Hollywood Fiction
A writer discovers what he really wants is to direct!
It’s a half-hour to midnight on New Year’s Eve and I’m standing in the private bathroom of a Hollywood night club. I tower over the well-styled mane of one of Tinsel Town’s D-list actors—whose name escapes me, because he’s a friend, of a friend, of someone I just met. He tries to induce vomiting. He gets some on my shoe and I just ignore it, as I’ve uncomfortably assumed a role as his narcotics man-servant. How I got into this club, with these people, to this moment, is some part due to indifference, boredom and chaotic fluke. It also seems to be the envy of every mediocre, next-big-thing.
But all I want is for this evening to end.
The D-list actor turns his head up from the toilet bowl and says, “Pass me the bag.” Bag? What bag? I think, “… over there,” he motions to the hand basin.
“Oh sorry,” I say, wondering why I’m apologizing? Maybe it’s because I’m unconsciously contributing to his early death, “… here you go.”
“Nice huh,” he says referring to the ornate man-bag, “I got it custom made by this guy on Sunset … they also do one for H.”
“Really? I’m more of a pot man myself.” He doesn’t get my sarcasm.
I then hear the sound of a gag and see his mop-top flip over. He’s passing out on the toilet floor, his disoriented eyes, looking up to the marble ceiling. He’s almost motionless—and I have my hands full of his accoutrements.
“I’m O.K. This shit happens to me sometimes.”
This is my cue to exit—stage left, or right—the hell out of this Hollywood drama.
It’s a slight deviation to my Los Angeles package holiday. I could be at the pre-arranged New Year’s Eve celebration near the Staples Center; enjoying a nice glass of champagne with fat middle-aged tourists and recounting the sightseeing adventures of the last few days.
They were having lobster.
It’s funny the places you can get into in Los Angeles with a foreign accent and a velvet Armani blazer. Never mind the Target jeans. If you think you belong—then people don’t assume otherwise. This half-cocked strategy, that was a departure from my norm, seemed to be working tonight.
Still, what was hard to reconcile, was going from eating baby back ribs on Santa Monica Pier that afternoon, to talking about rhinoplasty with two gorgeous actresses, earlier that night. They both had come from the Midwest to make it big in Hollywood.
“So what do you do in England?” gorgeous actress number one asked me.
“I’m from Australia, actually,” I yelled over the music. She didn’t hear me but she nodded anyway. “I’m an urban planner.”
“You’re a painter?” asked gorgeous actress number two.
“Painting—yeah I’m an artist,” I said without compunction, realizing that I wouldn’t see these people ever again. But there’s also something intoxicating about Hollywood that makes you want to exaggerate with others—to be a cooler, manufactured version of yourself.
“Oh, I love artists,” said gorgeous actress number one. I started to get it: the universal appeal to twenty-somethings of appearing to be a Bohemian fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants illusion always trumps the secure, respected, corporate clone. These thoughts helped me to justify my own Hollywood fiction for the rest of the night.
“Yeah, I do a lot of modern abstract art, but it’s writing that I love,” I said, realizing I know nothing about art.
“You’re a writer too,” one of them said—not sure who, as both they started looking the same. “Do we know any of your work?”
Normally, I can’t stand those liars, who build false expectations, lead you into emotional nirvana and then, strip it all away in an instant, but it was different in Hollywood. Everyone seemed to bullshit each other out here and maybe they needed to do this, to make life more palatable.
“Maybe—done a bit here and there.” I unsuccessfully tried to think of some magazines that they wouldn’t know. “Um, I’ve done a piece for Rolling Stone … others for GQ, um … and Harper’s Bazaar,” I said, then realizing that I’d never read Harper’s Bazaar.
“Wow,” said the same gorgeous actress, “You’re like a real writer. Can we Google some of your work?”
I was in deep shit.
“Yeah it should be on there, but um … um, it’s the Australian syndicated version of Rolling Stone you see—they just don’t make it available on the net.”
“Oh that’s too bad.”
“Never mind. I can send you a hard copy by post when I get back to Sydney if you like. How about I get your number?” I said with a cheeky smile.
With a speed akin to Clint Eastwood in some cowboy movie, they drew out business cards. In the dim light of the club I could make out glamour head-shots, the word “actress” in cursive script, contact details, and on the back—bullet-points outlining the bit parts they’d played on stage and screen.
Two hours later, I found myself speaking to four more would-be movie stars—three guys and a girl—on an eco-friendly pleather couch. They were all friends of the two gorgeous actresses.
“So are you working on anything at the moment for Rolling Stone or GQ?” asked Josh, a multi-media artist that works on Hollywood movies.
Not this again. I started to re-think my lies.
“Yeah I have a few ideas for a story but nothing developed yet—maybe something about Australian bands trying to make it in the LA music scene,” I said, trying to divert the focus to an area, I hoped, they knew little about.
“Oh that’s cool, I love Australian music. Wolfmother’s latest album is just so progressive—I have it on my iPod. Who do you think is going to be big this year?” then asked Eric, a twenty-three-year-old theatre arts graduate from NYU, now living in Culver City.
I made a mental note to self: Google “Wolfmother” when back at the hotel.
“Well they are progressive … but you know,” I said again, trying to cover-up, “I like LA music like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers—aren’t they from around here?”
“Yeah—they met in Hollywood High,” said Chris, another twenty-something too-cool-for-school non-actor, wearing a fur-lined parka and mirrored sunglasses (inside the club).
It was then the conversation went from local bands to auditions; workouts and diets for auditions; drugs for auditions and finally to sex—for auditions. I was amongst the blasé and almost mechanical discussion of making it in Hollywood. Everyone knew what was expected, and the price that needed to be paid, if you weren’t an exceptional actor.
Chris’s girlfriend, the beautiful brunette, Stacey—who was thinking of becoming a blonde, and getting her stage name legalized, told me that she didn’t go to college. Instead, she studied a three-month acting course with a well-known acting coach in LA. She seemed confident of her skills, as she assumed the pose of a celebrity being interviewed and said, “All I need is to get that break on like a sitcom or even a speaking part on a hit summer movie—and then I’ll be famous!” She laughed at this, and meant it to be tongue-in-cheek, but the rest of the group nodded in solemn agreement. I realized then, that they were not interested in developing the craft of acting, but in the fame game, and this was O.K. for them. But this was a Hollywood nightclub on New Year’s Eve, when illusion and artifice were in good supply—including my own.
Amid all my amateur and unintended fiction, I did make one slip-up that night. I asked Eric, the more intelligent one of the group, “What happens if it doesn’t work out for you as an actor in LA?”
He looked at me in disgust, covered partly by the low-light of the nightclub and said in a cool, calculated voice, “Don’t ever ask me that. The truth is, you can’t think that way—I’m going to be here until I make it big—no other options for me.” If he hadn’t said it with such conviction, I would have offered him some sort of faux-brotherly advice, that he should do something else more fulfilling with his life. He was smart enough; law school, med school or even barber school—anything was more certain than a life chasing a one-in-a-million dream, based on looks—assuming he wasn’t an exceptional actor.
Some minutes later, the two gorgeous actresses, Josh, Eric, Chris and Stacey; as well as one of their acquaintances—and whom I only remember as the D-list actor, with a mop-top, all adjourned into a private bathroom. The D-list actor produced an ornate and somewhat gaudy man-bag.
A few more minutes later, I watched them all slowly enter a better dream, than the one they all shared.
I leave LA at eleven the next morning with the middle-aged tour group. They all seem to have had a good time in the restaurant near the Staples Center. They tell me how I missed out on the lobster, and how the German couple kept dancing all night, even when there was no music.
“Where did you go last night?” asks one of the Dutch guys. “We had lobster … and lots of single elderly ladies on the dance floor—missed your chance.” He nudges his wife.
“Probably not my thing really—more a Dutch thing I reckon.” His wife is incensed. I remember why I didn’t go with the group.
I sit watching LA slip into the distance, as the tour group starts singing show tunes on the way to Las Vegas. In my mind, I’m reliving last night. No holiday tour or Universal Studios ride could have shown me that side of Hollywood. I think of my own fiction last night, and how it enabled me to witness the LA kind: the artifice of keeping one’s dreams alive.
As we enter Nevada and see the bright lights of Las Vegas in the desert dusk. I realize that I’m going into another land of fiction—a land of wedding chapels and $4.99 buffets. Only this time it’s back to the real me.
And the lobster is included.
Troy Rodrigues is an Australian writer and photographer who has since traded his briefcase for a backpack and set forth in search of more tales of mayhem. He officially calls Sydney home, though Paris will always be a lofty aspiration.