“Something to wrap the herring in” by Esther McCoy appeared in the February 1986 issue of Progressive Architecture. The magazine published Roger Corman’s response in August of that year.
The war between taste and money is eternal, perhaps, but there is something about the loud vulgarities of the movie business and the radical subtleties of the best California architecture that have long been at odds besides. Well before Kanye West purchased and effectively destroyed his Tadao Ando house in Malibu—before he turned a $57.3 million investment into a $36 million loss, with the new owners pledging to spend $5 million just to restore the design to what it was—there were wealthy Angelenos ready to run roughshod over the integrity of their domiciles, or at least to remake them in their own brassy likenesses. Indeed, homeownership in Hollywood is often an extension of self-image, an arena that, even as one’s physique or bank balance or social status may fluctuate, remains a locus of control. Think of Robert Evans’s Woodland, a house to which the legendary mogul, producer of Chinatown (1974), The Godfather (1972), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), was so devoted he once proclaimed it—the house!—“my second act in life.”
This tendency to treat a house less as a creation worthy of respect and more like a cross between a motion picture production and a mirror doesn’t always endear such moguls to their architects (nor to their neighbors, nor anyone else, really), but it does make for some tasty battles, be they lawsuits or other forms of public dispute. Consider the case of Roger Corman, the filmmaker and grandee of American International Pictures, whose 1984 purchase of a J. R. Davidson home at 2501 La Mesa Drive in Santa Monica attracted the attention of the legendary critic Esther McCoy. McCoy, an admirer (and, reportedly, romantic partner) of Davidson’s, believed this home, originally designed in 1937 for the songwriter and film composer Herbert Stothart, to be the architect’s “finest house in the International Style” and “one of the last intact examples of the Style in the area.” She did not like Corman’s remodel, executed by architect Craig Hodgetts (a former set decorator on a handful of Corman’s movies), one bit and decided to register her displeasure in print. As she put it, “A growing practice among film people is to buy a notable house half a century old, gut it, leave two walls standing, and behind them construct what has come to be known as a Think Bigger.”
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Whether what Hodgetts and Corman constructed here amounted to any kind of “Think Bigger” (a term of art with which I’m unfamiliar, but which I assume means vulgar or grandiose enlargement of some kind) seems disputable. As Hodgetts told me when we spoke on the phone recently, the house when he and Corman first encountered it was “a severe stucco box with punched windows, quite large but cut up into small rooms. It was very Germanic, with no distinct architectural appeal other than a kind of minimalist Bauhaus feel.” Their redesign may have been insensitive (“We took the roof off. We rearranged all the interior partitions. It was almost a rebuild from the ground up”), but it was hardly extreme.
McCoy frames her argument throughout in terms that pits the street’s “homeowners” against its “movie money” arrivistes (who are themselves homeowners, no?), suggesting this former category of denizens might possess a greater and subtler sophistication, a sensibility that, unlike those of Corman and the other showbiz vulgarians, “has little to do with fashion.”
Perhaps McCoy’s objection was more ideological in nature. The critic’s interest in modern architecture had grown out of a commitment to leftist politics: After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1926, she’d gone to work as a researcher for the socialist writer Theodore Dreiser and covered slums and housing for such periodicals as Upton Sinclair’s EPIC News. (The acronym stood for End Poverty in California.) The costly renovations of film industry nabobs may have vexed her to begin with, and Corman was not just another Hollywood bigwig. He had a reputation as a schlockmeister extraordinaire. The so-called “Pope of Pop Cinema,” whose hundreds of films skewed heavily toward low-budget horror, biker pictures, cheapo sci-fi, and just about every other form of exploitation flick you can imagine, Corman practically invented the modern B movie. In her critique, which she wrote for Progressive Architecture in February 1986, McCoy, a person of some elevated sensibility (she’d published fiction in The New Yorker and may not have lined up on opening weekend to catch Attack of the Giant Leeches [1959] or Monster from the Ocean Floor [1954]) borrows a screenwriter’s idiom to assert that, owing to the gaudy renovations assayed by its multiple Hollywood residents, La Mesa Drive had become “something to wrap the herring in,” which is to say: garbage.
Stothart House. Min Heo
McCoy’s piece takes shots at MGM Studios, Mel Brooks, and the director Herbert Ross—La Mesa property owners all—but reserves the bulk of her disgust for Corman. His and Hodgetts’s remodeling job involved not just the demolition of original cabinets and walls but a vast expansion of the living room (its height was doubled), the destruction of what had once been a soundproof music studio on the second story to create an open balcony, the painting of an “elegant stainless steel stair rail” pink, and (horror of horrors) the installation of yellow carpets and sofas. The stark sparseness of Davidson’s original design was gone, but so too, in McCoy’s view, were its refined and elegant sensibilities, its subtle orchestrations of space. Davidson’s cascading glass walls and partitions may have carved that space up in a way that seemed severe to Corman and Hodgetts, but—as McCoy saw it—they allowed the individual rooms a sense of intercommunication.
Corman shot back immediately, alleging that “almost every statement of fact [McCoy] makes is wrong.” In his letter, published by the magazine in August, the filmmaker asserts that the yellow carpets and sofas don’t exist—that the colors are gray and white, respectively—that the living room windows face west and not north, as McCoy claims, and makes a slew of additional counterclaims, my favorite among them being that, contra McCoy’s piece, an allegedly garish exterior wall of Mel Brooks’s home is not orange: “Mel’s wall is totally white. There isn’t a speck of orange on it.” Corman defends the replacement of the living room’s floor-to-ceiling glass walls by insisting that their (ahem) west-facing placement had rendered his living room too hot and glare-filled for much of the day. “Evidently Davidson, born and educated in Germany, did not understand the intensity of the Southern California sun,” Corman writes. “Hodgetts has corrected this error beautifully.”
The Pope of Pop Cinema counters, in other words, by conjuring another ancient conflict, that between the Old World and the New. We find traces of this conflict in McCoy’s piece as well. She quotes Hodgetts, who says that “Roger thought the style was dated and old fashioned” and claims the renovation made the home genuinely livable. McCoy, born in Arkansas (though she lived in Santa Monica from 1938 until her death in 1989, making her and Corman more or less neighbors at the time her piece was written), was just as American as Corman and Hodgetts, but her commitment to modernism, and her longtime involvement with Italian architecture—she curated exhibitions, published extensively in Italian journals, and was awarded the Star of Order of Solidarity by the Republic of Italy in 1960—perhaps rendered her sympathies more European. The aspects Corman found “dated” were precisely those McCoy would’ve hoped to preserve. Reading her drafts of her essay one finds digs at Corman noting that the director “turned out nine films in one year, some completed in two or three days,” and this is “the second house [Corman and Hodgetts] have gutted, the first a hit-and-run” in West LA. The dice in her review may have been loaded from the beginning: What could someone whose “gutting” of houses is compared to automotive violence—who makes his films in two days—possibly understand about architecture or about the “sense of repose” offered by Davidson’s original? But in a sense, McCoy gives the game away early—before she even gets to her complaints about the Corman residence or about those of Corman’s peers (Brooks, et al.)—when she claims that Hollywood first “invaded” La Mesa in 1935. An invasion may not be an infestation, quite—particularly not when she is referring to the very Davidson house she admires—but McCoy frames her argument throughout in terms that pits the street’s “homeowners” against its “movie money” arrivistes (who are themselves homeowners, no?), suggesting this former category of denizens might possess a greater and subtler sophistication, a sensibility that, unlike those of Corman and the other showbiz vulgarians, “has little to do with fashion.”
McCoy borrows a screenwriter’s idiom to assert that, owing to the gaudy renovations assayed by its multiple Hollywood residents, La Mesa Drive had become “something to wrap the herring in,” which is to say: garbage.
Perhaps I am too deformed by my own counterprejudices, being a child of Hollywood invaders myself (I grew up not on La Mesa but two blocks over on Georgina, and while I cannot recollect the color of Mel Brooks’s wall, I can confirm that the street that McCoy deems “Santa Monica’s most prestigious” was a nice place to enjoy some casual skateboarding and dope smoking), but my heart wants to award victory to Corman in this little contretemps. After all, the mogul’s ostensible vulgarity was more than offset by his contributions to the seventh art—his early mentorship of such figures as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Peter Bogdanovich; his American distribution of films by Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, and Akira Kurosawa—and the actual facts of the matter are by now irretrievable. (Corman passed away in the home last year at the age ninety-eight; Hodgetts was able to locate some faded forty-year-old scans, images that appear to show a few glimpses of yellow and pink, but the images are deteriorated enough to remain inconclusive and sadly unfit for print.) I continue to admire the exactitude of McCoy’s response to Corman’s letter. (She reports that the yellow carpet and sofas were there when she visited after the Cormans moved in—a visit that appears to have taken place without invitation, since Corman claims McCoy had never been there—and that she has determined that “the living room glass wall … faces twelve degrees west of due north.”) But in the end I rebut her with the words of the celebrated remodeler (and, incidentally, producer) Robert Evans: “There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.”