And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Seems like mostly GM cars.. occasionally a Stude or Nash.. Clean and neat, what a change in 70 years..what will it look like in another 70, or even 20 years...
That's Miracle Mile; the El Rey Theater is still there, at 5515 Wilshire.
And this was shot in late summer 1951. Both The Frogmen and Fugitive Lady (both seen on the El Rey's marquee) were released in July 1951.
The U.S. was a year into the Korean War when this film was shot; notice the complete lack of interest.
The first segment was shot driving eastbound; the second, westbound. Then they go east again, and west again, mostly shooting the north side of the boulevard. The south side was mostly vacant lots then. The Prudential Building is at 5757 Wilshire; it's now Screen Actor's Guild HQ. I worked at the Prudential Western Home Office there in the late 70's/early 80s, by which time it was a multi-story skyscraper, not the modest 7-story building seen in the film.
The park passed just beyond Prudential at the 3:16ff-3:46 segment, and again from 5:42-6:14, is actually the site of the La Brea Tar Pits, which now has an 8' iron fence around the premises, to keep the local despondent dumbasses from offering themselves as future fossils by jumping into them, and finding out they die from starvation over weeks, not asphyxiation from sinking into it.
Look up "Brontosaurus Bruce", a local dumbass who tried that around 1980, and then got pulled out by LAFD after he had second thoughts, and began screaming for help, after only sinking to the calves.
The sight of pedestrians in L.A. is stunning in itself. Missing Persons got that song right: "nobody walks in L.A.".
But in 1951, the population of L.A. was only 1.9M, about half of what it is now, and most of your toothless, banjo-playing kinfolk still lived back east, not having befouled the Golden State themselves, nor gawped helplessly while illegal alien hordes overwhelmed it by the millions from the south. Which explains the lack of anything resembling traffic on a main artery just a 5 miles west of downtown, and 2 miles south of Hollywood.
Also, the soundtrack is a looped pile of crap, with no relation to the film. Whoever composed this was working with a silent reel, and decided to jam some crapola generic city soundtrack onto it, repeating endlessly.
If I had the time and inclination, it would be instructive to re-shoot the video frame for frame, in modern times, for comparison, and show them on split-screen, for a look at how much has changed, and what hasn't.
Dang! Clean streets/compassionate drivers....a bygone era
ReplyDeleteSpectacular hand painted billboards. Sadly, a lost trade.
ReplyDeleteNoted on one such billboard: Bomb Shelters $795.
DeleteSeems like mostly GM cars.. occasionally a Stude or Nash.. Clean and neat, what a change in 70 years..what will it look like in another 70, or even 20 years...
ReplyDeleteThat's Miracle Mile; the El Rey Theater is still there, at 5515 Wilshire.
ReplyDeleteAnd this was shot in late summer 1951. Both The Frogmen and Fugitive Lady (both seen on the El Rey's marquee) were released in July 1951.
The U.S. was a year into the Korean War when this film was shot; notice the complete lack of interest.
The first segment was shot driving eastbound; the second, westbound. Then they go east again, and west again, mostly shooting the north side of the boulevard. The south side was mostly vacant lots then. The Prudential Building is at 5757 Wilshire; it's now Screen Actor's Guild HQ. I worked at the Prudential Western Home Office there in the late 70's/early 80s, by which time it was a multi-story skyscraper, not the modest 7-story building seen in the film.
The park passed just beyond Prudential at the 3:16ff-3:46 segment, and again from 5:42-6:14, is actually the site of the La Brea Tar Pits, which now has an 8' iron fence around the premises, to keep the local despondent dumbasses from offering themselves as future fossils by jumping into them, and finding out they die from starvation over weeks, not asphyxiation from sinking into it.
Look up "Brontosaurus Bruce", a local dumbass who tried that around 1980, and then got pulled out by LAFD after he had second thoughts, and began screaming for help, after only sinking to the calves.
The sight of pedestrians in L.A. is stunning in itself. Missing Persons got that song right: "nobody walks in L.A.".
But in 1951, the population of L.A. was only 1.9M, about half of what it is now, and most of your toothless, banjo-playing kinfolk still lived back east, not having befouled the Golden State themselves, nor gawped helplessly while illegal alien hordes overwhelmed it by the millions from the south. Which explains the lack of anything resembling traffic on a main artery just a 5 miles west of downtown, and 2 miles south of Hollywood.
Also, the soundtrack is a looped pile of crap, with no relation to the film. Whoever composed this was working with a silent reel, and decided to jam some crapola generic city soundtrack onto it, repeating endlessly.
If I had the time and inclination, it would be instructive to re-shoot the video frame for frame, in modern times, for comparison, and show them on split-screen, for a look at how much has changed, and what hasn't.