In the late 1950s Erik Daarstad was just beginning his career as a cinematographer in Los Angeles. His passion for film had brought him from his native Norway, where he grew up in the small industrial town of Sandnes, to the University of Southern California (USC) to pursue an undergraduate degree in the cinema department. He found lifelong friends and collaborators in the school’s film fraternity, Delta Kappa Alpha, learned his craft in courses led by Warner Bros. cinematographer Ralph Woolsey, and developed a keen interest in documentary from the seminars of the Dutch émigré film theorist Andries Deinum. Daarstad wrote in his memoir that Deinum “was one of those very special kinds of teachers who influences your life to such a degree that you always remember them. . . . [He] considered film very important in its ability to present and influence social issues and spoke eloquently in defense of film as art.”1 Daarstad’s thesis documentary, A Light for John (1957), focused on the tender relationship between a mentally disabled US Air Force veteran and his elderly mother. The two lived in a small apartment three blocks north of USC and struggled to make ends meet. After graduation, Daarstad worked as a cameraman and shared an apartment with his USC friends in Hollywood. He served as a gaffer, grip, and cinematographer on commissioned short films for Pat Dowling Pictures in the Pico-Robertson district near Beverly Hills. In addition, he shot low-budget features that targeted the youth audience, including the World War II action film Hell Squad (1958) for director Burt Topper, and Teenage Caveman (1958), A Bucket of Blood (1959), and The Raven (1963) for producer Roger Corman.
Daarstad would find more appealing opportunities with David Wolper’s newly formed documentary studio, Wolper Productions, located on the Sunset Strip. The Hollywood production company had emerged onto the national broadcasting scene with its acclaimed The Race for Space (1958), a film about the US–Soviet Union competition for space supremacy. The studio was swiftly expanding due to the increasing popularity of television, as well as government pressure on network executives and studio heads to educate viewers about the virtues of American democracy and the perils of Soviet Communism. Wolper would soon become the most prolific documentary producer in the country.
One of Daarstad’s early achievements at Wolper Productions was The Rafer Johnson Story (1961). The film followed the early career of the African American Olympian turned Peace Corps recruiter Rafer Johnson. The director of the United States Information Agency, Edward R. Murrow, saw the documentary and eagerly arranged for its exhibition overseas. Crewing on films for the studio offered Daarstad a steady paycheck and the chance to hone his craft. Employment at Wolper Productions also afforded him opportunities to travel to “real places” and interact with “real people” instead of working with actors playing roles in fictional stories.2 In his off hours Daarstad pursued independent films that defied the commercial market.
He answered the call of his old USC classmate Kent Mackenzie to help shoot his passion project, The Exiles (1961), an experimental documentary about working-class American Indians living in the downtown neighborhood of Bunker Hill. Daarstad filmed members of the close-knit community in their clapboard apartments, in the bars they frequented along Main Street, and at their favorite late-night meeting spot on a plot of land known as Hill X overlooking Chavez Ravine (soon to be Dodger Stadium). By means of observational cinematography and voice-over narration, The Exiles evocatively captured the anxieties and aspirations of a people marginalized within the municipal politics of Los Angeles. The film also criticized Hollywood’s derogatory treatment of the “red man” at a time of renewed popular interest in Westerns. Daarstad enjoyed dedicating sustained attention to filming individuals whose experiences did not fit neatly within mainstream storytelling conventions or the federal government’s rosy vision of an equitable and integrated American polity. He also took pleasure in the creative challenge of shooting in crowded interiors and wide-open streets at night, which involved coordinating a combination of natural and artificial light sources.3 The Exiles took more than three hard years to complete. It played to enthusiastic journalists at festivals in California, New York, and Europe, but failed to attract distributors.
Examining Daarstad’s back-and-forth trajectory from Hollywood to Hill X reveals much about his personal investments and practical needs as a professional cinematographer. It also reveals three significant aspects of film and television production in Los Angeles at the dawn of the 1960s. First, political forces along with shifts in the city’s media landscape made Los Angeles a vibrant center for a variety of documentary practices. In the era of Cold War liberalism and its discontents, filmmakers not only experimented formally, but also imagined documentary as a popular commercial product, a powerful form of mass persuasion, an artful medium of personal expression, and a tool of grassroots organizing. Second, documentaries made by individuals, collectives, and studios fashioned conflicting representations of social reality. As President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” stressed a strong welfare state with active citizen participation at home and an aggressive military abroad, documentaries affirmed the administration’s official platform or interrogated its weaknesses, inadequacies, and faults. And third, the high potential for intersection among documentaries made under different circumstances and with clashing motivations was characteristic of local production. Documentaries could be ideologically opposed, yet connected by way of sharing overlapping labor pools, facilities, or subject matter. Documentaries would continue to exist in tension with one another as Kennedy’s administration gave way to Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” vision of an expanded welfare state, the minority liberation movements of the late 1960s, and the time of fragile unification around the US bicentennial in 1976. Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 explores these tensions through key filmmakers active during this period, the institutions in which they worked, and the social impact of their films.
At the moment that Daarstad was finishing his studies at USC, Los Angeles was in a state of rapid transformation. The automotive, shipping, aerospace, and military defense industries brought massive economic growth that was accompanied by an unprecedented population boom. US News and World Report ran a cover story on the topic, proclaiming, “Los Angeles is growing faster than any other place in America. . . . [The] result is that ‘L.A.,’ the urban mass that attracts most sun, fun and job seekers, has been exploding into mountain valley, farmland, desert and seacoast.”4 Manufacturing sectors geared to World War II were retooled for Cold War military defense as well as the domestic initiative of suburbanization. Government-backed freeway construction accelerated the horizontal expansion of the city, turning Los Angeles into a sprawling metropolis. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, the lure of jobs and the Southern California climate attracted black, white, and American Indian laborers from the South, Southwest, and Midwest. Immigrants from Latin America and Asia also came in rising numbers, especially following the 1965 Hart-Celler Act’s changes to the government’s immigration quota system and exemptions for close relatives of US citizens. But Los Angeles was far more fragmented and segregated than media-made images of a sunlit paradise suggested. For many, upward mobility remained chimerical. Minorities regularly confronted residential segregation, police brutality, and workplace prejudice. By the mid-1960s, the Watts Uprising and rousing claims of Black Power fueled how Chicanos, Asian Americans, and American Indians saw self-definition and representation as essential to the broader struggle toward self-determination. Their interrelated movements continued well into the next decade, even as infighting, government repression, cultural cooptation, and the selective deindustrialization of the city would diminish their strength.5
Contemporaneous with uneven growth and social unrest in Los Angeles, the film and television industries were undergoing seismic changes. A number of factors radically altered their systems of production, including the increasingly dispersed American audience; the 1948 Supreme Court verdict in United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc., which broke up the monopoly of the big studios; the mass proliferation of television into American homes; and the increasing use of 16mm film in classrooms, offices, and community centers. Gone were the days when a small number of large, vertically integrated studios used their respective stables of talent to generate a high volume of features. USC professor Richard Dyer MacCann explained in his 1962 book Hollywood in Transition how the “television revolution” resulted in a new platform and, with it, big changes in media production.6 The old majors did not shut down; rather, they reinvented themselves in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s by making fewer, bigger productions and reconfiguring their back lots and soundstages for telefilm and sponsored assignments. There was a reduction in long-term contract labor, and it became increasingly common for people to crew on a greater variety of films on a project-by-project basis. Also, smaller studios and television stations, along with independent directors and organizations, began making films.
While scholars have devoted considerable attention to this period of film and television in Los Angeles, the relationship between documentary and the city has been doubly obscured. First, nonfiction theorists and historians have concentrated on New York and Boston, positioning these traditional East Coast intellectual centers and the documentaries created within them against Hollywood and the entertainment generated by the culture industries. Such studies are largely devoted to the pioneering American cinema verité efforts of D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, the Maysles brothers, and Robert Drew, who sought to transform social observation into an aesthetic experience by using sync-sound and mobile camera rigs.7 Another body of scholarship within this first group has sought to investigate filmmakers who closely aligned their practices with a specific minority community or political cause.8 Second, cinema scholars have typically explored Los Angeles in terms of theatrically released fiction films and television programs created by major studios. Recent Hollywood historiography has resulted in more nuanced understandings of corporate authorship as well as of the entangled relationship between the economics and the art of industrial modes of production. The studios Paramount and Warner Bros., the television operations of Desilu and Disney, and the countercultural insurgent American International Pictures are at the heart of these accounts.9
Los Angeles Documentary recalibrates the geography of documentary production during this period from New York and Boston to Southern California. David James’s The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (2005) has laid important groundwork for understanding multiple kinds of film in the metropolis and has been instrumental in dislodging New York as the often-presumed heart of avant-garde media. James surveys a vast swath of filmmakers throughout the twentieth century who were motivated by artistic and political interests rather than fame and profit. He begins with proletarian labor films in the 1910s and concludes with structural meditations on landscape at the turn of the century. These “minor cinemas” point to a range of distinct but related kinds of film: “experimental, poetic, underground, ethnic, amateur, counter, noncommodity, working-class, critical, artists’, orphan, and so on.”10 Importantly, as James has argued, the minor cinemas of Los Angeles are not a world away from Hollywood. The former have in fact always been constantly responding to and deviating from the latter:
Unstably and obliquely positioned, these local cultural formations are caught between the centrifugal pull of the indigenous practices of local communities and the centripetal pull of the hegemonic entertainment industries. The reciprocal core-periphery relations between the industrial mode of production and alternatives to it reflect the spatial situation of both. The structural tensions that shape the city geographically have recurred in the potentials that shape its arts, and Hollywood exists not only as a spatial center around which other cultural practices construct themselves but also as a formal or thematic point of reference for them.11
In James’s account, minor cinemas form a “periphery” around the “core” that is the commercial film and television sector. This relationship is expressed through the ideological conflicts between each kind of cinema, as well as through the geographic location in which each is created. Minor cinemas have frequently existed in constrained and ephemeral fashion beyond Hollywood studios, celebrity homes, and affluent entertainment destinations.
However, commercial Hollywood and alternative documentary did not necessarily conform to a core-periphery relationship. Documentary entailed geographic variation contingent on the material represented; on-location shooting, sound recording, the consulting of experts, and archival digs for footage happened all over the city and well outside of the metropolis. Additionally, the overt social aspirations of documentaries involved wide-ranging audiences. Small, independent films could potentially have a significant impact, while robustly funded Hollywood films could fail to resonate. James’s core-periphery model is helpful for clarifying characteristics of the mainstream-alternative dynamic that I navigate, but ultimately does not carry over to the field of documentary. Investigating documentary production and reception culture reveals the traffic of personnel, ideas, and resources circulating to and from Los Angeles. Furthermore, this approach emphasizes the importance of Los Angeles on the national stage and its influence on the political culture of the country.
Los Angeles Documentary concentrates on how the city’s production facilities, stock footage libraries, technology hubs, schools, art scenes, and government agencies, along with its diverse array of ethnic communities, made it a nurturing environment for both mainstream and alternative documentary. Los Angeles filmmakers played an integral role in shaping the social consciousness of the nation as well as in contributing to the discourse of documentary as a pedagogical cultural form. For just as Hollywood was not coterminous with the breadth of film production taking place in Los Angeles, Hollywood was also not itself a monolithic system of capitalist entertainment.
Los Angeles Documentary follows two main narrative strands. The first concentrates on Wolper Productions’ narratives about extraordinary citizens and influential politicians. “Understanding,” “collaboration,” “dialogue,” “integration,” and faith in “expertise” were key liberal themes. The studio projected images of a smoothly functioning pluralist democracy, but also masked disagreements within liberal democratic politics during this time, for example hesitancy with legislating civil rights reform, differing views on a top-down or a locally controlled approach to neighborhood initiatives, debates about whether to generate jobs through public works projects, and a lack of consensus surrounding America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia.12 The second strand of this book concentrates on filmmakers laboring independently, on the fringes of the mainstream, or in an array of noncommercial institutions. These filmmakers embraced documentary as a means to expose the contradictions and inadequacies of liberal governance, castigate the persistence of socioeconomic inequities, and empower minority communities. Incorporating both strands within this book shows the dynamic association between these two kinds of documentary. Vernacular folkways, grassroots political movements, and nonconventional filmmaking techniques “trickled up” and were absorbed by Hollywood. Marginalized filmmakers also used resources from commercial employers toward their own agenda. New forms of institutional support such as public television stations and interdisciplinary university filmmaking departments helped these documentarians to assert their presence in front of and behind the camera.
The documentaries of Wolper Productions and the alternative films produced in Los Angeles at this time constituted divergent forms of what came to be called “public history.” There was scattered mention of the phrase “public history” in the press over the course of the 1950s, 1960s, and early to mid-1970s, and filmmakers rarely used the term. It was not until the late 1970s that “public history” began to surface in intellectual circles and gain currency across the humanities. Its popularization thus coincided uncomfortably with the national shift toward the privatization of the economy, the deregulation of the telecommunications industries, and the defunding of humanities institutions under President Ronald Reagan. The graduate program in Public Historical Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1976–) and the professional association of the National Council on Public History (1980–) used the term to describe the application of the disciplinary methodology of history to professional endeavors beyond the university. In the first issue of Public Historian (1978–) the editorial team noted that “historical skills and method are needed now outside of the academy.”13 More broadly, public history came to designate the diverse ways that history informed public life in the present, for example through museum exhibitions, television programs, or heritage parks. Public history also constituted a field of contestation in which different practices and representations existed in ideological contrast to one another. The editors of Radical History Review wrote about how the commercial culture industries tended to fashion public history according to a top-down model, “packaging” the past in an easily digestible fashion that bolstered dominant values. Artists and left-leaning activists endeavored to craft an oppositional, bottom-up form of public history, focusing on resistant narratives that gave voice to underrepresented communities and advocated for social justice.14
It is no coincidence that there was spirited discussion about public history during this time. The term came to name something that had already been happening in practice for more than two decades. This earlier period was when the creation of public history was at its most robust. The late 1950s saw the democratization of media production, circulation, and exhibition. Liberal and more radical forms of documentary comprised compelling and widely seen types of public history. Filmmaking practice varied considerably, as did filmmakers’ views on their role in the process. Some were avid enthusiasts of cinema verité; others were interested in exploring the possibilities of layering voice-over narration onto archival footage, sound fragments, or photographs. Still, their methods of production often entailed shooting footage, gathering together audiovisual materials directly related to the existing social world, and shaping these elements into a film that advanced a distinct point of view. This process of creatively shaping nonfiction media around a central argument had been a persistent feature of documentary practice since the 1930s. It is what—according to classical documentary theorists such as John Grierson—distinguished social documentary from the broader field of newsreels, journalistic reportage, and photographs. As film theorist Philip Rosen would later write, “If shots as indexical traces of past reality may be treated as documents in the broad sense, documentary can be treated as a conversion from the document. This conversion involves a synthesizing knowledge claim, by virtue of a sequence that sublates an undoubtable referential field of pastness into meaning.”15
Even as filmmakers revised older forms of documentary thanks to innovations in recording equipment and access to a wider range of “documents” during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the historicist dimension and rhetorical charge described by Rosen endured. What made the work of so many committed filmmakers in this period public history was not simply a technological capability, but the broader cultural context that informed how documentaries were designed and interpreted. The convergence of Cold War politics, social movements, and shifts in the media industries resulted in lively debates about the strategic uses of history for either liberal governance or left-leaning forms of protest. Filmmakers wrestled with conceptions of American identity, the country’s place in the world, and individuals’ rights to a place in the polity. Government agencies, schools, television stations, film studios, and independent cooperatives all had a stake in documentaries. Television broadcasting and 16mm film projection enabled their exhibition in peoples’ homes, theaters, and civic venues. Filmmakers gravitated to documentary as a way to historicize contemporary experience as well as to provide a rhetorical perspective on the more distant past. The intent was not to hermetically seal the present off from the past, but to position the two in dialogue. In this way, documentaries created a usable past from which viewers could draw to see themselves as active agents influencing their contemporary environment.
Documentaries addressed viewers as members of a collectivity and oriented them to the world beyond the screen. Documentaries did not just aim for criticism or affirmation; they sought to mobilize spectators toward particular goals. For example, cinema scholar Jonathan Kahana demonstrates that independent leftist filmmaking by Newsreel, Winterfilm Collective, and Emile de Antonio organized viewers against such prolonged government actions as the Vietnam War.16 Kahana shows that the sonic elements of this kind of cinema, whether in the form of voice-over narration, on-screen interviews, or ambient noise, vehemently countered official state perspectives. At the same time, sound design was essential to giving voice to student activists, aggrieved war veterans, and movement leaders. Los Angeles Documentary builds on Kahana’s analysis, exploring how nonprofit institutions, government policies, commercial outlets, and intellectuals played a major role in the creation of both liberal and more radical forms of documentary, as well as how documentaries engaged viewers in the public sphere. The formation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the release of the Kerner Commission Report, the availability of government grants, and the expansion of the university were all vital for documentary. They made available technical and economic resources for production, new channels for distribution, and venues for exhibition.
Nowhere was the terrain of documentary more dynamic and contentious than in Los Angeles. As the city was both a national hub for the culture industries and a multiracial metropolis, the construction of public history became simultaneously a business enterprise, a civic duty, and an activist endeavor. Representing the top-down model, Wolper Productions was America’s leading producer of commercial documentary for theatrical release and network television. The Hollywood studio trumpeted America’s “exceptional” role in leading the “free world” and romanticized capitalist democracy as a benevolent force. Their documentaries did not so much encourage intellectual debate as posit answers to clearly articulated, streamlined questions. Locally, Wolper Productions showcased Los Angeles as a cosmopolitan, egalitarian metropolis, but ignored its long history of exclusion and prejudice that continued into the present.
Representing the bottom-up perspective, filmmakers working at the PBS station KCET, in association with universities, or in independent factions made their own documentaries that adamantly challenged the status quo in a city plagued by severe class stratification and racial segregation. Documentarians sought to advance the liberation movements they depicted, forging a political consciousness for marginalized communities. Their films addressed workplace sexism and racism, police brutality, school reform, urban renewal, community arts, the Vietnam War, and amnesiac visions of the Los Angeles social landscape. If these documentaries did not necessarily enjoy large audiences or turn a significant profit, they nonetheless resonated strongly with Angelenos and viewers across the country.
In order to understand the production context and impact of these films, I examine a wide breadth of primary documents, including articles from the trade press, news periodicals, memoirs, correspondence, and interviews. These rich sources nourish an in-depth historical investigation of Los Angeles and its place in post–World War II American culture.17 This period of public history resulted in a more inclusive understanding of American identity, but there was not a simple or singular outcome. Wolper Productions’ celebratory bicentennial programming ultimately prepared the ground for a conservative political culture predicated on the sanctity of the individual, privatization, and a reinvigorated Cold War nationalism. The bicentennial was in many ways the dress rehearsal for the 1984 Olympics. At the same time, the efforts of alternative documentarians bolstered a lasting, progressive sense of racial and ethnic pride and community awareness that would continue into the future. They also created flexible models of production that would be of use to later filmmakers. Furthermore, they established a foothold in universities and festivals that helped sustain left-leaning social causes and local activism in Los Angeles, even as struggles for rights and recognition were absorbed within the discourse of multiculturalism and faced opposition from the New Right.
Los Angeles Documentary designates three major periods of public history making, with each period comprising a section with two or three parallel chapters. In the first part, “New Frontier Visions in the Light and Shadow of Hollywood, 1958–1964,” the Sputnik launch, the network quiz show scandals, and the presidential election of John F. Kennedy inspired the desire to strengthen the body politic by means of educational forms of mass media. Chapter 1 argues that Wolper Productions occupied an essential position on the cultural front of Kennedy’s New Frontier. Documentaries about citizens, politicians, and military conflicts functioned as narratives of assurance. With the assassination of Kennedy, Wolper Productions became the preeminent custodian of the fallen president’s memory. The studio’s films on Kennedy’s rise to the highest office (The Making of the President: 1960 [1963]) and his death (Four Days in November [1964]) performed an important social function during a period of transition to the Johnson administration.
At the same time that Wolper was building his studio and staffing it with producers Mel Stuart, Alan Landsburg, and Jack Haley Jr., film school graduates were looking for employment in the city. Chapter 2 focuses on Kent Mackenzie, who, like other talented, university-trained filmmakers, worked for Wolper Productions, the United States Information Agency, and film firms that catered to the educational and business sectors. These jobs offered rewarding work outside of studio fiction but also entailed ideological and formal constraints. Mackenzie drew on the resources of his day jobs, along with the pro bono efforts of his colleagues, to make The Exiles. Examining the major thrust of Mackenzie’s career reveals the professional challenges and opportunities for young filmmakers interested in making socially engaged documentary. His trajectory also signaled the rumblings of a resistant minority cinema in Los Angeles.
The book’s second part, “After the Watts Uprising: Community Media from the Top Down and the Bottom Up, 1965–1973,” frames the rise of minority liberation movements and the fracturing of Cold War liberalism. Chapter 3 explores filmmaking in Watts, East Los Angeles, and Little Tokyo. These areas appeared on-screen as complex communities, not simply as “slums” or sites of loss. Prominent filmmakers included Joe Saltzman (Black on Black [1968]), Lynne Littman (Womanhouse Is Not a Home [1972]), Robert Nakamura (Manzanar [1971]), Sue Booker (Doin’ It at the Storefront [1972–73]), and Jesús Salvador Treviño (América Tropical [1971]). A combination of grassroots activism and government legislation inflected the training and production practices of these documentarians over the course of their time at commercial broadcasting stations, institutions of higher education, and public television outlets.
As Wolper Productions continued to make documentaries and experiment with fiction, the studio provided a professional entry point for promising talent and off-and-on employment for individuals involved with the cinema of New Hollywood. Chapter 4 investigates Wolper Productions’ output during a period in which the film and television industries faced a precarious financial situation. The studio’s forays into programs with the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau charted a fresh path for nonfiction. In contrast, packaging American history or capturing recent political events would prove to be a troublesome venture. Wolper Productions’ prospective adaptation of William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) was one of the earliest attempts by a major studio to make a commercial film about Black Power themes and figures. Widespread opposition to the film, however, resulted in a public relations disaster for Wolper Productions. Wolper and his circle came to understand the importance of having community support from the minority group the studio sought to represent.
The studio acted on this knowledge when the black record label Stax contacted Wolper about coproducing a film about the final concert of the 1972 Watts Summer Festival. Chapter 5 focuses on Wattstax (1973) and the different players involved with its creation. The film’s verité-style footage of Stax artists and fans in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, residents in the surrounding neighborhood, and testimony from comedian Richard Pryor constituted far more than a standard concert film. The documentary showed a feedback loop between everyday black experience and cultural expression. Wattstax also served as the crucial pivot project for Wolper’s push toward minority subjects, Stax’s attempt to become a film studio, and numerous crew members’ personal efforts to advance their careers.
The events surrounding the 1976 American bicentennial performed the same kind of identity building on a national scale that Wattstax performed locally. Los Angeles Documentary’s third part, “Bicentennial Screens, 1974–1977” looks at the two-hundred-year anniversary of the nation’s independence as a constellation of media-generated narratives around which the country either rallied or revolted. Bicentennial events in Los Angeles spoke to black mayor Tom Bradley’s plan for shaping the city into a business-friendly, multicultural metropolis—a plan that would reach fruition in the next decade. Chapter 6 looks at Wolper Productions’ principal role as an architect of patriotic culture of national commemoration. Without a cinematic record of early American history, the studio turned to “docudrama” as the solution to a narrative problem of documentary historiography. Combining the form and style of period fiction with the truth-telling charge of documentary, docudramas such as Sandburg’s Lincoln (1974–76) and I Will Fight No More Forever (1975) were a novel kind of prestige programming. Docudrama could command high ratings and claim the pedagogical intent of educating viewers. Wolper Productions made network series and specials on American history that culminated with the studio’s eight-part miniseries Roots (1977).
Chapter 7 considers resistant forms of national remembrance. As Hollywood docudrama incorporated minorities into a streamlined vision of the American social fabric, alternative films depicted a contentious relationship between a historic present and past. This chapter argues for the persistence of filmmakers’ interest in documentary, even as they experimented with other media or blended fiction and nonfiction. Long-form films and photo-books by the collective Visual Communications (Wataridori: Birds of Passage [1976], In Movement: A Pictorial History of Asian America [1977]), a documentary made from a collaboration between anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff and director Lynne Littman (Number Our Days [1976]), and the artisanal filmmaking of Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep [1977]) presented nuanced stories about the resilience of the city’s marginalized communities. Their work on Asian Americans in Little Tokyo, elderly Jews in Venice, and African Americans in Watts denounced national myths of bootstrap individualism and upward mobility, as well as industrial decentralization and uneven downtown development under the Bradley administration. The conclusion explores the branding of Los Angeles as a “world city” along with the deregulation of the media industries and the further retrenchment of the welfare state under President Reagan. Los Angeles would be prominently on display as the home city for the 1984 Olympics.