Taking the Long View of F/X

More than 300 years before the first installment of “Star Wars” took special effects into hyperspace, the Pope and his minions were up to something not too much different. That’s the thesis of “The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects,” the latest tome from Norman Klein, CalArts professor, author and cultural historian. Klein finds f/x not only in movies and cyberspace, but in theme parks, casinos, malls, urban developments and Baroque churches. From his home in Highland Park, Klein, who previously wrote “The History of Forgetting”--about how mythmaking has displaced historical memory in Los Angeles--walks us through history’s great illusions, decries the global Wal-Mart village and still finds things to love about L.A.

One might argue that special effects began with the Lascaux cave paintings, but your history begins shortly after the Italian Renaissance.

I tried to go back to a point where some of the same systems or the same software, let us say, were in operation. By the 1580s or so, you begin to see in theaters in particular machinery that was very elaborate. You could build shipwrecks, you could change the weather, you could move angels and devils into hell and up toward heaven. And they were all done according to new techniques of perspective.

Your book refers to “scripted spaces.” What do you mean by the term?

A scripted space is the way a space is staged so that a person walking through it goes through a story or a narrative. So when you walk through a shopping mall, you feel that everything is circling you, almost like a cloud of kindness and reassurance, to make you shop and feel at ease. Cathedrals are designed to show you that this is the path to God. As you walk through the church of St. Ignatius in Rome that was painted by Pozzo, the sky seems to open out literally. First it becomes a dome, then it becomes almost infinite, as if you’re spiraling toward heaven with St. Ignatius Loyola himself.

How did your upbringing affect your take on entertainment environments?

When I grew up [in Brooklyn] in the 1960s, Coney Island was a mess, a slum, a ruin. I was witnessing the dark, ironic, noir realities of special-effects environments. Because the paint was peeling, you were able to see more of the artifice, and there was something so honest and strange about what was left. There were still freak shows, nickel-and-dime games, rides. And there were still carny people trying to get folks in and out. I sensed that behind the smile is unbelievable anxiety. It’s difficult to make someone decide to eat at this Italian restaurant tonight rather than that Thai restaurant, or to go to Universal CityWalk. Even Disneyland, they are always nursing some sort of camouflage, always checking. It’s a low-grade nervous breakdown trying to get someone inside your place and still be able to vacuum out enough money by the time it’s over.

The people of Inglewood just voted against the building of a Wal-Mart within its borders. If Universal CityWalk had been subject to referendum, would you have voted against it?

The real problem is: How do we humanize a world that’s going to feel more like CityWalk even if it’s the center of Prague or Old Pasadena or Piccadilly Circus? What became apparent after CityWalk was that it wasn’t the enclosed CityWalk environment but the whole new urbanist fascination with suburbanizing the city itself and turning it into something awkward. Is the Grand Avenue project [near Disney Concert Hall] going to be a CityWalk downtown?

How could Grand Avenue escape that fate?

I would like it to be less a shopping mall for culture and more a part of neighborhoods that already exist, rather than a walled-off environment. If Sunset Boulevard and Temple were more open and available streets and downtown allowed to mix in a less glamorous way, you would have inexpensive versions of culture meeting expensive versions of culture, and everything around it would be nourished.

What areas have done this more successfully?

Leimert Park has its own spirit, and it’s built from the ground up, and there is a solidarity between what was there before and the new development.

How did you become obsessed with L.A.?

In the late 1970s, I bought an old gang house in Angelino Heights and I found odd pieces left by this doctor from the Prohibition days. I found whiskey bottles and cigarette tins and so on, and it began to fascinate me that I had some kind of archeological dig about the history of the families in that house. The area became a sort of textbook for me to peel away one layer upon another.

Tell us about your “anti-tours” of vanished wonders around L.A.

People like to see where the Bunker Hill line on Hill Street was cut in half, almost like a giant ax was thrown across the city. I would take people to Angelino Heights and Glendale Boulevard, where the old Mack Sennett studios used to be, where the Burger King is now. I’m going to change my anti-tour, because this new real-estate boom is beginning to feel too much like I’m taking them past emerging fancy real estate.