City as star: Los Angeles Plays Itself

It's totally enjoyable to watch Thom Andersen's 2004 documentary/essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, which is all one can reasonably ask, though I do have some quibbles w/ this otherwise excellent project. Over the 2.5 movie, Andersen (his voiceover narration read by an actor) reflects on the numerous, literally countless, films that are set in or depict Los Angeles (he mocks and moniker LA, though I will resort to using it) from the days of silent films to the present (i.e., 2004 in this case), with particular attention to LA landmarks and neighborhoods. As expected, many LA landmarks and iconic dwellings (garden apartments, houses in the hills, beach houses in Malibu) are used as standins for films supposedly set elsewhere; some play entirely different roles in a # of films, doubling as hospitals, office complexes, etc. What's most interesting is his sense of how filmmakers misunderstand LA, assuming that it's entirely a place of glitz and glamour without any recognition of the many neighborhoods where most Angelinos live - particularly notable in some pretentious contemporary directors who have no idea how others live in their city and whose films are amazingly all-white. Some of the best material concerns the few black filmmakers, and I think he could have made more of two of the great black LA films, The Exiles and Killer of Sheep. The only significant flaw, to me, was his fascination with copy stories - from Dragnet to Schwarzenegger and beyond - that are only nominally set in LA; it seems to me that this was a long, needless digression that was really about depiction of the police in movies and not any depiction of LA in particular. Throughout the film, we see clips of tons of motels, disasters (the end of the world seems often to begin w/ the destruction of LA!), car chases, glizty offices and condos, bars, airplanes; sometimes we see LA playing not-itself, elsewhere supposed LA scenes that look nothing like what we expect of LA. All told, fun to watch, even over several sittings, and informative about filmmaking and about sprawling American cities evolving over time.