LOS Angeles can be too hot, too dangerous, too sprawled out, too obsessed with fame, and too easy to mock, which is what sophisticated east coast New Yorkers love to do, cracking jokes about how, when you get there, there's no there there, or about how sun-soaked California is a great place - providing you're an orange.
Even Johnny Carson, who lives alongside other screen stars in the beach colony of Malibu, likes to sneer that 'the only culture in LA is yoghurt'.
Where else do you hear a person being described not as 'friendly' or 'a lawyer' or 'a mother of two' but as 'bankable'? Where else can you refer freely in conversation to Arnie and Warren and Goldie and Jack as if Schwarzenegger, Beatty, Hawn and Nicholson were old friends of yours, even though you have only seen them on the big screen? For better or worse, Los Angeles - and the executives who run the film and television studios there - shape much of the way we think about the world.
They prick our desires, mould our expectations, sharpen our prejudices - some of them more than others; some of us more than others.
In New York or London, Andy Warhol's quip about everyone being famous for 15 minutes is either a simplistic joke or a handy cliche for journalists with writer's block. In Los Angeles, it's a biblical commandment.
Even long-time natives jabber excitedly about how they spotted Michael Douglas in the drugstore and saw Cher collecting her dry-cleaning.