Voyage of Discovery to L.A. Past

For the next four weeks, public-television station KCET will be reminding Los Angeles that the city of the future also has a history.

Beginning tonight, Channel 28 will introduce the “Los Angeles History Project,” four half-hour programs exploring the city’s past. These first installments, which will air Monday nights at 7:30 through May 30, begin a series that the producers hope will continue with four episodes a year through 1991.

Tonight’s program, “Upon First Impression,” an overview of Los Angeles’ turbulent life story, quotes historian Carey McWilliams as saying, “Whatever America is, California is in accents and italics”--especially in fast-growing Los Angeles.

That, explained Jon Wilkman, series producer, is the reason he proposed the series, produced by KCET in association with Jon Wilkman Productions.

“History is more than years,” Wilkman said during a recent conversation at KCET’s Hollywood offices; the discussion also included Stephen Kulczycki, KCET vice president of programming, and Margaret Bach, project director.

“There’s a real significance to what has happened in Los Angeles. In many ways, this is a distillation of so many things that are purely American,” continued Wilkman, who grew up in the now mall-studded San Fernando Valley when it was dominated by orchards and fields. “The forces that created the city, the people who came here, the dreams they had--if you want to understand American history, you look at Los Angeles history, more than any other city in America, really.”

Added Kulczycki:”This city has been willed into existence. There was no reason to have a city here, by normal standards. There was no river here; there was an obvious water problem. But people wanted to live here, so they came. Every community needs to have some sense of what brought it to this place. So far, television has not organized the history of Los Angeles very well.”

Kulczycki added that one of the most telling facts of the history of Los Angeles is that its residents have tried so hard to forget where they came from as quickly as possible.

“Our history has been covered over with a desire to get on with the future,” he said. “It seemed important, as we come to the end of a century that is going to launch Los Angeles as the most populous city in the country, that the people who live in the community get a better chance to know what an extraordinary history they have, both the triumphs and the tragedies.”

The series creators decided to tell the story of Los Angeles through intimate human stories of the people of Los Angeles, rather than merely tracking major historical events.

“The approach we’re taking is to personalize the history, not to take the typical overview with a single expert who lifts himself above the field,” Wilkman said. “We want to get down in the field where the little mice are, and listen to them tell what they did down there.”

“Upon First Impression,” the first installment narrated by sixth-generation Angeleno Robert Stack, examines the first waves of settlers who came to Los Angeles.

Next Monday’s episode is “Ramona: A Story of Passion and Protest,” exploring the myth surrounding “Ramona,” the first novel set in Southern California, a tragic romance based on a real-life murder case.

On May 23, it’s “Trouble in Angel City,” a visit to the mean streets of Depression-era Los Angeles through the eyes of detective novelist Raymond Chandler.

The series concludes May 30 with “Harris Newmark’s Los Angeles,” a dramatization of the life and times of one of the city’s first Jewish pioneers, starring Theodore Bikel as Newmark.

The “Los Angeles History Project,” in development for two years, is the first television series to focus on Southern California’s past. The budget for the four shows is about $500,000.

Although it will be broadcast only on KCET this month, the series will be repeated in the fall on KCET and KLCS Channel 58, the public-TV station licensed by the Los Angeles Unified School District, to permit instructors ample opportunities to tape the programs for use in their classrooms.

During the summer, KCET and the Los Angeles Unified School District will sponsor a 16-hour workshop at KCET for teachers in Los Angeles County and eight surrounding counties, and plan to create printed instructional materials to be distributed to teachers and students.

The documentary makers do not plan to ignore the fact that to most of America, the city of Los Angeles is synonymous with the Hollywood movie and television industry. But the series most likely will explore Hollywood’s effect on the economic growth of the city, rather than re-visiting the celebrities, the glitter and the stars on Hollywood Boulevard, Bach said.

She added, however, that Los Angeles’ history as a movie-making town provides an extraordinary library of historic footage of the city during almost every moment of its unruly development. “We have a visual resource that’s virtually unique,” she said.

Bach said that work already has begun on future installments; the producers have begun collecting an “image bank” of videotape archival material, including conversations with older Angelenos, to make sure they get a chance to tell their stories. That group includes architect Cliff May, plus sports figures, union activists and members of ethnic groups that have been under-represented in historical literature. Pop singer Randy Newman (“I Love L.A.”) has been videotaped talking about growing up in Los Angeles in the ‘50s.

“The series will reflect the new emphasis on social history; it’s not just the history of the great and the powerful,” she said.

Bach added that the videotapes of these interviews, as well as all archival material donated during the research, will eventually be housed in San Marino’s Huntington Library for use by the general public.