Los Angeles's Bunker Hill: Pulp Fiction's Mean Streets and Film Noir's Ground Zero!

by Jim Dawson

Overview

When postwar movie directors went looking for a gritty location to shoot their psychological crime thrillers, they found Bunker Hill, a neighborhood of fading Victorians, flophouses, tough bars, stairways and dark alleys in downtown Los Angeles. Novelist Raymond Chandler had already been there exploring the real-life "mean streets" that his hardboiled detective, Philip Marlowe, prowled in the writer's exacting prose. But the biggest crime was going on behind the scenes, run by the city's power elite. And Hollywood just happened to capture it on film. Using nearly eighty photos, writer Jim Dawson enlarges the record of L.A. history with this grassroots investigation of a vanished place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609495466
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	06/22/2012
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	1,117,107
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Jim Dawson is a graduate of West Virginia University and a longtime resident of Hollywood. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Los Angeles's Angels Flight (2008), as well as a short documentary called Los Angeles's Bunker Hill (2011) on the Criterion Collection's Blu-ray/DVD reissue of the 1955 film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 5

Introduction 7

1 Reel Life on the Streets 11

2 Bunker Hill, Los Angeles 22

3 Hard-Boiled Memories 29

4 Bunker Hill Goes Hollywood 44

5 Last Double Bill and Testament 70

6 There Once Was a City Here 86

7 High Crimes and Misdirections 105

8 A Selective List of Films Shot on Bunker Hill 116

Bibliography 155

About the Author 159