L.A. Documentarian Aims to ‘Decode’ Polarizing Graffiti on Infamous DTLA High-Rises

Angeleno onlookers and witnesses alike were either quickly swooned or shocked by the city’s latest open-air, illegal art installation: a DTLA three-tower abandoned high-rise project that’s been graffitied top to bottom by artists.

However, not all were simply confined to a state of being startled, others quickly looked at Oceanwide Plaza and felt the need to investigate. Local activist and documentarian Linda Arroz was immediately captivated and wanted to put the urban phenomenon in front of a camera lens.

“It's a scar,” she says of her first thoughts about the graffiti. “I mean, it’s right in the heart of our Times Square.”

This initial exasperation led her to investigate the sequence of events surrounding the site and, specifically, what may have led the artists to take it over. Of course, the easy answer is that the buildings have been abandoned for the better part of five years now, quickly becoming an eyesore.

This, tied with a lawsuit filed last fall against its Beijing-based developers by a security company for more than $1.3 million in unpaid fees, left the high-rises unguarded and easily accessible to artists who had performed a similar feat on a 20-story abandoned healthcare facility just last December. But Arroz feels there’s a cryptic nature behind the art that goes beyond paint being slapped on a building.

“I feel that what the many of the graffiti artists that scurried, scampered, scrambled, and rappelled in the face of breaking the law — in the danger of injury — had something to say,” she says. “It might look like scribble… but I want to understand what the inspiration was… I want to understand the cipher, I want to decode it.”

She’s so far spoken to a few of the artists who chose to remain anonymous, including two women, one of whom is a mom. The group itself is seemingly invisible, with Arroz claiming another female artist is a dentist by day and two are mountain climbers. She jokes, “They’re a third of my age, but we hit it off.”

On the filming front, it was smooth sailing for Arroz until she crashed her drone while getting footage of the buildings just two weeks ago. It was then that she realized perhaps this endeavor for what is now titled Ghosted: The Story of a Skyscraper Graffiti Bomb, wouldn’t fall along the four to six-week release schedule she’d planned for.

“I knew I wanted to make a documentary, and then I crashed,” she recalls. “So, I knew I was going to need a lot more help with this. All of a sudden, it wasn't going to be just me.”

Luckily for Arroz, she’s a member of GreenLight Women, a group of women over 40 in media and entertainment that puts her in pretty good company. Surrounded by other documentarians and filmmakers with decades of experience, the project seems a lot more feasible.

“The graffiti on this skyscraper gave me an opinion about something I'd never thought about… I never really thought about graffiti,” she says. “But decoding this work… this is all part of Los Angeles.”