In 1911, a Broadway playwright wrote a snarky letter about a teenage actor who had recently train-tripped from New York to Los Angeles.
“The poor kid is actually thinking of taking up moving pictures seriously,” William C. deMille scribbled to his theater colleague, David Belasco. “So I suppose we’ll have to say goodbye to little Mary Pickford. She’ll never be heard of again.”
That gossip set the tone for the story of Hollywood: adventure, pathos, arrogance, comedy and a dramatic twist ending. Mary Pickford became the most famous face in the world and William and his family quickly followed her west where, in 1914, his little brother Cecil directed the town’s first full-length movie, “The Squaw Man.”
Since then, Los Angeles has produced who knows how many films. No one seems to have counted them. The most reasonable guesses I can find estimate the tally to be around 30,000 features, a number that sounds small for the psychological real estate that Hollywood occupies in the mind of its global audience. Back-of-the-envelope math calculates you could watch all of them in a little over five years — assuming you never slept.
From their ranks, we’ve chosen the 101 L.A.-set movies that best represent this city and its inhabitants: actors, scamps, cops, crooks, singers, strivers, slackers and even cyborgs.
In a fitting irony, “The Squaw Man” itself doesn’t count because Cecil imagined it took place on the plains. But the barn he used as a studio still stands on Highland Avenue — it’s now the Hollywood Heritage Museum. If you’ve been here at all, you’ve certainly driven past it on your way from Mulholland Drive to Sunset Boulevard and Chinatown, a tour that references three titles that stand tall on our list, even if the plots themselves don’t make us look pretty.
Part of what defines a Los Angeles movie is our city’s willingness to turn the camera on itself, to prioritize a riveting tale over our own reputation. We’re eager to share our saga with the world. Our glamorous and gruesome history is all there in a close-up of “Chinatown’s” Jack Nicholson: a movie star with a mutilated nose.
Intriguingly for a town that popularized the Hollywood happy ending, many of the movies we most identify with end on a downbeat note, roughly half of them. Sunshine aside, this isn’t an easy place to live and it’s getting harder. My friends and I joke that Hollywood makes movies like “Falling Down” and “Death Becomes Her,” in which traffic jams and narcissism lead directly to death, to keep more New Yorkers from flooding the place, like a Chihuahua owner posting a sign on their door that says: Beware of dog.
I arrived right after college, an Oklahoma transplant whose expectations of L.A. were, naturally, shaped by the movies. The Sunset Strip hair metal bands immortalized by Penelope Spheeris in “The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years” were long since extinct and the “Swingers” bros who ascended afterward were themselves aging out of the scene. To put an exact time stamp on it, I signed the lease of my first apartment in Little Armenia because the bowling alley from “The Big Lebowski” was only two blocks away. A month later, it closed. (Luckily, I did get to go once.)
Driving west, I’d steeled myself for two classic L.A. clichés: seismic earthquakes and shallow people. Instead, I was thrilled to discover a city full of fascinating characters and so many yet-to-be-explored corners that it will never run out of material.
Fifteen directors made our list at least twice, an eclectic group whose ranks include Amy Heckerling, David Lynch, Charles Burnett, Kathryn Bigelow, Michael Mann and Billy Wilder — the latter of whom has two films in the top 10. Each filmmaker revealed fresh layers in this soil and, upon it, built their own legacies. (Three other directors you may be able to guess earned even more than two spots.)
Storytellers — the best ones, at least — are curious by nature and in this town, no matter where they point a camera, there’s something worth seeing, from the hangout vibes of “Friday” to the erotic humidity of “Spa Night.” Sean Baker’s hyperactive “Tangerine,” shot on an iPhone at a doughnut shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, not only makes that point with gusto, it encourages you to get out and roam.
These movies are a permanent reminder that Los Angeles is a place where fiction and reality are fused. Right now, you could go get a cold soda at Bob’s Market in Angelino Heights — an ordinary joint with laundry detergent and fresh lemons on the shelves — and toast it for cameoing in three movies on our list: “L.A. Confidential,” “Nightcrawler” and, most iconically, Vin Diesel’s gasoline-powered 2001 crowdpleaser “The Fast and the Furious.”
To quote a needle drop from a title on this list, I love L.A. That Randy Newman anthem blares at the end of “Volcano” after Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche successfully divert a lava flow into the Pacific Ocean and the newly formed Mt. Wilshire exhales a sigh of relief. (Mick Jackson, who directed that disasterpiece, also helmed the aptly named Steve Martin rom-com “L.A. Story.”)
One summer shortly after I planted my own stake here, a science club hosted an outdoor screening of “Volcano” on site at the La Brea Tar Pits, nestled among the palm trees it took such pleasure in destroying. One local geologist wore a black bed sheet with orange and red foam noodles sticking out of her head — yes, she was costumed as a volcano. As the credits rolled next to the park’s mastodon sculptures, I couldn’t have agreed with Randy more.