From bestselling author Gary Krist, the story of the metropolis that never should have been and the visionaries who dreamed it into reality Little more than a century ago, the southern coast of California—bone-dry, harbor-less, isolated by deserts and mountain ranges—seemed destined to remain scrappy farmland. Then, as if overnight, one of the world’s iconic cities emerged. At the heart of Los … the heart of Los Angeles’ meteoric rise were three flawed visionaries: William Mulholland, an immigrant ditch-digger turned self-taught engineer, designed the massive aqueduct that would make urban life here possible. D.W. Griffith, who transformed the motion picture from a vaudeville-house novelty into a cornerstone of American culture, gave L.A. its signature industry. And Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist who founded a religion, cemented the city’s identity as a center for spiritual exploration.
All were masters of their craft, but also illusionists, of a kind. The images they conjured up—of a blossoming city in the desert, of a factory of celluloid dreamworks, of a community of seekers finding personal salvation under the California sun—were like mirages liable to evaporate on closer inspection. All three would pay a steep price to realize these dreams, in a crescendo of hubris, scandal, and catastrophic failure of design that threatened to topple each of their personal empires. Yet when the dust settled, the mirage that was LA remained.
Spanning the years from 1900 to 1930, The Mirage Factory is the enthralling tale of an improbable city and the people who willed it into existence by pushing the limits of human engineering and imagination.
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Having lived in Los Angeles I enjoyed learning about some of its history and the people who contributed to its unique character. Although this is non-fiction, it reads like a novel except of course the exceptionally long list of references.
Great, well researched, easy to read history of Los Angeles. Really well done.
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 for grand visions, and 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.
A title recommended by John Mulaney in Entertainment Weekly, The Mirage Factory is a fascinating history of the early growth of L.A. that focuses on how a water engineer, a silent movie director, and the founder of the first megachurch helped turn a desert town into the second largest city in America.
Wonderful! I love LA!
I don’t usually read non-fiction, but I flew through this book.
Did not finish the book, got half way thru and it was a struggle. Did not hold my interest.
Interesting subject.
I knew relatively little about Los Angeles’ early years before reading the book. The Mirage Factory is a nonfiction book that reads like a novel.
Great history of early Los Angeles told through the lives of three key figures.