Monday, November 2, 2009

Nick Pierotti's Facebook Comment

Sharon put an announcement for our NO NO BOY reading Saturday on her Facebook page, and a friend of hers posted the comment below.  It's pretty amazing and I figured I should share it here, in case it gives anyone any ideas for a possible screenplay: 

Nicholas Pierotti

This would make a great movie.


And also imagine what Los Angeles would be like today, if the United States had not instituted their intolerable internment policy.

Much of what is now Santa Monica and West L.A. and a lot of the San Fernando Valley were Japanese truck farms prior to the internment.

The internment was an enormous land-grab scheme on the level of "Chinatown" (where's Robert Towne when we really need him?).

And who profited? American superpatriot superheroes like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, who bought up all that San Fernando Valley land, and land in West L.A. and in Santa Monica (Chandler was right in calling "Bay City" the crookedest town in L.A.).

Hope and Crosby were movie stars, sure (if you like their "Road-movie" dreck), but their real money was in property. Lovable Bob Hope alone owned about 8,500 acres in California, most of it in the San Fernando Valley, bought when it was fruit orchards and vacant lots, after that land's real tenants had been rounded up and interred. By his own estimate, he was one of the largest individual property owners, if not the largest, in the Golden State.

Actually, if you read the original short stories that Raymond Chandler built his novels out of, you will find Marlowe's precursor driving to the coast through Santa Monica (Bay City in the stories), through miles of Japanese truck farms.
Isn't it time for full restitution and accountability? How about the confiscation of the Hope and Crosby estates, and the redistribution of that wealth among the descendants of the internment?

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