THE BOOK
“Sunny… 72 degrees… back to you.”
The above fictional forecast sums up how many people view Southern California weather. In the 1991 romcom L.A. Story, Steve Martin plays Harris K. Telemacher, a prototypical “wacky TV weatherman.” He prepares the 5-second prediction for the entire coming week in Los Angeles for his fill-in, played by George Plimpton. What could go wrong?
A quick cut to a torrential downpour runs with the joke. Later in the movie, another weather gag is a story about Los Angelenos coping with an unseasonably cold night, as temperatures drop to an incredible 58 DEGREES! Close those windows and bring in the cats!
Southern California’s seemingly unchanging weather has been the butt of jokes for decades. Long before the time of Telemacher, Bob Hope once quipped, “In England when you make a movie even the weather is against you. In Hollywood the weatherman gets a shooting schedule from all the major studios and then figures out where he can fit in a little rain without upsetting Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer too much.”
To the casual observer the weather here is quite vanilla. Some transplants even pine for traditional weather from back home as if Southern California weather was some guilty pleasure or came too cheap. Such appears to be the case with Irving Berlin, who, while famously “dreaming of a white Christmas,” wrote: “The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway. There’s never been such a day in Beverly Hills, L.A.” All that idyllic weather was a problem for him.
The reality is more fascinating than these dismissive portrayals. A closer examination reveals Southern California weather is anything but vanilla to anyone willing to observe and discover its mysteries.
