Certain things in movies I watched while growing up began to strike me as increasingly unreal. For instance: I’d never been in New York, but I found it unlikely that you could pull up in front of the Waldorf-Astoria at any hour of the day or night and find a parking space; I would get faintly indignant that no one waited for change when they paid a check in a restaurant; I found it hard to swallow that every married couple slept in twin beds, that the husband always wore pajamas, and the wife always woke up without her lipstick smeared; I knew it was a flat-out lie when the movie was set in Los Angeles and the men wore hats and overcoats. The misrepresentation of native dress was a serious violation of reality. It rankled me the way James Fenimore Cooper’s Indians rankled Mark Twain— when six of them jump out of a sapling barely six feet tall and somehow miss a barge 150 feet long passing beneath them at less than one mile an hour. Moreover, these hats in L.A. weren’t merely noted on the printed page; they were being shown on a huge screen, the offending item much larger than life. I’m sure I figured somewhere back then that sooner or later, when I grew up, I would try and do it differently. I’d make it “real.” Particularly because I grew up in a place outsiders claimed was unreal, and because I looked at representations of that world onscreen that I thought were unreal, I suppose I saw movies as a way of redressing a wrong. I would use one illusion— movies— in order to make another illusion—Los Angeles—real.

ROBERT TOWNE