'Los Angeles Now' tonight

Documentary filmmaker and L.A. native Philip Rodriguez's on-screen interviews in Los Angeles Now include Eli Broad, Phil Jackson, Salma Hayek, Yxta Maya Murray, Michael Ventura, D.J. Waldie, Cardinal Roger Mahony, Uptown 3000 and Renán Almendárez Coello (radio's El Cucuy). The film, which airs tonight at 9 on KCET, was shot in HiDef, makes use of computer-generated effects and claims that it "looks beyond Baywatch and Blade Runner to create a fresh and candid portrait" of Los Angeles. From the film's website:

Once the whitest city in America, Los Angeles is now the most multicultural city in the history of the world. Once an empty, bucolic space, L.A. is now a disorienting megalopolis.

Yet the city's cultural transformation has gone largely overlooked by the media, the movies, and even by the many of the city's residents themselves. The entertainment industy continues to churn out counterfeit and outmoded images of L.A. while ignoring the many new stories emerging from the city's increasingly diverse population.

It's part of the PBS Independent Lens series. Rodriguez is Senior Research Fellow at The Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount.