Our anonymous actor columnist contemplates that actorly Mecca, Los Angeles: from its Lychian surburbs, forest fires and mobsters to Chateau Marmont, valet parking and broken dreams...
This week I’ve been considering that journey west that so many actors dream upon, the move to Los Angeles.
The city has so many detractors but I think LA’s as fascinating as a jungle. And it doesn’t hurt if you look like Johnny Weissmuller – its aesthetics are old fashioned like that. If you’re a Chandler or John Fante reader you can scrape away at the accumulations of 80 or so years and still find their settings – the Angel’s Flight funicular railway in Bunker Hill or a row of houses in Silver Lake. The ordinariness of suburban LA has a morbid glamour because of Chandler and the films he inspired.
Out there, the films of David Lynch seem more explicable, less surreal, almost ordinary, as though to LA – an extraordinary, self-reflexive place – Lynch is merely a social realist. There is space for eccentricity – hidden homes, ghettos, enclaves away from the film business, thickets of olive groves and eucalyptus that hide people nursing broken dreams. Startling juxtapositions, the coexistence of the ultra-modern with the old and seedy are what give LA its depth. I took thousands of photographs and they all looked like they’d been art directed.
When I visited the city two summers ago the forest fires had just got going. From my bed in Santa Monica at night I watched the fires blazing in the hills. In the daytime, driving from meeting to meeting, a huge smoke cloud hung over us like a giant cliff, looming up at the end of every boulevard. In a city that loves to announce itself, the most interesting things keep themselves hidden, like the recluses of old Hollywood.
The banality of the shopping courts is a subterfuge. We found the best Japanese in one of the featureless little plazas that line the boulevards. In another mall, at the foot of the Hills, a producer took me to dinner at an apparently routine restaurant but owned by the brother of the “Teflon Don”, mobster John Gotti. We ate at Gotti’s old table that had sight lines of the whole restaurant – no tables behind – a precaution for a man with dangerous enemies.
There was a sonic boom over the city as a space shuttle landed, I joined a trapeze class, ate Mexican twice a day, swam in a pool at Herb Ritts’ old house. Cindy was in that pool once. My God, the inexhaustible glamour of it all.
The incongruity is so exhilarating and the life offers a kind of health I’d never known and yet… how breathtakingly cynical and dishonest it can suddenly appear. The endless meetings with the promise of more meetings, the cooing over your talent, the strength of your CV! The superiority of British actors! The breakfasts, the lunches, the dinners; the handshakes and kisses and smiles; the waiting rooms, the offers of help and water, the encouragement, the Chateau Marmont, the valet parking…
But then there is one meeting with someone who’s seen-it-all-before – a cynic, unimpressed by your accent and your bit part in Snow White and the whole illusion collapses inside you and you want to be home with the small and the shabby, and the world of “probably not”.
It is quite shocking how easily the whole effort of self-delusion and self- assurance collapses into awareness and self-doubt. The bottom line is there to trip you up…
Finally I get a dose of honesty and I find I don’t like it. A casting director says to me, “You’d be ideal casting as the sort of guy the girl from Nebraska thinks she’d have a chance with. Don’t get me wrong, but you’re no Brad Pitt.”
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Image: Adam Kesher by djenvert, available under a CC BY-NC-ND license.