ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

A MEMORY OF THE MOVIES

         

“You aren’t too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” Matty (Kathleen Turner) to Ned (William Hurt) in Body Heat, written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

I only lived in Los Angeles for two years, but it was the realisation of an adolescent dream. Like all such confrontations between desire and reality, however, it was both disappointing and elating. It was just as well that chance intervened and drew me away to Paris, a city where I had never had the slightest ambition to live or intention to do so. There’s a destiny that shapes our ends…

While in Los Angeles, I was “Our Hollywood Correspondent” for a number of magazines in both Britain and Australia. I don’t remember for which of them this was written, or even if it ever saw print: the attrition rate on periodicals, then as now, was savage and, once the cheque arrived, I preferred not to see what damage the editors inflicted on my text. If indeed this is its first appearance, it may some anthopological interest as reflectiomns on a different time way of life.

Cabana boys at work.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD….

  It's a classic Hollywood fable; the story of the Cabana Boys.

           Cabanas fringe the pool in all the best hotels. When the u.v. bites, guests retreat to their shade and ring for fresh towels and a spritzer - which are brought by ...yes, you guessed it.

           In 1987, two cabana boys at a fashionable LA hostelry read and loved William Gibson’s cyberpunk adventure Neumomancer. Loved it so much, in fact, that they persuaded a millionare lady guest - their methods are obscure - to buy them the film rights. Now they're in the movie business - like, it sometimes seems, everyone else in this town.

           There are a multitude of Cabana Boy stories. "Every asshole in Hollywood has a script in his back pocket," says actor Gary Busey sourly.  Colin Higgins made his first sale, Harold and Maude, to a producer whose lawn he was mowing at the time. When Michael Douglas bought Diane Thomas's script for Romancing the Stone, she was waiting tables. She bought a Porsche with the money and wrapped it round a tree before she had a chance to win another credit.     Success and failure can be as instantanous as a lottery win. David Seltzer conceived Punch Line in 1979 but it took nine years of haggling and doing without to get it made. After the meeting with Columbia's Dawn Steel that nailed the deal, Seltzer called for his battered car. The valet drove out a gleaming new BMW: the studio's quixotic gift.

           Then there was Ridley Scott's assistant on Someone to Watch Over Me who approached the LAPD for information on police procedure. A hard-boiled homicide cop spent hours talking murder and retribution, a glimpse for her of a world infinitely remote from the film industry's flimsy inventions. Dazed, she asked how she could repay him. "You could you let me take you to dinner," he said, "and you could read my script."

            Classic novels of the Hollywood writing experience like The Last Tycoon are laughably remote from contemporary reality.  Scott Fitzgerald was right only in his vision of the film community as a court where supplicants and intriguers compete for attention and approval. It's still a town of jealousy, gossip and betrayal, of has-beens and wannabes, where fortunes and reputations are lost on a whim, and just as easily made.

      Scott Fitzgerald never came to terms with this random generosity and cruelty. He was in movies but never of them. Like Nathanael West and Dorothy Parker and William Faulkner and Bertolt Brecht and the others imported in a misplaced attempt to give Hollywood "class", Fitzgerald hovered moth-like in its limelight, drawn but repelled. After working on The Women  or The Life of Madam Curie he'd go home and write another Pat Hobby story about a burnt-out writer from silent movies who panhandles around Hollywood. Though he liked to think such subversion kept him honest in a dishonest town,  it only showed that he shouldn't have been there in the first place.

           Film mythology is full of stories about novelists becalmed in California on an ocean of Chivas Regal. The format is standard: struggle and frustration, relieved by an occasional lucky escape. There's Brecht, sneering, "Every morning, to earn my bread/I go to the market where they buy lies," and always keeping a small suitcase packed by the door, against that day when the secret police  came. Everybody knows about William Faulkner, asking the studio if he could "work at home" and not telling them he meant Oxford, Mississippi,  and Nathanael West, writing movie musicals and comedies, then slipping away to create his Hogarthian satire The Day of the Locust

           It's harder to be honest about Los Angeles, to admit that the people are friendly, the city fascinating, the climate better than anywhere on earth, and the remuneration for a writer potentially fabulous. A few exiles acknowledged their seduction. Christopher Isherwood never could tear himself away. He settled, and died, here. Aldous Huxley ("Al" Huxley to Variety) found Los Angeles a year-round Roman carnival. Fleeing in the 'thirties from the bitchery of Somerset Maugham, Hugh Walpole succumbed utterly. "It is lovely to sit under the moon at midnight," he wrote, "and watch these beautiful creatures with practically nothing on play tennis under artificial light. But I think why I am really happy is that I am free for the first time from all the English jealousy that I've suffered from for years."

           Fitzgerald and Brecht would be even less at home in the Hollywood of today. Among other disbarments, they'd be too old in a community that fears and suspects seniority. Most successful screenwriters are around thirty and have never written for anything but movies. A recent Screenwriters' Guild survey uncovered bias against three sub-groups of writers: women, blacks - and those over forty. This last group can't create love scenes for a teenage audience, producers claim. Stung, a senior scribbler snapped "Some of us did keep diaries."

           The hunger of the young writers is in the air, like the taste of brass. You see them in the raffish/fashionable restaurants like Chaya and Citrus and Musso and Frank's: clones of rock stars in black coin shades, hair in a cropped pony tail, and all-over matt black clothes, with sleeves shoved halfway up their forearms.

           Most  know little more about films than the average college student. But to producers whose target audience is under twenty-five, that's just fine. Surfing into the 'nineties on remakes and sequels, Hollywood wants nothing new: only variations on the fashionable, the recent. The standard pitch is "Like...but..." : "It's like Fatal Attraction, but in 19th century Boston."  "It's Rambo, but with aliens. David Cronenberg said he was tampted to pitch Dead Ringers  as "It's like Rocky, but with twin gynaecologists.")

Like Rocky, but with twin gynaecologists. Jeremy Irons and Genevieve Bujold and Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers.

           Like spiders, the new writers survive on heat - heat generated by style and chutzpah and a restless monitoring of The Industry. The more enterprising circulate scripts on spec., remembering Chris Columbus, whose Gremlins caught the eye of Steven Spielberg and made $200 million. There's a trade in xeroxed copies of classic screenplays. Favourites are Chinatown and Body Heat: if you're cribbing, crib from the best.

           Other wannabes troll for agents with treatments and resumes, or take one of the screenwriting classes that infest college schedules - not to learn, but to network. Someone you meet in class may score a development deal with a major studio - and nobody these days writes alone. Then, too, teachers often have friends in the glass fortresses of Century City. A lucky class can be given the ear of a power figure, like Bob Kosberg, vice-president for Development with indieprod Guber/Peters, who not long ago fronted a cattle-call pitch for hopeful screenwriters. He'd have gone to Palm Springs for the weekend if he'd known 150 of them would show.

           Like all elite groups, New Screenwriting has its jargon. Often luridly obscene,  it's spun off the slang of rock, sports, computers and showbiz law. This movie or that has "cratered", and its writer is "off the sports list". Who's re-writing? "Dunno. I'm out of the loop."

           Someone else has pitched an idea to a producer. How did it go? "It was a very cast-driven movie, and we knew that going in. It was a nervous pitch. They passed."Soft pass -'Let's have another look when you've rewritten it'- or hard -'What else have you got?'?  "They took a Pasadena." And no part of Los Angeles is more remote, more suburban, more 'fifties than that satellite town. If they took a Pasadena on you, you're dried out, burned off, twisting in the wind; in the ultimate category of Hollywood disdain, you're Toast.

           Nobody promised any of them it was going to be easy, and most young writers almost relish the hell. No price is too high for the benison of that screen credit, even though critics will praise the director and audiences assume the stars made up their lines as they went along. And there are happy endings - though not always quite the endings you expect. The Cabana Boys, for instance. They never found a producer for Neuromancer. But one company did buy a story from them. It's about two cabana boys who read this novel....