Christina Hornisher's Warning to Women: L.A. as Civilizational Black Hole in Hollywood 90028

 

Finished in 1971 but not exhibited theatrically until 1974, writer-producer-director Christina Hornisher’s sole feature film, the remarkable Hollywood 90028, mostly languished in obscurity in the decades since its release until being rediscovered and reassessed in recent years. Despite being reissued under the lurid title Twisted Throats and as The Hollywood Hillside Strangler to exploit the notoriety of the 1977-1978 “Hillside Strangler” murders, Hollywood 90028 is not a horror film so much as a somber character study that happens to be about a serial killer. The film captures the downbeat post-Manson moment when the increasing seediness of the entertainment capital’s freewheeling sixties with its adult bookstores, strip clubs, and peep shows revealed a darker, more dangerous side. In addition, the grim film arguably carries an anti-Semitic undercurrent.

Christina Hornisher

Hollywood 90028 follows the parallel trajectories and intertwined doomed lives of two midwestern transplants to Los Angeles. Mark (Christopher Augustine) is a seemingly mild-mannered cameraman who shoots pornographic loops and Michelle (Jeannette Dilger) is a model and adult performer. The two come from similar backgrounds, Mark having been born in a small Indiana town while Michelle hails from flyover obscurity in Nebraska, both having been drawn to California by the seductive allure of Hollywood. The two are now employed by Jobal (Dick Glass), a grotesquely obese smut producer whose name might just as well be “jew-ball”. Sporting a ridiculous afro and munching on doughnuts during the making of one of his films, Jobal is depicted contentedly observing and encouraging the X-rated action from his perch on a balcony over one of his sets, his altitude suggesting the economic stratification that places him in a commanding position above the gentiles he employs.

Her initiation into the L.A. demimonde of increasingly misogynistic pornographic productions has brought Michelle into the orbit of Mark, whom no one suspects of being a serial strangler. Coming across as a charmer, Mark takes Michelle on an impromptu tour to see one of his favorite neighborhoods in the city, with its Victorian homes that will soon be demolished to make way for expensive modern apartments. L.A. appears here as a profit-driven nihilist Mecca, indifferent to its own disappearing landmarks and history, a civilizational black hole that sucks the disposable human resources it needs from across the country and into the moral darkness of its capitalist imperatives. Strolling with Mark through the recently developed Century City, Michelle delivers the autobiographical monologue that furnishes one of Hollywood 90028’s defining moments:

The story is simple. Born in a little town in a Midwest state where everybody knows everybody and there’s nothing to do, you spend your time going to movies, watching TV, and dreaming of the city you keep hearing about. You save some money, just a little, but it’s enough for a chance and you can’t let it go. So you say goodbye to everybody, and it’s even sort of sad to leave a little town so early in the morning. But the city’s fantastic, like you knew it would be. It’s big, it’s powerful, it’s exciting. Until you get used to it. You get a job at the phone company, but the pay’s not much and money starts to be a problem because the rent is high, food is expensive, and you need a car, so you look for another job, but you can’t find anything you’re qualified for. Until you see ads for models, telling you about easy work and lots of money. You go to find out. Your body’s good enough and they have work for you. You get a few legitimate jobs, the pay is good, just like they said, so you drop the phone company. Poor phone company. Then you’re asked to be in a porno film. You say no and they say okay, it’s fine. But you get less jobs. Then none at all. You run out of money. It’s your fault, they say. The girls who do it work all the time. And the rent is due. Oh, they make it easy for you. They even give you a wig, so that no one will ever recognize you, honey. First you’re alone in front of the camera, almost like you were before, but this time you have to caress yourself. Then a month later you have to do it with another girl. Then it’s with a boy, and then it’s in groups. And the circle is completed. And you’ll never again go back to that little town of your childhood. And you have no friends, no values, and you’re alone with that obscene image of yourself on the screen.

Interestingly, the monologue is intercut with flashes of signs advertising “LOAN”, “PAWN”, and “Master Charge”, conveying the interconnectedness of pornography and the power of mass media with the similarly predatory and Jewish-dominated pawnbroker and usury industries.

Had the psychotic Mark remained in his Indiana hometown, he might never have had the opportunity to indulge in his murderous impulses. The sprawling bustle and seedy anonymity of the streets of L.A., however, littered with lost women and always open for business, provides him with the ideal hunting ground for the venting of his frustrations. The first of his victims (Dianna Huntress), with her headband, incense, Paul McCartney and Janis Joplin records, and silly occult paraphernalia, appears as a naïve leftover of the Summer of Love, unmoored from any culture other than that contained in the products marketed by the entertainment industry and therefore easy prey for a photographer who promises to make her famous. The city is an unending supply of such people, and as the film ends on a helicopter shot that recedes from the final horror that transpires in Griffith Park at the famous Hollywood sign and broadens to take in the expanse of the city, the viewer is left with the impression that Mark is probably only one of many maniacs at work in the metropolis, the past and potential future victims as plentiful as grains of sand on a beach. Jobal, meanwhile, remains unscathed, and will presumably have little difficulty locating a new lowlife to shoot his loops and endless midwestern ingenues who need to pay their rent.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.