It’s a Photo Finish for Santa Anita Park in HBO’s Luck

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine February 2012

When writer David Milch and director Michael Mann set out to make their new HBO series, Luck, about the seedy, high-stakes world of horse racing, there was never a question about where it would be shot. “I’ve been to most of the tracks in Europe, and to me, Santa Anita is the most beautiful track in the world,” says Milch, a thoroughbred owner himself who loves how the Arcadia park “seems benign and pastoral but in fact it’s a jungle.” Mann had never been to Santa Anita until Milch took him, and he, too, was struck by the way the San Gabriel Mountains illuminate the stretch. That the series is partly about gamblers and degenerates only made the setting more perfect. “If this was My Friend Flicka or Secretariat, you would never shoot at Santa Anita,” says Mann. “It’s only because our people—and the language they use—are so not pretty that you’re able to get away with it.”

Had Grove developer Rick Caruso succeeded in building his proposed Shops at Santa Anita in the track’s parking lot, Milch and Mann’s mise-en-scène would have been dramatically different. The expansive family-oriented outdoor mall with a horse-drawn trolley wending its way past luxury retailers never materialized, leaving the 77-year-old Santa Anita (it’s on the National Register of Historic Places) in a state of degraded gentility. Of course that makes it a poignant stage for Luck’s hucksters and dreamers, portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, Nick Nolte, Dennis Farina, and seemingly every other craggy-faced actor in Hollywood. Milch, whose previous series include Deadwood (talk about craggy) and the short-lived John from Cincinnati, hopes cable watchers will thrill to Santa Anita as he does (racing season began the day after Christmas). “It’s a very arcane environment,” he says. “One enters at one’s peril.”

Mann agrees, sounding like a convert. “If it’s January at 6:30 in the morning,” he says, “and you’re out there and there’s snow on the mountains and the air is crystal clear, it’s fantastic.”

The star of the TNT cop series Southland on tweeting, busing, and Boyz N the Hood

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, January 2012

How do I say this? A white person’s upbringing in Los Angeles is different from a black person’s upbringing in Los Angeles. Even if both grew up in affluent neighborhoods, it’s totally different. I grew up in Windsor Hills, which is considered an affluent black neighborhood. My school was 54th Street, which was all black, but I was one of the first round of kids who were bused to make schools more integrated. I was in the fourth grade—maybe ’78 or ’79. I was bused to Click to continue »

With the debut of her new HBO series, Enlightened, the actress talks about growing up with actors (her parents are Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd), dying on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and being stuck in 1978

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, November 2011

My family’s biggest pet peeve about me is that whenever we get in the car, I tell them that wherever we’re going is 15 minutes away. Because I remember that it used to be 15 minutes away. I’m shocked that it doesn’t take 15 minutes to get from Santa Monica to West Hollywood. Shocked! If I have an appointment in West Hollywood and I’m at Ocean Avenue and Arizona, I leave 15 minutes to get there—knowing full well that crossing the 405 alone is going to take me an hour. As an L.A. native, I refuse to grow up in this one area: traffic. I’m just not going to allow L.A. to be different than it was in 1978. Otherwise I’d have to move.

I was born and spent my early childhood in Santa Monica and the Mar Vista area, so I love it there. And Beverly Hills means a lot to me, too. I lived there for quite a while, and my godmother, the actress Click to continue »

Yeah, I got my face done. And my nose. And my eyes. And my…

By Phyllis Diller as told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in the October 2011 issue of Los Angeles magazine

Why did I get my face done? I’ll tell you why. First of all, I didn’t touch it until I was 55. That’s when I saw myself on television, on the old Sonny & Cher show. I was playing a witch, and I threw my head back and it gave me a couple of chins. I had bags under my eyes. I’d always had irregular features. My nose was too long, and I’d broken it, which made it Click to continue »

The dancer-choreographer-singer turned judge—who reunites with Simon Cowell this month on Fox’s The X Factor—on Laker Girls, Valley condos, and Gene Kelly

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in September 2011 issue of Los Angeles magazine

In case you didn’t know, I’m not that tall. I’m five feet two on a good day. Growing up here, I’ve seen a lot. I was never the right height or the right look. I was one of those kids—like on American Idol or The X Factor—who would do anything for Click to continue »

What do you do when fate threatens to derail your dream job? If you’re this star of HBO’s True Blood, you trust the burnt surfer dude with the needle and thread

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, August 2011

It’s 6:55 a.m.—a Winchell’s morning. That means my friend and I have agreed to meet at Winchell’s on Melrose to go surfing. But he isn’t here. At 7:05 I text him—“u coming brah?”—then after a cup of coffee to work off the margarita hangover, hit the road without him.I get to my secret spot, a little farther north than usual, and put on my gear, then walk all the way to one end of the beach and all the way back. No waves.

I decide to get in anyway, picking a house under construction to be my lineup. I make it out, paddle south, and catch a few. But it’s cold and no good. My feet are getting numb. I keep thinking I’m going to go in, but then Click to continue »

The versatile actor, who plays the commander-in-chief on NBC’s alien-invasion series The Event, on having his face on billboards, Driving While Black, and getting the part

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, 6/2011

A few years after I moved to Los Angeles to be on L.A. Law, I did a TNT movie called Heat Wave about the Watts riots. I played the L.A. Times journalist who led a team whose reporting won the Pulitzer Prize. Then two years after that, the 1992 riots broke out. Martin Luther King said it best: A riot is the language of the unheard. I had this beautiful home in the hills of Los Feliz from which I could see South-Central, and I just had to be down there. Why? Because along with all the incredible wealth and all the glamour and glitz and red-carpet affairs—which are part of my life—I’m also an African American man. And while I wasn’t beaten like Rodney King, I’d been pulled over by the cops. Four times. It’s happened to a lot of African American men who drive nice cars.

Once a cop stopped me and put a gun to my temple. Another time my wife and I were coming home from church at 1 a.m. on New Year’s Eve. Coming up Gower near Hollywood, two cops stop us. I know the dance. They pull us over, guns drawn. “Get out of the car!” I put both my hands out the window and get out. “Get up against the wall!” My wife is in the passenger seat, and she’s watching. They tell her, “Turn around!” and she says, “No. I want to see what you’re doing to my husband.” So they’re patting me down, and one recognizes me. Then they start backtracking, apologizing. Later I called my friend Johnnie Cochran, the lawyer, and I told him about it. He said, “Your offense was DWB: Driving While Black.”

So on the night the riots began, I went to First AME Church, where the Reverend Cecil Murray was holding a service. Afterward I came out of the church, and the palm trees were on fire. My car was parked at a Laundromat that was on fire. People were running and screaming. And what was so surreal was I felt I was in a scene of a movie I’d already shot: Heat Wave. That was a pivotal Los Angeles moment for me.

I don’t get paid to put my face on those billboards for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. When the idea first came up, some people warned me it would cost me. “Don’t you worry that people will think you have HIV or AIDS?” they asked. But I thought it was the right thing to do. My experience with AIDS started with an organization I cofounded 23 years ago: Artists for a New South Africa. Then you see the need in your backyard, where the African American community is disproportionately impacted by HIV. AIDS is rising in the heterosexual community, too. I felt I could bring that message to people.

Here’s what’s ironic: Last year when they were casting The Event at Sunset Gower Studios, one of our AHF billboards was right outside. They had been looking for a Latino actor to play the president, but that wasn’t working out. A week before they were to start shooting the pilot the casting director came to work and passed my billboard, like she had every day for weeks. She went in and said to the producers, “Why aren’t we talking to him?” That’s how I got the part.

L.A. Story: Tim Burton

The Burbank-born movie director (who now lives in London) on Walt Disney’s frozen body, Christmas in L.A., and his new show at LACMA

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles, May 2011

You’re often compensating for things that are lacking in your life. If you’re in the cold all the time, you want sun. You need that for chemical balance. So if it’s always sunny and bright and warm, you want the opposite. Ever since I was three years old, I can remember I loved monster movies and dark, expressionistic kinds of things. Being a fairly quiet sort of nonverbal child, you look inward to explore your feelings and communicate through drawings.

When I was growing up in Burbank, the environment was very middle-class suburban, and I felt like Click to continue »

Los Angeles magazine won two National Magazine Awards, or Ellies, earlier this week. Here’s a photo of the editing crew standing around one of them (I’m in the middle)….

L.A. Story: Josh Radnor

The 36-year-old star of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, who also writes and directs (his first film, happythankyoumoreplease, debuts this month), talks about traffic, the gold rush, and L.A. as a blank canvas

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, March 2011

There are a lot of actors in New York who get flown out to L.A. because they’re doing a network test. They get put up at the Universal Hilton. It rains that weekend. They get lost driving, and they can’t find their way. They get cut at the studio and have to go immediately back home. That’s their experience of L.A., and they hate it. They feel like the city didn’t welcome them somehow.

I had a different experience. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and spent a lot of time in New York, but I moved to L.A. in 2003 because a girlfriend had moved out here. We lived in Click to continue »