We were already familiar with the city's underbelly thanks to adaptations of Raymond Chandler, and films such as Double Indemnity and In A Lonely Place. These films settled as a period between the 1920s and the 1950s, in time to be revisited in 1974 by Roman Polanskis Chinatown. Robert Townes script set the detective story against a background of the process through which Los Angeles became a modern city, with water crises and new immigrant populations. What could have been a simple pastiche exercise became something else, but still looked part of a tradition.
Even so, Chinatowns formula was difficult to replicate (as its own 1990 sequel demonstrated), or feel authentic and worthy of the period setting. As time went on, the concrete jungle offered new types of stories - riots and the crack epidemic instead of sleuthing and feel-bad romanticism.
Contemporary neo-noir was the closest descendant but its directors were determined to escape the LA of the past: Michael Manns Heat (1995) shot the city in a stark ahead-of-its-time manner, blues and greys and modern architecture. From the same year, David Finchers Se7en was filmed in LA, but its story kept the citys location anonymous for the purpose of atmosphere. There was no great demand for romanticism about Los Angeles, and even if there was, how much of the old city was available for filming? If that were possible, what was there left to express, beyond nostalgia?
