The North Hollywood Shootout Eat Out

At 9:17 AM, Larry Phillips, Jr. and Emil Mătăsăreanu began an armed confrontation with the Los Angeles police that caught the nation’s attention and eventually became the inspiration for the infamous if not overly stylized shootout scene in the film Heat. As one of the most televised botched and bloody escapes in history, it reminds us that just below our evolved ‘NPR sensibilities’ is a self-destructive fascination with spectacle, and like so much of Los Angeles lore, parts of our sprawling city only get attention when they bleed. For the North Hollywood Shootout Eat Out, Los Angeles Eats Itself investigates the idea of ‘The Valley,’ the massive suburban basins surrounding Los Angeles proper, as a kind of ‘hinterland;’ a surrounding area that is both in service to a sprawling metropolis but equally lying beyond what is visible or known to Angelenos. And unlike Los Angeles, known for its insatiable appetite for visibility and attention, our hinterland has had a history of being defined more by what it hid than what it revealed when it was once the not so secret porn capital of the world.

For the North Hollywood Shootout Eat Out we take a deep-throated dive into the not so secret industries that have often gone overlooked for more so called “noble” pursuits, and how ‘eating out’ in the valley, can be pornographic provision just as it can be an empowering provision of pornography.