Audio By Carbonatix
Chances are that when you think of Los Angeles, your mind pulls out a clip from a random movie you’ve seen over the years, depicting the city as a hot, dirty, sprawling mess of packed highways, teeming with crime and shifty characters. CalArts professor, filmmaker and L.A. resident Thom Anderson knows this misconception well, and in 2003 he released a video essay titled Los Angeles Plays Itself, a 169-minute collection of more 200 film clips from the history of cinema that he assembled to demonstrate just how badly Hollywood has exploited his beloved city’s identity.
Because the majority of clips in the film were not acquired legally, Los Angeles has only been seen over the past decade in secret or through bootleg copies passed around like a stash of white truffles. But more recently, fair-use law has made it easier for the film to play outside of the city it so epically depicts.
Today it will show in Denver — and it might just give Denver natives some ideas, says Denver Film Society programming manager Ernie Quiroz. “Should someone do that for Denver?” he asks. “Are we just a bunch of pot-smoking, Broncos-loving hippies? Is our legacy JonBenét or Columbine? Who will step up to change people’s perception of us?”
See Los Angeles Plays Itself today at 2 p.m. at the Sie, 2510 East Colfax Avenue. Tickets are $7 to $10; go to denverfilm.org for more info.
Sat., Jan. 3, 2 p.m., 2015
