I wrote you and told you
You were the biggest fish out here
You should’ve never gone to Hollywood
— “Lost In Hollywood,” System of A Down
No other decade embodies sleaze, decadence, and pure unlaundered evil like the 1970s. It was like Tombstone for cinema. You could get away with damned near anything back then. Speaking as a child of the 70s, Christina Hornisher’s 1974 film Hollywood 90028 is a crumpled, half-burnt snapshot of LA found in between the pages of a thrift-store cookbook. It may not be great but it’s so well-crafted, viewers may not give a rip by the time the movie shrieks into its shocking ending.
Screened as part of the Fantasia Retro section of the 2024 Fantasia Film Fest, Hollywood 90028 can best be described as a hell of a thing. It is a languorous movie about the screeching, scummy underbelly of 1970s Los Angeles. Mark (Christopher Augustine) is a stifled artist, a photographer who has lifted his feet and slid down the slippery slope into a life of filming porn loops. His childhood, shown in a series of stills, was a wreck. When Mark isn’t at work or driving around town in his dilapidated Volkswagen Beetle, he’s picking up random girls and strangling them with his bare hands.
Everyone needs a hobby.
One day, on a film set, Mark meets Michele (Jeannette Dilger), a beautiful brunette who intrigues him with her nihilistic outlook on life. The two engage in conversations that would confuse Ingmar Bergman. Questions are met with more questions. Answers are dismissed and thrown into the abyss of “what if?” Mark, who is used to meeting girls and squeezing the life out of them, becomes obsessed with Michele. It’s clear that Michele is not as interested in Mark as he is in her, but that doesn’t stop him.
Mark takes negatives of the porn footage he has shot of Michele and pieces them together. He wants her, his singular vision of Michele, a viewpoint she wants no part of. After all, Michele’s already living with a dude, a musician named Paul with whom she has a flexible and undefined relationship. Although Mark sees Michele as the pathway to a stable and normal life, that doesn’t stop Mark from killing random women.
It is with that particular story beat that Hollywood 90028 stops making sense. Why does no one seek after these missing girls? Shouldn’t the police have their heads up Mark’s ass, asking him questions and taking him into custody? Nope. That would get in the way of Mark’s great love affair with Michele.
Hollywood 90028 provides everything I want out of a picture from that time. Movie marquees are seen in some shots. You can tell this movie was filmed while Pancho Villa Rides was still playing second-run houses. This is an LA not seen by modern audiences. Grimy, run down, littered with pawn shops and adult bookstores, Hornisher’s LA is the second level of hell where sin is as banal as eating too many candy bars.
And yet, it’s Hornisher’s direction that sets Hollywood 90028 from other grindhouse wacksterpieces of the time. Altmanesque in its vision, Hornisher eschews the quick cuts and titty shots of its contemporaries. Hornisher frames Augustine against huge murals or animals at the zoo. We get the sense that no one is big in LA, no matter how famous one becomes. LA is a creature, carnivorous and dehumanizing, that sucks all of its inhabitants into a thick pool of moral and ethical muck. Everyone eats and gets eaten.
Much of the dialogue is unintentionally hilarious as Mark and Michele talk to each other in Sphynxian riddles. The score, created by Basil Poledouris (Conan the Barbarian, Robocop), contains more flutes than a Jethro Tull album. Hornisher includes seemingly endless sequences of Mark driving. As Missing Persons observed, “nobody walks in LA.”
Even if it can’t withstand a close look, Hollywood 90028 needs to be seen. Despite the absurdities of the story, Hollywood 90028 emerges as a piece of high art. Through modern eyes, it is a vital snapshot of the worst days of Los Angeles. Desperation and debauchery seep through every frame. In the end, Hollywood 90028 concludes with one of the most audacious shots ever attempted in a film, one that encapsulates the utter hopelessness of the characters and their misguided fantasies of fame and fortune.
Hollywood 90028 isn’t perfect, not by a long shot. But it is a vital piece of cinema, one that needs to be seen by a wider appreciative audience. If director Hornisher were alive today, studios would be clamoring at her ankles to make something anywhere near as good, as impactful as Hollywood 90028. Enjoy it for the archival record that it is and don’t look for too much logic.
You may not need to watch it attentively, but Hollywood 90028 deserves to be looked at. It is a gorgeous slice of horrible LA history wrapped in a miasma of glossy nihilistic smog.
Hollywood 90028 received its Canadian premiere as part of the Fantasia Retro section of the 2004 Fantasia Fest in Montreal on July 26, 2024. For all our Fantasia coverage, watch this space!
