Then there are the artists flocking to LA, including from Australia. They’re not your typical foot soldiers of capitalism but often return home brim-full of ideas about new ways of doing things.

New wave of glamour

Of course, there’s also Hollywood glamour – LA-based Australian film stars like Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie and Chris Hemsworth, and directors like Phillip Noyce and Peter Weir. Less prominent are Australian expatriates like The Lodge gallery owner Alice Lodge in East Hollywood, and young drummer Harry Thynne with the hard-driving rock group, Andy Clockwise, and many more.

They’re part of the newer wave of musicians and artists who are giving more texture and depth to LA. The entertainment industry – films, TV, music – remains the city’s biggest employer; but hence the flaky reputation.

However, it’s not all about corporatising Cheech & Chong lifestyles. Los Angeles also gains from the China-driven arrival of the Pacific century while the Euro-facing Atlantic US east coast, including New York, faces relative decline.

Underwriting LA’s role as an economic powerhouse, the Port of Long Beach is the biggest in the US, and the entry point for many Chinese exports. According to a recent study by California’s Santa Ana College, Long Beach accounts for $US270 billion ($389 billion) in trade value per year, nearly 500,000 jobs in greater Los Angeles, 1.5 million jobs throughout the US, and about $US10 billion in federal and state taxes and customs duties.

Separating California from the rest of the US, the state is reckoned to be the fifth biggest economy in the world, coming in behind Germany. About half California’s 42 million people live in greater Los Angeles. More economic muscling up derives from the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) companies that are headquartered in California or the US west coast.

Facebook is at Menlo Park, near Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, and just outside San Francisco. Amazon’s HQ is north of California in Seattle, Washington state, a city that is also the long-time host of Microsoft. Apple is in Cupertino, not far from Sacramento, California's state capital. Netflix is at Los Gatos, also not far from San Francisco, and Google’s HQ is at Mountain View, again not far from Menlo Park and Palo Alto.

Facebook’s Menlo Park, California HQ. New York Times

The explosive growth of Netflix, which offers online streaming of a library of films and TV programs, including in-house productions like the massive hit and celluloid work of art, House of Cards, is the most dramatic signal, if not the single most important contributor, of LA’s reinvigoration. Barely more than 20 years old, Netflix now owns, is moving into, or commissioning, four large buildings on or near Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and East Hollywood, where it barely had a foothold a decade ago.


Phillip Noyce, the Australian film director who has been based in Hollywood for nearly 30 years, likens Netflix’s pulling power for talent to one of those giant railway stations in Chinese cities such as Shanghai or Beijing. Many thousands mill just outside the station, waiting for the gates to open every half-hour, and then pile into the trains.

In a similar manner, would-be script writers, directors and producers mill around the huge waiting rooms in Netflix’s main building in Hollywood, and are ushered in to pitch to the company’s executives at regular intervals.

Earlier this year Netflix reported it had just under 150 million paid subscribers in 190 countries. It has offices in the Netherlands, Brazil, India, Japan and South Korea, and last month expanded to Sydney.

Follow the money

LA likes to let it all hang out, and the evidence is obvious as Netflix drives Hollywood’s humungous appetite for content. This surge has generated a greater understanding by US television networks about the decisive shift to a new, streaming-generated, cost-benefit quality equation. Finely acted, narrative-driven TV drama programs like Mad Men, Breaking Bad and House of Cards cost a lot more than reality TV – you know, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Married at First Sight; that sort of stuff. The former require brilliant scripts and acting talent. But they can also generate massive, hitherto unheard of returns as the series enter third, fourth, fifth, sixth and even seven years running.

“Follow the money,” people say, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the Netflix-driven streaming content revolution. In 2017 the company announced it had poached Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes from NBC in a $US150 million, four-year deal to develop eight exclusive TV series. There have been reports in the Hollywood trade press that the deal is worth much more.

Since then, there have been so many $US100 million-$US300 million deals involving script writers, or “show-runners” – to use a current term – that such reports have become, in the words of one veteran Hollywood observer, “de rigeur".

Fuelling this bidding war to attract the script-writing “show-runners” – those who can create long-run series that entice "binge" viewers – are new players in the streaming business, like Amazon and Apple. They also have billion-dollar war chests at their disposal.

“Only in LA,” as the saying goes.


All of this goes to show that when it comes to how we represent ourselves on screen, LA is the centre. It makes the running, pioneers the trend, and calls the financial tune. Hollywood is the global celluloid vampire, sucking the creative movie blood out of other countries like Australia.

Measuring this growth in LA’s influence is another matter, however. It is certainly far more influential than the mere accumulation of box office earnings, TV ratings, franchises, residuals and add-ons would suggest. At the same time, Los Angeles is badly served by the popularity of the term “soft power”. It plays into a common framing of the LA influence as evanescent – a sort of plaything of fickle popular taste.

A laboratory for democracy

Kit Rachlis, one of America’s pre-eminent observers of power shifts, says the rise of LA goes deeper. He traces the roots of the shift in power from New York to Los Angeles back to the 70s and 80s. This is the period when, according to Rachlis, the serpents’ eggs of Trumpism began to appear as large sections of US industry decamped, and New York went (temporarily) broke.

A former editor of American Prospect in Washington, LA Weekly and the Los Angeles magazine, and now a senior editor at The California Sunday Magazine, Rachlis says the tipping point in the shift from New York to LA came in the last few years. In addition to movies and television, it involves a convergence of art and music, LA’s extraordinary racial diversity, the US west coast emerging as the base of the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon Apple, Netflix, Google) companies, young artists finding the city more affordable compared with New York and, of course, the advent of the Pacific century.

We’re talking in the Aroma coffee shop in Studio City, near the famed Universal Studios and not far from Hollywood. It’s a place where beefy bodyguards wearing muscle-bulging T-shirts and Don Johnson-style stubble-beard stand front and back of blond TV stars and rich wannabes while a homeless man shuffles past, pushing a shopping cart full of filthy plastic bags.

Sipping on his coffee, Rachlis says the dramatic change in the relative position of LA and its racial diversity – more than 100 languages are spoken – has made the city a "laboratory for democracy”.

Latinos predominate more in greater LA than Caucasians or African-Americans. Los Angeles also hosts many micro-cultures. There’s Little Korea, Little Armenia, Little Georgia (as in the small country in the Caucasus region near Russia), Little Thailand, Little Bangladesh, and Little Iran – just to run through a sample.

There’s even what one Uber driver called an “Austro-land” – an enclave around Playa del Rey, a beach-side area just south of the better-known Marina del Rey, Venice and Santa Monica. This is a place where Australians, particularly those in the fashion business, often congregate.


Indeed, an "Australian look" is noticeable close by around Venice Beach. Australian bohemian-chic brands like Camilla, Spell Byron Bay and Arnhem feature among hip fashionistas parading along Abot Kinney Boulevard, described as the “coolest block in America” by GQ Magazine.

More broadly, greater LA’s huge size and increasing ethnic, economic and political complexity complicate the challenge of capturing the city’s significance, or even defining what Los Angeles is. Formally, it is a city of about 4 million people, but greater LA is about 20 million, or about 2 million less than the greater New York region.

The megalopolis takes in not just the city of Los Angeles, but Long Beach, Anaheim, Santa Ana, Riverside, Irvine, San Bernardino, Fontana, Oxnard, Moreno Valley, Glendale, Huntington Beach, Santa Clarita, Garden Grove and Ontario. It has 16 land-line telephone area codes and also hosts some of America‘s biggest defence contractors. At one time it was the second biggest in both auto and tyre manufacturing.

Sign on the window of an old truck on Abot Kinney Boulevard at Venice Beach, LA. Andrew Clark

LA’s strength in those last two areas has long since vanished. The greater Los Angeles economy now relies on films and television, media distribution, advertising, defence industries, its massive port, education and tourism.

History recycled into myth

It certainly cannot rely on history – or, more accurately, widespread perceptions of Los Angeles’ history – to provide the contours for contextualising its new, albeit largely unrecognised, status as America’s global powerhouse. As a prominent LA literary critic, David L. Ulin, has written: ”If LA has often seemed like a city without history, it is perhaps because so much of its past has been recycled into myth.”

Contrary to popular belief, for example, Los Angeles is not a byproduct of a movie business that started setting up shop in the area around the advent of World War I. In fact, Los Angeles was founded in 1781. It was briefly the capital of Mexican California before the US seized the area, along with Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, from Mexico in the 1840s. California was formally incorporated into the United States in 1850, or shortly after the California gold rush.

About 20 years later LA was linked to the trans-continental railway, and the long boom, lasting on and off for 150 years, began.

At the beginning of the 20th century tourism took off. According to the American social historian Carey McWilliams, the city “had its share of freaks, side-shows, novelties and show-places”. McWilliams has described a scene of "ducks" waddling “along the streets with advertisements painted on their backs, six-foot-nine pituitary giants with sandwich-board signs [who] stalked the downtown streets while thousands of people carrying Bibles in their hands and singing hymns marched in evangelical parades",


The city’s economic underpinning came from the relocation of the motion picture industry from the east coast to operate in a warmer, more predictable climate, and take advantage of the weirdos already in the area as "extras" in movie crowd scenes. The city’s growth generated the development of large tracts of land into urban blocks, a process underwritten by the diversion of water into the arid valley from the Owens River Valley.

From the start, the movie business in Los Angeles involved huge wads of money – often illicitly gained – giant egos, double-dealing, occasional Mob malefactor-ing, and many bad films. Hollywood also pretty much invented the great American art form of the feature-length film. On that point, it is no surprise that the truest cliché about Hollywood is that the best films made in Hollywood are films about Hollywood. Think Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive, Get Shorty and others.

From the start the movie business attracted writers from all over – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Bertold Brecht, among others. “For these, LA was exotic territory," Uline writes, a place “full of outsized ambitions and outsized fantasies, a funhouse mirror offering grotesquely exaggerated [images] of America itself”.

According to the late Brooklyn-based novelist and non-fiction writer Norman Mailer, “one gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live, or try to live, in the rootless pleasure of an adult child”. For English social critic, the late Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles was “mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they’ll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them aren’t even young and beautiful now.”

A new edge

But Hollywood also spawned the imagination of menace – the great film noir era of the 40s with writers like Raymond (The Big Sleep) Chandler and actors like Humphrey Bogart. As Uline writes, “Noir provided a gritty counterweight to the dreamier aspects of the movie’s’ fantasy life, a corrective to the endless happy endings promised by celebrity and glamour.”

Raymond Chandler’s Red Wind opens with this memorable description of the Santa Ana winds and their effect on people: “Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.”

And, despite Hitchens’ view, there’s a new “edge” in LA art, as more artists flocks to the area from New York and abroad. According to Sydney native Alice Lodge, who owns The Lodge gallery in East Hollywood, the move from New York by creative artists “started happening” after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in Manhattan on September 11, 2001.

Alice Lodge says New York artists decamped to the West Coast in search of cheaper rent. Andrew Clark


However, it was driven by “pure economics", Lodge says. Artists “could no longer afford to live in those [New York] lofts. They had to live further and further out. They decided: ‘We can go to LA For the same price we’re paying for a tiny little shithole [in New York], we can have a whole house [in LA]’."

Daughter of the late Jan Sharp, the Australian film producer and former model, who died in 2012, and Sydney-based cartoonist and illustrator Michael Lodge, Alice Lodge is a painter whose gallery is now generating a real buzz in the LA art scene. She first moved to Los Angeles in her early teens when her mother was married to Phil Noyce.

Returning to Hollywood after studying at Barnard College, CalArts and London’s Central Saint Martins, Lodge worked as a prop artist, set designer, decorator, collaborating with major film figures and the Ace Hotel Group. Alice credits her mother, Jan, for her obvious prowess as an Angelino salonista.

According to the US magazine Cultured, Lodge’s “unerring eye and endless curiosity” evoke American writer Eve Babitz’s view that “it takes a certain kind of innocence to like LA,” with its “creative outliers, nihilists and dreamers”. However, Lodge already detects a fraying of standards and critical sharpness in LA, partly resulting from the role of influencers on social media platforms like Instagram. “Art is becoming more of a flash in the pan. A millennial upstart can sell their piece for $US50,000.”

The new Millennial artists did not necessarily attend art school, according to Lodge, but ”they have hubris, they know famous people, they know how to promote themselves through Instagram. That’s how they sell their work.”

'The cultural centre of America'

However, she remains an optimist. ”I’m hoping that people are getting clued into it. There’s a great group of artists now living in LA I actually feel like it’s the cultural centre of America."

"As we know," Lodge goes on, "America likes to think of itself as the cultural centre, but it’s not.” However, “within America, LA is the cultural centre of the world.”

This is as good a point as any to return to Vincent van Gogh’s painting, Irises. He completed this great work in 1889 in the garden of the lunatic asylum at Saint-Remy, near Arles, in the south of France. It is a place where van Gogh was voluntarily confined after falling out with the French artist, Paul Gauguin, and the self-mutilation of his right ear.

Regarded by some as the greatest painting on display at the Getty, critics have said Irises shows van Gogh’s ability to give flowers the presence of portraits. The painting’s extraordinary energy and theme of the regenerative powers of the earth reflect van Gogh’s deeply held belief in the divine nature of art and nature, critics say.


Irises by Van Gogh, at the Getty Centre in Los Angeles.

Passing through various hands, Irises ended up on loan at Westbrook College, in Portland, Maine, in the Joan Whitney Payson Gallery of Art, after having been purchased for $US80,000 in 1947. Exactly 40 years later – in November 1987, a month after the stockmarket crash – Alan Bond bought the painting for a then record $US53.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York.

At first blush, van Gogh’s deeply held beliefs do not appeal as the views of the buccaneer Australian businessman. Bond was a declared bankrupt and jailed for fraud and his family was plagued by tragedy. However, Bond, a sign-writer by trade, also painted a portrait of the great West Coast Eagles AFL footballer, Peter Matera, while in jail.

In the end, Alan Bond was unable to stump up the cash for Irises. Once again, it changed hands numerous times, and in 1990 it was announced that the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Los Angeles, had acquired the great painting for an undisclosed sum. Its final and fitting resting place is the Getty Center with its commanding view of LA.

It remains an open question, however, whether the regenerative power of the earth reflected in the once Bond-owned Irises will continue to nurture Los Angeles as America’s great global powerhouse.