20 Things People Just Don't Understand About Hollywood

11. Hollywood Is Fundamentally Un-American. It'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 them-selves--at last, the dream realized--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, the Bill of Rights and the code of independent intellect. Hollywood was a harking back to despotism, slavery and a belief in the divinity of supernatural monsters. Every fourth year a Dole and a Clinton feel the need to woo, warm and co-opt Hollywood, while any halfway intelligent politician must realize 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 Acting. It 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 power monger who yearned to be regarded as everyone's father so that he could better abuse, degrade and exploit them. He acted to outdo the professional actors, those loathed beauties that 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 dramatized all exchanges, day and night, steal-ing 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 Publicity. There are tales of the young and tender in Hollywood who have been wounded by something written or said on TV about them. They howl and their personal PR rep and the studio's PR agree that what's been said is out of line. The PR people then speak to the offending entity, and sometimes even suspend relations to register their outrage over some quite ghastly revelation that is that ion of the horrendous truth. There is seldom any deeper disturbance, for the studios and the press and the publicists all need one another. And anyway, bad publicity is an esoteric concept nowadays. After all, every kind of wicked-ness, frivolity or arrogance that discretion might rather hush up can be read as simply a young, headstrong independence. Revelation is always wondrous and casts a magic light on those revealed. The only real danger is flinching, seeming to notice your own nakedness. If you don't flinch, you're merely nude, which is a classically recognized form of beauty. Smart stars know the trick of being photographed: act as if there is no camera there, no camera yet invented. When they get abused by the press, they play with their hair, think great thoughts. They don't explain, don't complain and never, ever ask to be liked, O.J.'s problem is that he still wants to be popular. If he were stronger, he'd just keep utterly calm. The point with O.J. and with all stars who've been caught in a misdeed is that they must convince us how easily they could do it again.

14. Everyone Does It for the Money. There are three colors of money in the Business: up-front, gross points and net points. Up-front is when maybe 25 percent is actually up-front and the rest comes in install-ments as the job gets done. Most people get their take up-front in studio checks (which is how un-dead the studio system really is) minus deductions, which run somewhere over 30 percent of the 25 percent, and the 10 percent their agent is taking. So Lip-front is, lops, 15 percent of what they thought they were going to get. Gross points means a percentage of the money returned to the distributor of a film from the First dollars earned. As a gross participant (no need to feel bad about that term) you get, say, 50 cents of every five dollars of ticket money if your points arc 10 percent. This is the only real way to make money; net points--points on the profits after everyone with gross points has had their share--never "happen." Now, here are the minimum estimated average annual expenditures for your normal, upwardly mobile VP in the business, with wife, two children and one former marriage:

Mortgage $35,000

insurance/property tax $8,000

child support $30,000

children's education $20,000

agent/lawyer/accountant $15,000

analysts (4 or 5 patients) $25,000

telephone/fax $15,000

automobile $15,000

entertaining $10,000

clothes $10,000

travel $15,000

trade papers $500

books $39.99

insurance $2,500

living cost $50,000

maid/cook $25,000

gardener $10,000

trainers, etc $10,000

child care $25,000

charities $10,000

$331,039.99*

*The only way to write off most of the above is to have an independent deal with the studio instead of working directly for the studio. Better to be a president in your own hell than a vice president at one of the majors.

All of which is to say: everybody does it for the money.

15. Scripts Are Bad Because Nobody Really Reads Them. The script is the literary form for a society giving up literacy. People in Hollywood don't read them. Not even the writers read them. They write the scenes out of order and seldom need to scan the whole thing through except to check for page numbers. One writer told me, "Reading is an alien rhythm to what happens on the screen. So reading is no help. It has to happen." At studios and agencies, no one with real power has the time or patience to read anything but contracts and deal memos. They buy cover-age. Once a movie's in preproduction, a producer gets so many versions of the script there's no sense reading any of them because there'll be a new draft by the time they're finished. They stay loose and pick up the "story" of the picture, its mood. They don't worry if there's no ending yet--if there were one, it would just change. Actors read only their own lines: they want to retain their creative space. And they'll want to talk to the writer them-selves, slip in some lines they like--it's amazing how often those lines come back on paper. In the end, everyone just lets the script breathe, so it can be amorphous and organic. The only people who actually read scripts are Writers Guild arbitration committee members, and those are some pretty sad people.

16. Budgets Are for Simps. Like the script, the budget is there, but no one ever quite looks at it. Most of the time, there's no such thing as "budgetary control." It's possible that, once upon a time, several grim-faced accountants went round the studios keeping score. Now, when $30 million is going out of style as an average cost, who counts? And you, the fannies in the dark, are right when you suspect that as budgets get bigger, movies get stupider. Because, of course, there are scumbags skimming the system if they can find spoons big enough. The bigger the budget, the more that leaks out in the way of technical adjustments, per diems, overtime, expenses, petty cash and what is this $555 doing in my pocket? And so, the budget is going to be what it's going to be. The budget is simply what everything adds up to at the end, plus or minus.

17. Gangster Movies Get Made Because Moguls Want To Be Gangsters. Remember the way Warren Beatty in Bugsy is always practicing his elocution so he might have a shot at being in pictures? A nice touch, but it would have been sweeter still if we'd seen some movie executives studying the Bug to get their own gangster acts down. The opportunity to wear slick clothes while talking filthy, to exude the sangfroid of men of the world while having your enemies killed, to be the epitome of cool with dames on your arm, while being a Hitler--ever since pictures began, the guys in charge of the business have aspired to the manner of GQ mobsters. It was The Godfather that locked the image down. Michael Corleone has been the guiding light of style and stealth in Hollywood far the last 25 years- with-drawn, austere, shy, a dandy, indifferent to the flesh, a beetle on the dung of money, whispering orders for destruction or elimination, all for the sake of the business. There is a rowdier model, too--Joe Pesci in any number of roles, always about to attack, always saying "fuck," always degrading women, always dangerous and unschooled. The only reason to see Casino is to watch the struggle in Scorsese's soul as to whether he most wants to be Pesci or De Niro, the unbridled Kong mobster or Mr, Cool, who fusses over every detail of his business and likes to sit in his plush office with his pants hanging folded in the closet so as not to lose their lovely crease.

18. Appearances Are Everything. Los Angeles is best thought of as a set. Plenty of long, scholarly books go on about the "illusory" nature of the city, about the "dystopia" that is always shifting, about buildings that go up and down like sexual arousal--and those books are part of the set decoration, like throw cushions that complement the steel and glass coffee table. Of course, the movies are behind this, because in picture-making everywhere you go is a location or a set, something you can paint as you like, knock down, move around, work till you get it right. In the end, the decor is what-ever is "right" for the character. So, on the big set of Hollywood, if you look "right," you have found yourself. It is at this nexus that fiction meshes with therapy and shopping. "I thank God far the Northridge earthquake," you hear people mutter, "it was the impulse I needed to re-see the living room." They want the wall color "right" for them, for their mood and their designer drop-deads and their important guests. The breakthrough will come when walls are invented that are actually screens with control panels you can play around with to find the "right" balance, the "right" hues, the ''right" themes. Then the ultimate movie experience will be just staying at home and running different dialogue and decor with the "right" people.

19. Fantasy Is Religion. Whenever Hollywood does Christ, whether it's Jeffrey Hunter or Max von Sydow or Willem Dafoe, the result is not just ridiculous and embarrassing and tedious and about as atmospheric as a paper cup. It is also the complete expurgation, elimination and eradication of any hint of the spirit. Those kinds of movies are the guaranteed death of religion, the way NBC's coverage of the Olympics would have destroyed sports and patriotism if it had gone on long enough. Such things are sins against photography and deterrents to inner life, eternal prospects and moral being. Now, one shot of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca wondering what to do, and the whole Ouija board shakes--that's the movies. Movies have been a 100-year séance called Fantasy. But what about God? The terrific thing about Fantasy is that you, you are God.

20. Movies Are No Longer About Anything. There was a time when movie audiences sighed in rapture because they were seeing, as if for the first time, a sunset in Monument Valley, a pretty girl taking off her clothes, a car crash. By now, we've learned how fake what's on the screen is, and we've gone blind. We don't care to be naive enough to believe anymore. And the movies have given up photographing the real thing. Just think how many pictures of the last 10 years have involved impossible places and people or creatures who could never exist. Special effects, they call it, and everybody's happy with it, hut what "special effects" implies is that the basic effect--the magic of movies--doesn't work anymore. What we have seen in our lifetime is the final abandonment of reality and life as points of reference. The ghost town can only tell ghost stories. Which is why an air of campiness has taken over. Camp doesn't play just because Hollywood is so gay, but because it carries with it a faint, superior sneer for all movies, and that is the underlying altitude of so many who make pictures now. You see, no one believes in a picture anymore for the story it tells--except maybe Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard. Everyone else has seen so many movies, absorbed so many tropes and rhythms of movie-ness that nothing is ever fresh or authentic. People once loved Hollywood because they hoped that the light on the screen could tell great stories to everyone. We know now that the flicks are only lies told for exploitation. Which is very likely what they always were, only now we are less gullible. We have become the cynics. Hollywood and L.A. are the shambles of destroyed hope. That was the explosion that left a congealed scum of shame and disappointment on every stretch of concrete. And hope really is all America ever had to offer.

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David Thomson is the author of Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, published by Knopf.

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