BEGUILING HOLLYWOOD

At the moment I’m looking at an old menu from a restaurant called the Brown Derby. On its cover is an imaginary map of Los Angeles with Hollywood at its center. It’s scattered with cartoon depictions of movie cameras, musical notes winging out of the Hollywood Bowl, crooners broadcasting from NBC Radio Studios, and roadsters zipping down Franklin Avenue.

It’s an extremely impressionistic guide to L.A.

This vast city (really a collection of towns) tends to be represented in its spatial relationship to Hollywood. Please note, the map is not to scale, it highlights the locations (there are several) of a once legendary and now gone restaurant: as I said, it was called the Brown Derby, a nexus of the dream factory drones and queen bees, so to speak.

USC, Mid City, Leimert Park, Koreatown, and South Central lie well beyond its margins. I will add sometimes a map is a map, and other times it’s a state of mind.

Now you’ve made it to the next episode of the podcast. And if you haven’t already, please vote. No more time to mail it in, either vote in person, or take your mail-in ballot to a drop box or your local election office.

At the onset of our thirties we, the former nannies, while ascending the career ladder, found our personal lives lagging. Polly found her male peers juvenile – emotionally immature and adolescent in their delight at attaining useless things. Darla made a three year, nine million dollar TV development deal and found all her male dinner companions, and prospective bedmates, really weren’t so very interested in her, but in her willingness to read their scripts and laugh at their desperate jokes. Jane fared slightly better in an academic setting, at least university men professed to a belief in gender equality and a need for sensitivity in human relations – in practice, not so much.

Unlike Mr. Booker, Bob Brown was not a man who, he liked to say, “Waded through god damn minutia,” especially the finer points of male versus female behavior. Bob Brown tended to set goals and chart practical points to achieve them. He thought of himself as an integral, fundamental, part of the clockwork that regularly ticked out the American dream. He was a big picture kind of guy. His mother had been an R.N., his father sold tires. When his big brother, Manny, got him a job in the mailroom at Darryl Zanuck’s studio, Fox, Bob Brown took off like a rocket: from machine age to space age. It never occurred to him, when he met a San Francisco heiress wearing a very becoming snug mohair sweater-set on the Fox lot that his trajectory was about to swing way out of orbit.

There is a kind of courtship that goes on between producer and director, a kind of wooing. The producer holds the means of movie making (money) and the director, if they’re any good, provides the vision. There’s a honeymoon period, and often an inevitable falling out. It was a form of sexual sublimation, but I thought it would do; sex, power, creativity, industry — yes, a muddle that would have to be sorted out in time, and it was the only muddle I had going.

While we went through the motions, sort of setting a price for film ideas, packaging, I brewed a pot of coffee and got distracted by the brand on the foil wrapped sack. Starbucks. That was a name I’d been familiar with long before the emergence of a national brand. It littered my father’s desk; Herman Melville immortalized it in Jake’s favorite book. Starbuck was the name of a Nantucket family, whalers and captains and ship owners. Dad, who still did business with the Coffins, Gardners, and Starbucks refused to drink the coffee. He scoffed at the lack of authenticity and preferred Folgers in a can.

There are definitely seasons in California, whatever anyone says to the contrary. In the winter the smog lifts. The daytime skies are a blue that delights my New England soul. At night the lights that sprawl from the San Gabriel Mountains to the sea glow against a heavenly dome of deep Mediterranean blue. People wear sweaters. In 1991 when I turned thirty the film I had worked on for over a year was released. It got critical acclaim over Thanksgiving weekend (a good omen for the Oscars) and as Christmas approached and the daytime temperatures maxed out at 68º the director I had faithfully assisted, Cooper, started to think about his next project.

“You know my mom and dad came out to visit me when I was on that first movie. I took them to set, Grauman’s Chinese, Max Factor’s. We looked at every little bitty star on Hollywood Boulevard and had hot fudge sundaes at C.C. Brown’s. The day they came to see me at work, oh my. Cooper had this girl hangin’ around wearing some kind of white-bra, kind a short-playsuit thing with a black leather jacket on top and ankle high stiletto boots. Said he wanted to get her a line so she could get Taft-Hartleyed.”

“One minute, Taft-Hartleyed?”

“If you get a line on a movie — kinda spontaneously because all of a sudden they need someone in a role they never thought of before, or thought to cast most likely — then you get Taft-Hartleyed. It’s a labor law. And you can get into SAG.”

“Ah. And everybody wants their SAG card.”

“So they can get residuals. Yes. Anyway, my mama took one look at that outfit and she told me, in no uncertain terms, that Mr. Daniels was consortin’ with the kind of caricature of a woman that a gay man dates before he finally figures out he likes boys.”

 

 

Shooting began. Patsy Morris, checking in one afternoon as the crew broke for lunch cautioned me. “Remember, movies are like high school with a paycheck. The same juvenile behavior and more cliques than you can keep track of.”

We were in pre-production for months, which is otherwise known as “development.” It’s mostly an accounting trick, cinema semantics as some impressive dollar deals are tied to certain points in the film schedule, like the huge fees that are handed out the first day of principal photography.

Some people apply battle strategy to film making. Many directors are able to extemporize on Sun Tzu’s thirteen principals of war. I wasn’t very familiar with eastern philosophy, even though Cooper Daniels had sent me to the Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose for a stack of treatises in vogue with Disney suits and CAA foot soldiers, but half of my family was Italian and I did remember distinctly the words of Machiavelli. “To know in war how to recognize an opportunity and seize it is better than anything else.”

Click here to follow on Spotify

I scanned the editing room to see if there was a physical tell for an epiphany moment. Two young men in their early twenties, my classmates, were hunched down in a darkened cubicle, stubble across their chins, staring at the projection screen. The only thing on their horizon was their unfolding masterpiece. It must have been around five o’clock. The editing room was nearly silent. The population of campus was thinning out in anticipation of altered states and misadventures. At a maternal 29 I felt those days had departed, but something key had suddenly taken their place: I liked control and I liked the inkling of muscularity, the real labor it took to make even the smallest film. Call it an epiphany, call it a benediction, call it a curse. For me it was a – no, it was the turning point.