Dateline>City of Angels

And now for this week’s choice for the most interesting, offbeat and/or entertaining web video sharing key themes with this blog…

Yesterday Dateline>City of Angels explored the forgotten history of Griffith Park’s Crystal Springs adobe, along with its possible link to the legendary Feliz Curse. I also took the opportunity to announce I’m writing a book on the curse. Today, on a lark, I decided to search for any related web videos on the topic.

Source: YouTube!
Search Criteria: “Griffith Park + Curse”

The Result: A trailer for a cheesy (so say the reviewers) 2007 horror flick based on the “true story” of the Feliz Curse. If you’re squeamish or easily offended by cinematic blood, gore and bad acting, you may want to skip this clip…

The Backstory

Created by Julian Higgins, son of rocker Bertie, and recently released in the U.S., The Wrath takes some curious creative license with the already fanciful tale, adding a lost treasure and a vengeful beast who dines on trespassers. The film’s plot and other details can be viewed here. Especially brave souls can order/download the full movie from Amazon. Finally, there’s also this Inmag interview, in which Bertie Higgins discloses:

“Julian and I did a short film in L.A.’s Griffith Park in early 2005 and we became very interested in the history of the park. After a great deal of research, we discovered the back story about the haunting of the old Feliz estate (which is now Griffith Park) and the screenplay began to take shape. We felt that the story was very compelling and that it had to be told.”

No offense to the two, but considering how the film seems to mostly parrot the popular urban legend, you have to wonder what passes for “a great deal of research” in Hollywood these days. The Tale of the Feliz Curse is indeed compelling, but the real story behind the myth is even more so. Too bad the research team didn’t dig a little deeper.

Lately, I’ve been working to improve my amateur photography, especially with more challenging night shots. In fact, ever since shooting the Vista Theater at dusk last week, it seems I’ve been in a neon mood.

This image was taken last night about 11 p.m., outside Paradise, a stark-white no-tell motel trimmed in fetishy purple neon, that overlooks Sunset Blvd. along Echo Park’s eastern fringes.

My skills definitely need honing: I failed to do justice to the sign’s intense purple lettering, but did manage to pull some interesting hues from other objects in the scene. (I’m a big fan of cartoonish color saturation, if only to fool Firefox browsers into rendering some sort of vibrancy…)

For other amateur shutterbugs who care about these things, this was shot in raw with a Nikon D70s, ISO 320, 3 sec. @ f3.7, 24mm focal length, and processed in Capture One Pro.

[Paradise Lost, 2008, Michael Imlay]