When Chuck Taggart arrived in Los Angeles in 1982, as a graduate film student from New Orleans, his new address was just minutes from Los Angeles International Airport. The very location seemed to imply a contingency plan: no matter what happens, easy in, easy out.
“I came out here completely blind,” Taggart admits. After a cross-country road trip, he and his roommates secured a “cruddy apartment” among the modest single-family homes on Arbor Vitae Street near La Cienega. “All of that is gone now,” Taggart says. Back then, “jumbo jets [were] coming in for a landing directly over our building every six minutes,” he remembers. “But the rent was cheap. My share was $165.” That stretch of fast road leading to LAX wasn’t something you’d see in a movie montage depicting L.A.’s signature features, but Taggart’s relocation would put him that much closer to his goal: “I wanted to pursue a film career,” specifically film production. What he did know was that Loyola Marymount University, or LMU, with its small Westside campus, offered a well-regarded communication arts program. That was enough of a pull.
If Los Angeles and the West are a dream, a point of activation, New Orleans, Taggart knows, is a mood, one hard to shake, something to wrap yourself up in. You take it wherever you go.
It’s this specific sentiment that many Angelenos might recognize when they hear Taggart’s name—and voice.
