My Los Angeles kick continues with a good one.
Being a big fan of Chinatown, I’ve always been curious about the truth behind the actual story to hydrate Los Angeles. Throw in the stories of the founding of the movie industry and the story of Aimee Semple McPherson’s controversial life and I’m in.
Gary Krist delivers. He doesn’t get too bogged down in the technical aspects of the respective fields he’s describing. I felt like I got a healthy picture of each particular person involved: McPherson, city engineer William Mulholland, and famed-but-controversial filmmaker D.W. Griffith.
That these three converged at a time that Los Angeles was being made to be the oasis in the desert, the New York of the west coast, was a stroke of remarkable coincidence. Mulholland’s plans to get water to L.A. preceded Griffith moving his productions west, and both preceded McPherson’s arrival to build the busiest Christian church west of the Mississippi. But looking at the three provides a great understanding of how the city was built and made famous.
If I have one beef, it’s that I would have been cool with this one being even longer, like 200-300 pages longer and incorporating the Chandlers and the Dohennys, the former being the big press barons, the latter the oil family. They’re mentioned throughout (at least the Dohennys were) and I’d love to see how they fit in the larger narrative, even if the timeline would have had to expand a bit.
But that’s a minor quibble. This is a good book, the best kind of readable non-fiction.