California Collage : Images: Exhibit celebrating 10th anniversary of Giorgio fragrance tries to avoid cliches in distilling the state’s essence.

The assignment was daunting. Sum up California, the executives said. Instead of words, use images to describe the Golden State--photographs and moving pictures. Make it accessible but not trite.

These were Betsy Jablow and Ron Haver’s marching orders. What they came up with--”California: The Cultural Edge,” on exhibit through Nov. 24 at the Director’s Guild in Hollywood--is much more than avocados and roller-blading. In fact, Jablow said she intentionally left out those obvious images, as well as many others that friends and colleagues suggested to evoke California.

“Barbie dolls, artichokes--people had lots of lists,” said Jablow, the exhibit’s photography curator. “Hula-Hoops and Frisbees--forget that. Nudism--that’s not California. Houses on stilts--whoever suggested that has never been to the Hamptons.”

Instead, Jablow chose 126 images, among them photographs of a cactus growing in director David Lynch’s garden and windmills in the Mojave Desert. And then there is Andrew Bush’s “Woman Caught in Traffic While Heading Southeast on Highway 101 near the Woodland Hills Exit, San Fernando Valley, California, at 5:38 p.m. in the Summer of 1989.”

California as concept--this was what the sweet-smelling folks at Giorgio Beverly Hills had in mind when they commissioned this multimedia exhibit. For a decade, they had marketed Giorgio, a fragrance that is advertised as capturing “the spirit of Beverly Hills in a bottle.”

To celebrate the perfume’s 10th birthday, they asked Jablow and Haver, who heads the film department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to distill the essence of the entire state.

The resulting exhibit, which features eight videotaped collages as well as framed photos, displays what the promotional brochure calls “the heat, heart and soul of a culture evolving.”

Even the installation evokes California. As designed by the Santa Monica-based Harmonica Inc., photos are hung on billboard-like panels--as if being viewed from a freeway--and lighted from overhead--as if on a movie set. Video monitors peek out from curved, wooden cabinets that suggest ocean waves.

With such a consistent theme running throughout, the exhibit still manages to surprise. Mixed in with the expected images of beautiful people, fast cars and nouvelle cuisine are harder-edged shots that display the ugly, the frightening, the stupid and the weird.

In Haver’s collages of music videos, television, feature films and news footage from the last 10 years, a clip of Randy Newman singing “I Love L.A.” is intercut with a scene from the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” In the scene, Sean Penn says: “Surfing’s not a sport. It’s a way of life. . . . It’s a way of looking at that wave and saying, ‘Hey, bud, let’s party!’ ”

Marlon Brando is shown testifying at the murder trial of his son, Christian. Moments later, in a clip from the movie “Pretty Woman,” Richard Gere screeches to a stop beside Julia Roberts and asks, “Could you tell me how to get to Beverly Hills?”

Perhaps California’s most repeated video moment--footage of Los Angeles police officers beating motorist Rodney G. King--is spliced together with a music video of singer Annie Lennox in brightly colored makeup and a television ad for the Gap.

Jacqueline Cohen, Giorgio Beverly Hills’ vice president of corporate marketing and communications, said Haver wanted the video collages to mimic “the constant hail of images we encounter on a daily basis.”

Not all the images are scenes of California. When Kevin Costner tells Susan Sarandon he believes in “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days” in a clip from the movie “Bull Durham,” he is, in fact, standing in a North Carolina living room. But Cohen said Haver felt strongly that even movies and music videos that were not set in California have “their California stamp.”

“The exhibition really is about ideas and trends that have come from California--that were created, written and produced here--and how they influence people the world over,” Cohen said. “People are influenced by California, whether they live here or not.”

Jablow lives in New York and is a former administrator at the Museum of Modern Art. When she began her quest for California images, she started in Manhattan--at Conde Nast Publications, which publishes several fashion and style magazines. Several of the photos that ended up in the exhibit came from those archives, including portraits by Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton.

But glossy, magazine-style photographs were only the beginning. By the end, Jablow had collected an eclectic mix that includes architectural and scientific photos, aerial shots, publicity photos from movie studios and one portrait of a homeless family that was living in a car.

The photos, shot by 59 photographers, span different eras as well. Recent photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge and of breakfast at the Bel-Air Hotel are contrasted with a 1935 photograph of Los Angeles’ first drive-in theater. A 1988 color photo of a woman practicing yoga in front of the ocean is not far from a black and white portrait of Muscle Beach, shot in 1949.

“These are photographs that you would normally not see under the same roof,” Jablow said. “You might see Leibovitz and Newton together--a celebrity show. Or other exhibits are organized by style or by period.” Having the chance to place a picture of San Simeon in close proximity to a shadowy silhouette of Mickey Mouse, she said, was an unusual opportunity.

Even as diverse as the show is, Jablow was second-guessed. “One photographer said to me, ‘Oh, god, you don’t have any plastic surgery pictures,’ ” she recalled.

But Jablow said her only regrets are the images she was unable to include, either because of space constraints or lack of availability: a giant redwood, a cult member, some illustration of movie special effects and a shot of the linear accelerator at Stanford.

Given the chance, Jablow said, “I could easily do another ‘Cultural Edge’ show a year from now.” There would be no danger of repetition, she said--as subjects go, California “is that kind of fluid thing.”

Proceeds from the sale of “Cultural Edge” calendars and T-shirts, available at all Giorgio Beverly Hills boutiques, will go to benefit 10 Los Angeles charities: AIDS Project Los Angeles, Comic Relief, ERAS Center for Children at Risk, Heal the Bay, Para los Ninos, Phoenix House, Project Angel Food, SHARE, Venice Family Clinic and the Young Musicians Foundation.