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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Mirage Factory is a history of the birth of Los Angeles, from roughly 1900 to 1930, as seen through the biographies of three key people, each of whom built great things only to end in disgrace. William Mulholland brought water to the city, to the eternal damnation of the Owen's Valley. D.W. Griffith invented the grammar of the motion picture, and then failed to follow the industry he pioneered. Aimee Semple McPherson combined Pentecostal preaching with the new technology of radio to create a new kind of broadcast, but her later life was embroiled in scandal.
Krist knows how to keep the story moving (this is the third of his urban histories), and if he skews more towards the salacious, there's plenty of quality gossip in early Hollywood. This is the third book I've read in a month with William Mulholland as a major character, and Krist breaks little new ground, hewing close to conventional accounts of the Owen's Valley water wars and the San Franciquito dam collapse. He has a genuine love of early cinema, and the chapters of D.W. Griffith are much better done.
Early cinema was scandalous, a D-rated non-art. Griffith figured out how to make the camera his own, which as an avowed Southerner and son of a Confederate colonel, he used his skills to make The Birth of a Nation. This was a high-water mark. Griffith's epic film style blew out budgets and produced a turgid epic about the evil of violence just as American entered the first World War. His fussy Victorian sentimentality didn't match the emerging tastes of Jazz Age audiences, and after successive failures as an independent director, he crawled into a bottle and drank himself to death over decades, making his last film in 1931.
Sister Aimee Semple McPherson is by far the most complex character. A devout pentecostal preacher, she damped down the hellfire and brimstone and took to the airwaves, broadcasting to an audience of thousands from her Angelus Temple. But her personal life was increasingly chaotic, as she's rumored to have carried on an affair with her chief radio engineer, and otherwise act in an ungodly manner. In 1926, she disappeared for six weeks while visiting the beach. She reappeared, claiming to have been kidnapped to Mexico and held prisoner. Investigations were inconclusive, unable to either find kidnappers or prove that McPherson carried out the hoax. Her ministry continued, though not at it's previous level, until her death in 1944 of a Seconal overdose. Her Foursquare church still exists, with millions of members and 50,000 congregations worldwide. Though perusing her Wikipedia page, I see there are internal church controversies not mentioned.
This is a popular history, and though strongly sourced, it has the feel of gossip pressed until authoritative, rather than original history. From what else I know of Mulholland, the stories here are sensational and on the shallow side, rather than getting at deep issues. But that's LA, a city who's best monument is a sign for a real estate development left up.
Krist knows how to keep the story moving (this is the third of his urban histories), and if he skews more towards the salacious, there's plenty of quality gossip in early Hollywood. This is the third book I've read in a month with William Mulholland as a major character, and Krist breaks little new ground, hewing close to conventional accounts of the Owen's Valley water wars and the San Franciquito dam collapse. He has a genuine love of early cinema, and the chapters of D.W. Griffith are much better done.
Early cinema was scandalous, a D-rated non-art. Griffith figured out how to make the camera his own, which as an avowed Southerner and son of a Confederate colonel, he used his skills to make The Birth of a Nation. This was a high-water mark. Griffith's epic film style blew out budgets and produced a turgid epic about the evil of violence just as American entered the first World War. His fussy Victorian sentimentality didn't match the emerging tastes of Jazz Age audiences, and after successive failures as an independent director, he crawled into a bottle and drank himself to death over decades, making his last film in 1931.
Sister Aimee Semple McPherson is by far the most complex character. A devout pentecostal preacher, she damped down the hellfire and brimstone and took to the airwaves, broadcasting to an audience of thousands from her Angelus Temple. But her personal life was increasingly chaotic, as she's rumored to have carried on an affair with her chief radio engineer, and otherwise act in an ungodly manner. In 1926, she disappeared for six weeks while visiting the beach. She reappeared, claiming to have been kidnapped to Mexico and held prisoner. Investigations were inconclusive, unable to either find kidnappers or prove that McPherson carried out the hoax. Her ministry continued, though not at it's previous level, until her death in 1944 of a Seconal overdose. Her Foursquare church still exists, with millions of members and 50,000 congregations worldwide. Though perusing her Wikipedia page, I see there are internal church controversies not mentioned.
This is a popular history, and though strongly sourced, it has the feel of gossip pressed until authoritative, rather than original history. From what else I know of Mulholland, the stories here are sensational and on the shallow side, rather than getting at deep issues. But that's LA, a city who's best monument is a sign for a real estate development left up.