Interesting link: a guy selling memberships to "then and now" LA film history photos
There is a person who keeps going on LA area subreddits and posting "then and now" photographs of the filming locations from random pieces of 20th century media. The average post will be a still from a movie next to a more modern photo (not even a high-resolution modern photo) taken from close to the exact same camera position.
The photo will then be labeled:
This person, ChrisBungoStudios1, is a prolific reddit poster. I watch the "new" feed for certain local subreddits, and sometimes I'll catch him while he's in the middle of posting the exact same image to as many as 11 different subreddits. This post about the Culver City-filmed, 1928 film "Dumb Daddies" (??!!!?!?!????) ended up on at least that many subs. The moderators of the Culver City subreddit, however, removed it. They said:
This post was removed because there are too many similar posts right now
Yeah. Chris Bungo is posting way too much self-promotional stuff to r/CulverCity. Chris Bungo really wants you to visit chrisbungostudios.com and see the rest of these then-and-now photographs!!!
Who the fuck is Chris Bungo and what is chrisbungostudios.com?
There's a strong interest in location identification among certain film buffs and film industry workers. You can find all sorts of online communities where they discuss this kind of thing. It strikes me as a pastime similar to birding, or even to my own interest in recording bike infrastructure videos - it seems like a fun way of bringing your hobbies and interests into the world around you.
And one of the more popular posters in the Facebook group I liked above is... Chris Bungo! Here, at last, his work is desired.
As near as I can tell, Chris Bungo is a guy who has created a private, Patreon-style membership service for his work documenting film locations in the greater Los Angeles area. He has an omnivorous taste, and will photograph the locations for movies, TV, and music videos. A lot of the stuff he covers is extremely old - stuff that my parents considered "old movies" when they were kids. People whose special interest is VERY historic filming locations probably love this stuff.
He claims to have 1,500 then-and-now photos behind his membership paywall. He also produces paywalled "documentaries" about these locations. These are just the plain video content of the original media, like Madonna's music video for Borderline... but he'll pause it every couple of seconds, which completely kills the music and dialogue. Then he'll use the strange, jarring silence to slowly fade in to a modern photograph of the location taken from almost precisely the same camera angle. The angle matches are incredibly close. You really gotta take a moment and go look at the Madonna video on his "free preview videos" page. It's such a weird way to watch that music video.
If the sample videos are an accurate representation of what the full videos are like, I don't know if I would call these "documentaries" - he doesn't seem to be providing any narration or additional information at all. He has not even added addresses to the shots within the video itself. This is simply an interesting (and somewhat alarming!) way to editorialize the content of a piece of historical media.
Not that the effort is worthless!! But he's selling this stuff hard, probably because it takes a lot of work to find the exact spot where a shot was taken from and line the camera up so fucking perfectly. It costs 6-4 USD per month to access his videos and photos, depending on how many months you buy at once.
But the wildest thing about his work on this site - and the reason I wanted to make this post on my blog - is how mundane and dull a lot of the then-and-now photos are.
I am way more impressed by the sheer force of human will required to run this niche business and get the photos than I am by the detail or content in the actual photos. And I live in LA! I love mundane, ordinary, yet unexpected ways of seeing this city! I have been trying to 100% cover most of the actual neighborhoods he's showing on my bike!
It's simply that the backgrounds of most classic TV episodes don't look very interesting. When you line up the camera exactly, you get such a fucking mundane and dull shot.
The front page of his site has this month's most recent uploads, and a lot of them are of very old stuff, like Laurel and Hardy. There's one where their car starts to catch on fire. For that sample video in particular, all the backgrounds are incidental streetside locations - just random corners of various private homes or front yards with nothing distracting in them. The background of a random shot on a street should probably be completely mundane and unremarkable. The interesting shit is in the foreground.
And when you photograph these locations from the same angle as the original camera which filmed the shot, a lot of the time the interesting stuff - like a larger view of the streetscape - is completely obscured.
On some level, the mundanity of the shots makes me even more impressed with what he's done here. Not only did he find the exact camera angle, the subject he was hunting for was extremely unimpressive and normal, and often extremely small in scale. The longest shots in a lot of these videos contain less than a block of streetscape. Finding the exact spot where the photo was taken from must have actually been pretty hard, even if he knew what town to look in. It's wild as hell.
Bungo claims that his site is now the largest collection of then-and-now historical filming location photographs on the internet, which I certainly believe. On his About page, he has a gigantic overhead shot of Culver City's Hal Roach Studios - a place I visit every week, because it's now the modern location of my closest metro station, and two blocks away from my favorite coffee shop. This weirdly familiar photo is paired with a plea for the power and importance of historical film location then-and-nows:
This site is NOT an entertainment site. The original films are incidental to the primary mission, which is to be able to take a look into the past and see what those places in these films look like 30, 40, 50... even 100+ years later.
He also talks about how he's been figuring this stuff out using map and photo archives on the internet. He apparently lives in Miami. I feel a strange kinship with Bungo: I, too, have spent hours poring over maps of Culver City, but it's because I wanted to bike on every road there. He's doing it to find the exact window some Twilight Zone guy ran past while screaming.
I'm so curious about the economics of this business. How big is the community of people willing to pay six dollars to suck down 1500 photographs of my town? Who is absolutely dying to see the most close-up, obscured, front-yard-streetscape shots of the neighborhoods I ride my bike in? Why? What are they getting out of it, really? Why is it worth money to them?
I know what I'm getting out of this, which is: delight that we live in a world with so many Types of Guy in it. So, so glad to see these Guys thriving.