An 'Official" Movie Website That Works

Spent some time looking through the official website for the movie The Black Dahlia, coming out on the 15th. Like all official movie sites these days, it’s all Flash based, so if you don’t like Flash, you’re out of luck. However, I thought this site was really well done, and had lots to see and read through while listening to some cool, moody music playing in the background. Several clips are available to watch, though I didn’t watch them all as I don’t want to chance ruining the film for myself. The usual desktop wallpapers (my two faves here and here), icons, synopsis, and trailers, are there, but the parts I liked the best were under the Features menu. The “Dark L.A.” was interesting to watch, as it showed newsreels of current events from the ‘40s like the kind that used to play before movies up until apparently the ‘60s (maybe they should bring newsreels and shorts back instead of the bad music videos and commercials we have to sit through nowadays). LA was quite the place back in the day. I hadn’t even heard of the “zoot-suit” riots either (extreme racial profiling, anyone?), which apparently is how the book starts off. The newsreel finishes as it announces the news of the Black Dahlia murder. The other fascinating part of the site was the “LA: Then & Now.” It shows eleven pictures of various LA sites that morph between shots from the ‘40s and current day. Each picture has a small write up of the significance and changes that have happened. I didn’t know that the opening of the famous Chinese Theatre sparked a riot or that the LA City Hall was the tallest building in LA until 1964 – not so much because of its height (454 ft), but because of seismic concerns that kept all buildings in the area short. This is a pretty cool website that promotes the movie, provides some nice informative background, and is laid out easily and clean without clutter or overuse of laborious Flash animation. If more movie websites were made like this, I might visit the ‘official’ sites more often.