In the end they are not even photogenic so if they boost a career for a while they
In the end, they are not even photogenic, so if they boost a career for a while, they end up cutting it short. On the other hand, just between vous et nous, drugs are to-die-for sublime, which the drug czars never mention. Why in the world do we have to lose our sense of humour and ignore that, bottom line, drugs make you feel good now? And now is nice, as well as near, and now can keep happening. Drugs are easily the best way to handle the paranoia God invented, and sooner or later in Hollywood everyone ends up doing paranoia in a serious way.
I mean, suppose the Bomb is 16 minutes away - are you going to read the new Joan Didion novel, or do the smack you've been hoarding? What is Joan going to do? I don't ask.9 FRIENDSHIP IN HOLLYWOOD ISN'T FRIENDLYOld chestnut: it is not enough for me to succeed, my friends must fail too. Anecdotally, there was the Hollywood wife who, after years of silent suffering, decided to divorce her husband because he kept having affairs. "Darling," he'd told her, "they don't mean a thing - they're only with friends." The day after she began proceedings, she received lavish flower arrangements from several of her lunch and bridge and tennis chums. That's how she found out exactly with whom her husband had had his affairs.
Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons floristry is such a blue-chip business in Hollywood.10 MOVIES AREN'T THE POINT ANY MORE"Synergy." They're all saying synergy is the thing the business is all about now. The dictionary says "synergy" is "combined action or operation", which in Hollywood supposedly means that you do a picture that also feeds into the theme parks and merchandising outlets owned by the conglomerate that owns the studios Rides, T-shirts, toys, video games, CDs. The business is working on multiple fronts, screwing the public in every orifice it can find. There's talk about synergy everywhere now, so you know it must be covering a multitude of sins Put that in your dictionary. Call me conservative, but I look at the people who are talking synergy and I see what I have always seen: thin-faced guys who are into pulling down $500,000 a year and fucking bimbos like shooting antelope in Africa.11 HOLLYWOOD IS FUNDAMENTALLY UN-AMERICANIt's a mistake to believe that the first generation of moguls, who escaped the cruelty and poverty and tyranny of life under the czar or king or emperor, left that world behind. Rather, they brought that system to the new world and cast themselves - at last, the dream realised - as the monarch, Mr Big.
In the land of the free, they fashioned a city-state where medieval powers existed, and to go with it they invented a cult that was close to the idolatrous nature of religions before the age of reason and science. So their Hollywood was intensely un-American, if you're thinking Jefferson and the Bill of Rights and the code of independent intellect. Hollywood was a harkening back to despotism, slavery, and a belief in the divinity of supernatural monsters. Any halfway intelligent politician must realise that the movies are - in their appeal to unreason and unreality, in their excitation of desire and instability, in their worship of power and glamour - the most abiding, virulent virus in the American organism.12 EVERYBODY IS ALWAYS ACTINGIt was always said in the grand old days of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that Louis B Mayer was the most chronic actor on the lot. This was often said with fondness, and with respect for Mr Mayer's profound - indeed, helpless - love of movies. But in truth, Mayer was a powermonger who yearned to be regarded as everyone's father so that he could better abuse, degrade and exploit.
He acted to outdo the professional actors, those loathed beauties he hired, half-owned, envied and despised He had his private deals with all of them. The ones whipped from birth, like Judy Garland, feared him; tough spirits like Katharine Hepburn chuckled and jousted with him, man to man. Mayer dramatised all exchanges, day and night, stealing from scripts with an unconscious ease matched later by Ronald Reagan. No professional actor could top him; it was his way of always being right. Professional actors went deeper and deeper in search of Sincerity and Truth, but Mayer exulted in the thing that only amateurs and hysterics know: that acting is the guardian of an absolute, complete falsehood that has crept off the screen and polluted real life, creating an America as delirious as Mayer's childish dreams We act up to show we are here. And we think that fake orgasms are the truest.13 ONLY STUPID STARS COMPLAIN ABOUT BAD PUBLICITYThere are tales of the young and tender in Hollywood who have been wounded by something written or said on TV about them.
