CASPER
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LOS ANGELES – This city has the worst luck.
Through decades of disaster films, Los Angeles has been targeted by aliens, toppled by temblors, sunken by tsunamis, leveled by lava, and a rogue tornado once took out the Hollywood sign.
And so it will be that calamity again strikes the City of Angels in the new sci-fi film "Skyline," opening Friday, followed by another bout of destruction early next year in the movie "Battle: Los Angeles."
What is it about L.A. that invites such repeated devastation?
"People love watching Los Angeles get destroyed," says "Battle: Los Angeles" director Jonathan Liebesman. "It's nice to screw up the great weather."
But there's so much more to it than that.
The city is home to Hollywood and the movie business, so the artists who write about, direct and execute mass destruction in Los Angeles are often intimately familiar with the territory.
Production designer Jackson De Govia — who helped blow up the Beverly Center shopping mall and decimate Wilshire Boulevard's museums in 1997's "Volcano" — says he loves trashing his own city on film.
"One of the funnest things you can do in movies is blow stuff up," says De Govia, who also pulverized Nakatomi Plaza in the original "Die Hard." "And if you're blowing up your hometown, and that hometown is Los Angeles, it's even better, because who hasn't wanted to do that at times?"
L.A. is a city filled with internationally recognized landmarks — the Hollywood sign, the Capitol Records building, City Hall and the skyscrapers of downtown — which make for "convenient cinematic shorthand," says Craig Detweiler, director of the Center for Entertainment, Media and Culture at Pepperdine University.
"It allows the scale of the disaster to strike everybody," he says. "Everybody recognizes the Hollywood sign. It's like, 'Oh, that's big.'"
Apart from its landmarks, L.A. is a popular disaster-movie locale because of its geography. Sitting in a seismic zone on the western edge of the continent, it is surrounded by beaches, mountains and deserts. In real life, the city is subject to floods, fires, earthquakes and big waves, so seeing freeways collapse or Santa Monica swallowed up by the sea (as in "2012") isn't such a stretch.
"L.A. can have these multiple functions as an apocalyptic disaster place because it's on the verge between urbanism and nature," Braudy says. "There's a sense of the precariousness of human habitation over this potentially eruptive nature."
Through decades of disaster films, Los Angeles has been targeted by aliens, toppled by temblors, sunken by tsunamis, leveled by lava, and a rogue tornado once took out the Hollywood sign.
And so it will be that calamity again strikes the City of Angels in the new sci-fi film "Skyline," opening Friday, followed by another bout of destruction early next year in the movie "Battle: Los Angeles."
What is it about L.A. that invites such repeated devastation?
"People love watching Los Angeles get destroyed," says "Battle: Los Angeles" director Jonathan Liebesman. "It's nice to screw up the great weather."
But there's so much more to it than that.
The city is home to Hollywood and the movie business, so the artists who write about, direct and execute mass destruction in Los Angeles are often intimately familiar with the territory.
Production designer Jackson De Govia — who helped blow up the Beverly Center shopping mall and decimate Wilshire Boulevard's museums in 1997's "Volcano" — says he loves trashing his own city on film.
"One of the funnest things you can do in movies is blow stuff up," says De Govia, who also pulverized Nakatomi Plaza in the original "Die Hard." "And if you're blowing up your hometown, and that hometown is Los Angeles, it's even better, because who hasn't wanted to do that at times?"
L.A. is a city filled with internationally recognized landmarks — the Hollywood sign, the Capitol Records building, City Hall and the skyscrapers of downtown — which make for "convenient cinematic shorthand," says Craig Detweiler, director of the Center for Entertainment, Media and Culture at Pepperdine University.
"It allows the scale of the disaster to strike everybody," he says. "Everybody recognizes the Hollywood sign. It's like, 'Oh, that's big.'"
Apart from its landmarks, L.A. is a popular disaster-movie locale because of its geography. Sitting in a seismic zone on the western edge of the continent, it is surrounded by beaches, mountains and deserts. In real life, the city is subject to floods, fires, earthquakes and big waves, so seeing freeways collapse or Santa Monica swallowed up by the sea (as in "2012") isn't such a stretch.
"L.A. can have these multiple functions as an apocalyptic disaster place because it's on the verge between urbanism and nature," Braudy says. "There's a sense of the precariousness of human habitation over this potentially eruptive nature."
