Hollywood Babylon
I forgot how estranged I am from Los Angeles until I returned this weekend for a shoot. I checked into a hotel I stayed in the last shoot, which was in roughly the same part of L.A.– the Burbank/North Hollywood region.
Day one of the shoot was fantastic, on the same street that looks as if it were custom-made for "suburban shoot locations." Trees that otherwise would not exist in Los Angeles can be found here. White picket fences a-plenty. It's actually kind of insulting, as if people who have never visited small town America or Middle America brainstormed what a normal locale would look like and came up with a more cynical version of a John Hughes film
Case in point, the house where we were shooting rents out for 15,000 a day. It is listed on Redfin as being 1.8 million. Unlike most homes in Los Angeles that cost that much, this one is fairly sizable, about 2500 square feet. It also has a large backyard and a pool.
The problem is that it is still in Los Angeles.
The hotel where I'm staying is about fifteen minutes away, or twenty-five minutes in my case because of course the closest exit to the freeway is closed and nothing is easy to navigate in this town.
The hotel has an interesting history– it was designed during the early 1970's. The brainchild of actress Beverly Garland, her husband Fillmore Crank, and Las Vegas hotel impresario, John Kell Houssels Jr. Despite the purple prose found on the hotel website, the property itself looks like a refurbished Marriott resort.
Tonight, every guest I encountered was wasted. Women in summer dresses who could barely keep their eyes open. Men falling asleep in their food. Two Japanese tourists who ordered two double shots of Jameson each.
As I paid my bill I asked the server if people threw down every night or only on weekends. Without hesitating she answered "Oh, it's every night. Because they are on vacation." That didn't account for the series of Angelenos I saw during my hour long meal who asked if they validated parking. I'd say half the restaurant guests were locals.
Maybe it's people who are desperate to launch the new roaring 20's considering how many articles have been written lately about our so-called mood. It's also strange the media would keep trying to write articles that point to some sort of unification when we're obviously so fragmented.
All I know is Los Angeles hasn't changed since its hedonistic early days. And even after living here for more than a decade, I will never understand the appeal.
Nathaniel West was one of the most criminally underrated writers whose life was cut too short too soon. His description of Hollywood and the fandom that supported it was decades if not nearly a century ahead of its time. Everyone needs to read his opus "Day of The Locust." Here's a quote from it. Note how even then, the audience was depicted as having become jaded.
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”
Emptiness.