Los Angeles beyond the frame
“City of stars
Are you shining just for me?
City of Stars
There’s so much that I can’t see
Who knows
Is this the start of something wonderful or new?
Or one more dream
That I cannot make true?”
La La Land (2016)
The city of dreams and dreamers. Of Hollywood hills, red carpets, Oscar afterparties, and oceanfront soirées at Nobu Malibu, where a single ounce (28 grams) of Japanese A5 Wagyu beef costs $42. If there's anywhere in the world to become somebody, surely it's Los Angeles.
At least, that's what the movies tell us.
Growing up in Southern California and later attending university in Los Angeles, I've come to recognize the smoke and mirrors separating the city we see on screen from the one I've come to know. And like any good Hollywood production, the illusion is spectacular.
So, without further ado, welcome to tonight's feature presentation: Los Angeles in 3D. No special glasses required. Just a willingness to look beyond the frame.
ACT I: THE DREAM FACTORY
Hollywood's success began, in part, with a geographical coincidence. An unexpected twist already, I know. But please, the plot twist comes later. Don't get lost in the exposition.
Within reach of Los Angeles, filmmakers found beaches, deserts, forests, snowy mountains, chaparral (my personal favorite), and nearly year-round sunshine. The world could be recreated on any day in Southern California without ever leaving the region.
By the early twentieth century, studios were settling in, stars were buying homes in the hills, and Los Angeles was becoming synonymous with possibility, fame, and fortune. The city didn't just produce movies. It produced an image of itself.
But Hollywood wasn't the only industry shaping LA's identity.
Long before the Walk of Fame, oil derricks punctuated the city's skyline. Petroleum helped fuel Los Angeles's expansion, yet today, much of that history remains hidden in plain sight. Along Pico Boulevard, a peculiar windowless tower was built to conceal an oil-drilling facility. Elsewhere, industrial infrastructure masqueraded as ordinary office buildings.
It's almost too perfect a metaphor. In a city built on appearances, even the oil wells needed costumes.
Then came the automobile. What was once a sprawling region connected by an extensive streetcar network gradually transformed into a landscape of freeways, parking lots, and drive-thrus. The promise of freedom became inseparable from owning a car.
Today, that freedom comes with a price. I once spent 55 minutes driving 11.2 miles, achieving a breakneck average speed of 12.2 mph (19.6 kmh). But slow traffic makes for a boring movie, so we'll just remove that in post.
Los Angeles had learned to manufacture not just movies, but lifestyles.
ACT II: OUTSIDE THE FRAME
Of course, every production involves a little selective editing.
Drive through Beverly Hills or along Sunset Boulevard and it's easy to understand why the world falls in love with Los Angeles. But downtown, another story unfolds.
In Skid Row, roughly fifty blocks of the city contain one of America's most concentrated populations of people experiencing homelessness. In 2024, approximately 3,800 people were unhoused in this neighborhood alone, many living without shelter.
I'd been warned countless times not to venture into Skid Row. Yet there are no walls, fences, or signs announcing its boundaries. The neighborhood sits between some of downtown's most recognizable districts: Little Tokyo, the Arts District, and the Fashion District.
On the one occasion I visited, I was volunteering to distribute resources to residents. Despite the absence of any official boundary, the transition was unmistakable. Streets lined with businesses and apartments gave way to sidewalks crowded with tents and makeshift shelters.
I remember meeting a mother and her two sons. Only the eldest spoke to us in English, and he seemed to take on the responsibility of communicating for his family. I knew almost nothing about their circumstances, but the encounter stayed with me. Behind the tents and makeshift shelters were families going about their lives, navigating a city that had somehow left them without a place to call home.
On another occasion, I attended a birthday party at Soho Warehouse, a members' club and hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Inside, everything felt carefully curated, from the interiors to the atmosphere of exclusivity. Yet just a short distance away, people were living in makeshift shelters on the sidewalks of Skid Row.
What unsettled me wasn't the celebration itself. It was how easily these two realities could exist beside one another without ever having to acknowledge each other.
I had always known about the city's inequalities. What surprised me was how little distance separated them. A few city blocks could mean the difference between being surrounded by the comforts of a luxury hotel and struggling to secure basic necessities.
The contradiction isn't simply that poverty exists alongside wealth. It's that both exist within a city whose defining export is the possibility of a better life.
And while mental illness and addiction are visible parts of the homelessness crisis, they don't explain it alone. Unaffordable housing, economic insecurity, and limited access to support have left thousands vulnerable to losing the most basic requirement of the American dream: somewhere to call home.
The people living this reality aren't extras in Hollywood's story. They are Angelenos, with histories, relationships, ambitions, and communities of their own.
The tragedy is that the city has become remarkably good at selling dreams while struggling to make room for those who need somewhere to sleep.
ACT III: THE CITY WITHOUT A SCRIPT
Yet Los Angeles is not simply a story of glamour disguising despair. In fact, this is where my true love for the city begins. Some of its most interesting cultural movements emerge precisely where the spotlight seldom falls.
At USC, one of the most beloved late-night food destinations isn't an upscale restaurant in the pristine USC Village. It's a taco stand, whose brand is only the color red, near an AutoZone parking lot, illuminated by strings of lights and affectionately nicknamed Taco Zone by students.
No celebrity endorsement required. No Hollywood close-up. Just good food prepared by people who know their craft, supported by a crowd that knows where to find it.
It's a small example, but an important one. Much of what makes Los Angeles remarkable wasn't invented on a studio backlot. It comes from immigrant families, street vendors, artists, and neighborhood communities whose contributions often go unrecognized in the city's official mythology.
Even Skid Row, so often portrayed exclusively through suffering, has a creative life of its own.
The Los Angeles Poverty Department, an arts organization founded in 1985, has spent decades creating performances with people who have experienced homelessness. Its Festival for All Skid Row Artists celebrates the neighborhood's artistic talent. Meanwhile, organizations such as the Los Angeles Community Action Network bring residents together through advocacy, food initiatives, and community arts.
These efforts don't erase the need for housing, healthcare, or systemic change. Nor should their existence make deprivation seem romantic.
But they reveal something Hollywood's version of Los Angeles often overlooks, and the tour buses rarely point out: some of the city's most compelling stories never needed a spotlight.
Perhaps the city's greatest talent was never its ability to create the illusion of another world. Perhaps it was the extraordinary number of people building their own worlds within it, sometimes only a block apart.
THE FINAL SCENE
For a city built on reinvention, Los Angeles has an uncomfortable habit of deciding which transformations deserve to be celebrated.
An aspiring actor becoming a movie star is the American dream. An immigrant opening a food stand is entrepreneurship. A community organizing to survive on Skid Row is too often reduced to a problem awaiting a solution.
Yet all three are stories of people trying to make something of their circumstances, building worlds wherever they can.
Maybe the Los Angeles of tomorrow won't be defined by another mansion in the hills, another blockbuster, or another name embedded in Hollywood Boulevard.
Maybe its greatest reinvention will begin when we stop judging the city's success by the dreams it sells, and start judging it by the diversity of lives it makes possible.
Written by Luc Hosy
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