O’Connell School in Dublin 1 has produced its fair share of taoisigh, sports people and journalists, writers and poets, but maybe few are as consequential in global terms as William Mulholland, the man who made Los Angeles.
Today’s column comes from the City of Angels, and more precisely Mulholland Drive. This road, immortalised by David Lynch’s 2001 movie, was named after the O’Connell’s old boy. Mulholland, stowaway, lumberjack, self-tought mechanic and engineer, is best known as the man who brought water to Los Angeles, breathing life into a barren land. Without fresh water there is no urban living.
LA at the end of the 19th century was an outpost, a somewhere-at-the-end-of-the-line place. As head of the Los Angeles department of power and water, Mulholland commissioned the construction of a spectacular example of public infrastructure – the Los Angeles aqueduct. Stretching nearly 400km from California’s Sierra Nevada mountains to the San Fernando Valley, the aqueduct made LA. Without Mulholland there is no Hollywood. And without Hollywood there is no one to tell the story of America. Hollywood is explainer, propagandist and storyteller-in-chief for this enormous country.
Political anoraks tend to link the story of America to the Federalist Papers, Liberty Bell, the founding fathers and Philadelphia of the later 18th century. But the American Dream was invented and reinvented in Hollywood. The scriptwriters of Hollywood created the America of the 20th century. The American Dream – that notion that you can get on no matter where you come from – was written by people who willed this to be true. They willed it to be true because they were immigrants on the make, and they needed to create a universal story that could be told to subsequent waves of migrants.
Today, social mobility in the US is among the worst in the developed world. But American stories have to have a happy ending because that’s the only thing that keeps this place together. Europeans can afford to be cynical; Americans can’t, and Hollywood keeps them on message.
Driven by the entertainment industry, this is part of what makes LA so beguiling. As Bono, another famous son of Dublin’s north side, observed in his autobiography Surrender, there are few places in the world where more people live off their imaginations as Los Angeles. It is easy to be cynical, and in many European quarters that cynicism is demanded, but there is an unparalleled economic energy here.
The entertainment industry is a product of the human imagination. Scriptwriters, directors and producers create value out of thin air. Unlike other cities that are anchored by some fixed extractive industry or a large governmental presence, a city devoted to entertainment is a city that makes stuff up for a living. And that takes creative brilliance.
Before the pandemic, Hollywood provided $504 billion per year to American GDP. Los Angeles’ creative economy employs more than 685,000 workers, accounting for over 12 per cent of the LA county’s workforce. According to a 2021 report, the creative economy directly contributes 19.4 per cent ($161 billion) of LA’s $828 billion economy – larger than any other major sector in the region, including manufacturing ($76.6 billion), tech ($74.3 billion), and healthcare and social assistance ($59.1 billion).
Last year the Hollywood strike closed production on studio releases for about six months. In the third quarter of 2023 production of TV dramas, comedies and pilots was down nearly 100 per cent compared with the previous year, while feature film shoots plummeted by about 55 per cent. The LA area collectively lost more than $1.4 billion in wages between April and September, which amounts to roughly 0.5 per cent of the industry’s annual economic activity.
When LA’s creatives strike a light goes off in this neon city. But that flicks a switch somewhere else, and one of those places is Ireland, where the film industry is booming. In 2021, across feature film, documentary, animation and TV drama the total production spend in the Irish economy was €500 million – 40 per cent higher than 2019′s previous record spend.
In 2021, local Irish film activity increased by 52 per cent from 2019, reaching the highest year ever for the category. More and more big studios are moving their production to Ireland to take advantage of tax relief and the beautiful scenery our country offers. And, as every movement needs its heroes, Irish actors are consistently being credited for their talent. For example, half of the six men - Andrew Scott, Cillian Murphy and Barry Keoghan (another O’Connell School ex-pupil - nominated for best actor in a drama motion picture for the Golden Globes are Irish.
The more Irish actors are recognised the more the country will be spoken of in the cinematic world. However, the city that William Mulholland facilitated isn’t going to pass the torch that easily. The capacity for reinvention and for reimagining is palpable everywhere in LA. Entire districts of the city go in and out of fashion. When they lose their cachet, the scene moves on, leaving the district to reinvent itself. Nothing is permanent. When you are up, you are up for now. There is little comparative advantage. If your gig is going well the most you have is a temporary monopoly. There is always someone eyeing the prize, ready to take it from you.
Whether you are an actor, director, singer, producer or writer, the gales of creative destruction howl constantly, pushing people to greater achievements. Those streets paved with gold are also the famous boulevards of broken dreams. This economic battle for survival gives LA both its harshness and its excitement.
This city exists on its wits, making stuff up, telling stories, teeming with immigrants, looking west to the Pacific and China rather than east to the Atlantic and Europe. This is the new America – a Korean America, an Iranian America, a Mexican America, an Indian America and, of course, a Chinese America. Throw these guys in with the old tribes – Irish, Jews, Italians and African Americans – and you get a cultural entrepot like nowhere else. The collective economic result of all this individual effort is an unrivalled commercial and creative energy.
Don’t bet against it, this bizarre, fascinating metropolis that William Mulholland of O’Connell School helped build.
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