Los Angeles Visionaries Association

Southern California 1931: Amongst the burgeoning urban sprawl built atop bulldozed orange groves and the bitter realization that you can’t eat the sunshine, recent emigré James M. Cain found a kernel of truth and his voice, which would eventually distill through his novels, ”The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Mildred Pierce” and “Double Indemnity” and subsequent film adaptations into the unique American genre: Film Noir.

How did this East Coat sophisticate go from managing editor of “The New Yorker” to populist novelist accused of writing dirty books? The tour explores Cain’s L.A. from Hollywood to Glendale and along old Route 66, and includes illuminating visits to Forest Lawn Memorial Park (a Glendale institution and site of the funeral of Mildred Pierce’s “other” daughter, Ray), the Glendale Train Station where the “Double Indemnity” murder plot played out, and the punch line to a Billy Wilder joke so subtle, it’s taken 63 years for anyone to get. The tour will also cover the artisans who transformed Cain’s tales into film, including Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner, each an important contributor to the Film Noir canon.

Join LAVA for our revived free monthly Sunday Salon series. We return to South Broadway, to the mezzanine of Les Noces du Figaro, which was recently opened by the family behind Figaro Bistro in Los Feliz. This handsome space was formerly Schaber’s Cafeteria (Charles F. Plummer, 1928), and the mezzanine features wonderful views of the Los Angeles Theatre.

On the last Sunday of each month, LAVA welcomes interested individuals to gather in downtown Los Angeles (noon-2pm), for a structured Salon featuring formal presentations and opportunities to meet and connect with one another. If you’re interested in joining LAVA as a creative contributor or an attendee, we recommend Salon attendance as an introduction to this growing community. We also recommend the eclairs.

Read about the original Sunday Salon at Clifton's Cafeteria here.

The Salon's theme will be Jazz Age Los Angeles, and the two talks (45 minutes each) will focus on that theme at the intersection of Crescent Heights and Sunset Blvd.

You are encouraged to arrive early if you wish to order food and beverages from the counter downstairs, and bring your meal upstairs. 

Please note that there will a morning and afternoon walking tour of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Hollywood on Saturday, June 29, and that our Salon presenters Martin Turnbull and Marc Chevalier will be making short appearances.

Presentation One: Martin Turnbull on The Garden of Allah

Martin Turnbull, author of The Garden Of Allah novels will be discussing life at that hotel and its infamous bungalow courtyard during the 1920s and 30s. Its bootleg liquor, fizzy flappers, all night parties defined the Jazz Age in Los Angeles. When Scott Fitzgerald when came to L.A. in the mid 1930s with his $1000/week contract at MGM, it was at the Garden of Allah he chose to land. it was also the home-away-from-home for Algonquin Round Table refugees Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, Donald Ogden Stewart and Marc Connelly, so Fitzgerald must have feel at home. As did anyone answering Hollywood’s siren call lucky enough to get a room there. Martin’s talk will be punctuated by readings from his first novel in the series, The Garden On Sunset.

Back Story on the Garden of Allah: Formerly the movie star mansion of luminous silent screen star, Alla Nazimova, the Garden of Allah opened its doors in 1927 at the height of the Jazz Age and in no time, word got out that Nazimova’s Garden could always provide hopeful Hollywood arrivals with a pillow, a pal and a party. Over those years, a virtual who’s who of Hollywood paraded through the place: Bogie and Bacall, Errol Flynn, David Niven, Harpo Marx, Tallulah Bankhead, Artie Shaw, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Dorothy Gish, Kay Thompson, Leopold Stokowski, Orson Welles, Ava Gardner, and Frank Sinatra.

Presentation Two: Marc Chevalier on the Crescent Heights Shopping Center & the ballyhoo spirit of the Jazz Age

For his talk, Marc Chevailer, the historian of the Oviatt Building, will focus on the Crescent Heights Shopping Center, just across the street from the Garden of Allah. First drawn to the building because of James Oviatt's proposed but never realized "satellite" shop for his famous haberdashery downtown, Marc soon become ensorcelled by this beautiful French Norman revival building. Built in 1925, this towered, marble-trimmed and mansard-roofed Norman ‘chateau’ housed Schwab’s Pharmacy and the Crescent Heights Market, which fed, drugged and boozed the Garden of Allah’s voracious guests. It was where Hollywood’s movielanders shopped, schmoozed, strove and scrounged for generations … where F. Scott Fitzgerald nearly died and Marilyn Monroe got her final prescription, and where Robert Mitchum, already a star, stocked grocery shelves just for fun. 

It was home to the Sunset Medical Center, the upscale Talmadge Jones flower shop (with its Rolls-Royce delivery trucks), a bakery, a dry cleaner, a beauty parlor, the infamous Crescent Heights Market (owned and managed by a cantankerous ex-speakeasy operator from New York, who randomly overcharged Hollywood's elite for its groceries), and a pharmacy that would be bought out by Schwab's in 1932. In 1949, Googie's would build its first coffee shop next to Schwab's.

While nothing remains of it today, “the chateau that housed Schwab’s” is ripe for rediscovery. Join Marc as he presents us a rich palimpsest of Hollywood from its halcyon era as he peels back the layers of the Crescent Heights Shopping Center, a compound which was drastically remodeled in the 1960s, and demolished in 1988.

Marc Chevalier stumbled across “the chateau that held Schwab’s” while doing research for his upcoming biography of James Oviatt, the man behind L.A.’s Oviatt Building. In 2008, in partnership with filmmaker Seth Shulman, he researched/wrote/produced a feature-length documentary on the Oviatt Building’s history. An English teacher by profession, Chevalier calls Los Angeles history his passion/addiction, and credits Kim Cooper and Richard Schave for feeding it regularly.

"[This tour is] a poetic journey full of rare insight into the life of a man who's come to represent the ghettoized contingency of the City of Angels.” - Tanja M. Laden, Flavorpill

"Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski's LA" focuses on Bukowski’s great passions: writing, screwing and Los Angeles. We’ll take in the canonical locations of his life and myth: the Postal Annex Terminal where he gathered the material for “Post Office,” the De Longpre apartment where he briefly experimented with marriage and fatherhood, one of his favorite bars and liquor stores, and many other spots. Along the way, we’ll explore the people and ideas that made up the warp and weft of Buk’s rich inner life. This Esotouric bus adventure is hosted by Richard Schave.

The tour spans Bukowski's personal city, from Skid Row to once-genteel Crown Hill, to Bukowski's favorite East Hollywood liquor store, the Pink Elephant.

Esotouric has made its name with true crime bus tours (Black Dahlia, Pasadena Confidential) and explorations of literary LA (Raymond Chandler, John Fante, James M. Cain). Now they turn their creative attentions to Bukowski, the prolific poet, novelist and screenwriter whose rough-hewn tales of boozing, wild women and rotten jobs never obscure the deep vein of sweetness and hope that runs through all his work. In one of his finest poems, he described this as a bluebird he kept caged, and that bluebird is been represented in the Bukbird, a pale blue version of his beloved alcoholic crow character, represented by a logo created by cartoonist Tony Millionaire exclusively for this tour. The Bukbird is available on T-shirts, beer coasters and fine art prints by plasticmuse.

REVEALING PLAY CAPTURES TRUE STORES ABOUT HOLLYWOOD’S "BACKROOM BOYS"

"… It’s a brilliant play. It's so good that I’m even tempted to steal from it myself." – William Saroyan's play character

A collection of wonderful stories and memories is the heart of a fascinating play called "Evenings with The Boys in the Backroom" by Peter Adum and Joyce Fante. It’s the Los Angeles version of Gertrude Stein’s 1920s "Left Bank Salon" in Paris where she hosted luminaries like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. The play, as a staged reading, showcases L.A.'s own 1930s salon of gifted writers set in Stanley Rose's Book Store, one door east of the Musso & Frank Grill and across from the Brown Derby in Hollywood. The world premiere production will be presented as a benefit for the Friends of the Altadena Public Library in association with The Moveable Theatre Company, which uses volunteer professional actors. The performance is Sunday, May 5, 2013 at 3:00 PM in the Altadena Public Library community room in Altadena, California. (For tickets: 626-798-0833 or www.altadenalibrary.org)

 "From the start, this play has interested and enchanted me," said Holly Witham, founder and production director of The Moveable Theatre Company. "Call me a 1930s buff, or a fan of the Golden Age of Hollywood or a hopeless bibliophile; I am guilty of all these things and from all, can point with enthusiasm to this fascinating story of how some of the best writers of an era socialized, played, fought, gossiped, supported and challenged each other, amid the sometimes cruel, heart-breaking and tough world of Hollywood," Witham said.

Set in 1938, this original work written a number of years ago, chronicles the friendships between Hollywood book store owner Stanley Rose and some of his most famous customers: John Fante, William Saroyan, Nathanael West and Carey McWilliams.  To help write the play, John Fante's widow, Joyce, now deceased, shared her knowledge of the intimate details of conversations that occurred in Stanley Rose's back room behind the book shop. This is where Rose's successful friends talked, drank, played cards and discussed ideas which would inspire their most famous works. The scene was like a "Who's Who" of the Los Angeles literary scene during Hollywood's Golden Age.

For example, William Saroyan wrote the Pulitzer Prize wining play, "The Time of Your Life." John Fante, a novelist, wrote "Ask the Dust" among others and Nathanael West wrote bitter, satirical novels like "Day of the Locust." Carey McWilliams, an attorney and "muckraker," wrote works including "Factories in the Fields" and one of the finest histories of Southern California.

The play paints the picture of the bookstore's backroom which was an "art gallery" (original Picassos), but retained the intimate atmosphere of the old speakeasy days. Bookstore owner, Stanley Rose, was characterized by playwright Peter Adum: "He was quite unique. Here was a hard-drinking, semi-literate, bootlegger who fed, nurtured and encouraged the writers who became his best friends. He wasn't Gertrude Stein, but he was very much the 'den mother'."  One of Rose's lines in the play says a lot: "I sell books. I don't read the damn things…."

Bungalows. Crime. Hollywood. Blondes. Vets. Smog. Death.

This was Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, which resonated under deft and melancholy fits from his writer’s bow.

Join us as we go down the mean streets that shaped his fiction, and that in turn shaped his hard-boiled times, in a four hour tour of downtown, Hollywood and surrounding environs: The Los Angeles Athletic Club, the Larry Edmunds Bookshop, the Hotel Van Nuys, Paramount Studio’s gates, and much, much more, including a Chandler-themed gelato stop at East Hollywood cult favorite Scoops.

Through published work, private correspondence, screenplays and film adaptations, we trace Chandler’s search for meaning and his anti-hero Philip Marlowe’s struggle to not be pigeonholed or give anything less than all he has, which lead them both down the rabbit hole of isolation, depression, and drink.

Click here to purchase tickets for the Salon.  Your ticket entitles you to entry to the event on April 27, which includes a buffet dinner featuring mid-century gourmet fare, the presentations, and complimentary parking. There will be a cash bar. 

ABOUT THIS SALON: Dashiell Hammett is remembered for both for his contributions to hard-boiled crime fiction and his stand against McCarthyism. Join Hammett scholar and granddaughter Julie M. Rivett as she explores her grandfather’s controversial political life, his relationship with Lillian Hellman, and the decades of consequent troubles that have tangled Hammett’s estate. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear an insider’s perspective on an important and too often misunderstood literary legacy.

Hammett biographer Richard Layman will begin the evening with a brief overview of Hammett's remarkable life and literary career, tracing his path from high-school dropout to world-renowned author. Layman's remarks will set the stage for Julie Rivett's discussion of her grandfather’s complicated literary afterlife.

Julie Rivett and special guest Richard Layman will close the evening with discussion and a question-and-answer session. Layman has written or edited eight books on Dashiell Hammett, including Dashiell Hammett: a Descriptive Bibliography, Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett, and Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade, nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

Together Layman and Rivett have edited four books by or about Dashiell Hammett. Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921-1960 and Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers by Jo Hammett were published in 2001. The Return of the Thin Man, with Hammett’s screen treatments for two of the beloved Thin Man film series sequels, was released in 2012. The Hunter and Other Stories, featuring unpublished and previously uncollected Hammett fiction, will make its debut in November 2013.

We are honored to welcome members of The Long Beach Shakespeare Company, who will present scenes featuring the legendary Hammett characters The Continental Op, The Femme Fatale and Nick and Nora Charles.  

Listen to Julie Rivett's podcast preview of the Salon, a second podcast on the salon, and a recent KFWB interview as well.

ABOUT THE BUFFET

Boris Chernyak, Executive Chef of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, is creating a special Salon menu inspired by the gourmet fare that was popular in high-end American restaurants circa 1950 and would have been enjoyed by the authors we celebrate. 

SALADS: Nicoise salad / Waldorf salad / Mixed greens / Assorted dressings and condiments 

ENTREES: Carving station with Baron of Beef Au Jus and horseradish cream / Parmesan-crusted Golden Tilapia / Chicken Tetrazzini

SIDES: Potato au Gratin / Grilled Vegetables/ Rice Pilaf / Steamed Asparagus 

ABOUT THE SERIES

LAVA’s Literary Salon is a place for lovers of great Los Angeles writers to come together in historic spaces for good company, fine food, and fascinating discussions by experts in the field. Join us in the historic Los Angeles Athletic Club, where Raymond Chandler, then a young oil executive, played bridge and eavesdropped on the powerful men who would shape the city and his detective fiction. 

It’s impossible to understand Los Angeles literature out of context of the place. In the 1920s and 1930s, L.A. was bursting at the seams, as one of the biggest boom towns the world had ever seen. And as the city grew, it attracted a varied and fascinating population: East coast intellectuals, filmmakers, European refugees, hustlers and visionaries of all stripes.

In this young city without an established cultural scene, the intelligentsia congregated in book shops, each with its own personality shaped by the book seller who curated the selection and the space. In the Salon series, we celebrate the forgotten history of L.A. book culture, from Hollywood Boulevard to downtown’s Bookseller’s Row, in an original presentation by Howard Prouty. Each book shop’s story illuminates the literary life of the city, and the emotional growth of the writers who called Los Angeles home. (Please note, Howard Prouty will not be presenting at the April 2013 Salon)

Past Salons have celebrated the life and work of John Fante, Raymond Chandler, Jim Tully, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker and the booksellers Jake Zeitlin, Stanley Rose, Louis Epstein (Pickwick Books) and Ernest Dawson (Dawson’s Bookshop).

Roar Shack Reading Series presents "Hide One Thing in Your Heart" on Sunday, March 17 from 5-7 pm at The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. Our lineup includes the remarkable novelist Bill Luvaas, Helena Lipstad, Erica Blumenson-Cooke, Ryan Wilson, Vicky Deger, J Ryan Stradal and musical guest Dylan Neal. We'll be reveling in their abandon and live writing with special guests. Come join us!

Southern California 1931: Amongst the burgeoning urban sprawl built atop bulldozed orange groves and the bitter realization that you can’t eat the sunshine, recent emigré James M. Cain found a kernel of truth and his voice, which would eventually distill through his novels, ”The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Mildred Pierce” and “Double Indemnity” and subsequent film adaptations into the unique American genre: Film Noir.

How did this East Coat sophisticate go from managing editor of “The New Yorker” to populist novelist accused of writing dirty books? The tour explores Cain’s L.A. from Hollywood to Glendale and along old Route 66, and includes illuminating visits to Forest Lawn Memorial Park (a Glendale institution and site of the funeral of Mildred Pierce’s “other” daughter, Ray), the Glendale Train Station where the “Double Indemnity” murder plot played out, and the punch line to a Billy Wilder joke so subtle, it’s taken 63 years for anyone to get. The tour will also cover the artisans who transformed Cain’s tales into film, including Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner, each an important contributor to the Film Noir canon.

"[This tour is] a poetic journey full of rare insight into the life of a man who's come to represent the ghettoized contingency of the City of Angels.” - Tanja M. Laden, Flavorpill

"Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski's LA" focuses on Bukowski’s great passions: writing, screwing and Los Angeles. We’ll take in the canonical locations of his life and myth: the Postal Annex Terminal where he gathered the material for “Post Office,” the De Longpre apartment where he briefly experimented with marriage and fatherhood, one of his favorite bars and liquor stores, and many other spots. Along the way, we’ll explore the people and ideas that made up the warp and weft of Buk’s rich inner life. This Esotouric bus adventure is hosted by Richard Schave.

The tour spans Bukowski's personal city, from Skid Row to once-genteel Crown Hill, to Bukowski's favorite East Hollywood liquor store, the Pink Elephant.

Esotouric has made its name with true crime bus tours (Black Dahlia, Pasadena Confidential) and explorations of literary LA (Raymond Chandler, John Fante, James M. Cain). Now they turn their creative attentions to Bukowski, the prolific poet, novelist and screenwriter whose rough-hewn tales of boozing, wild women and rotten jobs never obscure the deep vein of sweetness and hope that runs through all his work. In one of his finest poems, he described this as a bluebird he kept caged, and that bluebird is been represented in the Bukbird, a pale blue version of his beloved alcoholic crow character, represented by a logo created by cartoonist Tony Millionaire exclusively for this tour. The Bukbird is available on T-shirts, beer coastersand fine art prints by plasticmuse.

Press clips:

LA Weekly interviews Charles Bukowski tour host Richard Schave to compile a list of L.A. sites that were important to the writer.

Slake wonders if the Charles Bukowski tour is "'Fawlty Towers' on wheels."

Spike Magazine digs our literary tours.

Novelist Anna Stothard explores the hidden gems of Los Angeles for the London Guardian, including our Bukowski tour.

Annenberg News Radio covers our Charles Bukowski tour in a video/slideshow.

Marco Mannone on the Charles Bukowski bus: "Four hours after we departed, the tour drops us back off at Philippe’s. This is a terrible way to simplify the tour, filled with so much wit and insight into not only Bukowski, but lost parts of Los Angeles.&quot

Girls Gone Wild digs the Charles Bukowski tour.

For more info, see this short film on the landmarking of Bukowski’s former bungalow on De Longpre.

Early editions of this tour lamented John Fante's obscurity. On April 8, 2010, the City of Los Angeles declared the corner of 5th & Grand, beside the Central Library, JOHN FANTE SQUARE. Today John Fante might be best described as the most famous unknown writer in America. Climb aboard to hear his story and that of the lost neighborhood where he found his voice.

Before Kerouac, before Bukowski, there was John Fante, author of "Ask the Dust," "Dreams of Bunker Hill," "Full of Life," "The Road to Los Angeles" and "Wait Until Spring, Bandini." This five-novel cycle, written over sixty years, introduced the world to Arturo Bandini, an outspoken, down-and-out Mr. Hyde to Fante's Dr. Jekyll.

As Bunker Hill's prodigal son, Fante-as-Bandini chronicles a forgotten Los Angeles neighborhood teeming with immigrants, criminals and dreamers like himself. With genuine compassion and wonderful craft, he sketches the hopes and dreams which fly round their heads, and in the process finds his own voice, a revelation which carries him all the way to Hollywood. Once there, he is distracted by fame and fortune, and settles for easy answers to the questions of faith in oneself, the nature of inspiration, and the duality of failure and redemption. "Dreams of Bunker Hill" was dictated by a blind Fante two years before his death, and "Road to Los Angeles" was published posthumously. Bunker Hill is gone now, flattened, its mansions torn down, long since redeveloped by corporate and civic interests. But in today's downtown communities the same stories play out, in thriving micro-climates where artists and writers find their voices, where some are making it big and others breaking up on the reef, some moving away and others coming back in search of what they have lost. Arturo Bandini is alive and well, and his lament is as relevant today as it was 75 years ago. So please join us as we follow in his footsteps, to the Goodwill store, King Eddy's, Clifton's Cafeteria ("pay what you can"), the Los Angeles Library's Reading Room and the Post Office Terminal Annex (important landmarks for Bukowski and Fante), aboard the newly-restored Angels Flight Railway, and other evocative scenes of old L.A.

This tour is a meditation not only on John Fante, but the preservation of Public Space. The depopulation of Bunker Hill in the early 1960s became the benchmark for Community Redevelopment across the country-the term "Federal Bulldozer" came out of the many lawsuits filed against the city at the time. And now that corporate interests have decided it is time to repopulate western downtown Los Angeles with market-rate housing the ensuing catastrophe has spawned many new monikers (elegant density is one of the more polite ones) and problems. Public Space downtown can be saved and Arturo Bandini can lead the way. Please Note: This tour will have several sections which involve walking through parts of Downtown for up to ten minutes at a time. Walking shoes and sunscreen are advised.