Ronald Reagan succeeded Richard Nixon as national leader of the Republican New Right, he was also one of its principal co-founders.  Like Nixon, a world-historic figure of incalculable proportions, he shaped the U.S. nation-state with the institutional resources of the metropolis that shaped him: Los Angeles.  While it was Nixon who engineered the party machinery and attracted the mass base of frightened nationalist moralists, it was Reagan who fashioned the New Right's design and replaced Nixon's reign of fear with a contagiously optimistic, positive, hopeful and also stridently consistent message.  Reagan, dubbed The Great Communicator, created the outer shell of the Nixon regime.  To paraphrase deGaulle's contrast of presidents Johnson and Kennedy: Nixon created the regime itself, while Reagan created its mask.

The United States from the late 1970s through teh 1990s, was shaped most distinctly by the Southern-California regional regime. 

[Use Ethington-Levitus)

 

Insight here about no single personaly controlling everything.  Reagan as perfect example.  Hollywood connections.

 

Timid Internatioal Media Conglmoerate in teh 1970s-1980s, prmoting mass cutlure

 

Death Row Records, absorption into the mainstream

 

Chinatown and the End of Classic Hollywood

 

Strangling the Inner City in the 1980s and 90s. D.A.R.E., Hammer and the Rock (Nancy’s “caring” about kids helps advertise the dangerous ghetto), 

 

Daryl Gates Story  Domestic Fascism.  

 

Shampoo 1975  Beatty, Hawn, Nixon-Agnew
 

All the President's Men  1976
 

Star Wars 1977

 

Prop 13  1978
 

 

Blade Runner (1982)

Beverly Hills Cop 1984

Terminator 1984 

Fatal Attraction (1987)

Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988) “70,000 gang members, one million guns, two cops.”

Do the Right Thing (1989)

Boyz n the Hood (1991)

Thelma and Louise (1991)
RODNEY KING UPRISING  1992 APRIL

Menace II Society (1993)

Falling Down 1993, a film directed by Joel Schumacher, was mostly likely in development during the Rodney King Uprising.  The screenwriter and director broadcast their intent to create a timely and realistic portrait of Los Angeles and the state of the nation in the year after the Rodney King Uprising of April 1992.  While the Uprising is never mentioned int eh film, its context for the writer, the producer, and director, all of whom lived in LA in 1992, is obvious. "Things that are happening here today will be happening everywhere else tomorrow," the screenwriter, Ebbe Roe Smith told LA Time movie reviewer Ryan Murphy in February 1993: 

"In the film, the lead character (D-FENS, played by Michael Douglas) has to deal with a lot of L.A. issues--the rise of traffic and crime and gangs, the new tide of immigrants and the tensions that arise when neighborhoods bump into each other--that tomorrow will be the issues that other cities will be forced to deal with too." [Note 1]

Douglas plays the unbalanced and increasingly violent "D-FENS" sympathetically, but his view of the immigrant metropolis is contemptuous. The writing, directing, and acting all point to a real, not merely a stage, sympathy for the plight of crew-cut white-collar relic of the 1960s, with pen holder in his pocket, horn-rim glasses, and drafting tools in his bedroom in his mother's house. He’s a Willie Loman on an Odyssey through the city, in which he encounters monsters that are also common annoyances to all Americans: Douglas’s character confronts four kinds of enemies: Ethnic others/non-white immigrants, epitomized by the Latino gangsters in the second confrontation; The government, as represented by Metro Rail transit construction sites that block traffic and his way on foot; and over-priced consumer goods, with either faceless corporations or unassimilated foreign immigrants behind the high prices. All three of these are what his right-wing rage is directed against, but the fourth enemy is special.  He confronts a Neo-Nazi who thinks that the Douglas character is also a Neo-Nazi--something the audience might reasonably think by this point as well.  But D-Fense corrects him: “No, I’m an American, your’a nut!” The point of this scene seems clearly to keep D-FENS in the sympathy of the audience, and to signal that he is not meant to be a right-wing fascist, even though much of what he does and says looks that way. The climax of the third act is killing the neo-Nazi in the basement of the man's Army Navy Surplus store.

Uprising of 1992

 

Maps of 1990-2000, with Property Damage (Ong data)

 

Community Hearings/ Community Voice

Belmont Learning Complex/ Edward Roybal High School


NOTES

[Note 1]  Ryan Murphy, 'Falling Down' Writer Has Seen the Future: It's L.A. Los Angeles Times, 21 February 1993