For Sale: "The Savage Eye" (1959), Oscar Niemeyer's only U.S. residential commission (1963), thousands of burned out lots and the soul of Los Angeles

Gentle reader,

It’s such a kick when history rhymes, and lately it seems not just to rhyme, but to echo, like a house of mirrors that holds the secrets of who and what we are as Angelenos, secrets we desperately want to know and to share.

Today we had planned to tell you about the new Blu-Ray box-set release House of Psychotic Women: Rarities Collection Volume 2 (produced by Kier-La Janisse for Severin Films), a four movie set inspired by her acclaimed book, which includes the restored avant-garde “dramatized documentary” The Savage Eye (1959).

A second audio track features Kim’s poetic riffing on the film’s gritty Los Angeles locations and emotionally grueling portrait of Judith X (Barbara Baxley), a rootless divorcée who tests her psychic limits while jousting with the cruel beatnik God who lives in her head (voiced by Gary Merrill).

Judith X's Los Angeles

It’s a hell of a film, with starkly beautiful scenes of the city at mid-century, from Hollywood beer bars to Skid Row dives, the Olympic Auditorium wrestling ring to the Sunset Strip, pet cemeteries, a giant Sphinx head real estate office, burlesque clubs and beauty culture and bungalow courts, Pentecostal healers and sidewalk loiters, LAX and the capillary freeways that deliver a possibly suicidal Judith X to her uncertain fate.

More of Judith X's Los Angeles

Shot over several years by cinematographers Haskell Wexler, Helen Levitt, and Jack Couffer, The Savage Eye was directed by Joseph Strick, Ben Maddow and Sidney Meyers as a collaborative, low-budget cinema experiment, partly financed by Strick’s successful consumer electronics businesses.

The film was effusively received in New York and at European festivals, followed by an exclusive month-long run with daily matinees at the United Artists / Four Star on Wilshire, then was booked at Southern California art house theaters throughout 1962. It has rarely been seen since.

Local critics found the story powerful, if a bit overwrought, with too great an emphasis on freakish characters and after hours vice—though all of it beautifully shot. The Legion of Decency, meanwhile, rated the film a C: objectionable to all, morally repugnant, and unsuitable for any good Catholic to view.

A few years later, Joseph Strick went into debt to film Jean Genet’s The Balcony on a soundstage. Also around this time he divorced Anne, the mother of his three children. And like Judith X, he was cast off from his home, in this case the nearly completed residence designed from afar by Brazilian master architect Oscar Niemeyer, whom Strick had hired out of disgust that as a Communist, he couldn’t get a visa to work in America.

But in early 1960s Santa Monica, the building inspector trumped the artist. The September 1964 issue of Art + Architecture magazine (pages 20+) documented “a study in frustration, the defeat of a fine, imaginative design by paralyzing building regulations and their dogged, immovable enforcers.”

Strick House was completed, but it was fundamentally a compromise, something less than client and architect desired. The children’s bedrooms were intended to be below grade, with beautiful views out over the Riviera Country Club, but this was forbidden—ridiculously—because Santa Monica code assumed that rooms so situated might be rented to boarders. (Beatniks, no doubt.)

Without these spaces tucked underneath, it was impossible to build the fluid, boomerang roofline that was key to Niemeyer’s scheme.

To get a building permit, the roof became flat and T-shaped, symbolic of the bureaucratic power trip that had stripped much of the joy out of the project. Joseph Strick left California, settling in Paris for the remainder of his long, creative life. We’re all the poorer that this visionary documentarian didn’t stick around to tell any more uniquely Los Angeles stories, as he did with The Savage Eye and Muscle Beach before it.

The Strick House wasn’t what it might have been without bureaucratic meddling, but it is nevertheless Oscar Niemeyer’s only residential commission in North America, and much loved in its community.

Twenty five years ago, after Anne Strick sold it for $3.4 Million with no mention of the architectural pedigree, it was slated to be demolished by developer Jon Monkarsh, who was attracted to the large lot and believed a neo-Craftsman, 8000 square foot mansion would be a better fit.

Instead, design savvy locals rallied to declare the Strick House a Santa Monica landmark, and preservation minded buyers had an opportunity to take it off Monkarsh’s hands. Sensitively restored as their longtime home by Michael and Gabrielle Boyd, who recently auctioned some of their design collection, it’s once again on the market for a smidgen under $20 Million bucks.

Perhaps some deep pocketed soul reading this newsletter will be the next steward of the Strick House, in which case we hope they’ll project The Savage Eye on the white wall beside the pool that appears tailor made for private screenings.

And in the tale of the Strick House, too, history rhymes. Since March on Instagram, a person calling themselves palisades_embers has been chronicling their family’s efforts to move forward with a residential remodel that was already in the plan check process before their 1950s era home was destroyed in the Palisades fire.

Like Joseph Strick and Oscar Niemeyer six decades ago, p_e and their architect are getting pummeled by the arbitrary, irrational and antagonistic gate keepers in the building department, anonymous government functionaries who appear to be deliberately stalling and running up the costs for fire victims, a tactic that may make it impossible for Palisadeans to ever return to their community.

These “essays,” produced in the form of social media graphics that can’t be easily quoted, are not widely read—there were just 55 likes on yesterday’s post titled “Spirit and Intent of the Code” when we saw it—but we think they’re extremely important.

If it is true that civil servants are sabotaging rebuilding efforts, they need to be stopped, and probably investigated. This isn’t just one weird house on the country club that a pushy movie director wants designed by some pinko, it’s thousands of Angelenos who need help, now, or they will not be able to remain Angelenos.

Instead, their property will be purchased by developers, who seem to be the only ones with the tools to navigate the obstacle course that stands between a burned out lot and an approved new house.

A very similar story is unfolding in Altadena, where the planning savvy Steven S. Lamb presented several ideas for erecting an architecturally distinguished new home where his historic residence burned down, but found that nothing he wanted could satisfy the planners. The lifelong Altadenean is selling his lot and moving on, as the developers move in.

There are a couple more rhymes in this jingle, and a plea for those of you who care about Los Angeles and don’t want to see thousands of our neighbors give up and move away. It can feel hopeless, but it isn’t. We want you to have hope, and to get to work.

Kier-La Janisse, who asked Kim to provide the extra material to enhance the film’s reissue, is a very old friend. She produced a guerrilla documentary based on Kim’s and David Smay’s anthology Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop, from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears (2001.)

When Kier-La would visit Los Angeles, Kim took her to her favorite fancy restaurant, the Pacific Dining Car, to order off the all day breakfast menu and soak up the noir atmosphere and gracious service.

"We don’t want to lose any more of these places we care about," said Kim Cooper. "We want the city to take responsibility if the owners won’t."

That wonderful nearly 100 year old restaurant shut down a few years back amidst family acrimony, confusing statements and bankruptcy, and we’ve documented all of that, and then the repeated fires at the derelict, poorly secured structure that ultimately resulted in LAFD knocking down the walls for public safety.

Because we followed the contentious landmarking process, we knew that at the center of the structure was the 1934 all steel kitchen that was designated as a protected landmark a few years back.

We were present during the demolition, and asked LAFD Heavy Equipment Captain Rich Diede to determine if the kitchen had survived the blaze, and if so not to crush it. He went inside, found the kitchen intact, and directed his wrecking crew to encapsulate it. We informed the Office of Historic Resources that it was still in there.

So when we saw on the agenda of the Board of Building and Safety Commissioners a vote to declare the Pacific Dining Car a public nuisance that must be fully demolished, we sent an email to OHR.

Worryingly, staff had not been informed that BBSC intended to hold an unappealable hearing about the landmark, but responded to us before the meeting started.

We went downtown to attend the hearing, which is not live streamed, listened to the building inspector and the property owner’s rep, then made public comment asking the Commissioners to consider protection of the kitchen in their determination. Alerted to this hearing happening in the same City building, Melissa Jones came down from OHR and spoke, too. The proceedings are embedded above.

Ultimately, the Commissioners voted to declare the former restaurant a public nuisance—but with the understanding that the process will include the City Planning Department having the opportunity to review the demolition permit. This will allow OHR to advise the property owner on options to salvage the kitchen, so it can have another life somewhere else. We know it’s not much, but it’s something.

We reckon that hundreds of thousands of people enjoyed the fare at the Pacific Dining Car (and the Santa Monica outpost) during its 99 years in business. Here’s what California restaurant historian George Geary had to say about its loss.

But it was just us two who ran over to the scene when we saw on social media that LAFD was knocking down walls, who spoke up to save the kitchen from being crushed, who alerted OHR to the most recent demolition threat, and who addressed the Commissioners to make sure they knew what was at stake.

And if the kitchen is saved, it will be because we did all of this.

Our plea to you, who cares enough about Los Angeles to have read this far, is this: pick something about this City that matters to you and that is deeply screwed up, become an expert, and share your knowledge, observations and recommendations with the community. Show up and speak out. Demand that those with power do something with it. It’s only when we don’t pay attention and don’t get involved that the things we love are lost.

Our dream for Los Angeles, the city we were born in, the city we love, is that it will once again become a place that is welcoming to artists and oddballs, dreamers and visionaries, to strangers and native sons and daughters. What’s standing in the way is an entrenched, corrupt, ill mannered and tedious system that isn’t interested in solving problems, but only in perpetuating itself.

We can’t afford to lose anymore Joseph Stricks, or palisades_embers, or Pacific Dining Cars, or Steven S. Lambs. We can’t afford to lose you!

Tomorrow’s tour of Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue isn’t just the story of a Victorian era subdivision and its preservation, but about a refreshingly progressive era in Los Angeles city planning when elected and appointed officials used their resources to move demolition threatened historic homes, bury unsightly power lines and solve citizens’ problems instead of making them worse. We believe by studying the past, Angelenos can be empowered to take back their city from the jerks who tell us they can’t do anything to make it better. Join us, do!

Yours for Los Angeles,

Kim & Richard

Esotouric

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Our work—leading tours and historic preservation and cultural landmark advocacy—is about building a bridge between Los Angeles' past and its future, and not allowing the corrupt, greedy, inept and misguided players who hold present power to destroy the city's soul and body. If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.

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UPCOMING WALKING TOURS

• Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (6/7) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (6/14) •Know Your Downtown LA: Bradbury, Basements, Dutch Chocolate Shop (6/21) • Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness (6/22) • Westlake Park Time Travel Trip (6/28) • Film Noir / Real Noir (7/12) • The Real Black Dahlia (7/19) • Early Hollywood’s Silent Comedy Legends (7/26) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (8/9) • Weird West Adams / Elmer McCurdy Museum (8/16) • Christine Sterling & Leo Politi: Angels of Los Angeles (8/23) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (8/30) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (9/6) • Film Noir / Real Noir (9/20) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (9/27)