OFF THE WALL : Photographer Melba Levick Brings the Larger-Than-Life Murals of Los Angeles Indoors in a New Exhibit

“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

--Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard”

And smaller. And smaller. Not only have movie palaces with screens fit for a sun king been replaced by miserly multiplexes, but more and more Americans are taking their movies in even tinier doses, through the wee window of the TV screen. The larger-than-life is getting harder to find these days. Which is why the resurgence of murals in Los Angeles, marked by a new book and a gallery show, is every bit as timely as Hopalong Cassidy riding to the rescue ever was. “The Big Picture,” a collection of photographs by Melba Levick, is about to be published, and a selection of her pictures will be featured at the B-1 Gallery in Santa Monica from March 7 to April 3, with a book-signing March 18.

It is surely fitting that the town where terms such as “supercolossal” were bandied about as though they meant something should have become the home, over the past 20 years, to hundreds of murals--huge, epic, unashamed acres of paint popping up in the likeliest (and unlikeliest) of locations. In schoolyards and in private homes, on the sides of buildings and over every spare freeway ramp, the brightest, gaudiest colors display themselves in the electric Southern California sun. It’s not only that the sun makes them seem at home here; it’s also that the movies have prepared our minds for the outlandish and the super-real.

And although a wall is a wall is a wall, the murals on them are painted in competing styles and flavors. The most traditional might be called the epic, the one that attempts to tell a tale. Like the photo-realistic history of L.A.’s Jewish community that graces the walls of its secular shrine, Canter’s on Fairfax, or like “Exposition Park Welcomes the World,” a populist tribute to the Olympic ideal.

Next consider the political murals, the vibrant howls for spiritual and sociopolitical recognition that roared out of the Latino and black communities and that still dazzle with the daring of their color combinations and aesthetic styles. The idea that L.A. is all bucolic blandness is skewered by one look at the diverse themes and styles of “Ofrenda Maya,” “Corrido de Boyle Heights” and the San Fernando Valley’s own “Great Wall.”

Dazzling in a different way are the tromp l’oeil efforts that fool the eye and disturb the mind. Who can look at the vision of post-apocalypse L.A. in “Isle of California” without feeling a chill, or glide by Jane Golden’s stand of redwoods on distinctly non-rural Lincoln Boulevard without experiencing the cool breeze of unexpected tranquillity?

The best of the murals are the whoppers, the ones that couldn’t be more comfortable with their outsized size. Larger-than-life is a pale term indeed for Kent Twitchell’s marvelous five-story “Bride and Groom,” a putatively happy couple who loom over Broadway. Similarly, Ed Ruscha towers over 10th Street, and artist Lita Albuquerque looks longingly across a divided downtown freeway. “I see them as monuments,” Twitchell has said of his work, “like the stone figures on Easter Island.” It’s no stretch to see why.

What the best of all these efforts share not only with each other but also with the dream factory that was Hollywood is the ability to awaken us from the everyday, to rouse us out of ourselves and into a sense of celebration. L.A.’s murals astonish and delight with their always-bracing effrontery. So move over, IMAX. So long, Cinemascope. Take five, Todd-AO. It’s no longer the movies, but the murals, that are bigger and better than ever.

Photographs by Melba Levick, from the forthcoming book “The Big Picture.” Copyright 1988 by Thames and Hudson Ltd., London. Reprinted by arrangement with Little, Brown and Co. Inc.