One of cinema’s most extraordinary records of midcentury Los Angeles, Smog offers a fascinating outsider’s view of the city at the height of its Modernist transformation. The film follows Vittorio (Enrico Maria Salerno), a conservative Roman attorney stranded in Los Angeles during a 48-hour layover. Emerging from LAX with little more than his bag, he sets out on foot into an unfamiliar landscape of car lots, oil fields, diners and remarkable Modernist architecture, from Paul R. Williams’s futuristic Theme Building at LAX to Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House and Bernard Judge’s extraordinary Triponent “Bubble” House.

After committing his first foreign faux pas—walking in Los Angeles—Vittorio falls in with a glamorous and slightly sinister group of Italian expatriates who lead him on a wandering journey through the city. As he moves from one encounter to the next, Los Angeles itself becomes a character, a place whose freedom, optimism and possibilities prove as seductive as they are unsettling. What begins as an unexpected layover gradually becomes something more existential, while the camera captures an extraordinary portrait of Southern California at the dawn of the 1960s.

After premiering at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, Smog virtually disappeared from view for six decades, surviving largely through a striking poster and a handful of intriguing stills. The surviving elements were eventually recovered and restored by the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with the UCLA Film & Television Archive, returning the film to the screen at UCLA’s 2024 Festival of Preservation. Now Palm Springs audiences have a rare opportunity to experience this beautifully restored time capsule of Los Angeles and its architecture, landscape, contradictions and futurist dreams.

Presented by Alison Martino, writer, television producer, historian and founder of Vintage Los Angeles, the screening will be followed by a Q&A with Alison and Chris Menrad, founder and past president of the Palm Springs Modern Committee.

Ticket includes a glass of Prosecco and Classic Movie Theater Popcorn.

A portion of the proceeds from the tour directly benefit the Palm Springs Modern Committee (PS ModCom), a non-profit organization dedicated to the appreciation and preservation of Desert Modern architecture and design. We accomplish this through education, advocacy for threatened buildings, promotion of heritage tourism, and the celebration of successes in preservation and adaptive reuse.

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