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Film shows how newspaper family 'invented' Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- The Los Angeles Times' headquarters aptly sits where the U.S. Army corralled camels during the Civil War, when Southern California was a desert with no natural resources.

Los Angeles' development from an arid wasteland to a world metropolis and cultural capital is closely linked to the newspaper's rise under the ownership of one family.

"It would still be a desert," documentary filmmaker Peter Jones said, if Gen. Harrison Gray Otis didn't arrive in the 1880s to take over the bankrupt Los Angeles Times and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, wasn't there to follow him.

Jones' documentary is a saga of four generations of the region's most powerful family shaping Los Angeles as they pursued their own civil agendas -- and accumulated wealth. "Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times" premieres Monday on PBS.

Historian David Halberstam said in the documentary that the Chandlers dominated Southern California as no other family has dominated any major region of the United States.

"They did not so much foster the growth of Los Angeles as invent it," said Halberstam, who died in 2007.

Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, Norman Chandler and Otis Chandler succeeded each other at the helm of the Los Angeles Times over a span of 100 years.

The city grew from a small desert town to the nation's second-largest city, while the family became one of the nation's wealthiest.

The Chandler family dynasty ended when the general's great-grandson Otis Chandler was ousted as chairman of the Times board of directors in 1985. The family eventually sold its Times-Mirror Company to Chicago's Tribune Company -- which is now in bankruptcy.

Each man's personality and strengths were tailored for what was demanded of their time, said Jones. "For each era, they were up to that particular era," he said.

"You couldn't actually rearrange them," said Harry Chandler's namesake and the great-great-grandson of the general.

"You couldn't have a General Otis in late 20th-century America," Chandler told CNN, referring to the dynasty's founder who served as an Army general in the Philippine-American War before taking over the Los Angeles Times.

"His character was one of the period. 'I have a vision and everything I touch needs to support that vision and damn the consequences.'"...
Read entire article at CNN