Narrated by Michael Caine
Los Angeles is one of the richest cities on earth and for the past 20 years it's been spending a lot of its money on art, thereby knocking a big hole in its reputation as a city bereft of the traditional arts.
The most dramatic symbol of the city's new-found enthusiasm for art is the Getty Museum, the collection of oil billionaire J. Paul Getty. It's an amazing Roman villa of a place on the shores of the Pacific, with a rich hoard of old master paintings, antiquities and French furniture.
The film also looks at the Huntington, the collection of a railway baron with a taste for Gainsboroughs; it meets Armand Hammer, another oil tycoon, friend of Lenin, negotiator with Brezhnev, collector of Rembrandts; visits the new County Museum, as it buys its way into the big league of America's national collections, and slides past the swimming pools and Henry Moores of Beverly Hills to penetrate the private world of Los Angeles' art-collecting addicts.