“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 lege…