Once, while at a writers&#8217; conference in San Antonio, Texas, I happened to meet a local artist who had some very strong opinions about Los Angeles. He complained about the traffic and the weather. (Yes, the weather.) &#8220;Plus,&#8221; he said, &#8220;everyone there is, like, so fake.&#8221; After some time, when I realized he was not going to waver from his opinion, I simply walked away and left him standing there, in mid-sentence.
San Antonio artists might not fully appreciate these pieces, I thought as I sat to write this, and I determined that this was, indeed, just fine. Each of the pieces gathered here resists an idea of a single, dominant narrative about Los Angeles. Each of the pieces reveals the ways in which contact and conflict have given rise to innovation, creativity, and resilience.
Ask anyone outside of Los Angeles for the quintessential &#8220;LA story,&#8221; and they almost always have one that usually involves shallow people, plastic surgeries, and Sig Alerts. Ask anyone from Los Angeles for the quintessential &#8220;LA story,&#8221; and they&#8217;re stumped. These pieces here prove why.
&#8211; Alex Espinoza

Introduction by Alex Espinoza

Strange Behavior by Ben Ehrenreich

CECI N’EST PAS UN CHAPEAU. In fact, it’s a shell of a restaurant in the shape of a bowler, plunked atop one of many nondescript shopping centers in Los Angeles’s densest district. Its sign and the brim are both gone. But in its bones, it’s still the Brown Derby, with a series of lives and deaths all its own. In my mind, the Derby always belonged to another Los Angeles, not mine, different enough that I rarely think to graft it onto the present-day city. But recently, revisiting Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, the place jumped out at me from her know-it-when-I-see-it list of examples. When she described the aesthetic in the 1960s, the other landmarks she named weren’t dead and gone (nor are they now): Paris’s Metro entrances, Barcelona’s Gaudi projects, Munich’s rococo churches. They have remained where they always were, while the Brown Derby has taken an unpredictable course.

Once, there were multiple Derbies floating about the city. The original was the one on Wilshire Boulevard, which opened a block from its current mini-mall location, across from what was then the Ambassador Hotel. Like the Brown Derby, the hotel and its Cocoanut Grove club dated to the 1920s. The Grove hosted early Academy Awards ceremonies and, memorably to me, the first musical number of Singin’ in the Rain. But after Bobby Kennedy’s killing in its kitchen in 1968, the Ambassador began a descent. Around the time of Sontag’s essay, Sammy Davis Jr. tried to restore the Grove and brought in new acts like Richard Pryor, but the neighborhood was succumbing to crime and had yet to experience renewal by arriving Koreans. Going the way of other historic Los Angeles properties, by the 1990s the hotel had closed to public business and become a film stand-in for itself — in Pretty Woman, L.A. Story, True Romance, and more. When it met the wrecking ball 10 years ago, it had already outlasted the ground-level huge hat. There is now a school on the site.
¤
Early on the first Derby migrated from the corner of Kenmore Avenue to Alexandria, but in the perilous 1970s it closed for good. As a concession to preservationists, the dome has enjoyed its third-floor perch these past 35 years, which in Los Angeles is a feat in itself. The otherwise unremarkable semi-spherical structure housed a Korean bar for a while, but lately it’s been vacant. It was part of a “programmatic” design trend of novelty creations to catch the eye of passing drivers, perfect for Southern California, sharing an objective with John Lautner’s later Googies coffee shop. The Brown Derby came at a time when fewer restrictions governed the planning process. Similar mimetic buildings still exist around Los Angeles — the Donut Hole in La Puente (still in original use), the Shutter Shak in Westminster (preserved within a park), the Tamale in East Los Angeles (repurposed as a beauty salon), the Koffee Pot in Long Beach (currently being restored) — but why a hat for a restaurant? The name originated from a Vaudeville hangout on Long Island, which was shaped conventionally but named for the Laurel and Hardy–style topper of choice — not such a strange ancestry here, since beside the Chinese Theater we have a mall designed to look like a film set designed to look like ancient Babylon. The Derby’s convex ceiling presaged the curves of treasured local landmarks to follow: Griffith Observatory in the 1930s, the Cinerama Dome of the 1960s.

Los Angeles’s first Derby had been a venture of wise guy Wilson Mizner (companion of leading screenwriter Anita Loos), Herbert Somborn (sometime husband of Gloria Swanson), and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_L._Warner">Jack Warner</a> (the founding Warner Brother). The owner of the second, at Hollywood and Vine, was Robert Cobb, who supposedly invented his eponymous salad from leftovers one late night for a tooth-achy Sid Grauman. Other original recipes, now available in a Cobb family cookbook, included chiffon pie and a cream cheese–iced grapefruit cake. True to its entertainment heritage and location, the slightly newer Brown Derby became an integral part of the show business scene. Rendered in the more common Mission style, it kept some of the kitsch: Jack Lane’s celebrity caricatures covered a wall. Maître d’s wore tuxedos, diners sat at rounded brown leather banquettes. Hit songwriters competed to be the patron in highest demand on the tableside phone. The spot became the favorite of radio actors and then of superstars like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Gable">Clark Gable</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carole_Lombard">Carole Lombard</a>, the informal office of both pioneering movie columnist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louella_Parsons">Louella Parsons</a> and vicious rival <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedda_Hopper">Hedda Hopper</a>, and the site of many wrap parties. The guest list included Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Barbara Stanwyck, and Rita Hayworth. Joan Crawford tended bar there in Mildred Pierce, William Holden got a pie in the face on I Love Lucy, and Groucho Marx made a spontaneous cameo appearance on This Is Your Life. Mickey Mouse even considered the hat as a hiding place in his cartoon. This may have been the Derby iteration Sontag had in mind. She placed it on Sunset, but there doesn’t seem to have been a franchise there.

The Hollywood Brown Derby went up in smoke in a 1980s fire. The neighborhood was also struggling then, but new owners rebuilt the location into Premieres of Hollywood, trying to bring back some Golden Age glamour. Alas, the revival was short-lived; the new place fell to the riots of 1992. Now, like much of redeveloped Hollywood, the address holds a tall but indistinguishable mixed-use complex, partly vacant, partly occupied by chain stores. Another, very similar Derby at Wilshire and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills lasted for nearly the same 50 years before demolition.

A fourth Brown Derby stood at the corner of Hillhurst and Los Feliz Boulevard. The space had opened in the 1920s as Willard’s Chicken Inn; Cecil B. DeMille turned it into a Derby in 1940. Besides the usual fine dining, this one had a drive-in carhop service area created by architect Wayne McAllister. Raised in San Diego, McAllister had gone from building bungalows to designing the first Las Vegas resorts, the original Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, and a number of long-gone Southwestern institutions (he later retired to farm ostriches). In the days before air conditioning, a system would pump water out of the Los Feliz Brown Derby’s domed roof so that it ran down the restaurant’s exterior and cooled the inside.

In 1960, former actor Michael St. Angel bought the site and converted it into Michael’s of Los Feliz, an incarnation that lasted until the early 1990s. The Michael’s stage was the initial home of the beloved lounge musicians Marty and Elayne, talent poached by a Dresden Room manager in 1982 and iconic fixtures on Vermont Avenue ever since. Back around the corner, the former Michael’s morphed into The Derby, a club that housed the 1990s swing craze and other throwbacks. One former manager rhapsodically remembers hearing Roger Daltrey play “Baba O’Riley” at a private party there. In June 2004 an LLC took over with plans to erect five floors of condominiums, but neighbors and their supporters campaigned to rescue the building. In 2006 the City Council named it an official cultural monument. One of the developers later expressed relief that the deal hadn’t gone through, since many condo projects of the time quickly met with foreclosure. By the end of 2008, though, the venue had switched to a month-to-month rental agreement — and in the early hours of a hip-hop night booked by outside promoters, an attendee pulled a gun and shot two people. The landlords decided not to renew the lease, and the club closed that winter. A bank branch moved in and split the space with an outpost of Louise’s Trattoria, based in West Los Angeles. In 2012, local investors bought the site for over $9 million, intending to keep it the same.

But the owners of Louise’s closed it and reopened as the current Messhall Kitchen: a “modernized version of an Army mess hall.” The faux-utilitarian interior features communal tables; the staff are called “Troops,” the booze menu “Survival.” Lunch options include an “SOS” shrimp salad, and a “C-3 Bomber” is an $8 glass of juice. MHK counts as a fan the self-unmasked food critic Jonathan Gold, next to whom Brown Derby regular John Barrymore would have appeared a picture of moderation. (Real-life mess halls lack such well-heeled charm; their SOS is creamed chipped beef. Of the US military dining facilities in Kabul, one Special Operations service member has said, “I’d rather eat shell casings.”)

After Hollywood’s Derby owner Bob Cobb died in the 1970s, his wife sold the assets to SoCal businessman Walter Scharfe. In the 1980s Scharfe made a licensing deal with Disney-MGM, and the latter opened a themed restaurant at Walt Disney World in Florida. Not far from the better-known Magic Kingdom there, past branded hotels and golf courses, between a water park and a grandiose zoo, the Hollywood Studios area models California-style low stuccoed slabs with tiled roofs among identical palms. Surreally, visitors can stop by the Fairfax Farmers Market, pass the programmatic Darkroom on the Miracle Mile, and dodge street performers outside of Grauman’s. While designed for maximum occupancy, the Hollywood Brown Derby® maintains tablecloths, wine flights, and a book of reservations. It would be a peculiar place to take kids, and an even more peculiar trip to take without them, but the facility has lasted almost 30 years.

Disney struck up several more agreements in the 1990s, opening short-lived restaurants at the MGM-Grand casinos in Las Vegas and Detroit, and allowing use of the concept at other Disney amusement parks. But Tokyo seems never to have made use of the license, and at Disneyland in Anaheim, the Brown Derby is only a dessert. The struggling Euro-Disney in France has a more compact version of Orlando’s reimagined Hollywood, in this case a short pseudo-street with old-time facades — including the Derby’s — hiding a functioning French restaurant on one side and a gift shop on the other.

A handful of unrelated Brown Derby restaurants, bars, and liquor stores have come and gone around the US, and the Long Island namesake closed several years ago. While the dome in Los Feliz survived respectably for a long time, the displaced one on Wilshire may triumph yet. Los Angeles’s 1933 Group — of Thirsty Crow and Bigfoot bars fame — have brought back North Hollywood’s barrel-shaped Idle Hour. A smaller reproduction of the Bulldog Café, formerly residing at the Petersen Automotive Museum, sits on the leafy patio out back. If the Koreatown hat is fortunate, it will find a steward like the Idle Hour’s reverent Bobby Green, rather than Messhall’s enterprising Bill Chait.

Since the Brown Derby’s whole lineage is one of replicas and revivals, we can likely look forward to the past. Yet while the space stands empty, it brims with possibilities: for film shoots or gunshots, rock shows or riots, like the prop cakes that could hold either mobsters or chorus girls. Might a giant apple pop out, the way it does at a Mets game? Perhaps the hat could land on the head of fellow camp designee King Kong. Think of LACMA’s massive rock — things appear in the strangest of places.
¤
<a title="Bonnie Johnson" href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/bonnie-johnson/">Bonnie Johnson studied Modern Thought and Politics at Stanford and the LSE. In her previous life she was a labor and community organizer. Her recent work also appears in The Rumpus.</a>

Magritte in Koreatown

Magritte in Koreatown by Bonnie Johnson

An Urban History: The Influence of Street Gangs on Contemporary Art by Rodrigo Ribera d'Ebre

#PlantSomeShit

#PlantSomeShit by Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn

The Fight for Frogtown

The Fight for Frogtown by Molly Strauss

THE TALL, good-looking guy had it all — wealth, fame, style, success, a fashion-model wife. I was just a reporter covering his trial. Each morning, trekking downtown to the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse, I joined my colleagues of the press, confronting the awesome enigma of John DeLorean, the “maverick automaker,” in the full-blown wreck of his rags-to-riches high-rolling career, accused of trafficking 100 kilos of cocaine, a charge of which he was ultimately acquitted.
Three decades later, as the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future is marked with frequent allusions to the iconic DeLorean automobile that served as the movie’s time machine, I look back on the four-and-a-half months I spent covering John DeLorean’s trial with an uneasy feeling. By the time the story I wrote on assignment landed on my editor’s desk, the trial was over, the media had moved on, and my article never appeared. DeLorean is dead now, never recovering his loss of fame and fortune. I’m still a journalist, trying to figure things out. At least I got paid.
But still, what was the truth about all that fuss in the spring and summer of 1984? An American tragedy played out in the headlines, a 59-year-old man reaching for a dream — did he just pay the inevitable dues for challenging the existing order? Sealed in a courtroom verdict, truth often unravels in hindsight.
Tattered, coffee-stained courtroom notes — my own equivalent of the flux capacitor (the power source for the movie’s time machine) — transport me back to the morning of the trial’s opening day, April 18, 1984 … a mild 61 degrees at 9 a.m. in downtown Los Angeles. Ronald Reagan is president, a gallon of gas is $1.10, Kenny Loggins is singing “Footloose” on the radio, and a ticket to the movies is $2.50.
The man with the steel-gray hair and cosmetically shaped chin sitting beside his attorneys at the defense table is John Zachary DeLorean, former vice president of General Motors. Detroit-born son of Austro-Hungarian immigrants whose alcoholic father worked in the Ford auto factory and mother did the best she could. English sparsely spoken at home. “You don’t know what poor is until you know how poor we were,” he told biographers Ivan Fallon and James Srodes in Dreammaker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. Delorean. He grew up on the Detroit streets, studied engineering, a wunderkind going on to become General Motors’s youngest division manager, the man behind the Pontiac GTO, Firebird — muscle cars tearing up the nation’s new fabric of highways, American power roaring at its apogee.
It was partly DeLorean’s Hollywood hippie lifestyle — shaggy hair and dates with Raquel Welch and Ursula Andress — that earned him his “maverick” moniker. He was, according to one auto industry observer, “perhaps the ultimate fantasy figure for every underpaid automotive hack or working-class car nut in America.”
Where he clashed with the auto industry’s conservative corporate establishment was in his sleek, singular vision, infused with overtones of the 1960s social revolution, of sporty wheels for the masses — an “ethical” sports car, DeLorean called it: compact, efficient, safe, and affordable. It was a challenge to Detroit, which had lost leadership on all these points.
DeLorean said he was “firing” General Motors when he quit as GM’s head of North American operations in 1973, although GM insiders say he was on the verge of being fired. Striking out on his own, DeLorean reached for immortality, like Henry Ford, putting his name on a car of his own design.
First unveiled at an auto show in New Orleans in 1977, the exterior of his visionary coupé was executed by Giorgetto Giugiaro. The Italian designer was capable of producing a people’s car, such as the Volkswagen Golf, but was better known for shaping Maseratis and Lamborghinis. The stainless steel, gull-winged DMC-12 prototype was a horny spin on “ethical,” more like a Playboy centerfold for car freaks, targeting the testosterone-fueled Chevy Corvette crowd seeking street-racing perfection.
The vehicle that first rolled off the production line in 1981, however, was flawed. The brushed-steel body scratched easily, showing every oily hand and fingerprint. The rear-mounted Renault V6 engine departed from the original drive-train design by GTO engineer Billy Collins, seriously compromising the sports car’s performance. “It’s not a barn burner,” reported Road &amp; Track. And the DMC-12 cost $10,000 more than a Corvette. The US economy was slumping, and DMC sales struggled — only 9,000 cars were made before production ended in early 1983.
Now, a year later, with DMC bankrupt, the factory in Northern Ireland in receivership, and thousands laid off, DeLorean is facing more than 60 years in prison. Still, the 59-year-old defendant is a rich man, an owner of the San Diego Chargers and the New York Yankees, with friends like Sammy Davis Jr. and Johnny Carson. Ford president Lee Iacocca served as best man at his second wedding. His wife, Cristina Ferrare, the former Max Factor girl, sitting beside him each day with their young son, is a fixture in the fashion pages; his high-priced attorneys, Howard Weitzman and Donald Re, hold daily press conferences on the courthouse steps. Even as US Attorney James Walsh reads the charges against DeLorean — conspiracy, possession, distribution of cocaine, interstate travel for felonious purposes, nine counts in all — the subject in the pressroom is the designer of Ferrare’s dress.
Walsh outlines the chronology of events beginning with a June 2, 1982, phone conversation between DeLorean and a former neighbor-turned-government-informer, James Timothy Hoffman, proceeding to a series of secretly recorded phone calls between DeLorean and undercover DEA and FBI agents, and leading to surveillance video tapes that ultimately “caught John DeLorean,” Walsh says, “in the act of being himself.”
DeLorean sits quietly listening to the case being made against him. From tidbits gleaned from his legal team, we learn that on the way back from court they stop at Mo Better Burgers on the corner of Fairfax and Olympic for lunch. The man with the bankrupt car company and astronomical legal costs is on a junk food budget — and his wife says he has found Jesus and they’ve both become born again. Beyond those meager facts, he remains a mystery. And strangely, from the moment the trial begins, DeLorean seems to quietly shrink and, over the course of the trial, almost disappear.
We quickly overdosed on the plethora of transcripts and constant drone of replayed tape recordings with DeLorean’s deep, Midwestern voice talking about the imminent seizure by the British government of his failing car company. Listening to him discussing money laundering in vague language pertaining to a vague deal in which he was to put up two million dollars and some get 20 times that in return — given the massive numbers, it should be exciting, but it is like listening to paint dry.
In one recording echoing in the courtroom DeLorean tells a man named James Benedict, supposedly a crooked banker working out of Eureka Savings &amp; Loan in San Carlos, California, that he can’t hold up his end of the deal. The two million needed to buy the cocaine belongs to the Irish Republican Army and they’ve handed the money over to the British government to help save DeLorean’s Belfast factory.
“So what do you want me to do,” says Benedict on the tape, “kill this deal?”
“I don’t see any alternative,” DeLorean replies, “unless you’ve got some other idea … all I can do is try to develop an alternative, and if I can, I’ll leave word at your office.”
The press corps is nodding off as another recorded phone conversation plays — DeLorean agreeing to put up stock and an inventory of DeLorean cars as collateral to keep the deal alive. A promissory note listing 40 vehicle ID numbers and a stock certificate for 1,000 shares of DeLorean Motor Company, FedExed to Benedict on September 29, 1982, are entered as evidence. Assistant US Attorney Robert Perry continues his direct examination of Benedict, who is actually FBI Agent Benedict Tisa.
Perry’s annoyingly nasal voice chases me and my colleagues back to the pressroom where we lounge over cigarettes and coffee, half-listening to Perry leading the FBI’s undercover agent forward on the audio feed.
Suddenly the date October 19 is mentioned and the TV monitors switched on. The press corps streams back into the courtroom. The audience is transfixed — judge, jury, clerks, reporters, lawyers, the accused and his family and the crowd in the public seats — by the infamous “Bust Tape,” excerpts from which world has seen over and over on the evening news.
Even as a rerun, the drama is still fascinating in its almost scripted quality as it plays out in its entirety …
Scene: Night — Sheraton La Reina Hotel near LAX, room 501 
John DeLorean, “James Benedict,” and informant James Hoffman, a man called Vicenza, all seated on a white couch. Vicenza places a suitcase on the coffee table. He cracks it open to reveal white bags of cocaine. Hoffman hands DeLorean a kilo. DeLorean hefts the bag.
DeLorean (laughs)
It’s better than gold. Gold weighs more than that, for God’s sake.
Benedict offers a champagne toast, pouring glasses of Moët all around.
The Hitchcockian thrill in the courtroom is undeniable: knowing what the on-screen character does not know — he’s trapped! Sure enough …
Door bursts open, a man in a suit steps into the room.
Man In Suit
I’m Jerry West with the FBI. You’re under arrest.
Perry says, “No further questions, your honor.” No further questions seem possible. DeLorean is cooked.
Howard Weitzman steps up to the podium and, after a pause, shuffling some papers, looks up and says to the FBI agent on the stand, “You caught the big one, didn’tcha?”
“Objection!” cries Perry.
Weitzman shoves forward, firing a quick round of questions, gaining high ground with four points: no money had ever changed hands in the alleged dope deal; the stock and collateral DeLorean signed over were not only worthless, but the government knew they were worthless; the FBI’s key informant Hoffman is an admitted perjurer; and the government’s key witness, FBI Agent Tisa, is being doggedly evasive.
“Will you please look at me and answer ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ sir!” says Weitzman again and again, making the work “sir” the equivalent of “shithead.”
Ferrare whispers audibly, “Give it to him, Howard. Give it to him,” while the jury sits straight up in their seats and reporters grin at the attorney’s taut performance. In minutes, the situation in the courtroom has flip-flopped: DeLorean is no longer the defendant. Now the government is on trial.
Three days later, toward noon on a Friday after a long week, FBI Agent Tisa is still on the stand and pissed off. He’s already made headlines by admitting he’d destroyed his original log of the investigation, earning an acid rebuke from Walsh, overheard with glee in the pressroom. Now Weitzman is pressing him on a conversation that he, posing as James Benedict, had with DeLorean concerning phony stock options, tax benefits, employment records, all to conceal the money-laundering scheme pivotal to the proposed dope deal.
“You came up with this all by yourself,” says Weitzman.
“What do you mean all by my myself?” Tisa says.
“Did John DeLorean ever suggest these things himself?”
“No.”
“You initiated the conversation about dope, not John DeLorean, didn’t you, sir?”
“I —”
“Didn’t you!”
“Yes.”
“You're doggone right,” snaps Weitzman.
The judge calls a recess. Weitzman actually receives applause from the public seats.
“Later that afternoon,” Weitzman grills Tisa further. “Did you really believe,” says Weitzman, winking over at the press section, “that the IRA and the British government were partners on behalf of John DeLorean?”
Everyone laughs. FBI agents have already testified that they found no connection between DeLorean and the IRA, and it’s clear that the desperate carmaker had pathetically — preposterously! — invoked the militant group’s name as a bluff.
When Weitzman is finished, he has established that the US government introduced DeLorean to the notion of saving his car company through a dope deal, and that the man, essentially broke and feeling too threatened to back out, was unable to follow through with the deal — yet, they’d pursued him anyway.
Strangely, we could see US Attorney Walsh and his team begin emulating the wealth and style of the man they were pursuing. Walsh started wearing sharper suits, his gray hair styled in a hipper length, like DeLorean’s. As DeLorean’s family appeared each day, so did Walsh’s wife and children take seats on the opposite side of the courtroom. From the testimony it was clear that from the beginning of their investigation to the climactic day they stood concealed in the next room of the Sheraton La Reina Hotel, ordering lavish room service meals and telling each other, “This will get us the cover of Time!” they were seduced by the free-wheeling DeLorean. These federal employees, stuck on a treadmill of salary grades and a life in service to a pallid bureaucracy were staying in the same hotels, jet-setting around the country on expense accounts in hot pursuit, hatching massive, risky deals — to an eerie point where one had to ask: hadn’t they switched identities?
In the end, as the jury concluded, the dope dealer in question was not DeLorean. How could he be, if the money to make the dope deal was Uncle Sam’s, along with the dope?
One could say that DeLorean shared with his prosecutors and their Washington bosses a tragic trajectory of hubris. The trial marked one of the earliest tests of government guidelines issued by the attorney general in 1981 for undercover operations following the ABSCAM scandals of the late 1970s. DeLorean’s victory was the first acquittal of a defendant on the grounds of entrapment after hearings on the issue by the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, which had issued a report four months earlier in an attempt to curtail undercover police abuses. Today, government misconduct is a daily headline, from police shootings to massive invasions of privacy under the cover of the Patriot Act. With antiterrorist agencies seeking out potential jihadists by tracking pro-ISIS sympathizers on Facebook and luring them into bomb plots, the same questions of overreaching and entrapment are more urgent than ever.
On a personal level, DeLorean’s acquittal turned out to be hollow victory. Following the trial, DeLorean lost everything, including his wife. Within a year, Cristina Ferrare, daughter of an Italian butcher in Cleveland, married ABC-TV executive Tony Thomopoulos, Bronx-born son of Greek immigrants. They did all right — Ferrare as itinerant TV host, Thomopoulos as one of the industry’s ubiquitous execs, bouncing from job to job until the Hollywood trades no longer took notice.
DeLorean’s tragedy was not his alone. The automobile industry in which he’d risen to such heights, and which powered the postwar US economy for so many years, lost world dominance to its own incompetence and overseas competition. His hometown, the city of Detroit, was a burnt-out shell. Deserted by the white beneficiaries of the auto industry’s economic blessings, the municipality’s tax base went to the suburbs with them, and Detroit’s first- and second-generation black migrants, who’d fled persecution elsewhere for their own piece of the American Dream, faced a broken Motor City and 25 percent unemployment. For these outcomes, there is enough blame to go around, but DeLorean did his small part by locating the factory to build his dream car in another country.
What saved the maverick automaker from utter destitution and ignominy was pure Hollywood. The licensing deal for DeLorean DMC-12 used in Back to the Future helped keep the car’s namesake afloat.
“John DeLorean wrote us a fan letter after the movie came out” the movie’s co-screenwriter Bob Gale recalls. “‘Thank you for keeping my dream alive.’”
Before his death in 2005, DeLorean was forced to sell his rolling 434-acre New Jersey estate, which today entertains wealthy duffers as the Trump (yes, that Trump) National Golf Club, “a bastion of sophistication and luxury,” according to Links Magazine.
The heroic strivings of DeLorean’s generation, sons and daughters of European immigrant waves washing ashore in the first half of the American Century, have somehow come to this: a greatly diminished Detroit and a fancy golf course owned by a man who wants to run the United States like a private golf club.
If we can learn anything by going into the past — or from movies about going into the past — a clue may be found in Doc Brown’s answer when Marty McFly asks why he chose the DeLorean — a flop automobile, a failed business venture — as his time-traveling vehicle: “The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?”
It was 100 percent all-American style, built on ephemeral good looks, swaggering engines, a headlong rush to escape honest origins at the expense of fundamental ethics, burning fossil fuels down the road, the accused and his accuser in pursuit of a dream — back to a future where truth, we always hope, will one day be faced.
¤
<a title="Rex Weiner" href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/rex-weiner/">Rex Weiner’s articles have been published in Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Observer, LA Weekly, The Paris Review, and Rolling Stone Italia.</a>

How John DeLorean Took Us Back to the Future

How John DeLorean Took Us Back to the Future by Rex Weiner

LARB Digital eDitions #45: Los Angeles

LARB Digital eDitions #45: Los Angeles

March 201656 pages