The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles

Here’s an ambitious—maybe even overly ambitious book. In The Mirage Factory author Gary Christ sets out to tell not one, not two, but three stories of famous personages who made LA what it was. First there’s William Mulholland, the self-taught structural engineer who conceived the dam that would give LA its water, and also one of its most calamitous disasters. Then there’s D.W. Griffith, inarguable father of the American film industry, whose ambition and borderline madness helped him almost singlehandedly define film grammar and merge art and commerce. Lastly there’s Aimee McPherson, the girl from the Canadian countryside whose ability to come first in scripture-quoting contests eventually led her to become one of the most famous female preachers in history.Mr. Christ does a good enough job of considering each of these tales in isolation, but he succeeds less in interweaving the tales, or showing how they’re all chimerical. D.W. Griffith was obviously a master of illusion, smoke and mirrors and literal stagecraft, but William Mulholland? The man worked in concrete and did it effectively for decades before one of his dams gave way, and even then it was arguably due to deliberate sabotage. And while America has become increasingly hostile to certain forms of organized religion over the decades, one would be hard-pressed to call Aimee McPherson a storefront preacher or mountebank. Even when considering her more controversial actions and personality quirks the author acknowledges that her Angelus Temple literally kept people alive during the Great Depression.And while some parts of each story work when considered in isolation, the MacPherson and Mulholland strands show quite a bit of fraying before the final page. Mulholland’s rise is compelling, especially reading about his early years as a ditchdigger. It takes a special kind of stick-to-itiveness (h/t Principal Skinner) to labor all day in the hot sun and study engineering tomes all night. But parts of his struggle to bring water to L.A. read like the minutes from an old C-Span episode, dry and filled with torturous minutiae. It doesn’t help that Christ makes it clear from the outset that the only dialogue included in the book will be that which can be verified. In a way, The Mirage Factory is kind of an object lesson in why creative nonfiction exists, and why liberties should sometimes be taken, however small.The D.W. Griffith tale works the best, arguably because it’s the one that’s most grounded in LA’s most compelling and magical institution, the film industry. The author is on solid ground when detailing Griffith’s attempts to expand the language of film, first by lengthening their runtimes, then fashioning himself into the seminal auteur director. One could argue that Griffith more than anyone else showed that wresting control from producers and seeking independent financing results in a more cohesive, compelling work.Things get shaky again, though, when Christ gets to McPherson’s saga. He does a good job of setting up her transition from barnstormer and tent revivalist to megachurch minister. But then the story lurches from being about the Sister’s nigh-unimpeachable faith and campaign of good works to being about her alleged infidelity, till-dipping, and a kidnapping plot. It’s all compelling, dramatic stuff, or at least it would be, but Christ inexplicably chooses to only dwell on it for a few pages.And still the ultimate impression I have of the book is mixed rather than negative, if only because Christ shows great ambition and a nice depth of knowledge. He just lacks passion, a discernible style, and the kind of cohesive vision he pretends to.With photos, mostly presented at the beginning of each chapter.

There’s an art to good nonfiction—the selection of subjects, the arrangement of the story, the decision to present information in the right sequence—and The Mirage Factory is high art indeed. Krist has picked three truly intriguing subjects and placed them in close proximity to one another to tell a tale about how a once-minor American town became one of the world’s leading cities. The result is absolutely engrossing, one of the best works of nonfiction I’ve read in the last year.William Mulholland, D.W. Griffith, and Aimee Semple McPherson lived three very different lives, but their passions for water, for moviemaking, and for religion informed their lives, and shaped the city they came to call home. None of them were from LA, but somehow each were drawn to this empty space, this blank canvas in the desert; each filled part of it, so that it might summon many more.Mulholland’s tale is well known: the self-taught Irish-born civil engineer who enabled Los Angeles’ population growth by bringing water from the Owens River over two hundred miles to the city via a massive aqueduct. Krist tells his story compellingly—the vision of an outsized and improbable accomplishment, and its realization through a mixture of good old fashioned hard work and underhanded legal maneuverings against the Owens Valley residents. (Some of whom responded by dynamiting sections of the aqueduct in the years after its completion.) And yet his story ended in tragedy—the once-proud man finally a pariah in the city he helped build.While D.W. Griffith is certainly every bit as famous, he’s remembered primarily for his racist epic The Birth of a Nation, the movie whose crude caricatures of African Americans (and willingness to literally whitewash the despicable actions of European Americans) led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. And while this movie transformed America—or perhaps allowed its racism to be more openly expressed—it’s important to realize that it transformed movies themselves as well. Its stunning financial success, seemingly against the odds, meant that a medium of fifteen-minute shorts became one of two- and three-hour stories; it also gave D.W. Griffith carte blanche to attempt even bigger and grandiose epics, trying to create and then fill canvasses the size of his ego. That he failed on those bigger projects is perhaps less important than the fact that he established an archetype for directors working in the most collaborative artistic medium: the big-budget opulence of the money-mad visionary. Long before Francis Ford Coppola grappled with drugs and madness and epic ambition on the set of Apocalypse Now, there was Griffith battling similar demons while shooting Intolerance.Aimee Semple McPherson (the subject I knew least about) also enjoyed and suffered grand visions, along with the added notion that hers were divinely inspired. Because I’d known the least about her, her story offered the most surprises, and I’m reluctant to spoil them in a review, for they made for some of the most gripping reading I’ve had in some time. Suffice it to say that her story, too, became a template for others: the preacher as flimflam artist.The notion of Los Angeles as a somewhat fake place is certainly not new; there’s a reason Hollywood’s called Tinseltown. Still somehow Krist captures the essence of the place in his own artistic way and gives it his own subtle spin, based on these three people who so intriguingly combined success and failure. A different set of subjects might have produced a different story with different lessons; while there was no other Mulholland in LA’s history, one could have certainly told the story of the city through, say, Cecil B. DeMille and Robert Schuller. But that would have been less exciting…and what’s more appropriate for the home of the movie industry than a good story?In short, it’s possible to imagine a different book about early LA, but it’s hard to imagine a better one. As the title suggests, the city is a mirage factory. And in the end Krist has us looking not just at the mirage part, but the factory part—the fact that the oasis materialized, that these people (and so many who followed them) built a city and an industry every bit as substantial as their visions.

This book covers three subjects affecting the early development of Los Angeles, California:[1] Growing the water supply to support the growing population of a city essentially located in a desert[2] Developing the movie industry[3] Bringing spirituality to LAFor each of these three subjects, the author anchors the coverage via one key individual while still covering the entire subject to some depth. I noticed that each of these key individuals also appeared to have had lives of great personal drama.Without LA’s systems of dams and aqueducts, the city couldn’t have grown much larger than the size of Des Moines, Iowa. So LA basically owes its existence to William Mulholland. The book was certainly correct in including the topic of water – and I though the coverage of this subject was both interesting and dramatic.The movies industry is almost the very definition of LA (and especially of Hollywood). So the book’s covering of the development of movie making was also an expected topic as well as an interesting one. The early history of the movies (and so the history in this book, which covers the time period roughly from about 1905 -1930) is mostly a history of the silent film era as the Talkies came into being in the latter half of the 1920’s.I thought the history of spirituality in LA was an odd choice. Perhaps the author chose that subject because Aimee Semple McPherson (whom the book focuses on) led such a dramatic and colorful life. But when I think of phrases that define LA, “a hub of religious spiritually” isn’t one of them. (Personal note: Although I live in Iowa, I lived in Southern California for 10 years.)Bottom line: Two subjects of interest. Unfortunately, the book covered three subjects.

I have lived in Los Angles for 20 years and this book drew me in