Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969): The “Baroque Geometry” of Los Angeles in the 1960s

“I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable and most uncivilized major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer. . . .”1
– Adam Raphael, The Guardian, 1968

“I was really moved by the geometry of the city, its baroque harmony. It’s a fabulous city. It’s pure poetry.”
– George Matthews (Gary Lockwood), Model Shop (1969)

“You aren’t likely to forget – immediately anyway – a movie in which someone speaks of the ‘baroque geometry’ of Los Angeles. I know that I won’t.”2
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times, 1969

* * *

French New Wave film director Jacques Demy, best known for his award-winning The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), made only one English-language, Hollywood studio film, Model Shop, released in April 1969. Based primarily on the critical and popular success of the all-singing dialogue, colorful cinematography, and poignant romantic music of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Demy was invited by Columbia Pictures to come to Los Angeles under a contract to make a movie. During the year 1967-1968 that he and his wife, fellow filmmaker Agnes Varda, lived in Los Angeles, Demy was inspired by his many automobile drives through the city to make a film that would capture the character, textures, and rhythms of LA. He originally wanted to call the film Los Angeles, 1968. Model Shop was a box office failure and quickly disappeared. Demy himself referred to his only Hollywood effort as “Model Flop.”3 When promoting the film, Demy said he wanted to make an all-singing musical in America about students called The Interview.4 It was never made. After Model Shop’s release, Columbia rejected all other proposed film projects from Demy, who promptly returned to France. He never worked in Hollywood again.5 Model Shop remained almost forgotten since its release. Viewed as an anomaly in Demy’s filmography, it received scant attention in both English- and French-language academic publications. With the increasing interest in the work of Demy generally, Sony finally released the film on DVD in 2009.6 Since then, scholarly interest in Model Shop has revived, with particular focus on the connections with other Demy films, as an example of a “Euro-American art film,” as the forerunner of the “New Hollywood youth culture film,” and its depiction of 1960s Los Angeles as the main character in the film.7 Thom Andersen observed that “when location shooting became prevalent and the city of Los Angeles reappeared as background, then as character, and finally as subject, the movies created another mythological city – but it wasn’t exactly magical.”8 Andersen in his documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) admits that as a resident of the city he resented Model Shop at first because it was a west side LA story that doesn’t “extend beyond Vine Street,” but later found it offers an extraordinary portrait of the city as character.9 Lawrence Webb also points out that in most recent cinema, “Unlike New York, Los Angeles is not primarily figured as a ‘melting pot’ but rather a mosaic of diverse and disaggregated fragments, and while Hollywood may seem like the sine qua non of aspiration, it has been routinely fictionalized as a place where dreams are frustrated, debased, or commodified.”10 The emergence of Model Shop in current popular culture occurred when it was featured on an episode of the television series Mad Men, “Field Trip,” April 27, 2014, when Don Draper is shown watching it in a theater in the midst of his failing marriage with this actress wife Megan.11

But the directors of three recent films about Los Angeles, in using Model Shop as an inspiration, homage, or template, have really spiked the profile and reputation of Demy’s Los Angeles film. Director Damien Chazelle’s highly successful La La Land (2016) is clearly an homage to Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in terms of tone, color, narrative, and the creative use of the musical genre.12 But surely Model Shop was also on his mind as it also features two lovers who attempt to reconcile their respective futures against the topography of LA. Interesting comparisons can be made between the two directors in their treatment of LA. Andrew Slater, director of Echo in the Canyon (2019), a documentary about the musical scene in Los Angeles from the mid to late l960s, explicitly credits Model Shop as inspiration for his film, so much so that he included clips from the film in Echo in the Canyon to invoke 1960s Los Angeles.13 And finally, Quentin Tarantino, asked by Sony to promote his own personal visit to the 1960s, Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood (2019), put Model Shop high on the list of films representative of the era that influenced him in the making of his film.14 Above all, Demy saw Model Shop as an opportunity to depict American culture and Los Angeles from within in the pivotal year of 1968-1969, while always remaining an outsider. Along the way, he takes the viewer on a fabulous tour of the city in the 1960s. “And so Demy,” writes Calum Marsh, “playing the part of the wide eyed-tourist, set to work creating a testament to the spirit of Los Angeles. Model Shop is not simply a film in which action takes place in Los Angeles; it’s a film about the Los Angeles experience, in a meaningful way, to the point where even the city’s layout and design shape the narrative and direct the action. L.A. in the film’s conception becomes a land designed expressly to wander.”15 Film critic Clare Stewart referred to the film as “a road picture that doesn’t go anywhere,” creating a “drifting, dreamy mood piece,” according to Jeff Stafford.16 So despite its initial stumble into obscurity, Model Shop is now held in high regard by film critics such as Armond White, who wrote that “Model Shop is a post-masterpiece, elaborating Demy’s own expressive vocabulary – making his imagination real, fulfilling that now-forgotten New Wave decree the movies be taken seriously as emotion pictures. Going back to Model Shop could help modern movies discover love.”17 Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum sees the film as one of Jacques Demy’s most underrated and neglected films, writing that “the play between actuality and artifice is the most complex and unconventional.”18 Model Shop is one of the more important beginning points for the aforementioned three films as they attempt to explore the subjectivities of history, memory, and nostalgia in Los Angeles and/or the 1960s.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Demy described his thinking behind the making of Model Shop:

I came here for a vacation, not to make a movie. But I fell in love with LA. I just had to make a film. It’s so marvelous. When I left Paris it was dead. Now I’ve missed the revolution and everything. But I had been so depressed, so discouraged. I said I must go someplace where something’s happening. I don’t want to be pretentious but I want The Model Shop to be Los Angeles 1968 – like Rossellini’s Europa ’51. . . . I want to forget Cherbourg, Rochefort. I’ve gone as far as I can with that. I needed another language, new problems. This won’t be a Hollywood movie. I told them I like to shoot on location, use real people whenever possible. The sound stage, big stars, big budget – I wouldn’t enjoy that. I learned the city by driving – from one end of Sunset to the other, down Western all the way to Long Beach. LA has the perfect proportions for film. It fits the frame perfectly.19

In 1971, Bradford, England-born Reyner Banham, the author of the most pro-LA book ever written, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, echoed these driving instructions as a way to “read” Los Angeles, stating that “like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive to read Los Angeles in the original.”20

One fascinating bit of trivia about Demy’s film is that it could have featured an unknown actor named Harrison Ford, the director’s first choice for the lead role of George Matthews. In his recollection for the documentary The World of Jacques Demy, Ford remembers that before the movie was made he and Demy visited a model shop on Santa Monica Boulevard where male clients rented a camera to photograph a young woman in a setting and pose of their choosing. Agnes Varda then explains that model shops were “naïve forerunners of the sex shops.” Ford says that everyone was nervous and had no idea of what they were doing, not that it mattered very much for his chances of landing the role. “The head of the studio said forget me; I had no future in this business.”21 The studio instead opted for the actor Gary Lockwood as being more bankable, having just come off a role as Dr. Frank Poole in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where he is murdered by a computer. Earlier he had appeared as Helmsman Gary Mitchell in the second Star Trek pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (1965), in which his character develops super-human powers.22 Carole Eastman assisted Demy with the English-language screenplay for Model Shop. Significantly under the name Adrien Joyce, she also did the screenplay for Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970) starring Jack Nicholson, a strikingly similar tale of alienation and disenchantment.

The terse, airless plot of Model Shop covers a 24-hour period in the life of George Matthews (Gary Lockwood), an architect who has just left his job – “I didn’t waste seven years in college to end up designing gas pipes that won’t ever be seen.” He also finds himself in a failing relationship with Gloria, an aspiring actress (Alexandra Hay) who decries his lack of ambition. “Who’s going to give a million dollars to a guy of 26 just because he has ideas?” she laments. The film follows George as he attempts to raise enough money to save his beloved classic MG-TD Roadster from being repossessed. (Anyone even vaguely familiar with this type of vintage British roadster finds it incredible that George did not break down multiple times in the course of his rambles.) As if things were not bad enough, he also faces being drafted and sent to Vietnam. In the process of driving around Los Angeles he catches a glimpse of an exotic, beautiful woman dressed in white at a parking lot, where he is hitting up the attendant for some cash to save his beloved car. He becomes obsessed by her, going so far as to follow her both in his car and on foot. He eventually arrives at her place of employment, a model shop where men pay to photograph women in a choice of intimate settings, living room or bedroom. He then hires his object of obsession, Lola (Anouk Aimée), for a photo shoot.

Lola is a divorced Frenchwoman who has no work permit and got the job through her roommate Barbara (Carole Cole), who works as a topless dancer. Lola, whose real name is Cecile, hopes to earn enough money to purchase airfare back to Paris to be with her son. Like two ships passing in the night, or in this case two cars passing each other, they do have one sexual encounter, and then go their separate ways. She returns to Paris, and George presumably to the military and then Vietnam. When he returns home, he finds Gloria has left him for the man who got her a job in a soap bubbles commercial, which George ridicules as crass, sneering that other actresses got their start doing Shakespeare. As the film ends, George is on the phone trying to reach Lola while the tow truck hauls away his repossessed MG-TD, trying to raise his voice above the urban sounds of cars, oil derricks, and airplanes. Lola is, of course, gone, so George is left to tell Barbara about his attempt to escape what has come to be a life empty not just of love, but of any meaning at all. He tells her:

I just wanted to tell her I loved her. I just wanted her to know that I was going to try to begin again. You know what I mean? I just wanted her to know that I was going to try. Yeah, it sounds stupid, doesn’t it? But I can try, you know? Yeah, always try. Yeah, always try (cut to black).

Here one thinks of the last line of the novel The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”23 For as Reyner Banham explains:

Los Angeles is where you confront the objective fact that you mean nothing; the desert, the ocean, the tectonic plates, the clear skies, the sun itself, the Hollywood Walk of Fame – even the parking lots: everything there precedes you, even new construction sites, and it’s bigger than you and more abstract than you and indifferent to you. You don’t matter. You’re free.24

The existentialist thought that we must get on with our lives the best we can and not get bogged down in the bleakness and limitations of life echoes the fate of the two lovers in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and anticipates the restlessness and dislocations of ’70s films like Five Easy Pieces.

Despite the sad white dude depiction of an aimless, dropout counterculture youth waiting for his draft notice, Paul Ramaeker details the complexities of placing the film in the wider context of countercultural film history of the 1960s and ’70s:

It is both quintessentially a Demy film, set in a cinematic universe of characters and relations of his own devising, and yet unlike other Demy films, it is a clear example of a Euro-America art film, a new Hollywood youth culture film – indeed a forerunner to most of them – that has little in common with that type. It is a film that is not particularly representative of anything aside from itself, yet in both its similarities to and differences from other films of its time, it can illuminate Hollywood at the close of the 1960s, as well as Demy’s auteur status.25

Beyond any politics or style, Model Shop represents Demy’s penchant for connecting characters from earlier films. Anouk Aimée played the original Lola, a nightclub singer waiting for the father of her child to return, in his film Lola (1961). The narrative now takes her to Los Angeles almost ten years later. Demy links another of his films to Model Shop by having Lola explain to George how her husband Michel ran off with a beautiful gambler, which recalls Jackie Demaistre played by Jeanne Moreau in Bay of Angels (1963). Lola is no longer the romantic and charming figure from the earlier film, but now finds herself completely bereft of love, longing for the old days and Frankie, the American sailor she befriended back then and subsequently learned has been killed in Vietnam, thus closing the circle with George’s current draft dilemma. Demy did not find the America of Gene Kelly and Vincent Minnelli, but a world closer to Easy Rider (1969) and an American counterculture that he rendered in his own inimical style in Model Shop.

Michael Duffy observes, “Jacques Demy’s Model Shop brought a contemporary French aesthetic to a city in transition. Demy’s film is devoid of action or spectacle, but rich in characterized desolation stemming from the post-urban renewal wasteland of Los Angeles.”26 Demy wanted to film what he considered to be the authentic Los Angeles that contained not only the desolation seen by those familiar with the city, but also the beauty he found in something so appealing and new to his foreign, tourist eyes and roving camera. Calum Marsh wrote, “It’s a bit of a cliché to describe a city as a character in a film.”27 But that is exactly what Demy has created: Los Angeles as a multifaceted character. This is similar to his last film, Three Seats for the 26th^, (1988), where Yves Montand’s own life “provides the documentary subject in almost the same way that Los Angeles figures in Model Shop.”28 Jean-Pierre Berthome argues that Demy in his films always wanted to return to Nantes, the city in France where he grew up, “a port sufficiently far from the sea not to see it, but close enough for its presence always to be felt, if only in the dreams of leaving that float through the town. Hence the choice of Nice, Cherbourg, Rochefort, and Marseille” as film locations.29 Thus it was not surprising that he choose the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles (now in Marina Del Rey) as the place where Gloria and George lived, next to an oil rocker pump jack and the airport. The proximity of the ocean is conveyed by a misty, grainy, filtered sunny atmosphere. Model Shop marks a significant departure, however, from the usual Demy city that acts as the set for a story closed in on itself. Demy created a geographically diverse vision of Los Angeles that runs from Venice to West Los Angeles to the Hollywood Hills. And as Berthome writes, the difference does not stop there:

Model Shop was also one of Demy’s films in which the greatest fear of the hero was to be torn from the secure and mediocre cocoon in which he was wandering without any real goal and without lasting ties. The year was 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam War, and it was not a time for dreams of leaving, any more than it had been for Guy, called to go to Algeria in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg.30

Vincent Canby was one of the few early reviewers to pick up on the flat, eye-level urban environment Los Angeles evoked for Demy through the “solid state grid of boulevards, parking lots, two-story loft buildings, drugstores, supermarkets, and beach houses,”31 full of billboards and neon signs that created a commercialized world that is “utilitarian, commodified, and excessive.”32 Mark Shiel quite correctly argues that “the existential crisis of the protagonist owes much to this build environment . . . and that is also increasingly difficult to find one’s way around because it was constantly expanding. The result is a semiotically confused streetscape in which human scale seems diminished and devalued.”33

Consistent with Los Angeles as character, shot composition, angle, distance, and sound are used to underline the characters’ other connections “between their bodies and their environment, their mood and their habitat, the self and the surrounding world.”34 The house that George and Gloria occupy is cluttered, small, and confined, reflective of their own constricted lives. Whether on foot or in his MG-TD, George gives an impromptu tour of 1960s Los Angeles. He goes by oil derricks, palm trees, car washes, diners, gas stations, parking lots, billboards, a Chinese laundry, neon signs, seedy tropical motels, shopping strip malls, supermarkets, and photo shops. When on foot stalking Lola he finds the sidewalks strangely devoid of pedestrians. Ambient sounds are everywhere. Engines, horns, sirens, radio news broadcasts about the Vietnam War, billboard pop music, and even the radio sound of Bach, Schumann, or Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade accompany George on his wanderings. Along with the sound of jet planes, all this external noise seems to muffle verbal communication between the characters. The incessant chatter and noise intensify and mirror the frustrations, anxieties, alienation, and melancholy of both Lola and George. The streets at night sparkle with color and do not appear sinister as they could in the 1960s and ’70s. Freeways are missing from this view of mid-20th-century Los Angeles, but later critics so associate them with Los Angeles that some include them as being in the film. In fact, the only mention of them comes when a cab driver makes a reference to a pile-up on the freeway as the reason for his being late. George is a man without a plan, but as Calum Marsh writes, “he seems to be living in the perfect city for it: Los Angeles, with its shapeless geography and loose-knit feel, accommodates the aimless. It’s built to be explored, not conquered.”35 In the opening title sequence – a reverse tracking shot through an unglamorous set of buildings next to George and Gloria’s house – Demy and cinematographer Michel Hugo make Los Angeles look like “a dead end town, a nowhere place, a stopover for all the characters in the film before they move on to somewhere else.”36 Demy does an excellent job of capturing the sunniness or seediness of Los Angeles, or as Mike Davis put it in the City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, “sunshine or noir.”37

Jean Luc-Godard, when asked by a member of the audience during a lecture at USC, “What is your impression of Los Angeles?,” replied, “It’s a big garage.”38 As has been pointed out by Mark Shiel, “Demy’s Model Shop does not present as biting a critique of automobile culture as that of Godard’s Weekend (1967)” – indeed, when it was released in the spring of 1969, Demy’s film was often praised for its originality in capturing what many critics described as the unconventional beauty of LA.39 Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times praised Model Shop as “a film that understands that ours is a pneumatic, nomadic culture.”40 Later reviewers and critics have continued to praise the film for outsider Demy’s affection for the sprawling urban mass of Los Angeles. In Model Shop, George tells a friend of his revelatory experience of overlooking the city from the spot where he followed Lola to a house in the Hollywood Hills. (Why Lola goes to this expensive home in the first place is never made clear in the film, but given her occupation it certainly looks like she was providing some special personal extra service):

I was driving down Sunset, and I turned on one of those roads that lead up into the hills, and I stopped at this place that overlooks the whole city. It was fantastic. I suddenly felt exhilarated. I was really moved by the geometry of the place, its conception, its baroque harmony. It’s a fabulous city. To think some claim it’s an ugly city when it’s really pure poetry, it just kills me. I wanted to build something right then, create something.

“I’m trying to capture a world in my films,” Demy once said. But unlike his other films, in Model Shop Demy is content to capture, not manipulate, Los Angeles.41 For Demy, LA represents an excessive, commodified, commercialized mélange of incongruous elements, while at the same time containing an expansive, energetic, melodramatic, romantic, and beautiful wild “baroque geometry” that contrasted so vividly with the classicism and order of Paris and Nantes. After the failure of the May 1968 revolution in Paris, LA seemed to offer Demy an almost utopian sense of possibility. Machines and urban architectural detritus may dominate the environment, but seen from a distance a harmony emerges. For the tourist, what is new and shocking assumes a perverse beauty of its own. What is important to the outsider is what made Los Angeles different from the cities they had previously known. A palpable sense of ennui and existential detachment does pervade Model Shop, but “Demy’s Los Angeles takes some pleasure from the populist built environment, but without neglecting its dehumanization,” thus ensuring its legacy and impact surpassing the simple nostalgia in recent films dealing with Los Angeles-Hollywood and/or the 1960s, such as La La Land, Echo in the Canyon, and Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood.

Damien Chazelle, although a dedicated student of Jacques Demy who has done much to popularize his films, presents a radically different version of Los Angeles in La La Land. The contrast is brought out particularly well by Scott Nye:

La La Land rarely sets itself on average L.A. streets, confining them (or suburban counterparts) to snapshot moments in montages. The few full scenes in outdoor locations take place at landmarks . . . the Griffith Observatory, the Hollywood Hills. The specificity of place is granted from the outside in, catering to a national audience, rather than inside-out, representing a lived experience as a local resident. There’s nothing in La La Land an outsider wouldn’t expect to see in Los Angeles.42

Chazelle does not celebrate the public face of the city. Indeed, LA seems to exist in the realm of some strange present/past. The film appears to dwell in an earlier time. As Michael Green observes, “Few movies have represented LA with such fawning reverence and nostalgia.” For Greene, Chazelle depicts a “clean, spare, elegant, city, sluiced in mid-century Technicolor, consisting almost exclusively of jazz clubs and studio backlots, dreamy piers and sodium lamps, starlight and cappuccinos.”43 For Demy, writes Scott Nye, “the city’s intersection between the everyday and the bizarre” assumes greater importance.44 The relationship between residents of Los Angeles and their cars has also changed since 1969. George seems free to drive about the streets of Los Angeles without any difficulties, interacting with both people and the built environment in a natural manner. Mia (Emma Stone) and Seb (Ryan Gosling) first meet on a clogged freeway interchange that magically turns into the happy dance number “Another Day of Sun.” Interaction by car only happens in cases of dire necessity or accident. Mia drives a Toyota Prius, the ultimate in utility that nonetheless gets both towed and misplaced by Mia due to its ubiquity as the vehicle of choice by many ecologically aware Angelenos. Nye concludes that “Chazelle may not capture the specificity of public L.A. arenas simply because, like most residents, he bypasses them more often that he interacts with them.”45 While George waxes eloquent about the beauty of Los Angeles viewed from the hills, the same view also inspires the twilight tap dance of Mia and Seb. But while they are idealistic, and hungry, even desperate for success, Model Shop runs counter to the dominant image of a successful, ambitious, America/Los Angeles/Hollywood where dreams come true if one believes in them hard enough, and is willing to sacrifice relationships. George and Seb altruistically both play crucial roles in getting Lola and Mia to Paris to pursue dreams. Demy and Chazelle take the moviegoer on fabulous, if different, tours of the “City of Stars”: “a lovely and quite delusional place . . . a kind of over-developed suburbia that, particularly, when the lights come on, might make you imagine you are living in a vast urban world that had not yet bloomed in its true existence.”46 Maybe not all that different from the “City of Stars,” full of hope as well as disappointment, that Seb sang about on the Hermosa Beach Pier. Chazelle envisions his own spiritual and poetic side of Los Angeles that Demy previously gave viewers as George briefly looked out upon the city. For George, the inspiration to build something beautiful may have been provoked by the view, but hard circumstances prevent him from achieving any such dreams.

Andrew Slater and Jakob Dylan (son of Bob) state that the inspiration for their documentary Echo in the Canyon came one night when they were hanging out, flipping through television channels. They happened on a movie playing on TCM called Model Shop. As the friends watched Gary Lockwood wander around Hollywood, they were reminded of the music that initially got them interested in the music industry. They decided it would be nice to record some classic music from that era. “Maybe in a sense, we were rejecting the contemporary music business – or the contemporary music business was rejecting us,” Slater said. “We were like, ‘Let’s go back to what we really love about where we live, and the reason we got into music in the first place.’”47 They revisited the old songs, organizing a tribute concert at the Orpheum in 2015. They then decided to make a film about the Laurel Canyon rock music scene in the mid-late ’60s, what Slater calls the “initial age of innocence,” when Roger McGuinn saw the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and picked up a 12-string guitar. In addition to McGuinn, interviews are conducted with Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Jackson Browne, David Crosby, Michelle Phillips, and Lou Adler, among others. Asked why he included scenes from Model Shop since no background information is provided in the documentary about it, Slater simply noted that the movie “looked how the era sounded.”48 The film even features Jakob Dylan cruising the streets of Hollywood in a vintage 1967 Pontiac Firebird. What is strange, however, is that the only credited music in Model Shop comes from Spirit, a California band not featured in the documentary. They produced a soundtrack album, and the members of the band appear in the film when George visits their house/studio. Model Shop has become the go-to film about 1960s Los Angeles because it does not feel like a reenactment as do so many other movies produced in the 1960s and ’70s about the counterculture in Los Angeles.

2019 marked the 50-year celebration of the Woodstock festival; 1969 also happens to be the year that Jakob Dylan was born, Model Shop was released, and the year Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood is set, punctuating the much-remarked loss of innocence that came with the Manson murders. Just as Jacques Demy stated that he wanted to make “Los Angeles, 1968,” so Quentin Tarantino announced that he wanted to make “Hollywood 1969.” Thierry Fremaux, Cannes film festival delegate, described the film as “a love letter to the Hollywood of [Tarantino’s] childhood, a rock music tour of 1969, and an ode to cinema as a whole.”49 To bring back the world of the late 1960s, Tarantino spent weeks filming in Westwood, Burbank, the Fairfax district, and at a rebuilt early Taco Bell in Orange County. Tarantino refurbished Hollywood Boulevard by painting many storefronts, returning them to their former glory.50 Leonardo DiCaprio plays washed-up actor Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt his easygoing stunt double Cliff Both, both attempting to revive their sagging careers in the movie and TV business. Margot Robbie plays Manson murder victim Sharon Tate. For Charles Bramesco, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood takes epochal changeover as its primary focus, clocking the beginning of one era as it kills the one that came before.”51 The film is a cornucopia of pop culture, television, and movie references, especially to Tarantino’s own work, so extensive that entire websites are dedicated to their explication.52

Tarantino makes many references to Model Shop in Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood. Paramount Studios, along its Melrose Avenue side, was briefly dressed as Columbia Studios, and covered in six giant movie posters, one of which featured Model Shop. Debates rage as to which real-life characters Rick and Cliff are based on, but Cliff adrift in his own time does closely resemble Gary Lockwood’s restless, aimless LA flâneur George, whether navigating the streets listening to the car radio or on the sidewalks of Los Angeles. Both inhabit the old straight and new hippie world of the 1960s. George and Cliff encounter female hippies from whom they respectively receive a marijuana joint and an acid-dipped cigarette that they later consume. Quentin Tarantino could not get enough of Cliff Booth driving around Los Angeles. Cliff also just happens to live next to an oil pumper rocker jack, just like George. Tarantino showed Model Shop to movie car coordinator Steven Butcher. Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski drive a classic 1952 MG-TD. Cliff drives a 1964 Karmann Ghia and Rick Dalton a 1966 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Model Shop may have influenced the fashion of Margot Robbie’s take on Sharon Tate. Both films feature houses and streets in the Hollywood Hills. Tarantino himself name-dropped Model Shop several times before the movie’s release as just one of the many inspirations for his film.53 What makes the film so important to his project is its perceived authenticity of the period as he remembers it and the way the camera shot George from the hood of the MG-TD as he was driving around Los Angeles:

We can get actual photos of what Sunset Blvd. looked like in 1969 or what Riverside Drive looked like, or Magnolia. We can do that. And we did it. But the jumping-off point was going to be my memory – as a six-year-old in the passenger seat of my stepfather’s Karmann Ghia. And even that shot, that kind of looks up at Cliff as he drives by the Earl Schieb [car paint and body shop] and all those signs, that’s pretty much my perspective, being a little kid.54

Tarantino continues, “I’m looking out the window and see Los Angeles out in front of me and I’m more selective about what I’m looking at as opposed to Demy in Model Shop. . . . So I’m not seeing the Geritol billboard, but the Hollywood Wax Museum and the Clark Gable picture. And so, in doing a memory piece, I create that landscape.”55 Both Model Shop and Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood aim for authenticity, while not being documentaries. Both are very personal stories. Both tap into the past reality of their director’s previous films. Tarantino in his film views the past through a nostalgia-tinged lens of youthful memory and feelings created by the movies and the city streets, billboards, signs, and buildings of Los Angeles in the 1960s. With the bloody, historically misdirected conclusion involving the Manson family in Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood, Tarantino reveals again the city’s “continually fascinating dark charms as both the city of angels and place of apocalyptic despair.”56

For a long time, Jacques Demy’s Model Shop passed under the radar of most critics, reviewers, and movie fans. But now with the release of La La Land, Echo in the Canyon, and Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood, which were so inspired by Model Shop, Demy’s work can truly be called “one of the great movies about L.A.”57 It now plays frequently at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, plays regularly on TCM, and is readily available on YouTube. Demy’s focus rests with the cultural, geographic, geometric, and architectural diversity of the city character Los Angeles. All of the things so associated with the American counterculture of the late 1960s and early ’70s – drugs, music, long hair, Vietnam, the draft, underground newspapers, revolutionary rhetoric, fashion, sex, anomie, “hippies,” existential angst, disillusionment with the “establishment,” and crushed idealism – are there, but never treated as wild curiosities to be feared or forgiven as in so many youth movies of the period that have not aged well, such as Riot on the Sunset Strip (1967) or Roger Corman’s The Trip (1967). It does not look or feel like a reenactment. “‘Hollywood’ . . . is purely imaginary,” writes Paul Ramaeker, “by contrast to the L.A. that Demy gives us, made up of people who happen to be in the place, simply ‘doing their thing.’”58 John S. Meyer in The Art of the Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture writes about historians:

We arrange facts and interpretations into stories that have the feeling of objectivity, of finitude, of having happened. We will things and events and people into a prior time, even if this “past” is imperfect, incomplete, brushing up against the present moment. We transform a past within the reach of many people’s memory into “proper” history. As we historicize, we draw a strict line between “now” and “then.” We suppress our subjectivities – narratives of things we may have seen or heard about. Memories of events we watched on television without understanding what they were, memories that exist as a kind of sentiment in the pit of our awareness. The account is confidently historical, compellingly “objective.” All is past.59

Model Shop is one of the crucial points of departure for the films La La Land, Echo in the Canyon, and particularly Tarantino’s counter history Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood (2019), in the exploration of the above ambiguities and subjectivities of memory, history, and nostalgia in Los Angeles and the 1960s. Rather than inquire “What happened?” Meyer contends that such artists and filmmakers “dwell stubbornly in the interstices of history and memory, the murky ‘no man’s land’ [of] . . . recentness.”60 Why does this era and place affect us? What does this place and time mean to us now? Only by asking such questions can we begin “to perceive the historical nature of subjectivity itself,”61 which in turn will lead to an understanding of our own place in time, always conscious that remembered time will never replicate the past.

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Images are screenshots from the film.