Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Towne

There is a sly little eulogy buried in Towne's logistical gripe: Los Angeles has developed itself out of its own mythology. The line looks like a producer's note about locations, but it’s really about a city that keeps selling nostalgia while bulldozing the physical evidence that made nostalgia possible in the first place. California, the factory floor of American dream-making, can no longer convincingly play itself. That irony lands harder coming from Towne, whose best-known work ("Chinatown") is practically a noir autopsy of L.A.'s self-invention.

The intent is practical - find a place that still has the bones of an earlier era - yet the subtext is cultural. "Heavily built up" reads as progress and contamination at once: the sprawl, the glass, the sameness. Film needs surfaces that tell time. When those surfaces disappear, history becomes something you have to import, like a costume. Cape Town becomes a kind of cinematic time machine not because South Africa is "more authentic", but because it hasn't been paved into the same real-estate grid. That's the quiet indictment: development doesn't just change a city; it flattens its narrative range.

Context matters too. As global productions chase tax incentives and flexible streetscapes, "coming to Cape Town" is also shorthand for how Hollywood now externalizes its own past. The old Los Angeles survives as a set, staged offshore, while the real city moves on - richer, denser, and less filmable. Towne frames that as an "invitation", but it’s tinged with loss: the past is still available, just not at home.