When postwar movie directors went looking for a gritty location to shoot their psychological crime thrillers, they found Bunker Hill, a neighborhood of fading Victorians, flophouses, tough bars, stairways and dark alleys in downtown Los Angeles. Novelist Raymond Chandler had already been there exploring the real-life "mean streets" that his hardboiled detective, Philip Marlowe, prowled in the writer's exacting prose. But the biggest crime was going on behind the scenes, run by the city's power elite. And Hollywood just happened to capture it on film. Using nearly eighty photos, writer Jim Dawson enlarges the record of L.A. history with this grassroots investigation of a vanished place.
Jim Dawson is a graduate of West Virginia University and a longtime resident of Hollywood. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Los Angeles's Angels Flight (2008), as well as a short documentary called Los Angeles's Bunker Hill (2011) on the Criterion Collection's Blu-ray/DVD reissue of the 1955 film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly.