City of Illusion: Los Angeles In The Movies

"[Tom Tomorrow] declared, 'Los Angeles isn't a city â€" it's a scientific experiment designed to drive New Yorkers crazy.'"

"When the movies did make Los Angeles a character (and sometimes even a subject), they created another mythological city â€" but it wasn't exactly magical...The pervasive aura of disenchantment in "Chinatown" is so seductive that it's even led some credulous viewers to question the very legitimacy of Los Angeles as a city. After all, it's founded on water stolen from some better place. But then, so are San Francisco and New York, and most other mega-cities...in its portrait of race relations in Los Angeles, "Crash" seems strangely cut off and abstract. But maybe that's the point: Los Angeles isn't a "real" city where people walk and touch one another. This old cliché is a half-truth at best; there are plenty of us walking and riding the bus, but apparently we don't count either."