Recently, in a piece for the New Yorker, screenwriter and novelist Michael Tolkin lamented of Los Angeles,

"This is a hard city for holding memories. The absence of real seasons makes time pass without easy markers, and the loss of real politics surrenders to the arrhythmia of riot, scandal, and natural disaster. The sad, brilliant beauty of the place, the January sky after the rains, with snow on the San Gabriels and every thin wire on the radio towers of Mt. Wilson visible thirty miles away, or the city at night, seen from a plane as it comes over San Bernardino, or the crowds of Hispanics in Griffith Park on a Sunday afternoon; these and a million other impressions have been stripped of specific local truth by all the movies set there arbitrarily by Hollywood."

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