The Story Behind LOST LA
The History of Lost LA
After the public television station KCET separated from PBS, they decided to expand their online editorial content. The station's new Editor in Chief of Blogs, Zachary Behrens, chose to partner with the University of Southern California Libraries to help the KCET blog become an informative and enriching destination. As part of this partnership, in January 2011, Nathan Masters began a weekly blog on KCET's website called LA as Subject. His articles and photo essays told forgotten stories from the region through an archivist's lens and frequently featured artifacts from LAAS member archives. This article series connected with readers and shed light on the history of Los Angeles. Over time the LAAS blog became one of the stations' most popular editorial series.
Even in the beginning stages of the partnership, there was interest in creating video content about Los Angeles history. KCET leadership discuss creating videos based on Masters' articles, but they needed a proof of concept first. Nathan and Zachary Behrens shot a series of short videos about funiculars in the LA area, including Angel's Flight and the Island Mountain Railway on Santa Catalina. Around the same time, Bill Dottinson and Liza Posas spearheaded Monomania LA, a series on short documentaries profiling five LAAS collectors who turned their obsessions with LA history into public resources. Because of LAAS's relationship with KCET, the videos were packaged together and turned into a special hour-long episode of the KCET show Artbound.
After the success of both of these ventures, Juan Devis, the Chief Creative Officer, greenlite a pilot season for a series based on the LAAS articles with Nathan Masters as the host. Many of the most popular articles had the word "lost" in the title. Since the term lost seemed to capture people's imaginations, they decided to call the series Lost LA. In the first season of Lost LA, each of the three-episodes consisted of three segments based on the most popular of articles in the LAAS series. Each was segment was directed by a different emerging filmmaker with their own innovative visual style.