G Ray Hawkins

While the day-to-day reality of movie sets is that they tend to be the most boring places on earth, they also exist, as does film itself, on the level of myth and mystery. These are, after all, the places where dreams are manufactured, and getting a glimpse of life on the set is like having a peek behind the scenes of the oracle at Delphi. Actors simultaneously in and out of character, directors in the grip of the muse, surreal juxtapositions of fantasy and reality, they all happen here.

The horde of movie-goers flooding theaters to see "Terminator 2" might experience a rude awakening if they checked out the current exhibition at the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery in Santa Monica. On view is "Arnold Schwarzenegger," a visual essay on America's No. 1 hero by British photographer and filmmaker George Butler.

Photographer Max Yavno, whose black-and-white pictures captured Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1940s as no one else's did, has died of pneumonia and complications arising from a fall in a shower while in Italy last year. He was 73. Yavno, who died Thursday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, initially could not earn a living photographing urban life, despite the attention his work drew.

A child sits in a car, head tipped back to take in a familiar bit of urban symmetry--the echoing facade of an apartment complex. Rectangular entryways open onto small green patches of lawn and walkways. Shot from the back seat of a car, the photo of this scene gives a kid's-eye view, as closely observed as a familiar face.