It's a combo of City of Quartz, Cadillac Desert and living there for ten years. Frank Lloyd Wright said "tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles"; a fellow New Mexico alumn living in Oakland said that "San Francisco is LA's bitchy, high-maintenance girlfriend." I'll say this: there are normies in California but the culture is absolutely dominated by people on the make. You don't move to Huntington Beach to settle down unless you've already made your bones in Santa Monica and you don't get to make your bones in Santa Monica until you've managed to escape Echo Park. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/03/pretty-woman-original-ending California is run by the crushers at the expense of the crushed. There are those who manage to keep out of the way but in general it's a predatory economy. That Disney would turn a cautionary tale about soulless corporate raiders and the prostitutes they destroy into a Prince Charming analog says everything you need to know about how California sells itself to California. And always has, and always will. Everyone I know in Los Angeles who comes from the midwest regards the midwest as a lost paradise they long to return to yet are forsaking. Except for the ones who left. They smile more in their photos.Interesting take on CA.
The kernel of what would become 3,000—and then Pretty Woman—isn’t necessarily obvious in the final film, but it’s there: “Wall Street had either come out or was coming out, I had heard about it and the whole issue about the financiers who were destroying companies. I kind of thought about the idea that one of these people would met somebody who was affected by what they were doing,” Lawton remembers. That he happened to be living in Hollywood at the time, in a neighborhood populated by daughters of the Rust Belt who had turned to prostitution, was just a strange coincidence.
I tend to think many people undervalue the basics of Michigan. That’s fine, you wouldn’t like it here anyway.