it’s a wonderful life

“You Got Your Wish, George. There is No Planning Department.”

We all know urban planning has an image problem. But it’s odd to come across an example of a planning department producing a propaganda film to redress the situation. Yet that’s exactly what the Beverley Hills Planning Department did with this short from 2003, It’s a Wonderful City.

As the title suggests, it’s a take on It’s a Wonderful Life, which is already a highly suggestive, must-see film for urban planners (I talk about it more here). The original film shows the fortunes of a classic Hollywood small town as it teeters on the edge of suburbanisation, with the fate of the town depending on the existence or otherwise of affordable-housing pioneer George Bailey. In the Beverley Hills take, we follow George Buildley as we see how the town would fare without a town planning department.

While it’s a brave attempt, I can’t help but chuckle at the efforts to make a world without planning seem so nightmarish. And it’s a little depressing that even in pro-planning propaganda there’s a scene in which someone is driven to the edge of madness by planning bureaucracy. (“Review process… the Planning Commission, the Architectural Commission… there isn’t time!)

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Stalking the Movies

Film Urban Planning and Film

My post a while back about the changes to L.A. since the 1940s got me thinking again about the experience of visiting real movie locations, something I wrote about a few years ago (here). As I said then, it can be quite an uncanny experience visiting the spot where a familiar movie scene was filmed. What has changed since that post, though, is the roll-out of Google’s Street View. Where seeing the real locations where movies were shot was once something of a pilgrimage, these days we can do it virtually. So I thought it would be fun to find a few familiar or iconic locations on Street View.

Unlike my earlier post, I don’t have any larger point to make about changes to the city as a result of this post. I just thought it would be interesting. Perhaps you see no point in dong this… if so, fair enough. Move along, there’s nothing to see here…

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Capratastic

Film Film Reviews Urban Planning and Film

It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

In his autobiography The Name Above the Title, Frank Capra was straightforward in his self-assessment of It’s a Wonderful Life. “I thought it was the greatest film I had ever made,” he wrote, adding: “Better yet, I thought it was the greatest film anybody had ever made.” We might fault Capra for saying it himself, but the passage of time has largely vindicated his hubris. As fewer and fewer films from the middle of the twentieth century are revived, It’s a Wonderful Life remains one of the perennial standards, still widely loved by popular audiences rather than just a hard core of film buffs. Its impact on audiences remains strong: the dulling of impact usually wrought by the passage of time has not appreciably weakened the film. This is particularly surprising given the its firm footing in its time. The film expresses many of the fears and hopes of America after World War II, and is one of the most rewarding films to study in looking at the values espoused by Hollywood at the start of the post-war era.

We do the film a disservice, though, if we only consider it as a social document and forget its value as an entertainment. As a film designed to get an emotional response, it is about as effective as any made. This at first seems to be for straightforward reasons. It is a sentimental story of an impossibly good man – George Bailey, played by one of the twentieth century’s most charismatic actors, James Stewart – who gives up many of his dreams to support his family, friends, and community. Bailey falls on bad times, is mistreated, and loses faith… only to regain it at the conclusion of the film. Broadly speaking, it’s a classic Hollywood trajectory and the impact of the film might therefore seem not at all mysterious. The extreme goodness of Bailey gets us on-side, and we have a hissable villain to contrast him with in the corrupt developer Henry Potter. The misfortunes that fall upon our good character arouse our sympathies, and we can cheer when he overcomes them. Yet there’s something more going on here than this standard storytelling device. Beyond the broad sweep of the story, the film’s approach is actually highly unusual and rarely imitated.

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