Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2014 November 26 • Wednesday

If one of the things you like about watching old movies is keeping an eye out for interesting details in the background or on the peripheries, especially during scenes shot on location, then you would most likely enjoy this book by Jim Dawson: Los Angeles's Bunker Hill: Pulp Fiction's Mean Streets and Film Ground Zero!.

Bunker Hill has quite a pedigree. It's featured in numerous movies and television shows (helpfully listed in an appendix), and was home to Raymond Chandler for a while. (It's to this fact that the mean streets of the subtitle no doubt refer, while the ground zero is a nod to Kiss Me Deadly, another movie that starred Bunker Hill.

Perhaps the last hurrah for Bunker Hill was the use of the Bradbury apartment interior for J. F. Sebastian's apartment building in Blade Runner. I've never been to the area but apparently nothing remains of Bunker Hill, not even the hill itself. This book is a window into the past, and looks upon the residents of this bygone time and place with sympathy and admiration.