'Ugly' trend hitting Hollywood where it lives

Last July, the television series “Ugly Betty” moved from Los Angeles, where it has been filmed for two years, to New York, on account of a recently tripled tax incentive. Given that the series, whose third season premieres tonight, is now being shot in the city where it is supposed to take place, you can't exactly call it a runaway production -- more like a "run-to production," perhaps. Still, it feels like a loss for the home team and an injury to local pride, not to say local pocketbooks.

As an L.A. native -- born near the corner of Vermont and Sunset, blocks from where D.W. Griffith raised the Great Wall of Babylon for “Intolerance”(film) -- I was conscious from an early age of living in the place where moving pictures are made. The house I grew up in was built on the site of the former RKO Ranch, where Frank Capra earlier built Bedford Falls for "It's a Wonderful Life." I toured Universal Studios for childhood birthdays, before it had turned completely into a theme park, drawn not so much by the glitter and glamour of it all as by the ordinary magic of the false fronts. The studio system may have been dead, but the studios were still there, manned behind their fortress walls by armies of artists and artisans whose life's work it was to re-create the entire world, and all its history, in and around Hollywood, Calif.

This is what we had instead of the things the East called culture.

Still, while the "Betty" move seems like poaching, it may, from the opposite coast, also be seen as payback: New York was home to the movie business before it headed out to Hollywood in the 1910s and '20s; television production was also centered there before its own migration west, leaving behind only soap operas, talk shows, news and Ed Sullivan. For decades the New York seen on screen, and therefore the New York most people knew, was something made in Southern California, with an occasional authentic location insert or rear-screen projection to sell the illusion. The same could have been said of nearly everywhere else the movies showed. Even when film crews began to travel extensively, a door in El Paso or San Francisco would emerge into a room built on a stage in Culver or Studio or Universal City.

That is less and less the case.