For three generations, the Otis and Chandler men had Los Angeles as their personal playground.They ran its top paper (the Times) and manipulated its people and politics. Harrison Otis and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, dominated the city.
Otis "used the paper as a bully pulpit for his personal political views," said Peter Jones, whose richly detailed documentary is on PBS. "Harry Chandler was more a behind-the-scenes manipulator."
And he wanted to manipulate everything. "At one point he was, I think, on 26 boards and (was the) largest landowner in the state," Harry Brant Chandler said of his great-grandfather and namesake.
Their newspaper brought big profits and little respect. Then things changed:
At the paper. Chandler's grandson took over and tripled the news budget. Once listed by Time Magazine as America's third-worst newspaper, the Times was now listed as one of the 10 best.
In the city. "I think the first two publishers ... envisioned a city that would be filled with white, Middlewesterners," Jones said. "It didn't turn out that way."
Otis was clearly a Midwesterner, a former Civil War officer from Ohio. He co-founded the Times in 1881 and made it pro-business, pro-development, anti-union; his son-in-law did the same.
They were the leaders of the drive to pipe in water from hundreds of miles away. ... And to lure the movie business. ... And to start the Tournament of Roses parade and a development originally called "Hollywoodland." ... And to start plane-manufacturing.
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