Notes Introduction: Visions of Community 1 . The literature is vast but for especially relevant examples see Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001); Robert Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); David R. Coon, Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2013). 2 . For a small sense of this very large body of work, see anthologies such as David Clarke, ed., The Cinematic City (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Mark Lamster, ed., Architecture and Film (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000); Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds., Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Mark Shiel, ed., Screening the City (London and New York: Verso, 2003); Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson, eds., Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2008). Many more significant in-depth works in the field are cited throughout the book. 3 . Rob Lapsley, “Mainly in Cities and at Night: Some Notes on Cities and Film,” in The Cinematic City , ed. David B. Clarke (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 187. 4 . Mark Shiel, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Studies in a Global Context , ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 3–4. 5 . I am thinking here, for example, of the so-called (and loosely formed) Los Angeles School of urbanism, which has frequently invoked culture in its postmodern theorization of the city. See for example Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992); Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places 216 NOTES (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996); Michael J. Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); and the collection Michael J. Dear and J. Dallas Dishman, eds., From Chicago to L.A.: Making Sense of Urban Theory (Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage, 2002). 6 . Quoted in Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls (London: Unbound, 2012), 12. 7 . James Sanders, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). 8 . Sanders, Celluloid Skyline , 15. 9 . Ibid., 366–383. 10 . Ibid., 20. 11 . Kenneth MacKinnon, Hollywood’s Small Towns: An Introduction to the American Small-Town Movie (Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 18. 12 . Understandably, for example, the shorter engagements in edited col- lections such as Clarke, The Cinematic City ; Shiel and Fitzmaurice, Cinema and the City ; and Shiel, Screening the City typically take this approach. 13 . An example would be the theory of “filmspace” outlined in Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition , chap. 9. 14 . Darnell M. Hunt, “Representing ‘Los Angeles’: Media, Space, and Place,” in From Chicago to L.A.: Making Sense of Urban Theory , ed. Michael J. Dear and J. Dallas Dishman (Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage, 2002), 321–342. 15 . Hunt, “Representing ‘Los Angeles,’” 329. Hunt expresses a post- modern skepticism about whether these can be considered objec- tively measurable. My own view would be that this part of the diagram can be considered the realm of the objective, and the rest of the diagram sufficiently accounts for our subjective mediation of this underlying objective reality. 16 . Ibid.,’” 332. 17. Ibid., 333. 18 . Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse , 22. 19 . Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century , 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), chap. 2; Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1982), 10–12. 20 . Ebenezer Howard, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1898), 8. 21 . Howard, To-Morrow , 131. 22 . For an extraordinarily thorough, heavily illustrated account, see Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove, Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City (New York: Monacelli Press, 2013). NOTES 217 23 . Stern, Fishman, and Tilove, Paradise Planned , 123–127; Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Vintage, 2003), 61–65; Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 126–133; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 79–81. 24 . Hall, Cities of Tomorrow , 312–315; Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century , 122–134. 25 . Hall, Cities of Tomorrow , 314. 26 . Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning (New York: Dover Publications, 1987 [originally published in French in 1924 and in English in 1929]), xxi. 27 . Ibid., 116. Emphasis in original. 28 . Ibid., 220. Capitalization in original; this paragraph was also itali- cized to further underline its importance. 29 . Ibid., 240. 30 . For a concise history of urban renewal in Britain and America, set in the context of Le Corbusier’s influence, see Hall, Cities of Tomorrow , 240–254. 31 . Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning , 118, 179. 32 . Ibid., 154, 156. 33 . David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 66. 34 . Nigel Taylor, Urban Planning Theory since 1945 (London: Sage, 1998), chap. 2. 35 . See in particular Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier ; Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias ; Hayden, Building Suburbia . 36 . This shift is discussed in Thomas J. Campanella, “Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning,” in Reconsidering Jane Jacobs , ed. Max Page and Timothy Mennel (Chicago and Washington, DC: American Planners Association/Planners Press, 2011), 141–160. 1 Movie Towns 1 . From Life , May 10, 1943, 19. This advertisement is also reproduced in John Archer, Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 271. 2 . This campaign is discussed in John Bush Jones, All-Out for Victory! Magazine Advertising and the World War II Home Front (Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2009), 286. 3 . Reproduced in Cynthia Lee Henthorn, From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939–1959 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 133. 218 NOTES 4 . Life , March 29, 1943. 5 . Donald C. Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking (Chicago and Washington: Planners Press, 2005), 674. 6 . Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). 7 . MacKinnon, Hollywood’s Small Towns , 9; Emanuel Levy, Small- Town America in Film: The Decline and Fall of Community (New York: Continuum, 1990), 66–67. 8 . Charles J. Maland, Frank Capra (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 131; Levy, Small-Town America in Film , 88. 9 . The film’s afterlife and ongoing appeal as a seasonal classic is dis- cussed in Danny Peary, Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful (New York: Delta, 1981), 162–163. 10 . I have referred throughout this chapter to the film’s narrator as Morgan (the surname of the druggist), as this is the way he is pre- sented in the film. In Wilder’s play it is clearer that the narrator (“stage manager”) is not actually the druggist, but “steps into” the role of Morgan for the scene in the drug store. 11 . Richard Francaviglia, Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 130. 12 . The history of these backlots has long been documented by a community of amateur film history buffs sharing information on the Internet. However, recent years have seen a number of books starting to appear that document history of various lots. See Steven Bingen, Stephen X. Sylvester, and Michael Troyan, MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot (Solana Beach: Santa Monica Press, 2011); Steven Bingen, Warner Bros.: Hollywood’s Ultimate Backlot (Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2014); Robert S. Birchard, Early Universal City (Charleston: Arcadia, 2009); Julie Lugo Cerra and Marc Wanamaker, Movie Studios of Culver City (Charleston: Arcadia, 2011); E. J. Stephens and Marc Wanamaker, Early Warner Bros. Studios (Charleston: Arcadia, 2010); E. J. Stephens, Michael Christaldi, and Marc Wanamaker, Early Paramount Studios (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2013). 13. Photographs of the relevant portion of the MGM backlot can be seen in Bingen, Sylvester, and Troyan, MGM , 162. 14 . For the RKO backlot location, compare the street as dressed for Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) at Kipp Teague, “40 Acres—The Lost Studio Backlot of Movie & Television Fame,” Retroweb , 2012, http://www.retroweb.com/40acres_gwtw.html . 15 . For the location, see Gerald Kaufman, Meet Me in St. Louis (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 18; Robert Neuman, “Disneyland’s NOTES 219 Main Street, USA, and Its Sources in Hollywood, USA,” The Journal of American Culture 31 (March 2008): 90–91; Bingen, Sylvester, and Troyan, MGM , 160. 16 . Neuman, “Disneyland’s Main Street, USA,” 92–93. 17 . Michael Willian, The Essential It’s a Wonderful Life: A Scene-by- Scene Guide to the Classic Film , 2nd ed. (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006), 6; Neuman, “Disneyland’s Main Street, USA,” 95. 18 . Willian, The Essential It’s a Wonderful Life , 8–9. 19 . Tony Reeves, The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations , 3rd rev. ed. (London: Titan Books, 2006), 347–348; Neuman, “Disneyland’s Main Street, USA,” 89–90. 20 . Francaviglia, Main Street Revisited , 97–100, 157–159. 21 . The description of “a universally true Main Street,” used in connec- tion with Disneyland, is frequently attributed to Paul Goldberger but is actually a quote from Disneyland designer John Hench, as quoted by Goldberger.