A few years ago, pre-corona, I was away from home on what we then referred to as a business trip. That was this thing where people left their homes and offices to conduct their work in another location. I did it so often back then that I rarely got excited about it anymore. There were airports, security lines, shuttles and trams, rental cars, uber rides, hotels to check into and all sorts of other things that often left little time beyond work to explore much. And now I miss it terribly. I don't remember which trip I was on, where exactly I was, or what portion of the wait part of the hurry-up-and-wait cycle of air travel I was in when I began reading an article about L.A.'s most notorious hotel. I can't find the article anymore. Thanks to the documentary I'm reviewing, a Google search using the keywords I'm looking for yields literally a hay field. That's ok. Finding it isn't critical to this review.
The article focused on Cecil Hotel and it's storied history. Built in 1924, the Cecil was an ambitious project with grand vision of being the place that the flood of business travelers in the booming city of Los Angeles would use as their upscale temporary home away from home. It was meant to be the kind of place that I stay in when on one of those mythological trips we hear so much about. On the off chance that you've been under a rock in the last several weeks and don't know anything about the Cecil now, to know what it could be today think a place like the Palmer House in the Chicago Loop. The lobby instantly telegraphs a luxurious respite for people with places to go and people to see and very little time to do it.
Welcome to your temporary haven:
So far, the two seem to be on the same level. Go upstairs to your room, the Palmer shows its age a little. Rooms have been reasonably retrofitted to fit the demands of modern guests, but you're still reminded that the normal creature comforts that we require have evolved over time. Bedrooms and bathrooms are smaller. Some rooms may not have had private bathrooms at one time and you can see where remodeling has taken place. Had the Chicago Loop area fallen on hard times during the great depression, it could just as easily be another Cecil. If ever there were a story that emphasizes the cliché maxims of real estate, it is the story of the Cecil. The Depression saw the neighborhood surrounding the Cecil transform into Skid Row. Location location location. The nicest way to describe what occurred at the Cecil would be to say that the luxury hotel was "re-purposed."
It wasn't long before Cecil became a hotbed of all kinds of illegal activity. Everything from drugs, to prostitution, to robbery, to domestic violence became almost routine. I wouldn't say it was normalized to the point that you expected all of this on a regular basis, but when it did happen, it wasn't necessarily surprising either. Stories of murder and suicide were reported over and over again throughout the 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's. Certain ordinances in Los Angeles leave little option for remedying this. The hotel is required by law to operate and make accommodations for those who otherwise wouldn't have a roof over their head. This also makes it near impossible to make the hotel attractive as an option for travelers. People want to feel safe when they travel. With all that said, the pictures of the Cecil entrance and lobby aren't from a bygone era. They were taken less than 5 years ago. What this means is that many out of towners looking for a place to stay may book a room at the Cecil without having any idea what kind of neighborhood they made a reservation in or who might be sharing an elevator with them. I guess that's true for any traveler, but the way the Cecil presents itself can be deeply deceptive to anyone not familiar with downtown LA. And that's where the hotel picks up the story of the final days of Elisa Lam’s life.
The article I read years ago focused on the Cecil as place rumored to have a supernatural presence. With such a checkered history, naturally ghost stories and urban legends stick to the Cecil like glue. It went on to tell the story of a Canadian college student, backpacking through the American west coast on part of her larger life journey to discover the world. She hit multiple stops, but things got strange when she checked in at the Cecil. She later disappeared and her body wasn't discovered for 19 days. During the search, the only evidence available to the public suggested something evil had occurred. I'm referring to the instantly infamous elevator footage, the last footage anyone has of Elisa while she was still alive. The unusual length of time the elevator door takes to close and Elisa's behavior coupled with the lack of sound to provide any additional context is the kind of material that you think you'd see in a horror movie. If you haven't seen it for yourself, take a moment and think about where your imagination might go if you were on the case to find this missing woman and had no idea where she was or what happened to her.
The search quickly turned into a circus where internet sleuths were certain that Elisa was either the victim of a crime, or perhaps some evil entity that inhabits the hotel and they all searched tirelessly for any additional clues that could fill in the missing pieces. When her body was discovered, the horrifying and unusual details that accompanied the discovery offered little clarity and really only served to complicate matters and fire up peoples' imaginations even more.
Crime Scene is a 4 part documentary that tells all of the sordid details of the hotel, its remarkable past, and Elisa Lam and all of the people from the LAPD to internet sleuths half-way around the world who got caught up in her disappearance and tragic death. Crime Scene does a good job of exploring each angle and perspective on this very unusual story, although the pacing is sometimes too slow and labors on with details in some parts that aren't proportionately relevant or interesting for the part they play in the overall story. But I have to commend the film for not taking the dirty laundry bait. This story contains some of the most fertile ground I've ever seen to take an over-simplified approach to draw dramatic conclusions that aren't supported by evidence. Hats off to producer Joe Berlinger and team for looking at this from multiple angles and examining facts that support all of the prevailing theories and the resulting explanation that Elisa's family has accepted.
Another thing I want to touch on is the film makers' effort to help us get to know who Elisa Lam was. Like the Head Writer and Editor in Chief at the Big Empty, Elisa Lam was a blogger who shared herself online without necessarily knowing or caring if she had an audience. She left a trail of breadcrumbs that when combined with the facts of her case and the interest it spawned, have forced people to reckon with what many people just like Elisa Lam go through without anybody ever knowing or hearing about it. She died on the same block of Los Angeles where many people with stories just like hers sleep and die on the street without anybody giving it a second thought. For this reason, maybe her story is the work of some higher power, just not the kind that everyone thought when they first saw her on youtube in the elevator.
Ultimately, experts have landed on the simplest explanation for what has occurred to be the correct conclusion. Occam's Razor in this case still yields one of the dammed oddest sequences of events that you or I may ever hear about, but it's important that we understand that Elisa Lam's truth is the most important thing here. I wasn't kidding when I said that some documentaries are stranger than fiction and Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel was the one I was thinking of when I wrote that. It's very easy to get caught up in all of the bizarre coincidences and even the circumstances surrounding the hotel itself. As the film concludes, it will have spent most of your time focusing on that but then steers you the viewer toward what is really the only important take away. This isn't a story about supernatural evil or some type of predatory presence in the hotel human or otherwise. It is a story that is all too common, albeit not with this many bizarre details attached, and it is incredibly sad that it has to include so many unusual details to get any attention from a very distracted world.
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