REMEMBRANCES : The Wonder Years : Notes from a quarter-century of interviewing vivid characters, recording a revolution in Hollywood and the growth of L.A. culture

A joke that made the rounds a few years ago said that if Ed McMahon were drowning, all of Johnny Carson’s life would flash before his eyes. The fact is that it requires less than drowning to make your own life rush through the mind like a runaway train. Any birthday divisible by five will do it, as I’ve noticed ever since 40. (Or was it 30?) And retirement sets memory to working overtime.

Minded as I now am to detour out of the commuter paths and spend more time hunched before the computer screen, I find my Los Angeles years coming back at me like one of those Chuck Workman movie collages from the Academy Awards shows run at double speed.

My first look at Los Angeles, on a stifling afternoon in August, 1959, is as clear as the day was not. Thanks to Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Nathanael West and Budd Schulberg, the palm trees, the vivid ladies, the bungalows and the street names were familiar, not foreign. Coming West felt more like a homecoming than a visitation and it has seemed so ever since.

However tawdry parts of the metropolis looked in the hot smog of daytime, my first drive along Mulholland at night, that extraordinary carpet of incandescence sweeping north and south almost as far as they eye could see, was thrilling. By now the carpet is wider and denser and still as thrilling.

As I wrote back then in my first excitements, most of the giants who had left pawprints in wet cement in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese were still with us and so were many of the founding moguls who had invented the film business and many of the creative geniuses who had defined what the movies could say and do.

Jack Warner was still running his studio and telling his awful jokes over lunch, as I discovered, justifying Jack Benny’s crack that Warner would rather make a bad joke than a good movie. The truth was, of course, that he loved to make good movies, too, and his decision to make “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” helped change the nature of the movies by its boldness.

Not long after I joined The Times in 1965, I had lunch with Sam Goldwyn in his office--off the record, he insisted, and I wondered years later if it was because he had grown sensitive about his Goldwynisms and was afraid I would catch him in one. I didn’t, but heard some hilarious reminiscences about his earliest days in Hollywood. I begged him to let me do a story, but he said he would wait until he had his next picture to announce. I feared there wouldn’t be one and sadly I was right.

Over lunch in his studio dining room (prefaced by a Bloody Mary in his office), Walt Disney remembered his childhood in Kansas City, intensely poor and, while still very young, delivering papers in the bitter winter dawns. He spoke of catching catnaps in the warm vestibules of apartment buildings before pushing on, and of stopping to play with rich kids’ toys, left on verandas, in the warm summer dawns.

The memories may have improved with the tellings, yet it seemed to me they explained a great deal about Disney’s understanding of the diverting entertainment people craved in lives that were less vivid than his cartoons. The memories, I think, also helped explain his feelings for the dark side of life that Disney could make so menacing in his witches and other villains.

I had been drawn to Los Angeles by the movies, fascinated by the power they have had (still do) to shape our aspirations, our material wants, our ideas of what was desirable in speech, dress, cars, housing and romantic partners, of what was OK and not OK in human conduct. The power was not always used wisely but the power was there--even, in the 1960s, when the industry was struggling to adjust to the post-television world.

It became more evident each year that I had arrived in a time of revolutionary change for Hollywood. Audiences by the tens of millions were opting to stay home and watch the glow in the living room. A new generation of management, less sure of its footing, was replacing the moguls at the studios they built. The great congregations of players, artisans, writers, directors and producers that constituted the studios were dispersing to free-lance status.

At that the most revolutionary of the changes was in the content of films as they tried to compete with the small screen. The new ratings in 1968 confirmed that the old, massive, largely automatic movie audience was gone forever, the movies were no longer the mass medium of entertainment and, at the same time, the filmmakers were freed of the necessity for making all pictures for the whole audience.

The swift changes in content and intensity made uneasy times for critics (this one, anyway, but for most, if they were honest). The new freedom of the screen was welcome, washing away the hypocrisies of the past, the imposed happy and lawful endings, the gulf that had existed between life as it was lived and life as it could be depicted on the screen. The movies had come of age as a medium of expression, but the results, then and now, were a mixed blessing.

The critic, sworn in his soul to defend and enlarge freedom of expression, had to wince at the early exploitative uses of the new freedoms. There was a wide curiosity about what movies could do (in the mainstream, anyway) that they’d never been able to do before. The elders could remember that David O. Selznick paid a $5,000 fine for the privilege of having Clark Gable utter a single “damn” in “Gone With the Wind.” At that price, it’s a staggering thought what “Raging Bull” or many a lesser film would have cost.

Sorting out the organic and proper uses of the new freedoms from those that were merely exploitative became a tricky mind-game, and now and again the critic could at best forewarn the potential audiences what was coming, and point out that we were none of us in Kansas anymore.

Violence has been the most difficult area of all--part of life, especially American life, repugnant and maybe purgative, as Aristotle said it was, to most viewers. But it is also the easiest area to exploit and, worst, the commodity that demands a rising intensity and explicitness as audiences grow inured to what went before. The matter is complicated because there is serious screen violence (meant to leave no doubt that it kills and hurts unfunnily) and violence that is intentionally so gross as to be funny (as in “Home Alone”).

In the end the only meaningful (and workable) censorship is exercised by the audience, which will finally announce it’s had its fill of gratuitous violence--or will go on asking for more. There are some signs, as in the Academy Awards, that audiences are ready for a little more romance and films that leave you feeling enriched rather than drained.

The competition between the movies and television has been a remarkable item these last three decades. The ending of the near-monopoly on prime-time viewing by the three commercial networks and the proliferation of cable channels, a fourth network and newly lively independent stations has been thrilling to watch. Minority or alternative television has become a reality to a degree that public television never achieved. (Public television now seems virtually as mainstream and ratings-driven as the commercial networks.)

The movies themselves continue to conduct their ongoing dance with disaster, buoyed by a relatively few breakout films that conceal for a time the hard fact that their production costs are disastrously out of line and their financial doings not only sinfully cynical but ultimately counterproductive because they reinforce the dangerous dependence on stars to carry dubious films.

For me, the hope for the motion-picture medium rests more than ever in the independent sector, which for all practical purposes gave us “Dances With Wolves” along with “The Grifters,” “To Sleep With Anger,” “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” and other notable films last year. Adventurous, personal and cost-efficient, independent films can now find screens available--a problem in times past--in the innumerable multiplex cinemas around the country.

(It’s an intriguing sidelight that the number of movies screens has roughly doubled in the last 30 years, mostly in multiple-screen complexes. It is still true that many a town has long since closed its last picture show.)

If it has been a revolutionary time for the movies, it has been hardly less a revolutionary time for the cultural life of Southern California. The Olympic Arts Festival in 1984 will stay in memory as having put to rest all the old tales about Los Angeles as a cultural desert. The postwar population explosion had worked in many ways, pushing the suburbs to the horizons but, with the help of the state college and university systems, creating an educated, arts-hip region. The success of the arts festival and its successor versions has confirmed that there were abundant consumers for the arts at their most demanding.

The theater diet was thin in 1959, unless you couldn’t get enough of “Pajama Tops” or “Under the Yum-Yum Tree.” Jimmy Doolittle was waging a valiant fight at the Huntington Hartford (now named for him) and at the Greek in the summertime. There were important stirrings at UCLA and in a handful of smaller theaters, and the Civic Light Opera was doing its classy productions under the late Edwin Lester.

But the Biltmore was on its last legs, the Music Center was not yet in business and the Shubert did not yet exist.

The millennium is not even now at hand. But the existence of an opera company, the excellence of the Philharmonic, the emergence of dance as an important local arts form (despite the specific troubles of the Joffrey), the brave if difficult existence of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the birth of the Performing Arts Center in Orange County, the quality of work at the Mark Taper Forum, and the proliferation of theatrical and musical events as revealed every week in the pages of this newspaper suggest how far Southern California has come.

Nothing is easy and the recession endangers the financing of all the arts that are unable to pay their own way. Yet the arts survived the last recession better here than in other U.S. cities and there is every reason to hope they will survive again.

After a quarter-century of pack-rat inclinations, my office suddenly looks as if a vacuum had struck it, tidy beyond comprehension. I’ve sorted through an appalling weight of correspondence and printed materials I was sure I’d need again. I thought I’d written a lot for the paper; I’m aghast at the additional thousands of words I wrote in letters--confessing my mistakes, defending the rights of critics to criticize, explaining how men and women of equal intelligence and good will can differ, rejecting manuscripts written in every tone from rage to terminal fatuity, murmuring thanks for praises received.

As I walked out of the office for the last time, I felt the presences of many an absent colleague--Art Seidenbaum most particularly, Phil Scheuer, Henry Seldis, Peg Harford, Leonard Riblett who hired me in the first place. And I could hear in memory many a voice I listened to with such delight, from Cary Grant and Fred Astaire to Irene Dunne and King Vidor and the incomparable Mr. Hitchcock.

It has been a rich time, and it is not over yet.