A Man with a Dream
California City
LAist Studios
4.5 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2020
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The vision that Ben Perez was sold in 2017 began in 1958, with one man's dream to build a utopian desert city from scratch.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for LAST comes from Pasadena Playhouse presenting Eureka Day. |
| 0:04.6 | Jonathan Spector's Razor Sharp 2025 Tony Award winning satire. |
| 0:09.1 | Eureka Day is on stage at Pasadena Playhouse beginning September 10th. |
| 0:13.2 | Tickets are on sale now at Pasadena Playhouse.org. |
| 0:17.1 | Live stream, supported by South Coast Repertory, presenting million-dollar quartet. |
| 0:21.7 | Step back to 1956 when Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins |
| 0:26.8 | made music history with one of the greatest rock and roll jam sessions. |
| 0:30.3 | In this musical with over 20 hits, September 13th through October 19th, tickets at SCR.org. |
| 0:36.7 | Thank you. October 19th. Tickets at SCR.org. |
| 0:44.1 | Previously on California City. |
| 0:47.6 | That's actually my five years savings. |
| 0:50.8 | I work five years just to save that 30,000. That's your five years savings? |
| 0:52.8 | Somehow they got our name probably from that Filipino grocery store. |
| 0:57.8 | I don't know. Maybe I have the charisma. |
| 1:02.4 | So when you first saw the Yelp reviews, like how did you feel? |
| 1:06.6 | I said, oh my God, this is a scam. |
| 1:13.6 | I told Ben Perez I would try to figure out what happened to him, |
| 1:17.8 | how he spent so much of his money on a slice of empty desert land |
| 1:21.8 | that he somehow believed would make him rich one day. |
| 1:26.3 | But in order to do that, I had to understand where this belief |
| 1:30.0 | came from. Who started it? And what was this town anyway? The man who started California City was |
| 1:37.9 | named Nat Mendelssohn. Nat Mendelsohn was a real estate developer, who, 60 years ago, decided to build a city from scratch in the Mojave Desert. |
... |
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