COMING SOON to a screen near you -- as in your classroom -- we'll be looking at how Los Angeles was "invented" -- dreamed and coaxed into existence -- by a newspaper. Not just any newspaper-- but the Los Angeles Times and the influential family behind it, the Chandlers. The documentary, Inventing L.A., directed by Emmy-award winner, Peter Jones, examines four generations of Chandlers and their "rule" of Los Angeles. Led by the patriarch, Harry Chandler, (who took over the paper in 1917 after his father-in-law, Col. Harrison Gray Otis's death in 1917), the Chandlers saw L.A. -- still an arid, sprawling afterthought -- as "a city of the future" and were determined to make it such, truly by any means necessary. From the PBS description:
"For four generations, the Chandlers wielded unique influence through their newspaper. In their pursuit of personal agendas and civic ideals, they built the city of the future, but also exposed the dark side of the American dream."
-- L.G.
top photo caption: "City of Destiny," screengrab from PBS.'s Inventing L.A.
photo credit: PBS
bottom photo caption: Harry Chandler
photo credit: babcock ancestry
