Life in California is full of vexing questions. Is it inappropriate to order “animal style” in front of the kids? Fireworks or gunshots? Are there suddenly too many bagel places?
Alta Journal has enlisted two experts to answer all of your questions: Stacey Grenrock Woods and Gustavo Arellano, both of whom bring decades of hard-won knowledge and laser-sharp insights into the Golden State.
What is the best movie about life in California? This can be from any era or in any genre.
—The Moviegoer
Stacey: A movie that’s merely about life in California would just be two hours of people asking each other why it’s so humid now and complaining about how unevenly their Trader Joe’s avocados ripen. I’d still watch it, of course, but, theoretically, movies are about more than that. What I think you want are some movies (plural—one’s not possible) that exude (for me, anyway) a feeling of life in California. I hope you like Goldie Hawn.
Though not from our shores, sunny Goldie was able to tap into a vein of California gold, movie-wise. In Foul Play and Seems Like Old Times, she and Chevy Chase packed more statewide sensation into two movies in two years than any two East Coasters ever could. Watch Foul Play enough and you’ll have been to 1970s San Francisco. It, along with Play Misty for Me, The Long Goodbye, and Shampoo (Goldie again), is a classic Ferns in Macramé movie—a genre I just made up but I think you’ll agree is spot-on. (Seems Like Old Times, by comparison, is more of a Copper Pots on the Wall movie.) Goldie’s California essence is further distilled in 1982’s Best Friends, an excellent Glass Brick and Mauve Couch movie (Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Short Cuts are two more examples of this genre), in which Goldie and Burt Reynolds play screenwriting lovers who argue a lot about their script, she while wearing a Camp Beverly Hills T-shirt. I don’t think you can get more California than that.
Blake Edwards and Albert Brooks are two directors who deserve special mention for their contributions to the cinema of California Vibe. The first 20 or so minutes of 10, when Dudley Moore’s unfulfilled composer character drives his cream-colored Rolls (license plate “ASCAP”) to and from his perfect hillside architectural gem, do for Los Angeles nearly what all of Manhattan does for New York, and S.O.B. is as perfect a Feeling Suicidal During an Orgy in Malibu film (we’ve all been there) as there’s ever been. Almost every Albert Brooks movie—from 1981’s Modern Romance (a triumph of Silver Porsche and Brown Corduroy filmmaking) through 1999’s The Muse, whose Four Seasons Waldorf salad one can almost taste—is a study in Californiambience.
I’m not mentioning Chinatown, both because it’s too obvious and because the people for whom California feels like Chinatown are long gone, but I’d never forgive myself if I left out Fast Times at Ridgemont High, an excellent Bagel in Your Waistband movie, or Boogie Nights, which looks just like my childhood in the San Fernando Valley, if you take out the porn. Three sides of the turn of the century are on display in the following list: the Designer Water ’90s of L.A. Story and The Player; the What L.A. Actually Felt Like If You Were into Some Bad Stuff ’90s of Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown; and the What L.A. Actually Felt Like If You Were into Some Really Bad Stuff 2000s of David Ayer’s Harsh Times. But the big one, the grandaddy of California Feeling movies (OK, I guess there is one), is Americathon. Predating Idiocracy, it’s 1979’s vision of 1998 Southern California, where President Chet Roosevelt (John Ritter) hatches a plan from the Western White House (a condo in Marina del Rey) with a telethon hosted by Harvey Korman. I know this all probably raises more questions than it answers, but forget it, Moviegoer, it’s Americathon.
Gustavo: Yay, my annual chance to dust off the film studies degree I earned at Chapman University five million years ago! The easy—and probably right—answer, of course, is Chinatown, because it captures the deep, decrepit heart of Los Angeles like few other pictures before and since. A completely left-field answer would be The Princess Diaries, which shows a San Francisco of whimsy and possibility that Fox News tells me doesn’t exist anymore. It also stars Anne Hathaway, one of only three celebrity-actress crushes I’ve ever had (the other two? Ann Curry and Annie Potts in her Designing Women days. No Anas, alas, though Ann-Margret is awesome).
But for my California flick, I’m going with Born in East L.A., the 1987 comedy that remains the only narrative film Cheech Marin ever directed. It has a bunch of the Golden State’s key features: slapstick comedy, pathos, Latinos (and not just Mexicans), racist white people, Asians, illegal immigration, the Dodgers, “La Bamba,” Aztec dancers, and Tijuana. All done in 85 minutes! Even Kevin Starr couldn’t have summed up California better.
Why are surfers so unwelcoming of newbies and visitors? I can’t think of another activity where the biggest bar to entry is lack of acceptance.
—Yokels Only
Stacey: That’s not fair, Yokels. Surfers are unwelcoming to everyone.
“Surfers are very stupid people,” a lifelong surfer I know told me. They used to be stupid, mellow people, but in recent years, he explained, surfing has attracted “more jock-y, muscular, aggressive types” who tend to be “small-minded, bigoted, not kind to women or weaker people, and territorial.” And he told me why: “Because they suck.”
But it’s also because of waves. Though they might look endless, crashing for poets and writers of inspirational calendars, surfers see waves as precious and limited. They don’t want to give them up to people they feel will squander them. That’s why if you attempt to join the lineup at, say, Malibu or Silver Strand in Ventura, they probably won’t let you catch one. If you attempt to surf Lunada Bay in Palos Verdes Estates, a group of middle-aged locals who call themselves the Lunada Bay Boys might vandalize your car, or you. It’s called localism, and it’s all they have.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not also about you. How you’re treated has more to do with how you carry yourself than anything else. “It’s just like prison,” says a lifelong surfer I’m married to. “Be respectful in the water and people will react well to you.” There’s the sport, and then there’s the sport of getting to do the sport, which is the real sport. His advice to those just starting out? “Just go where it doesn’t matter.” Like where? “Sunset. Porto.” Where are those? I don’t know. Figure it out, kook.
Gustavo: I don’t swim in the ocean, mostly because I grew up with a swimming pool but really because my late, sainted mami told me that ocean currents would take me away, which forever scared me away from Orange County’s polluted, overcrowded coastline. So I don’t care or know anything about surfers or surfing—except surf gangs. Talk about losers! Bunch of rich boys—and it’s almost always boys—chasing off outsiders because they consider a particular beach or surf break theirs? Epitome of entitlement culture—did they take lessons from Oildale residents?
A pioneering 2023 California appeals court ruling that threatens to hold the city of Palos Verdes Estates accountable for the actions of residents who have violently blocked access to Lunada Bay’s waves for decades isn’t enough. You know how Gavin Newsom can send in the National Guard for emergencies? I say he deputizes a new surf police stocked solely with actual—not poser—gang members. They can be armed only with mad-dogger sunglasses and chants of “Hey, foo, you a surfer?” and get time shaved off their parole for every Lunada Bay Boy that the cholo beach brigade scares off. California’s coastline would clear out of losers faster than the crowd at a Nickelback show after the final encore.
What should Californians do to prepare for this November’s election?
—Bracing for Impact
Stacey: I think your earthquake-preparedness kit should be sufficient. Don’t have one? Neither do I. In fact, the only person I know who does have one lives in fear of surviving the Big One, only to have to wade through the destruction in the scrunchie-style socks she’s had packed in there since the ’90s. Talk about a disaster!
There’s no use in preparing for the unknown. It’s unknown, for one thing, and when it is known, it will be different in ways you could never have known. Remember Y2K? Yeah, neither do I, but I do remember that none of the things people feared would happen did, and other, weirder things came about on their own—things that we might’ve handled better had we not been preparing for Y2K. This will be like that. About half the country will be angrier than the other half, which will be gloating, and some strange things will transpire, but ultimately, everything will go on just as it always does.
Bracing, the best thing to arm yourself with this election is information. When you get your ballot, spend a few terse minutes googling all the smaller things that you don’t know about. These are the things that will probably affect your life the most. For example, have you noticed how the TV commercials that used to be so loud aren’t as loud anymore? You have me to thank for that: were it not for my tireless work voting for the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act of 2010, you might still be jolted awake by super loud Consumer Cellular commercials during Forensic Files. That, friends, is democracy in action. Let it surprise you.
Gustavo: Vote. Volunteer for a candidate. Vote. Attend a rally. Vote. Use all the campaign literature that will bombard your mailbox as impromptu doggie bags. Vote. Tell your local pub trivia master to do an election-themed night featuring nothing but local water district board members as answers, which will allow you to overwhelmingly win, since no one even knows that they don’t vote for their local water district board. Vote. Did I mention vote? Vote.•
Have a question of your own? Ask a Californian!
Gustavo Arellano is the author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. In 2025, Arellano was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was formerly editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, and penned the award-winning ¡Ask a Mexican!, a nationally syndicated column in which he answered any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Arellano is the recipient of awards ranging from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Best Columnist to the Los Angeles Press Club President’s Award to an Impact Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and he was recognized by the California Latino Legislative Caucus with a 2008 Spirit Award for his “exceptional vision, creativity, and work ethic.” Arellano is a lifelong resident of Orange County and is the proud son of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.
Stacey Grenrock Woods is a regular contributor to Esquire and a former correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She writes and consults on various TV shows, and has a recurring role as Tricia Thoon on Fox’s Arrested Development. Her first book is I, California.
