Tales of the American Interviews

"Tales of the American" filmmakers Pamela Wilson and Stephen Seemayer interviewed more than 100 artists, musicians, writers and others who have lived, worked and partied in and around the American Hotel over the past four decades. As new development and a growing population drasticallhy change the downtown landscape, Wilson and Seemayer hope to preserve memories of the vibrant art community that flourished there in the 1970s, '80s, '90s and early 2000s. These are the people who created the Arts District. Their recollections will be released (in alphabetical order) below and on a new YouTube channel, Tales of the American Interviews. 

If there’s an art event in Downtown Los Angeles, photographer Rick Mendoza will be there, and it’s been that way since he first started coming to the Arts District more than 20 years ago. He may live in the San Gabriel Valley, but he has made himself an integral member of the artist community by documenting openings, theater productions, fashion shows and parties that make the DTLA neighborhood “a small town in the big city,” as he puts it. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Antonio Mendoza moved to Downtown Los Angeles in 1985 after being impressed by the city of “Blade Runner” and “Eraserhead.” Among the community in what became the Arts District, Mendoza found lifelong friends and a supportive environment for creativity. “We were all in it together,” Mendoza says, adding that Al’s Bar in the American Hotel was the vibrant hub around which the young arts scene revolved. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Kyle McCulloch acted in movies in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, before moving to L.A. in 1993. He found a home at the American Hotel in Downtown’s nascent Arts District. “It was cheap,” he explains. “If I was working, I might have ended up someplace else.” McCulloch’s many talents include music, voice acting, writing and creating “fabulous things,” such as a carnival-game version of longtime American Hotel resident Don Jones. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Colin McCarthy knew little about Al’s Bar when he transformed the space that once housed the legendary punk venue into an upscale retail outlet. Since opening Rogue Collective in 2016 on the ground floor of the American Hotel, McCarthy says, not a day goes by that someone doesn’t stop in to recount raucous memories, always exclaiming, “This used to be Al’s Bar!” After the pandemic, Rogue Collective was renamed Al's General Store. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

While having coffee with his friend Raymond Newton at the Pie Hole, “Tales of the American,” director Stephen Seemayer met Adam McAllister, a homeless man who had set up his tent at the Eastern end of Traction Avenue. Loquacious and friendly, McAllister was known to the artists and residents of the area around the American Hotel. Seemayer and Newton, a photographer and cameraman, filmed this short interview on Jan. 31, 2015. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Personal tragedy led Fannie Mayfield to the streets of L.A.'s Skid Row. After 25 years struggling with drug and alcohol abuse, Mayfield got sober and found a home at the Downtown Women’s Center. But she found a family in the Arts District, where she had gone to collect recyclables in the early 1990s. The artists she encountered embraced her kindness, welcomed her into the community, and helped her through a battle with cancer. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

After moving to L.A. in the 1980s, Damon Martin discovered the art scene that was forming in Downtown. Inspired by muralists such as Kent Twitchell, he went from painting on canvas to the epic scale of exterior walls. In 2012 — amid a ban on new murals — he created “Every Piece of Ivory Comes From a Dead Elephant” on East 3rd Street, calling attention, Martin says, “to the plight of elephants and the kind of danger they face today. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Jim Marquez has been called “the Chicano Charles Bukowski.” Born and raised in East L.A., he was a hard-living, hard-drinking writer who published more than a dozen books about life in the underbelly of Los Angeles. In 2016, “Tales of the American” director Stephen Seemayer sat down with him at the H.M.S. Bounty in Koreatown. Marquez toured Europe before the pandemic and passed away after returning to L.A. in 2021. He was 54. (Click on photo to watch vignette.)

Barry Markowitz, lured by the Summer of Love, moved to California from New York City in 1967, establishing a studio in Downtown Los Angeles in 1972. As a student of painter Hans Burkhardt at Cal State Northridge, he honed a career in performance, painting and sculpture that continues five decades later. “I center my efforts on being part of the community,” Markowitz says. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Fashion designer Oliver Manhattan came to Downtown L.A. in the 1980s looking for community, which she found at Al’s Bar. She started booking Monday nights there with acts from around the world. Known as Oliver, her creativity fueled a series of guerrilla marketplaces called Sunday Jump. She relocated “by accident” to New Orleans in the early 1990s, but returns often to the Arts District that sprung from the American Hotel and Al’s Bar. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Painter Tod Lychkoff moved to 810 E. 3rd St. in 1987 and maintained a loft on the 4th floor until 2009. In his more than two decades in Downtown Los Angeles, Lychkoff was a prolific member of a community of artists that transformed a sleepy industrial quarter of the city into a vibrant and rapidly growing Arts District. His paintings and scratchboard drawings reflect the beauty, as well as the danger and despair, of an urban existence. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

In the 1970s & ’80s, Gary Lloyd’s “surveillance sculpture” was unlike anything others in the burgeoning Downtown L.A. art community were doing. His coin-clad installations not only raised questions about art’s value, but also about how a person’s worth is measured. The pieces — each equipped with a radio transmitter — listened in on those around them, and broadcast conversations and events over pirate airwaves to passersby. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

In the late 1970s, Wild Don Lewis learned of the creative scene taking root in Downtown L.A., an abandoned industrial zone where “you could do whatever you wanted because nobody cared.” He moved there in 1990 and still lives in the Arts District. Lewis photographed the punk scene before realizing that his calling was music. In 2008, he began Small Drone Orchestra, and still performs sound compositions at venues and festivals. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Composer Drew Lesso moved to Downtown L.A. in the 1970s after hearing of the art community taking hold in the empty warehouses and factories of what is now the Arts District. He and a partner leased a floor of a building on Los Angeles Street and split it into four units, renting out the extra spaces to subsidize expenses and turn a profit. It was the first of several artist buildings Lesso would helm in more than 40 years downtown. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

“People don’t recognize me if I don’t have a camera!” says photographer Gary Leonard. For more than 50 years, the photojournalist has been capturing moments both epic and intimate for a historical record of Los Angeles. In the 1970s and ’80s, Leonard became known for documenting the punk scene spreading throughout venues from Hollywood to Long Beach, but he always harbored a fondness for what he calls “the Al’s Bar district.” (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Mona Lee had lived all over L.A. before she decided to settle in Downtown. While not an artist herself, she enjoyed the creative community that thrived among the warehouses and other old buildings being converted into lofts in the early days of what would become known as the Arts District. While holding down a day job, Lee bartended at Bedlam and amassed a collection of works by local artists, such as Becca and Jett Jackson. (Click on photo to watch interview.) 

When actor Steven Lamprinos moved into the American Hotel in 1994, the idea was he’d save some money to start his own theater group. Staying for 12 years in the smallest room in the building was definitely not the plan! But Lamprinos has never regretted a minute of it. “Everything I do is formed from this place,” he says. “If I hadn’t gotten engaged in 2007, I’d probably still be here.” (Click on photo to watch interview.)

One evening while filming “Tales of the American,” director Stephen Seemayer encountered an artist named Emery Lambert at the corner of Traction Avenue and 3rd Street. Lambert was in a wheelchair drawing pictures of Jesus to sell to passersby. Seemayer, ever ready with his Elph Powershot, filmed this short interview. (Click on photo to watch vignette.)

Neon artist Lili Lakich is an O.G. of the Downtown Los Angeles Arts District, having set up her studio on Traction Avenue in 1980, just as the art community was taking root. She has fabricated her glowing works there ever since, from intimate political pieces to mammoth public installations. Lakich also founded the Museum of Neon Art there and still teaches workshops in “all things neon” to students from all over the world. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

As a bluesman from Chicago, Jake La Botz came to L.A. in 1996 hoping to kick heroin. When he moved into the American Hotel, “the dope spot was just down the street” and many of the residents had similar habits. In exchange for a room, La Botz played downstairs at Al’s Bar. After a few tries at rehab, he got clean and got busy. A favorite of blues and rockabilly fans, La Botz also acts in movies such as “Rambo” and "DOA" with John Doe. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Loretta Minjarez came to the American Hotel in 1990 when she was hired to manage the tenants, help run the American Gallery, and step in when Al’s Bar needed tending. Though she was in her early 20s, she “felt like a parent sometimes” in dealing with the diverse creative personalities who called the American home. “I found my people,” Minjarez says, including filmmaker Chris Kraft, who she met in Al's Bar and married in 1996. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Faye Ochsenreiter grew up in a Pittsburgh but felt right at home when, in 2001 — while working as an insurance executive — she was introduced to L.A.’s Downtown Arts District. Ochsenreiter fell in love, not just with the community, but with painter Emmeric Konrad, who was living at the time in the American Hotel. One whirlwind romance and bohemian wedding later, Faye and Emmeric Konrad moved into a loft in the Old Bank District. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

In 1990, Emmeric Konrad was a student at Otis when he rented a loft in what would soon be called the Arts District. His youthful love of comic books blossomed into a successful career, and his paintings — marked by wit and grotesquely cartoonish imagery — are colorful, manic reflections of the DTLA community he called “a wild safari safe place for these critters called artists.” Konrad died in August 2022, survived by wife Faye. He was 58. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Alex Koiv moved to Los Angeles because it was the city she hated so much that she knew she would be able to focus on her art there. Within days, she was a regular at the Clubhouse and Al’s Bar, where distractions abounded. Changing her medium from painting to metalwork, Koiv “found a home … people like me” in the Downtown Arts District, a community "where you could be completely free." (Click on photo to watch interview.)

Artist Tim Keating moved to Los Angeles in 1982, convinced that “world culture would evolve on this stage before anywhere else.” He has worked toward that end ever since, and in 2002, he co-founded LADADSpace, a nonprofit supporting creative endeavors in the Downtown Arts District. Keating has helped bring world-renowned muralists to the area and raise money for arts programs from film production in the neighborhood. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

For nearly two years, aspiring actor and comedian Jen Kater worked her day job at the Novel Café on Traction Avenue in the Downtown L.A. Arts District. She found support for her dreams in the regulars she got to know there, many of whom were artists, writers, musicians and others who made her feel part of a creative community. After the Novel Café closed in November 2014, Kater found success as a comedic actor in movies and television. (Click on photo to watch interview.)

CLICK ON A BUTTON BELOW FOR PREVIOUSLY POSTED INTERVIEWS (ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY)

OR CLICK ON AN IMAGE BELOW FOR A SPECIFIC INTERVIEW