Walking to Hollywood

by Will Self

  ‘OK, OK.’

  ‘That’s not all, man, ’cause after all there’s thousands like you in this town but you’re different: you’ve got the motivation. The movies may’ve rejected you, but then you go and fall in love with Angel herself.’

  ‘You believe this?’

  ‘I’ve read your stuff, man, it’s a fucking love letter to LA, all about how she’s been betrayed by the movies, how they eyed her up, used her, then cut her up into so many pieces nobody can put her back together again – no one, that is, except you. That’s what this walking tour is really about – you aren’t looking for who killed the movies, you’re trying to get your skinny shanks inside LA’s hot haunches!’

  As parting shots go it was a good one, and although he wasn’t a fellow given to melodrama Mac made his exit, strolling off the Filling Station’s apron and sauntering away along the boulevard.

  I called after him: ‘But you’ll still do my legwork for me, won’t you?’

  He turned back. ‘Oh, I dunno, man, I dunno.’

  ‘Just check a few things out, be a friend to the cause.’ He ambled back, and I whispered, ‘But don’t call me, it’s not safe.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Ellen DeGeneres is throwing a little party for me tomorrow evening at the Bar Marmont.’

  ‘For you?’

  ‘It’s a very little party – more of a gathering, really. Anyway, if you show up we can talk after.’

  ‘You better have some cash for me. Two hundred – plus whatever expenses I’ve incurred.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘But don’t get your hopes up, my friend, and remember: client privilege don’t buy you no protection – this is a helluva tough town.’

  ‘I know that.’

  But did I, really? The elevator gate closed in a monogamous marriage of old metal, and the Culver Hotel seemed quiet enough – yet was there perhaps a trill of dwarfish laughter from the end of the corridor? What eerie visions would trouble me as I turned and turned again in my rental four-poster? Judy Garland going down on the Tin Man, her carmine lips sliding lubriciously over his steely rod, then rearing up, green oil dripping from her sharp little chin? The money shot – again.

  When I eventually made it into my room the message light was winking: Busner had rung while I was at dinner. ‘I do hope you’re having a good time.’ His recorded voice was far more immediate that his spoken one. ‘And that you’ve remembered what I said ... about avoiding the noirish.’

  To my surprise I slept soundly and blankly, awakening to the Dolby hiss of another day. I ate bacon and eggs in the foyer, then, after returning to my room, expeditiously shat. I was a man with an appointment.

  *This may be the purest form of the jump cut, the eye’s saccade involuntarily following the gun barrel’s pan, so seeing the same wound in metal, then flesh, then metal again.

  9

  The Pitch

  Way back in the beeswax-scented past, Arnold Schoenberg had woken one fine morning, and, in the last heady rush of his Romanticism, decided that it would be a good idea to pen some music for exactly these sorts of comings and goings, small swoops and glissandos of strings that with uncanny prescience suggested the yaw of Escalades as they swung off the boulevard, the reeling down of tinted windows, the reeling up of tinted windows, the red-and-white-striped baton flung high to conduct them on to the Sony Pictures lot.

  I dogged along behind, then picked my way between acacias and eucalyptuses towards a Palladian façade, the pediment of which was lettered IRVING THALBERG BUILDING in Art Deco bronze. There was a copper stoup bolted to the wall beside the doors. Assuming that the liquid in this must be the tears of stars delivering Oscar acceptance speeches, carefully captured in vials by their personal assistants, then deposited here at the behest of the studio, I dipped my fingers, genuflected, then went inside.

  In the foyer there was a reception module womaned by central casting, and mirror-backed cabinets lined with Oscar statuettes, the tragic masks of BAFTAs, and some other awards I didn’t recognize but that were symbolized by figurines of Pan sporting what looked like Stetsons.

  Having been announced, I travelled along a sunlit corridor, my nape hairs erect in anticipation of the smack of a bullet. To either side open doors revealed sets of offices expertly arrayed with exactly the kind of desks, framed movie posters, filing cabinets and waggle-on-their-springs desk mascots that you would’ve expected. In front of the desks, tipped back in their swivel chairs, were minor players played by minor actors. Discreetly, quietly, they made marks in the margins of scripts, or else, ear-muffed by surround sound, watched product on their computer screens.

  Upstairs, unity of production design, which in the movies makes of the entire world an opulent suburban home, was spectacularly in evidence. On Michael Lynton’s set high, narrow windows leaked daylight between drapes of taupe crushed satin; the floor was rough-adzed boards; a Columbia icon hefted a torch on the wall; a white orchid sat on a glass table surrounded by steel-framed chairs. There were two conversation areas: one had sofas, covered in creamy fabric patterned with black coral polyps, grouped around a hardwood coffee table; the other involved mushroom leatherette club chairs menacing a discoid of white-veined marble. Somewhere in the beeswax-scented present Lynton was on a call. Nearer, in the antechamber, his secretary was finishing one. ‘Love you guys,’ floated through.

  I sat waiting on the polyps – yet felt no discomfort. This was the Zoloft of interiors. Lynton made an entrance at the back of the open plan: he was wearing plain black shoes, grey trousers with a light check, a subdued and striped blue shirt. He had the lean, dark expressive good looks of the younger De Niro. His hand, when it shook my paw, was cool and beautifully manicured.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘you walked here, is that right?’

  I admitted this was the case.

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  We sat down behind our palisades of sharp knees and the tea arrived. I gave him my spiel: how walking was the least filmic possible way of travelling, while Los Angeles was the most filmed location. I told him that I suspected that the movies were waning as the dominant cultural discourse of our era, and that this seemed the easiest way of gaining entrance to such a labyrinthine subject ... I left out the stuff about the murder, the fugues I experienced after drinking Powerade, and the fact that he himself was in the frame. Despite these cuts Lynton still seemed engaged and when I finished – as if to season his shoulders – he shook his lightly pepper-and-salted coif and said:

  ‘Oh, I thought you’d come to make a pitch.’

  I was momentarily dumfounded, and my mind laboured through the possible permutations: I was Thewlis, I was Postlethwaite – he was De Niro, and had done the decent thing with the mole.

  ‘No, really,’ I said, recovering myself, ‘I was simply interested in your take on all this; after all, here we are in the Thalberg Building, while you, I suppose, are the closest thing to a contemporary mogul.’

  He smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘Maybe, but in many ways I agree with you: the wow effect has gone from the movies – the wow effect and a certain degree of social relevance. By the way,’ he said abruptly, ‘I heard you were on the set at Pinewood.’ I sat looking bemused, and he pressed: ‘Quantum of Solace?’

  ‘Well, uh, yeah – I did stop by.’

  The masterful brushwork of exploding petrol, the Wagnerian curtain of roaring flame, the koi for sale from the bungalow ... How much did he know about Scoobert?

  ‘A difficult shoot,’ he continued conversationally. ‘I heard Dan Craig sliced his fingertip off on the last day.’

  This must be some kind of code. ‘Um, yup, I heard there’d been a couple of ... accidents.’

  ‘Well,’ De Niro said, ‘this is this.’ Then he continued his discursive remarks on the state of the industry, animadverting on counter-programming, Made of Honor, budgetary constraints, spring-versus-fall release dates, the threat of SAG industrial action – I mimed taking notes. What see
med to exercise him the most was the advent of PVRs: ‘In the seventies there were maybe sixty or seventy movies released a year – now it’s four hundred. If we want to get people into the multiplexes we have to focus our big TV advertising on the weekend before release, but now, well, if they skip the ads ...’

  His hand tensing, De Niro pinched the insinuation between his thumb and forefinger: this infinitesimal wilfulness had killed the movies; like participants in a perverse psychological experiment, encouraged to administer electric shocks to actors playing guinea pigs, the public had demonstrated that their empathy went no further than their own fingertips.

  I must have been making the right kind of grunts – good enough for him to keep talking. Yes, he himself admired most the era of The Deer Hunter, Platoon and The China Syndrome – movies that minded the gap between social relevance and commercial success; but, while times may’ve changed, the movies still had a role. What about motion-capture and CGI? Well, the bar kept getting raised; Bob Zemeckis’s Beowulf had showed the way: a new generation of 3-D was coming, I’d soon find out about that.

  He stood, and I rose up into that lovely hand-job: his was firm and dry, mine limp and clammy.

  ‘Relevance,’ Lynton said, ‘that’s the key word.’

  ‘Listen.’ I hung on to his fingered thing long beyond the socially prescribed time. ‘I do want to make a pitch: one of my therapists back in London – a guy called Shiva Mukti – he’s making these films of his schizophrenic and bipolar patients during their flamboyant phases – you know the kind of thing, whirling their arms like copter blades, trying to claw the transmitters from their foreheads – then when they’ve calmed down he shows them what it looked like. You see, the biggest problem with these guys is that they can’t accept how crazy they get if they don’t take their medication – obviously the whole thing is done with their consent.’ I laughed, in such a way, I hoped, as to imply that anything else would be deeply unethical – unfortunately all that emerged was a horsey lip-fart. ‘But the thing is you here in Hollywood are doing the same thing on a massive scale and without anyone’s consent. I mean, tell me I’m wrong, but what are these car-crushing beasts, these shape-shifting chimeras, these liquid buildings and this solid air, if not the death-ray projections of our own unfettered Ids?’ Tiny beads of my spittle jewelled the luxuriant chest hair in the V of his open-necked shirt. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ I cantered on, ‘I approve of this, I think humanity needs to be told to take its medication – I just think it should be done with more conviction and greater artistry. I think everyone leaving the theatre – whether in Des Moines or Dubai – should understand the magical significance of the number of footsteps it takes them to cross the foyer, should believe the voiceover telling them what to do with the knives when ... they get home ...’

  ‘Great.’ He released my hand. ‘It’s been great talking with you, and I’m glad we understand each other so well.’

  I had reached the outer office when Lynton called after me: ‘By the way, if you’d like to take a walk around the studio while you’re here that’ll be fine. I’m afraid we aren’t actually shooting anything today but it’s still worth a look.’

  We did indeed understand each other – he had blown my cover and granted me temporary sanctuary at the same time: I would be safe at Sony. I thanked him and turned to leave.

  ‘Bye, Pete,’ Lynton called.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Postlethwaite,’ his secretary echoed. ‘And, by the way’ – she made the usual moue – ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying it, but I loved you in Dinotopia.’

  I walked down Main Street, passing neon signs for bowling alleys, a piano bar, the Continental Hotel. This was no torn children’s book, the fragments dancing in an open fire – nor was it the Sargasso of the imagination where all the dreams ever dreamt are becalmed. No doubt somewhere in the cool, humming interiors of the sound stages, animatronic ducks were dancing in front of a blue screen, but out here there was only a carpenter lifting paint pots from a golf cart, and the open doors to a cavernous prop warehouse.

  I paused, rubbing my eyes, hearing them squelch: a Spiderman caught in the web of the present. On three-storey shelves sat the things, the great material substratum of the enacted, its TVs and washing machines, magazine racks and rugs, bottles of Powerade and bathroom mats, telephones and coat trees, brass statuettes and Barcaloungers, pool toys and vibrators, the neurofibrillary tangles and Bronze Age funerary gifts of a culture crazed by its own capacity for replication. Even a cursory examination was enough to tell me that this hangar possessed its own stratigraphy; that the stuff of Now reposed on the highest shelves, up near the roof, while at ground level I was staring at the fox-fur stoles, Victrolas and aspidistra pots of the era when the movies had only just begun. As I looked on, a forklift truck pulled into the stores and shovelled up a henge of ancient beige plastic computing equipment. No doubt soon enough it would be shot; and then, chained to their seats in the caves of illusion, the prisoners would watch the shadows of these things cast upon the wall. So that when they arose they might go back to the plaster and plywood of their own lives, bite down on the sawdust.

  Beyond the main gates Los Angeles was waiting, her hot legs spread – and I entered them, devoutly. In the Hayden Tract, a phantasmagoria of Sci-Arc buildings with broken bone girders, staircases to nowhere and oriel windows bursting like buboes, I found a café where I could sit outside. I smoked, drank tea and finished Bret’s Lunar Park. There was room in the novel for Harrison Ford to have a walk-on part – he, who had himself once been a set carpenter, hammering away on the hulks becalmed in the Sargasso of the imagination. I left the book lying on the table – what did narrative have going for it anyway – only smelting kryptonite out of coincidence so as to trap us superheroes in the mundane.

  Out here, by rights, I should have feared the zephyrs uncoiling from the brows of the Baldwin Hills – but instead I hitched up my pants and made for La Cienega; it – not they – would carry me the six miles north, back to Hollywood.

  ‘Surfer frat boys – that’s all I can think about.’

  ‘And you’re telling me he didn’t have a place to live?’

  ‘Yeah, but he was sooo cute, but crazy – when I first started dating him he admitted it.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘That he’d set the fire himself – the one he received the, uh, commendation for.’

  I couldn’t prevent myself from eavesdropping: did she really say ‘surfer frat boys’? Or from looking from the sheepskin seams of her lambbag to her charm bracelet to her anorexic bangs. Her companion was just a hair head to me.

  I’d regained consciousness in a booth in a McDonald’s, and, judging by my small pot of soda and skimpy burger, I’d only popped in to use the restroom. It wasn’t until I was back out in the street, striding through the tinted air, that it occurred to me to offer her this factoid: her lover was not alone. It’s been estimated that 20 per cent of all fires are set by the LAFD itself – acts of daring professional closure that could only make psychiatrists gasp in admiration as they drove their patients insane with neuropharmacology.

  It wasn’t until I was back out on Cienega that I realized where I was: around the junction with Olympic. And this ... this too needed to be noted: that every time Marlowe or Archer got sapped, then came to with a line of inconsequential dialogue in his ears surfer frat boys ... it was a metaphor for Los Angeles’s sprawl, as its long lean boulevards stretched out from the rumpled bed. Too much trouble to describe all those Hummers with their wobble-board doors bass vibrating, too much effort to block in those body shops and dental technicians, the stench of a gas station and the street persons, who, skin like bacon rind, were frying today as the smog blew away. Keep on walking ... Johnnie Walker, dapper in top hat and frock coat, his boots shined, his monocle screwed into his eye, strode out towards Hollywood, yet never arrived, pinned as he was like a butterfly to the billboard.

  I came to again in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, getting rea
dy for the party being given in my honour. (Well, not so much a party – that implies an importance I wouldn’t wish for a second to arrogate to myself; more of a gathering, really.) I was still thinking about the burning of Los Angeles and waiting for Faye to get back – it was that kind of bungalow. Naked, fresh from the shower, I wandered from the small bedroom, icy with state-of-tech TV and music system, to the kitchen, which, with its humming rhombus of an icebox, its foursquare sink – suitable for tanning hides – its chintzy muslin curtains and linoleum pong, suggested a happier era of making do belied by the dishonourable tray loaded with potato chips, cookies, cashews and liquor bottles.

  I dressed and went outside to where evening had sidled between the palm leaves, and cheery lanterns lit up the mini-homesteads of this dinky banana republic. From the direction of the pool I could hear a little pre-supper goosing going on: a splash, a cry, the wet thwack of a bikini strap. Behind my bungalow Mike Myers’s moon face rose up, cratered by the Mare Imbrium of his fake beard. His karma is huge ...

  I walked towards the thwack, let myself out through the metal gate, skirted the porte-cochère, walked down the lane, then along Sunset, and, passing between two sharp-featured young women snapped into black Lycra, entered the Bar Marmont. My key fob bulged in the pocket of my short pants as I walked up some stairs, along a narrowing corridor, through a barroom the width of a train carriage and into a second, narrow as a toilet stall, then into a third no wider than a chicken run, at the end of which I climbed through a trapdoor into a hutch cluttered with armchairs and oil paintings and people – most of whom were thrashing about in a purse seine smoking area, accessed via french windows the size of marmalade jars.