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      Whistling as an Art Almost Died Off. Can Molly Lewis Keep It Alive?

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      The 31-year-old has whistled at tournaments, in the studio for Dr. Dre and at her Los Angeles lounge show, Café Molly. Now she’s releasing her debut EP.Molly Lewis lives at the top of a steep hill in East Los Angeles, where a group of feral peafowl roam idly around, as if they own the place. Peacocks and peahens don’t have much of a bird song — they emit a sharp “caw” that is “not cute,” Lewis said — but other birds have found themselves in conversation with the 31-year-old whistler.“If I’m out walking in the woods and I hear a birdcall, I try to mimic it,” she said, lamenting that the chats are a little one-sided: “I’ve probably got a terrible accent in ‘bird.’”Humans tend to be more impressed. By her early 20s, Lewis was a veteran of the niche world of competitive whistling; in 2015, she took first prize in the women’s live-band division at the Masters of Musical Whistling tournament. These days, she’s more focused on Café Molly, her lounge show that’s become a trendy affair in Los Angeles nightlife.Led by Lewis and her band, the act usually features special guests: John C. Reilly has stopped by to perform Slim Whitman, and the indie rocker Mac DeMarco to do some Frank Sinatra. All the while, Lewis will stand at the mic, pursing her lips when it’s time to play her parts.The show also helped her get a record contract. Scouts for the label Jagjaguwar reached out after attending a Café Molly event, and in lockdown, Lewis learned guitar, which helped her write formal songs. On Friday, she’ll release her first EP, “The Forgotten Edge,” made with the help of the producer Thomas Brenneck, best known for his work with Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley. The set is part tiki-bar exotica and part spaghetti-western dreamscape, each track anchored by Lewis’s theremin-like whistle. (Pre-orders come with a mint lip balm.)“I always felt like we were making soundtracks for lost films,” Lewis said.The EP was named after the colloquial term for Lewis’s micro-neighborhood at the top of the peafowl-ridden hill by Dodger Stadium. “It’s officially called Victor Heights,” she said on a recent warm afternoon, walking up a particularly steep street to a scenic overlook. For a time, she explained while gasping for air, these few blocks weren’t clearly assigned to any police precinct, leading it to have a lawless reputation. “That’s why it became known as” — here, she adopted a dramatic tone, as if introducing a radio mystery — “‘the Forgotten Edge.’ I just loved that name. It sounded so noir.”Video by Brian Overend for The New York TimesLewis was born in Sydney, but raised in Los Angeles, eventually returning to Australia for high school and college. (Her family lives in Mullumbimby, known as “the Biggest Little Town in Australia.”) She comes from an artistically inclined household: Her mother, Rhyl, is a music supervisor, and her father, Mark, is a documentary filmmaker, specializing in animals and subcultures. His influential 1988 film, “Cane Toads: An Unnatural History,” is viewed in schools around the world.When Lewis took an interest in whistling as a teenager, her parents showed her the 2005 documentary “Pucker Up,” which goes behind the scenes at the now-defunct International Whistlers Convention, in Louisburg, N.C., and has a Christopher Guest-like quality to it. Not long after, she was competing in Louisburg herself, winning the “Whistler Who Traveled the Greatest Distance” award in 2012. Lewis moved to Los Angeles a year later, where whistling gigs of all types, from touring to session work, eventually took over. (She was recently in the studio to play a whistle part for Dr. Dre.)The city “just kind of had a spell on me,” Lewis said. “But I also think L.A. is the only place in the world where I can do what I’m doing. I really don’t think this would have happened anywhere else.”Lewis gravitates toward the older establishments in the city — places where the food may not be great, but the ambience is. “Go to Hollywood, any restaurant, and Molly’s going to know the 80-year-old bartender,” said DeMarco, whose partner, Kiera McNally, is close with Lewis and appears in the video for the track “Oceanic Feeling,” alongside Reilly and a well-behaved hawk. “That’s Molly’s vibe.”“I want to play beautiful music that makes people feel something,” Lewis said. “And it just so happens that whistling is the only thing I can do that allows me entry into the world of musicians.”Brian Overend for The New York TimesIn true form, when asked where she might like to grab a bite to eat, Lewis suggested the Tam O’Shanter, a storybook-style roadhouse in Atwater Village that dates back to 1922. She trusted the waiter’s suggestion for a cocktail (the “Table 31,” named for the corner spot where Walt Disney used to regularly sit), and studied the menu with amusement. “What is a ‘toad in the hole’?” she asked, laughing.Within the Tam O’Shanter’s lifetime, whistling was a relatively common act in the music world. Artists like Elmo Tanner and Muzzy Marcellino made careers for themselves with their lips, and in 1967, the whistling song “I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman” became an international hit.Is the ever-increasing speed of society replacing life’s simple pleasures with more complex ones? “I do think, in some sense, it is a lost art in that way,” Lewis said of her vocation. But revivalism isn’t really her goal. And if she remains the only indie-rock whistler for her entire life, that’s fine, too.“I want to play beautiful music that makes people feel something,” she said. “And it just so happens that whistling is the only thing I can do that allows me entry into the world of musicians.”Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs was one of the first major musicians to see the possibilities with Lewis. In 2016, the two performed a duet, you could say, of the gospel song “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” at a Harry Dean Stanton tribute concert. “I’ve always thought of the voice as a sort of instrument,” Karen O said. “Whistling is this other instrument — it’s human breath. I was never witness to someone who can whistle like Molly can. It’s really extraordinary.”No one around Lewis seems surprised at her ability to make whistling a career, but sometimes even she can’t quite believe it. “It’s been working for some crazy reason,” she said, still taking it all in. “I’m going to try to ride it. See how it goes.” More

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      Britney Spears, in Her Own Words

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      Britney Spears, in Her Own WordsMaya SalamReporting on Pop CultureFrederic J. Brown/AFP — Getty ImagesOn Wednesday, Britney Spears made a rare public statement in court, pleading for the conservatorship that controls her life to end. “I have the right to use my voice and take up for myself,” said Spears, 39.Here’s what else she told the judge → More

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      ‘Rebel Hearts’ Review: Sisters Act Up

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      This flashy, feel-good documentary follows a group of progressive Catholic nuns in 1960s Los Angeles.Few institutions notoriously resist change like the Roman Catholic Church, which to this day upholds rules of celibacy and continues to forbid the ordination of women. So for some, it may be surprising to learn that the church’s iron-fisted rule has long been met with resistance.Such a struggle is captured in “Rebel Hearts,” Pedro Kos’s feel-good documentary about a particularly gutsy group of nuns who took inspiration from the social upheavals of the 1960s to fight against exploitation by their male superiors.Combining archival footage with paper doll-esque animation and a flurry of talking-head interviews gathered over two decades by Shawnee Isaac-Smith, one of the film’s producers, this documentary traces the controversies and trailblazing feats of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, whose social activism and participation in civil rights and workers protests upended notions of the fragile, cloistered nun.Led by Anita Caspary, these women — and the liberal college they ran in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles — were considered dangerous by Catholic hard-liners like Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, the entrepreneurial head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese who the documentary claims staffed his many religious schools with unpaid, unqualified young nuns. Caspary and her unruly flock (including the pop artist Corita Kent, whose screen prints and drawings were often the cause of scandal) collectively sought autonomy — voting, for instance, to rescind the habit requirement.An unrelenting pop music soundtrack vests the story with a cheesy rah-rah sensibility, while the film’s breakneck pacing hinders proper reflection of any single event or anecdote. The onslaught of information certainly impresses by illuminating a rich and not-often-discussed slice of feminist history, but the execution is distractingly flashy and gratingly unfocused.Rebel HeartsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      Three Hollywood Stars Recast Their Lives Deep in the Heart of Texas

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      As the pandemic upended Tinseltown, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Haylie Duff and Becca Tobin made a pact to abandon Los Angeles and join the mass migration from California to Texas.During the blockbuster plot twist that was 2020, three Los Angeles-based actors and longtime friends wrote themselves a scene that was playing out in cities across the United States. Early into lockdown, Becca Tobin, best known for her role as Kitty Wilde on the Fox series “Glee,” formed a pandemic pod with her fellow actors Haylie Duff and Jamie-Lynn Sigler, gathering for regular backyard confabs about shifting priorities, family demands and their future in Hollywood.“We had been able to work from home successfully and set up our careers from anywhere,” Ms. Tobin said. “And we were all kind of ready for a change.”Ms. Tobin, 35, Ms. Duff, 36 and Ms. Sigler, 40, had all moved to Los Angeles in their 20s for work and, like so many others, spent much of 2020 wondering if they wanted to live somewhere else. Hollywood the town and Hollywood the job had been cleaved apart, with acting classes going online, self-tape auditions replacing in-person, and the offscreen demands of the job — red carpets, award shows, interviews — going virtual or extinct.“We found our conversations shifting more toward life,” said Ms. Sigler, who made her mark playing Meadow Soprano on “The Sopranos.” “And then we started to fantasize about what it would be like to live in different cities, and would we ever want to leave L. A.?”They were far from alone. For the first time in more than a century, California lost people last year, according to population estimates released by the state in May. Some of that was a result of Covid-19 deaths, falling birthrates and the Trump administration’s efforts to limit immigration. But for many, it was simply a matter of finding better prices in greener pastures.The three made a pact to relocate their “quaranteam,” leaving Hollywood together for a new city where they could keep working but enjoy a less hectic, and less expensive, life.“It reminded me of being in high school and being like, ‘You’re gonna go home tonight and shave your legs, right? Because I’m going to do it, too,’” Ms. Tobin said of the agreement. “Like adult peer pressure.”During the summer, Ms. Duff, the native Texan in the group, had visited her parents in Houston and felt the pull back home. The older sister of the actress Hilary Duff, she has been acting since she was a teenager and had always planned to move back to Texas eventually, and after the trip, she cut her family’s five-year plan to a five-month plan. As more friends relocated, there was “an energy around people choosing to make a change in their life, for a positive reason, for a self-care reason,” she said.The friends considered different cities they had heard of people moving to, like Nashville or Atlanta, but they kept coming back to Texas. “We liked the idea of being in a progressive city, but not necessarily something so overly populated,” Ms. Tobin said.The obvious choice was Austin, the booming southern crossroads of culture and technology, where they could more or less split the distance between Los Angeles and New York. It was a madcap move in the rush of a red-hot sellers market, a once-in-a-century chance to pause, then fast-forward.Austin’s housing market, already in a decade-long development frenzy, wound up defying the pandemic and roaring back to life. In May 2021, the median sale price in the Austin metro area hit an all-time high of $465,000.Stacy Sodolak for The New York Times“Even though we were together so much during quarantine and Covid, it really chipped away at us as a family, like many families,” said Ms. Sigler, who had only been to Austin once, for a film premiere at the South by Southwest festival. “Coming to this new city all together on this adventure offered a lot of repair for us, as well.”Ms. Tobin, a Georgia native who had lived in Los Angeles for 12 years, said of Tinseltown: “As easy as it was to come, it was as easy for me to say goodbye.”The three families made a common checklist, headlined by ample outdoor space and good public schools. They “hit the Zillow hard,” Ms. Sigler said, lobbing listings at one another from film sets and playgrounds. In October, they embarked on a house-hunting tour with partners and children in tow (Ms. Duff has two daughters; Ms. Sigler has two sons), and settled on a neighborhood about 20 minutes northwest of downtown Austin.When they arrived in the spring, the culture shock came by way of small-town hospitality and everyday conveniences. “You mean I can get in my car, drive five minutes and not fight people when I’m in the grocery store to get in a lot?” said Ms. Tobin, who arrived in April after filming a TV reboot of the 1989 film “Turner & Hooch” in Vancouver, British Columbia. “Oh, and you don’t pay for parking anywhere.”In decamping to Austin — home to an ever-expanding ecosystem of film festivals and production studios — they were joining a wave of high-profile Californians like Tesla founder Elon Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan, as well as the other roughly 70,000 people who moved to the area last year, according to U.S. census data, making it the fastest-growing metro area in the United States.“Once you come here, it’s hard to leave,” said Ms. Duff, whose film roles include “Napoleon Dynamite” and “The Wedding Pact,” and who spent time this year shooting a movie in Fort Wayne, Ind. She noted that each of the friends booked gigs not long after closing on their Austin homes, which felt like a nod from the universe.“I almost feel more connected to my craft and why I love acting,” said Ms. Sigler, who had just returned from recording dialogue at a studio in downtown Austin for an ABC pilot she shot in Los Angeles. “When the calls come in, it’s a beautiful surprise. I’m still on things and I’m still a businesswoman and it’s still my career, but I don’t feel the pressure around it because we took a stand for ourselves and we made decisions for our families.”With its bohemian charms, natural splendors and lack of state income taxes, Austin has been courting California’s twin economic engines, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, for years, all while trying to maintain its cherished “Keep Austin Weird” credibility. According to Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, about 90,000 Californians moved to Texas in 2018 and 2019. The pandemic has only deepened the romance. Austin enjoyed a P.R. blitz of high-profile corporate relocations and expansions last year, with tech giant Oracle moving its headquarters there from Redwood Shores, Calif., and Mr. Musk announcing Tesla’s $1 billion “gigafactory” on the southeast edge of town.The housing market, already in a decade-long development frenzy, wound up defying the pandemic and roaring back to life. In May 2021, the median sale price in the Austin metro area hit an all-time high of $465,000, according to the Austin Board of Realtors. High-end home prices spiked 24 percent, according to Redfin, the most of any area in the country.Still, anyone used to California prices sees Texas as a bargain, said Scott Michaels, an Austin real estate agent with Compass, who described cutthroat, all-cash bidding wars that drew 40 to 60 offers on a single property. “It’s a challenge because we’re competing with people moving from out-of-state, and there’s just not a lot of inventory on the market,” he said.For Ms. Sigler, who is from Long Island, Austin’s square footage and outdoor space were revelatory. “There was a lot of like, ‘Oh my God, look what we can get for this. Look at the life we can give ourselves,’ you know, compared to what we’re able to afford here in L.A.,” she said. “I just feel like we’re taking a big, deep breath since we got here.”Apartment towers sprout on the shores of Lady Bird Lake, luring workers in entertainment, tech and other high-profile industries from cities across the U.S. “It’s an incredible burst of prosperity for the city, but it’s also just terrifying from a housing affordability standpoint, what that means for people living here,” said Jake Weggman, an associate professor of community and regional planning at the University of Texas at Austin.Stacy Sodolak for The New York TimesMs. Sigler and Ms. Duff started their careers as teens but wanted a different lifestyle for their children in Austin, where space and nature are plentiful, and paparazzi aren’t. “That was a big choice for us, wanting our kids to stay young,” Ms. Duff said.Austin has been contending with growing pains since the early 1980s, during its first hint of what locals call Silicon Hills, said Natasha Harper-Madison, the city’s Mayor Pro-Tem. Born and raised in East Austin, Ms. Harper-Madison said the changing cityscape was best described by her mother: “She said, ‘I really like my neighbors. I just wish I didn’t have to lose so many of the old ones to get new ones.’ And I think, in large part, that’s how folks feel. It’s not any sort of absence of the desire to welcome people to our communities. It’s the exact opposite. In fact, people want to preserve and sort of steward the evolution of their communities.”Despite some natal cries of “Don’t California My Texas” from both ends of the political spectrum, what’s fueling the migration are the states’ similarities. Sitting on the border with relatively sunny climates, “they’re both super diverse, in every possible way — ethnically, economically, geographically,” said Jake Weggman, an associate professor of community and regional planning at the University of Texas at Austin.“It’s an incredible burst of prosperity for the city, but it’s also just terrifying from a housing affordability standpoint, what that means for people living here,” Mr. Weggman said.Ms. Tobin has sensed some side-eye when she tells locals where she’s from, but she tries to put them at ease. Voting and donating are two ways to do it, she said, and she has contributed to causes that support homeless outreach and abortion rights through local nonprofits like Mobile Loaves & Fishes and the Lilith Fund.“I get it, they don’t want us to L.A. their Austin,” she said. “My husband and I personally are going to really try to do our best to help out in the community and get involved where we can.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Theater

      In Covid’s Early Days, Her Loss Resonated. She Hopes Her Hope Does, Too.

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      LOS ANGELES — Amanda Kloots is not surprised that she’s famous.You don’t move to New York from Ohio at 18, go to countless thanks-but-no-thanks auditions, dust yourself off again and again, or practice tap dance nightly on your small apartment bathroom floor in case a spot in the ensemble for “42nd Street” or the Rockettes opens because you think you are best suited to a life of quiet anonymity. More

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      in Movies

      Film or Real Life?

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      THE TAKEFilm or Real Life?Jake Michaels for The New York TimesSometimes a place is more than just a place; it can be a scene. Even the blankest backdrops, like a parking lot or a sun-baked freeway, can shimmer with cinematic potential. Four photographers showed us the movie moments that they found all over.Jolie Ruben and Jake MichaelsWhen Jake Michaels began shooting around Los Angeles, he noticed how the backdrop and spontaneous action within the frame combine to tell a story, and how those moments dissolve quickly. “That’s why I think it’s interesting to go back to a place several times,” Michaels said. “You can see life kind of cycling. You see from a static point of view how much life exists in that frame.”Jake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesAn Rong XuAn Rong Xu, who made these photographs around Taiwan, is often influenced by the movies of 1990s Hong Kong and the Taiwanese cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing, who created images from “slow gestures that gather into something larger,” Xu said. In other words: Viewers sense a bigger story in the photo and are drawn in by that mystery.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesSarah Van RijSarah van Rij made these pictures around Amsterdam and The Hague. Van Rij declared that filmmakers strongly influence her work — “maybe more than other photographers,” she said. Van Rij, who takes most of her shots outside on the streets, searches for a feeling before snapping the shutter, sometimes inventing her own private back story for a scene.Sarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn BottomsFor September Dawn Bottoms, who shot in and around Tulsa, Okla., the answer to what makes a photo cinematic flows from her personal point of view. “I photograph my own life all of the time,” she said. “Every photo is about me and what I’m seeing, I’m just never in it.”September Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times More

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      A Soaring Arts Scene in Los Angeles Confronts a Changing Landscape

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      Its cultural institutions, buffeted by the pandemic, will have to recover without the help of Eli Broad, the transformational benefactor who died last month.LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an open construction pit these days, surrounded by 12-foot-high wooden fences, with cranes rising across now open skies. Most of its midcentury modernist complex on Wilshire Boulevard was quietly demolished during the Covid shutdown to make way for a wavy $650 million light-filled building spanning the boulevard and designed by the architect Peter Zumthor.LACMA, as it is known, has long been a cultural anchor for Southern California, extraordinarily popular and as responsible as any institution for helping define the region’s cultural identity. “New Galleries. More Art. Opening 2024,” promises a sign in the courtyard. But the success of its next incarnation is hardly assured as the museum seeks to redefine its mission in a smaller building whose design, if adventurous, is not universally acclaimed.It is not only LACMA that finds itself in a moment of transition. Before the pandemic froze California in a wave of shutdowns and disease, Los Angeles had established itself as a cultural capital with its galaxy of museums, galleries and performing arts institutions, defying dated stereotypes of a superficial Hollywood with little interest in art. It now confronts uncertainty across its cultural landscape.Los Angeles institutions share many of the same challenges that their peers around the world face in trying to recover from the pandemic: bringing back wary audiences, confronting the expense and technical challenges of making their spaces safe, and raising money from philanthropists and government in the face of competing demands in a time of economic struggle. They are in precarious financial condition after a calamitous loss of revenue forced many to lay off staff members and abandon leases on theaters and galleries.But they face the added complications of recovering without the help of many of the old guard philanthropists who helped establish the civic and cultural scene here. That was underlined by the death last month of Eli Broad, 87, a billionaire philanthropist who played an outsized role in creating many of the region’s marquee cultural institutions, among them Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and one of the buildings left standing at the LACMA complex.The next chapter for Los Angeles’s arts institutions will unfold without Eli Broad, a philanthropist who transformed the city’s cultural landscape who died last month. He is shown here in 2015 outside the Broad, a museum he financed himself to display his art collection. Kendrick Brinson for The New York TimesThere is cautious optimism that the region will return to its upward trajectory as the virus recedes.“Los Angeles, like New York, is a resilient city full of entrepreneurial creative people who will get back up on the horse,” said Ann Philbin, the director of the Hammer Museum, which was also in the midst of an expansion project in Westwood when the pandemic hit.But in many ways the challenges here are more intense and complex, in no small part because the virus hit at a time when so many things were in flux. The next steps — by cultural institutions, wealthy philanthropists, government and audiences — could well determine whether Covid will have derailed, or merely delayed, the city’s ascendance as a cultural destination.For all its wealth, Los Angeles has always been a challenging fund-raising environment. Michael Govan, the director of LACMA, struggled to raise money to build the Zumthor building. The project turned the corner after David Geffen, 78, an entertainment magnate who has become a major arts benefactor, agreed to donate $150 million.A rendering of the new David Geffen Galleries at Lacma, a wavy, light-filled building being designed by Peter Zumthor.Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner/The BoundaryThe death of Mr. Broad has rattled a Southern California arts world already worried about whether donors will come forward to help at a difficult time. Although he stepped down from public life in 2017, leaving the field to a new generation of benefactors, Mr. Broad had a history of being there at moments of need — getting the Walt Disney Concert Hall project back on track after it stalled in the 1990s, and offering a $30 million bailout for the Museum of Contemporary Art when it was on the verge of collapse in 2008.Mr. Broad was a singular figure in many ways — part billionaire philanthropist, part civic bulldozer — and it’s hardly clear who can (or even should) step in to fill in the gap he left. “It’s a little scary to imagine Los Angeles without Eli Broad,” said Donna Bojarsky, the founder of Future of Cities: Los Angeles, a nonprofit civic group.The pandemic was economically ruinous for many cultural organizations. The Los Angeles Philharmonic slashed its annual budget from $152 million to $77 million. Museums lost millions in revenues. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills had to lay off 30 people.“It will probably take us 12 months to three years to get back to the same level of operation,” said Rachel Fine, the executive director of the Wallis.In addition to the challenge of philanthropy, the sheer difficulty of getting around this city — one sure sign that the recovery is at hand is that traffic has returned to roads and freeways — has long made it harder for theaters, music halls and galleries looking to draw crowds. The transit system is in the midst of a dramatic expansion, funded by a $120 billion mass transit plan. But it will be many years before it is completed.“It’s a wonderful place to live and it’s a wonderful place to work,” said Deborah Borda, who was the president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years before becoming president of the New York Philharmonic. “And it’s truly a receptive place for the arts. But if you want be there for a 7:30 concert, you really have to leave at 6. I knew people who used to come but stopped: That would be a reason that they would give.”Los Angeles has long been a cultural magnet, and not just for the creative classes who flocked to Hollywood. It has drawn composers like Stravinsky and Schoenberg, writers like Thomas Mann and Joan Didion, architects like Frank Gehry and artists like David Hockney. It took longer for the city to establish institutions: Mr. Broad, who played a key role in establishing the Museum of Contemporary Art, recalled in a 2019 essay that while Los Angeles had long been home to brilliant artists, great art schools and leading galleries, it had lacked a modern or contemporary art museum when he got there.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a $482 million complex designed by Renzo Piano, is scheduled to open this year.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesAnd pandemic or not, the next three years promise to be transformative, with a series of openings of major projects that Los Angeles officials believe will dramatically expand the cultural offerings here.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a $482 million complex designed by Renzo Piano next door to LACMA, is scheduled to open by the end of the year. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a sprawling futuristic $1 billion building being financed by George Lucas, is scheduled to open in Exposition Park in 2023.“We are slowly climbing back,” Mr. Govan said. “I think the big institutions will survive. It’s been hard. But I can’t be anything other than optimistic.”Chad Smith, the chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, said that as recently as three weeks ago he was resigned to staging a handful of concerts this season at the Hollywood Bowl, expecting to be able to seat only 4,000 people in the 18,000-seat amphitheater. Now, the Bowl is planning 50 events and is hoping to fill 65 percent of capacity, reflecting the dramatic decline of the virus and the lifting of regulations.This is critical because the Bowl, with its diverse mixture of outdoor programming — from Beethoven to Car Seat Headrest — is a major source of revenue for the Philharmonic.“At this point, we see ourselves coming out of this, with these 40 or 50 concerts at the Bowl,” Mr. Smith said. “Our financial situation will improve. It has to improve. We have been relying entirely on contributions.”The arts scene is animated here not only by big institutions but by an estimated 500 small nonprofit arts organizations. Many were forced to abandon leases on performance or exhibition spaces over the past 14 months, and some are now in danger of fading away.The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a futuristic $1 billion building being financed by George Lucas, is under construction in Exposition Park.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“We see a lot of the arts, especially the performing arts, as being the last to recover,” said Kristin Sakoda, the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture. “We know there is a long road to recovery.”In response, a group of philanthropists has created the L.A. Arts Recovery Fund to help theaters, music halls, museums and galleries survive the transition. “For Los Angeles to regain its prowess as a leader in the arts we need to come together,” William Ahmanson, the president of the Ahmanson Foundation, said in a letter seeking contributions.The Recovery Fund set a goal of $50 million, and has already raised $38.7 million. But even before Covid hit, cultural institutions were struggling to compete for philanthropic dollars, and there is concern that this trend will only continue.“The demand for social services and social justice funding is just ramped up so significantly, somewhat at the expense of performing arts,” said David Bohnett, a philanthropist and member of the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “That was already happening. But we are coming out of this learning the value of the performing arts to social service and social justice initiatives.”Still, arts executives are hopeful that a soaring stock market has created a new class of donors. “There is enough to support both social services and the cultural sector, and we just need more people to step forward in civic-mindedness,” Ms. Philbin said.Mr. Geffen, an art collector, said he was hopeful younger people who were getting wealthy and buying art would eventually become donors, though arts professionals said that transition has been slow to happen in Los Angeles. “I would think that young people who are making incredible amounts of money in tech,” he said, “will be generous in the future.”Still, he acknowledged the difficulties LACMA had faced before he wrote his $150 million check. “L.A. deserves a world class museum,” he said. “And it didn’t seem like anyone else was stepping up to the plate.” More