Film buffs still wax nostalgic about MGM sending directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly to shoot the musical “On the Town” on location in New York City in 1949, a nearly unprecedented move for a genre that was always soundstage-bound. But during its glory days, MGM never exploited its home base of Los Angeles in the same way, not even in Donen and Kelly’s Hollywood-centric “Singin’ in th
Sure, that classic film offers up a splashy Grauman’s Chinese movie premiere, and the canyons that have served as the backdrop to a thousand Westerns, but it never captures that uniquely Southern California atmosphere, where the blisteringly bright sunlight fights its way through a hazy sky to deliver its glow to the hills, the swimming pools and the clogged freeways.