In high school, he’d made a short mockumentary about a spectacularly endowed porn star he dubbed Dirk Diggler. The Valley was (and still is) the adult-film capital of America, and Anderson had grown up imagining what went on in the anonymous industrial buildings he’d ridden by on his bike as a kid. The film took us back to the 1970s and ’80s, revealing the hidden world of professional porn. With Boogie Nights, his second feature, the Valley had found its 27-year-old cinematic muse. “Even though it wasn’t the Valley, just the way it looked kind of bleached out and f-ed-up, it looked ugly.” “When I saw Altman’s Short Cuts I thought, ‘That looks like where I live,’ ” he says. A decade later, in 1993, he caught a movie that would leave an even deeper impression. He was 12, and he thought it was the coolest thing to finally see his own backyard on film, and to watch it in the Sherman Oaks Galleria, where parts of it were shot. The first movie Anderson remembers seeing that reflected where he lived was Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Then, in the early ’80s, it achieved a dubious national identity-like, totally-as the birthplace of Valspeak, the habitat of vapid teenage girls whose sentences climaxed in querulous question marks. At best, the Valley was a footnote in the Hollywood lexicon, a sunbaked suburban afterthought. But these images never jibed with the L.A. The iconic signifiers-palm trees, the Hollywood sign, the Venice boardwalk, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre-are known worldwide. From Double Indemnity to Down and Out in Beverly Hills, from Boyz N the Hood to Blade Runner, Hollywood has always turned its cameras on itself, for reasons both practical and narcissistic. movies, the images have always come from the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains. After he first saw John Boorman’s Point Blank, he was so obsessed with it he scoured the city to check out all the locations Boorman used. Wherever Anderson goes, his Los Angeles is haunted by cinematic ghosts: Every time he gets off the 101 freeway at Vine, he thinks of the apartment William Holden lived in in Sunset Boulevard. A passionate cinephile who always keeps an old movie running on TCM in his office, he knows that Huston shot The Red Badge of Courage in the nearby hills. John Huston, whose The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of his favorite films, had an estate just a stone’s throw from where Anderson now lives. In such films as Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love-all set in his beloved Valley-and in his latest, Inherent Vice, set in L.A.’s South Bay, Anderson leads us down side streets we’ve never taken, arriving at destinations where we’ve never been.Īnderson, 44, lives atop a hill in a sprawling 1940 ranch-style home with Maya Rudolph and their four kids, but before we head up there, he wants to show me the former home of one of his idols. We think we know it, but it takes an artist to help us see it anew. Los Angeles, of course, has been the backdrop of thousands of movies since the silent era. There are filmmakers whose work is inextricably linked with a locale-Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese are inseparable from New York, Nebraska is owned by Alexander Payne, Federico Fellini transformed our vision of Rome.
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