Travel by DAR

LA: On Twenty Gripes A Day
An East Coast Writer's Insights into Hollywood

(First published in The New York Times Arts & Leisure Section)

“Writers with pride don’t live in LA” – Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard

The LA Freeway is filled with traffic of three distinct types. In the passing lane, stretch limos ... in the middle lane, Mercedes ... in the slow lane, dented subcompacts. Signs above the three lanes, from left to right, are: "Superstars" ... "Producers" ... "Struggling Writers." (Original cartoon doodled by frustrated screenwriter on hold.)

Preston Sturgess was wrong. LA is not Bridgeport with palm trees.

Not at all. In Bridgeport, an ex-East Coast writer turned screenwriter does not take the limo in from the airport and get flashed by a bare-breasted woman singing

"Welcome, pale face!" In Bridgeport, he doesn't drive in from the airport and the second thing he sees is a team of set designers spray-painting the word INTEGRITY on the side of a mock whorehouse palace.

No, a writer leaving his oh-so-promising but oh-so-troublesome novel back East and arriving in LA to knock off a couple of movie scripts understands at once that Preston Sturgess was dead wrong. LA is LA. No comparisons apply.

Winging in from the frigid climes of a New England February, the writer soaks up the LA sunshine like a blessing that seems to expunge all his East Coast trepidations in one blazing ray -- bleaches them out as it bleaches out his laughably outdated sense that life's rewards must be earned the hard way. The Puritanism is KOed -- just like that! -- as irrelevant a weight as that itchy cashmere coat on his arm. Here instead of slush puddles and adenoidal faces, ping pong tables sit out on the lawns, birds peck at an earth that is spongy with perpetual spring, bicycle cops sun themselves at a yogurt bar.

And any litter? -- is flowers.

Which is why the first reaction of the East Coast literary expat, stumbling out of the airport like a sun-blinking emigrant from some third world backwater, is quite inevitably the surety that he's seen the light. This kind of weather is here for the asking? Day after day? You can actually buy Brussels sprouts still on the vine and bite into raisins that squirt warm juice into your mouth and hear the seals bark in Santa Monica Bay at all hours of the night? You can call an 800 number to learn where the wildflowers are blooming? Casting a final glance Eastward, he has to beat down the urge not to gloat. Back home they're at 18 degrees! Poor benighted Pilgrims, huddling around wood stoves! When are they going to wise up? His colleagues are still banging out sonnets at three cents a word, when here even penning the blurb on the back of a video box will put 500 big ones in your pocket.

Driving top down under the palms in no time, wind blowing what's left of his hair (he'd have more hair if he'd come here earlier), he soon realizes: guess what? -- he is living the California cliches. And what wonderful cliches they are! Air so soft it curls your toes ... women so blond they seem backlit by sunset ... If these be the California cliches, long may they rerun! He's eating and breathing and maybe even working in a town so self-confidently cool it gets away with initializing itself. LA!

With all the zeal of the instant convert, our writer is indignant with boosterism. The plane that got him here seems no longer the red eye but the green eye, filled as it was with non-natives envious that they don't live here. What do they mean, all those green-eyed detractors of which so late he was one, that the four seasons of LA are drought, earthquake, mudslide, and fire? What about this night, for instance? The moon is more full than it's ever been before (it's been airbrushed of blemishes). Each wavelet in the susurrating Pacific is painted as if with a fingerbrush of silver (colorizing by TNT). To the writer, turning down his alley towards the ocean, the surf seems to be choreographed to the beat of his car radio in a way that makes him think: Surely this landscape loves him, does it not? Surely it could never turn against him? And look, what more proof is needed? Out there in the dunes, could that be someone taking home video footage of a police beating, recording each thump of nightstick on skull for posterity? The writer's era, his personal epoch, is being recorded! He's at the very heartbeat of a crass and dying society!

Writer is pitching his story to a bunch of Hollywood producers. Whipping out his manuscript proudly, the writer exclaims: "Now here's a mediocre idea you're really going to love." (Original cartoon doodled by writer on hold.)

Odd, therefore, that the East Coast writer can't help but notice that in Bridgeport people don't spend nearly so much time justifying where they are. Must be the weather: this much sun is like winning the climate lottery day after day. Excuses are in order. Guilt sets in. The sentiment he keeps encountering is that "back there" is what's real; that everyone is getting away with something being here. Oft-heard sentiment: "Having my parents (spouse, children) still in the East keeps me honest (grounded, rooted)."

Which is all to the advantage of the East Coast writer who trails with him vapors of rectitude just by dint of hailing where he hails from. Old fashioned values accrue to him -- the very ones he nearly flushed into the clouds on that green eye from LaGuardia. He personifies serious credentials ... having published a couple of books with no pictures.

And not only is he a Real Writer. He's new. The newest writer in town! Newness is a commodity to be husbanded, a power to titillate in inverse proportion to how much of it he uses. The way to retain his clout is not to flaunt it, he quickly learns. If he shows little of his work, he can stay new for days. If he shows them nothing, who knows, he could stay flavor of the week for a month!

Not to say that traditional hard-earned hierarchy and classic status symbols are unimportant. No. Asked the time, the cab driver will interrupt his tale of what a lousy tipper Sly Stallone is to say: "According to my Rolodex ..." Asked what sort of music is played at the Hollywood Bowl, the nice cultured lady will remark: "Oh, it's wonderful. You get a box, and the longer you've had a box, the closer you are to the stage ..." No, LA is all status and hierarchy, total in-your-face brand-names and angling for a place in the sun. But the wonderful paradox of LA is that never has there been a place where hierarchy and status is so naked yet so fluid. Fueled by ever more recent legends about the emigrant next door who conceived the concept for the latest reality-based tv smash in the shower, there's a perverse receptivity to newcomers. The Cachet of the New dictates that any mealy-mouthed stranger just might be the next Matt Groenig. They pat him on the back, wish him good luck ...

It's not hospitality. It's that they don't want to be caught kicking someone in the head until they're sure he's down for the count.

This much is true: In Bridgeport, the East Coast writer could never pick up the phone his second day and cold-call one of the top people in town, a 25 year old Killer Agent in tee shirt and ripped black jeans who has already placed four $800,000 screenplays this year, and to whom he is pretty sure the syllables of his name have never been whispered, and have her chirp: "Oh hi, how've you been?"

Just in case ...

"So," says this Killer Agent over Pellegrino and lime at the back of Morton's that night, visibly sniffing for the aroma of pipe smoke off his Eastern tweed, "so tell me a story ..."

For like it or not, its saving grace, or its undying curse, is that LA is a story town. In fact, precisely what makes this mill town unlike other mill towns across the country is that what the mills churn out is not soap dishes or steampipe fittings but stories. And as befitting a town founded on fables, everyone keeps an ear cocked. The writer witnesses acrobatic amounts of body English being performed in restaurants, hears the baby wail of printers shrieking from apartment windows at all hours of the night, watches scripted pages fluttering like seagulls at the dump in the non-stop wind above the freeways ...

However, before he is allowed to breathe word one of his story, a serious work based on heretofore undisclosed findings that Jackie O was in bed during the Cuban Missile Crisis with a certain Fidel C -- the writer is interrupted by the slithering of a contract across the table. A mere formality, the Killer Agent yawns; a technical trifle.

But with such high stakes, you understand. And with the likes of Art Buchwald squawking that Eddie Murphy stole his concept for Coming To America, can you imagine ...

That's the way it is, all over town. The Killer Agent has to protect herself against a possible law suit. Those Who Hold All Power will not consent to hear a word from Those Who Lack All Power until the latter signs away all rights to their story forever.

Just in case ...

LA beach with big surf, gorgeous girls, and cloak-and-dagger spies lurking behind the dunes to dash out and grab manuscript pages left on beach towels. Sign says: "Caution: Screenplays being stolen." (Original cartoon doodled by writer on hold.)

So it being such a story town, here's one about that unsung but all-important element, the indispensable component upon whose back the myth of Hollywood gets made and all green envy devolves: The Sorry Fringe. If, as they say, the road to Hollywood is paved with broken hearts, these are the folks who supply the raw product. Wholesale. OK, true story: Guy comes to LA after film school with all the hope, all the dreams, and -- let's not forget the bottom line here -- all the connections to make things happen. But he doesn't make it. Who knows why? Most people don't, and he's one of them. 15 years later, he's barely making a living managing an organic eatery in Santa Monica. But is he bitter? Is he resigned? Not on your life! He still basks in the long shadow of LA glamour for one reason: His restaurant plumbing is used by celebrities.

"Guess who came in today?!" he implores, grabbing the writer's arm, pummeling it. "Dustin Hoffman!!! He was in for like four minutes!!!"

What did he order, Jeff?

"Well, he was in a rush, he just used the john, but he talked to me for like 30 seconds ...!"

The secret to Jeff's success is that by a lucky break (and from what else but such divine accidents does LA glory devolve?) Jeff's restaurant finds itself situated next door to a liberal church where celebrities periodically show up to perform quality-time social causes. Being a good neighbor, the church after a few hours always points the visiting celebs over to Jeff's.

Not to eat. To void. The church has no bathroom of its own. And here's what makes the Sorry Fringe sorry. Jeff is not ironic about this! Au contraire: He couldn't be more thrilled. He's one block over from the hottest street in the nation, the Santa Monica Promenade, and he can't get the joint to succeed because in LA being one block from the action is being one block on Mars -- so close, yet so far away, just like his career --

But:

"He talked to me for like 30 seconds!!!"

(As for the great man Hoffman, himself ... Our writer happened to catch him that day strolling out of the john and his face was something to behold. The pope on Christmas Eve has never been more beatific, bestowing smiles on the faithful left and right, gracing the entire congregation as he was by voiding in their proximity.)

Which is why, despite the preponderance of all those California cliches, beneath the thrill-a-minute glamour of silver wavelets and personally choreographed surf and proximate voiding ... there's anger in the air. Forest fires of wrath, in fact. Earthquakes of bile.

For writers, this phenomenon is easily understood. They don't get the respect they deserve. Execs still tell the one about the Polish actress so stupid she slept with the screenwriter. Producers still complain, at the end of a brainstorming session, "if only we'd had a writer here." As if writers are nothing but glorified secretaries. As if the whole industry isn't constructed smack dab atop the writer's imagination.

Why are writers low man? Partly it's that they don't sell glamorous; that they tend to sport uncombed hair and soft-soled shoes and other accouterments of the isolated life which are read as weakness by the image-conscious gangsters who run the show. But more crucial is the fact that writers, themselves, don't feel entitled. Professional self-doubters, they have this thing about their work being only play. And needless to say, non-entitlement spells death in a city in which the bulliest ego wins, where he who plays the honesty angle too seriously or hesitates at the intersection is lost. If you balk at out-booring the guy at the blinking light, you may as well go back to Bridgeport -- don't even bother getting off the plane.

So our writer, virginal to the ways of the West, blinking at the product emerging from the story mills, says, "I can do better than that." Mistake Number One. They don't want better than that. They've got a thriving industry churning out exactly what sells. As Kevin Bacon's "Uncle Olaf" says in one of the more egregious productions of the past few years (He Said She Said), "Why fix it if it ain't broke?"

Our writer says: "At least I can spell." But they don't want spelling. In fact, it's the only branch of the writing profession where a protagonist's name can be misspelled throughout a manuscript -- and no one will notice. Here are a few of the spelling mistakes our writer saw in actual produced screenplays that had passed through hundreds of Hollywood hands on their way to minting big bucks: "Blue color neighborhood." "Gravesight." "A very lay-back person." "Nuclear waist." Here is the concluding line taken verbatim from the screen outline of An Officer And A Gentleman: "In their final kiss, he transforms from self-love to loving another as one's self."

The East Coast writer says: "But I know Faulkner and Dostoevsky."

Big mistake. Not only do they not want to hear about Faulkner and Big D, but if the writer promises never again to admit that he was raised reading them rather than He-Man and She-Ra, they're gonna be real nice and forget he ever said it.

(They're lying, again. They forget nothing.)

The LA answer to its own illiteracy is to make up in pretense what it lacks in grammar. Variety regularly stuffs its interviews with such hard-blowing phraseology as "he allows" and "he rather agrees." Our writer's personal fave: "Her success comes and goes like Michelangelo."

The longer they're here -- writers -- the shorter their teeth.

But the province of rage is not confined to male writers. Female writers have it even worse. In its deepest sociological essence, Hollywood is a town of rich old men taking their revenge on beautiful young women. At least that's how it felt to Margy, our writer's roommate, co-writer, and freelance Disney cartoon voice. Margy's rage grew with each pre-feminist cartoon character she was forced to inhabit, with the consequence that it squirted out in unpredictable ways. Who in the audience would know, for instance, that the mouth enunciating the balmy lullabies of Snow White was capable of screaming, foaming, ranting with fragments of breakfast flying from her lips -- and all this over a thirty cent dispute on the phone bill?

The targets of Snow White's rage were as random as they were innocent. For several weeks the writer watched these targets move closer until, inexorably, Target Numero Uno became the writer himself. Who one day found himself shut out of his apartment, the bolts changed, the windows drilled shut, his belongings locked out and his brand new refrigerator locked in. The writer did what had to be done. Emboldened by a dose of the LA rage that was there for the taking, he scaled the bricks of the three story building, pushed in the screen, emptied his fridge of her food which he stacked neatly on the floor to rot, and wheeled the fridge out the door.

If he had to go to court, he figured, his defense would be simple. LA made him do it. The Seven Dwarfs, your honor.

Tour group being led through Hollywood studio stops at a room where fully conscious people are strapped down to tables while the insides of their chest cavities are being scooped out. "Oh them?" says the tour guide. "They're just screenwriters going through the rejection process." (Original cartoon doodled by writer on hold.)

So it is different. From Bridgeport: yessiree, Preston. The difference is this.

* In Bridgeport, you're not expected to judge the quality of a restaurant's food by how many limos are parked out front. Nor does the parking attendant snub you because the restaurant happens to be owned by Stephen Spielberg's mother.

* In Bridgeport, coffee table books tend to be four color tints of Brancusi or photographic studies of Pompeii. Not Porsche catalogues and Calvin Klein brochures.

* In Bridgeport, the receptionist will have a sign on her desk saying "Thank you for not smoking." She will not have a sign saying "Sorry we do not validate."

* In Bridgeport, the best pick-up place in town is not necessarily the AA meetings. Nor is it the accepted wisdom, in Bridgeport, that if you're not recovering from some addiction, you must still be practicing it.

* In Bridgeport, the mailman does not sport pink toenail polish. Nor does every taco stand boast its own wall of signed Farrah Fawcett endorsements.

* In Bridgeport, car dealership billboards do not quote Oscar acceptance speeches.

* They don't have emergency vitamin delivery service.

* They don't have flyers on the telephone poles announcing: "Tortoise found."

* In Bridgeport, the garbage trucks don't have car phones. Nor do the street hookers wear beepers.

* In Bridgeport, the lifeguards don't all have cancer from going in the water. Nor do the high-colonic health radicals all smoke Camels as a private buffer zone against air pollution.

* In Bridgeport, the shop windows don't display emergency earthquake kits which include eye shadow and plum liner. Nor, to raise money, does the PTA auction quake-damaged household items of local celebrities (Nick Nolte's broken beer mugs, two for ten dollars).

* In Bridgeport, after a natural disaster, the 11 o'clock local news does not have a special entitled, "Is God Mad at Us?" Nor do phone psychics offer discounts on the singular question: "Should I stay or should I move?"

* In Bridgeport, three out of four men using the Y's sauna won't be sitting za-zen. Nor will the fourth be a naked old-timer who suddenly gets the impulse to stand in a Shakespearean pose and declaim: "Nevertheless, I'm having a reasonably good hair day!"

* In Bridgeport, there isn't a bar that gives free drinks to anyone who can produce a check for residuals under a dollar. Nor do you hear this sad refrain from every other table: "I wanted to sell out but there weren't any buyers."

* In Bridgeport, you won't overhear a mother calling her child this way: "Brando, where are you, bubbela?" Nor are Christmas cards from Robert De Niro kept nonchalantly out on the mantle till June.

* In Bridgeport, the guy in the supermarket dressed as Dracula will not be ignored like he wasn't even there by the housewives loading Tropicana into their carts. Nor do various drunk driving schools compete for your business by featuring instructors who are stand-up belly-dancing comics.

* In Bridgeport, the value of a house which was the site of a mass murder does not go up three times in value. Nor, in Bridgeport, when they say something is written "like a dime store novel," do they mean it as a compliment.

* In Bridgeport, they still make a habit of hitting the mute button if someone calls and they're watching TV.

* They don't turn the TV up louder because the medium is nothing to be ashamed about.

* In Bridgeport, the hot shot director and the hot shot producer do not make each other's acquaintance at a pool party while jointly resuscitating a guest who choked on the radicchio, and proceed to iron out the details of their deal between life-saving breaths. Not does the yoga teacher come to class wearing gold leaf high heels because she just came off the set where she was doubling as a scream queen.

* In Bridgeport, people tend to take it in stride if they happen to meet someone socially who isn't in "the industry." They don't wait with expectant smile for the punch line ("I don't get it, what am I missing here?") when told that the other person happens to own, say, a chain of hardware stores.

* Nor, in Bridgeport, do you find high school janitors conducting hunger fasts to demand scheduled breaks for astroyoga, municipal buses carrying advertisements for penile enlargements, pet loss clinics sponsoring weddings between bereaved clients ...

* And of course in Bridgeport, on an average Saturday night, you won't see Daniel Day Lewis so drunk he is falling into his arugula, Diane Keaton pushing and pushing on a bathroom door plainly labeled PULL, Robocop picking his nose with his pinky finger. Nor will you hear the bartender say: "Don't look now, but right behind you is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Just finished the fourth in his trilogy!"

All of which reminds you of the historical fact that, even after California attained statehood in 1850, it was for years easier to get there by freighting around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America than by travelling the direct route overland. That's how much farther away LA has always been in mind-set than mere geography ...

Producer is telling screenwriter: "You're smarter than most people writing this stuff ... and I don't say that just to discourage you." (Original cartoon doodled by writer on hold.)

A final story. The writer's dentmobile was broken into. Flattered though he was that LA thieves deemed his car radio worthy of their efforts, he was unhappy that they had messed up the wires so he couldn't turn off the heat. He took it to the dealer who said repairs would take two weeks and cost a minimum two grand, no guarantees.

It became a crisis. Homesick in the dealer's parking lot, no longer tweedy but tan-chested in Malibu pants and polka dot mocs, overhot with engine heat flooding through the vents in all that infernal LA sunshine so that he felt the entire landscape was in personal revolt against him; eager for slush, longing for adenoidal faces, and further disheartened by the fact that he had finally come off hold after six months only to learn that the 23 year old Weenie Assistant of the 25 year old Killer Agent had stolen his story and was turning it into a Hallmark Special revealing that Jackie O ran a franchise of dominatrix services ... the writer drove to a park overlooking the Pacific.

A homeless person living under the trees shuffled over, assessed the situation, and offered to take a look at the writer's engine. Sure, like the writer, savvy to the ways of the West, was going to entrust whatever wires were left to this Sorry Fringer with no teeth.

But something inside the writer told him to let Glen try. Fifteen minutes later the car was fixed.

Glen noticed the look of astonishment on the writer's face.

"Of course, didn't you know?" Glen said matter-of-factly. "The best minds in this town live in the park."

So he left.

That was it. Crystal clear. The writer could either go down to the pool with a martini and suddenly he'd be 90 years old ... or he could go back East, publish his

original cartoons, and make a perfectly fine living in the grand tradition of dissing the West ...

On the bus ride out to the airport, the sky looked smudged with a wet eraser so he couldn't even see the clouds through all the smog. At ground level he rode past ping pong tables warped in the sun, past the litter of rotting palm leaves, past bicycle cops roughing up a bare-breasted woman for allegedly spitting yogurt at them.

He also passed a bit of graffiti that he vaguely remembered seeing when he came in, a lifetime of lost hair ago. There it was again, still spray-painted on the set of a mock whorehouse palace, faded by exposure but nearly distinct enough to renew his sense of hope, nearly legible enough to make him want to jump off the bus and hitch back to town to give it one last shot:

The word INTEGRITY.

Six months later, someone had added the most eloquent word in the LA lexicon.

"Not."