 70’s. At the JAC, all classes were taught by working artists and, because we raised money to pay them, fees were kept low. The children produced very good work that we tried to reward, holding an annual exhibition in Barnsdall Park and giving prizes. To raise awareness of children’s art, we partnered with one of the billboard companies on a project called “Imagine a Great City.” Children entered drawings on the theme of Los Angeles, and the winners were displayed on billboards during February, a slow month in the industry. The program ran for a few years in the early 90’s. Despite the ubiquity of the downtown skyline, LAPD helicopters and palm trees in many of the submissions, it was a success.

“Imagine a Great City” came back to me when I was given a copy of Gabriel Kahane’s new Los Angeles-themed album, “The Ambassador.” Kahane is a classically trained composer and virtuoso musician, but his music contains rock, soul, blues and Broadway references. His lyrics are equally beautiful and complex, as poetic as any by Joni Mitchell.

Each song on “The Ambassador” concerns a Los Angeles building, either commercial or residential or, in the case of the “Mildred Pierce”-themed “Veda,” imaginary, and through these addresses Kahane tells the story of modern Los Angeles. Kahane’s subject matter includes modernist architecture (“Villains”), “Blade Runner” (“Bradbury”), the novels of Raymond Chandler (“Musso and Frank”), and Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination (“Ambassador Hotel). In the album’s most ambitious composition, “Empire Liquor Mart,” Kahane tells the life story of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, whose 1991 murder at the hands of Korean store owner Soon Da Ju was a catalyst for the 1992 riots. He begins with the shooting, from Harlins’ point of view:

The lady in the fishing vest
Has dropped the gun
Who wears a fishing vest
When they’re working at a liquor store?

I float up to the corner
Just above the ice cream  And the frozen food.
I perch beside the surveillance
Camera…

He then traces the Harlins family’s move west from St. Louis, revealing the devastating loss of Latasha’s mother and uncle in separate shootings, before returning to Harlins’ murder.

Nobody reads from the Book of Job
At the church where me and my grandma go.
Nobody sees the trouble I know
But I know that trouble’s gonna find me.

So when I say that my un-
timely death was
Something certain,

What I mean is
That these tragedies
Are a kind of family tradition.

The album concludes with another masterpiece, “Union Station,” which considers manifest destiny, apocalypse and the tragedy of leaving LA:

When the pilasters slplit to admit the sea,
The hands of the clock will be covered in verdigris
I’ll swim to the train and I’ll find my seat
And hazard a smile at anyone who looks at me.

When the Alkali flats with their cracks pass by,
Think of the color wheel, think of the Western sky:
Distant city with a distant glow,
The hall of the lost has let me go.

This is songwriting of the highest order, incisive and deeply felt. The fact Kahane doesn’t even live here (although born in Los Angeles, he grew up in Northern California and lives in New York) says something too: that the tired La-la Land cliches have finally fallen away. Gabriel Kahane is appearing tonight at the Fonda, opening for the Punch Brothers, and I’m looking forward to his performance.

Related article: https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/the-lessons-of-429-how-the-la-riots-transformed-the-korean-american-community/