Fair point regarding the mighty past achievements of our mutually adopted home state of California — but does the culture that produced Casablanca exist anymore here? As we saw with Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s The Good German in 2006, Modern Hollywood still has the craftsmen to replicate that seminal 1943 film’s outward aesthetics, but certainly not its soul.
And ditto the Beach Boys. Sonically, a well-equipped L.A. recording studio can generate anything, but who’s the modern California equivalent to Brian Wilson — at least before he traded in the Little Deuce Coupe for massive quantities of LSD?
The one saving grace is the computer industry, which is lowering both the cost of entry and reducing the geographic element to those who wish to compete in these arenas. But then, Hollywood and Silicon Valley have long had a sort of quiet civil war going on beneath the surface.
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