Transcript

(cymbals crash)

(helicopter blades whirring) (sirens wailing)

[Reporter] OJ Simpson

is believed to be armed and dangerous.

I was watching the OJ car chase

with my daughter in New York.

Tears were streaming down my eyes,

and my daughter turned to me, and she said,

What's wrong, did you know that guy?

And I said,

who cares about that guy?

It's that light.

That's the light I keep telling you girls about,

that's it, that's it right there.

The light up on those mountains,

the desert, the pink light

off the ocean, into the smog,

off of the palm fronds.

It is absolutely the defining character of the place.

The soul of the place is that light.

Like any exile from Los Angeles, I've

thought about and I think about

LA light all the time.

What I decided to do

was to go and talk to people

who spend their lives in the light.

I talked to Vince Scully,

the great broadcaster of the Dodgers.

He gets to watch the sunset every night.

[Vince] Boy, what a sky.

Cotton candy pink

with a canopy of blue.

Good enough to eat.

Painter David Hockney

told me how, growing up in England,

where it was raining all the time,

what amazed him was to see Laurel and Hardy movies.

They were wearing winter clothes,

but there were sharp, crisp shadows.

Hockney made us see shadows

that we'd never see the beauty of.

Architect Clark Howard

talked about the freeness of light.

The object, the shadow, and reflection.

I was talking to everybody,

it occurred to me I should talk to the OJ chase

helicopter pilot...

[Reporter] We're gonna go to the picture

inside chopper two, here.

[Lawrence] Whose name in those days was Bob Tur,

but now goes by Zoey Tur.

It turned out she did the news for money,

but what she really loved

was the light of LA.

10, nine, eight, seven, six, five,

four, three, two, one.

We're about to fly.

My name's Zoey Tur,

I'm a helicopter pilot reporter, fire chief,

transgender warrior princess.

We were covering OJ Simpson because

the pursuit began in the afternoon,

and traveled into the golden light period.

Los Angeles was showcased,

and OJ went off to jail.

We should show this to people

back east, because they'll move out here.

I mean, look at this.

This is one of the rarest days

of the year, because you have the combination of

clear air, we have a sunset,

and then we also have a supermoon.

Los Angeles has always been my home.

Our light here, it's addictive.

You got a city with over 350 days of sunlight.

That's why the studios came here.

Movies like Annie Hall made fun of Los Angeles...

Keeps out the alpha rays, Max.

You don't get old.

They're making fun of Los Angeles light,

and he hates it.

The people who hate LA,

Peter Bogdanovich, for example,

he said, I can't stand the place.

There's something trance-inducing about the light.

He quoted a conversation with Orson Welles,

who said, The trouble with LA is,

you sit down at 24, and you

get up and you're 65.

When German Expressionist filmmakers

encounter that light of LA,

which they can't make heads or tails of,

they invent something called film noire.

They do all of their

erotic films at night, or indoors.

The other way that people talk about

the light of LA is smog.

Movies like To Live and Die in LA,

it was gritty, it was harsh.

The mean streets of Los Angeles.

Smog played a very important role

in creating a feel.

People told me, if I wanted to talk about smog,

I should go to Caltech.

There's characteristics of Los Angeles

that make the pollution here a much more

challenging problem than most other cities.

The San Gabriel Mountains trap the air,

and so anything we put in the air

in LA lasts a lot longer.

Then, when you combine 14 million people,

all the emissions from all those cars,

and allow a lot of sun to cook it all up,

you end up with these very small particles

causing the atmosphere to be glowing.

That's LA glow, yeah.

Thankfully, there's not the smog there was.

Still, I don't wanna romanticize that at all,

but what can I tell you?

It was pretty amazing light,

and thankfully, it still is pretty amazing.

[Zoey] As we make this left turn,

wait till you see this.

This is the money shot.

(In the Light by Shana Falana)