Mixer: Cue LA’s on-screen destruction

Whether or not a movie is made in this company town, Hollywood seems to really like one thing: destroying Los Angeles.

Some examples include the movies The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Escape from LA (1996), Battle Los Angeles (2011), Earthquake (1974), This is the End (2013), and Independence Day (1996).

Maybe your plans include the latest iteration of imagination and conflagration on the big screen: San Andreas.

That one opens this weekend at theaters, and features not just a big earthquake, but several really big ones and a tsunami to boot. The West coast is toast.

Harry Medved works for Fandango, the entertainment site for moviegoers, and studies Hollywood history and wrote the book “Hollywood Escapes.” Alex Pappademas writes for the website Grantland and had an article this week about the LA big screen apocalypse.

Both joined us for the Mixer.

So what’s the fascination with decimating Los Angeles? (New York City gets the screen screams as well).

Medved and Pappademas say studios target audiences in middle America, and people between the coasts oftentimes believe that — given their large populations and even larger than life reputations — LA and New York are places that are fun to watch getting destroyed.

There are more iconic structures and attractions in those cities that people can identify.

It also could be, they say, a part of a real-life love/hate relationship with LA, where producers can cause cataclysmic damage to a city in which they live.

Even as, increasingly and ironically, those studios send their film crews elsewhere.