The Expo Line may not come to stop in the middle of Sawtelle, but it can already carry you somewhat closer to the center of an even better-known west-side neighborhood: Culver City, which — the name doesn’t lie — actually counts as a city on its own. People seem, generally, to know that it enjoys this status in a way they don’t always know it about, say, West Hollywood; despite encirclement by several areas we call “Los Angeles,” Culver City has retained a noticeably separate identity. Ten miles of distance from downtown have no doubt helped it to do so, but in the century since developer Harry Culver took the first steps to establish his eponymous municipality, the place has also cultivated something else. Having resisted strong bids for annexation, the way the likes of Venice didn’t find themselves in the position to do, Culver City has even made a fair few annexations of its own, resulting in a confusing zig-zag of a border, but one that has apparently done no harm to its brand. Not that this comes as surprise; if anyone can build a brand, movie studios can, and you’ll find a great deal of studio activity in Culver City’s history.
The modern robustness of the Culver City brand draws much from twentieth-century film production. You recognize this early, provided you enter on the right street; one particularly notable sign doesn’t just present the words “CULVER CITY” inside a stylized film strip, but places the silhouette of a motion-picture camera beside it, and over that, the motto “THE HEART OF SCREENLAND.” You get the impression, looking into the matter, that the local city fathers never really got over how “Hollywood” became the synecdoche for greater Los Angeles’ entertainment industry. One especially telling late-1930s struggle saw the Culver City Chamber of Commerce adopt the slogan “Where Hollywood Movies Are Made,” not quite managing to push through a proposed change of the city’s name to, simply, Hollywood. But whether you consider its center Culver City or Hollywood proper, the glamorously polished old American film machine would soon thereafter achieve peak performance in its annus mirabilis, as acknowledged by many an observer and insider alike, of 1939. These days, I imagine such historically distant territorial disputes weigh none too heavily on the minds of either the Hollywood tourists flocking compulsively to Graumann’s Chinese Theater, or the workaday Culver City studio employees just looking for a decent lunch panini.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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