“You might want to take that off,” a tanned young lady said to me in a cute Californian accent as she pointed to my sweatshirt. A surge of arrogance swept over me as I prepared to reciprocate what I perceived to be flirtation, but refrained for fear that I’d eventually use a word with an “ah” sound in it.
The pilot’s voice came over the speaker: “We’ll soon be touching down in sunny Los Angeles where it’s currently 89 degrees.”
I glanced out the window and saw the sun, that bastard, smugly shining down on a city oblivious to the millions of pasty-skinned bumpkins who have been deprived of his services for the past four months. For the next 48 hours, he was mine.
My cabbie advised me to keep my window rolled up because he wanted to keep the air conditioning cranked. I happily obliged and enjoyed the view from Sepulveda Blvd. — an In ‘N’ Out Burger, a Ralph’s and a bowling alley — suddenly I was craving a White Russian. I thought about pinching myself, but decided I didn’t want to wake up quite yet.
That weekend, I got the feeling that all of Los Angeles felt the same way.
As an entertainment journalist and film junkie living in semi-squalor, I was overjoyed to learn two weeks ago that my pilgrimage to the movie Mecca would be paid for all in the name of publicity. What a nice gesture, I thought. With any luck, everyone out there would be as obliging as my flight companion.
That’s not to say that I came to LA with starry-eyed delusions of running into Owen Wilson at McDonald’s and having him buy me a Quarter Pounder. I didn’t know what to expect, really. I only wanted to see why just under a century ago a handful of executives from New York decided to make this modest port city into the entertainment capital of the world.
As soon as I stepped out of the airport terminal, I knew why. When they saw LA, they saw a movie, the same sort of waking dream I had stumbled into.
Snow-capped mountains in one direction, sandy beaches in the other and nothing but sunshine shining down on shiny, happy people. The air, smog-ridden though it might be, seemed to intoxicate everyone just enough to plaster a smile onto their faces. For all I knew, people fashioned careers on the stuff.
I was sure that every speeding bus I saw had a heroic Keanu Reeves on it trying to defuse a bomb, that on every skyscraper’s top floor Bruce Willis was defusing a terrorist threat and that every dime-a-dozen diner was being patronized by three German nihilists and a woman with nine toes.
Only hours into my visit I had hypnotized myself into thinking I was an extra in the most elaborately produced film this side of “Titanic.” But there is something dangerous, I think, about living in this perpetual movie, in the waking dream. It provides a false sense of self and makes you think your 15 minutes might just be 15 minutes away.
Billy Wilder saw it. Robert Altman and David Lynch also knew what dodged in and out of the shadows cast by the ubiquitous sun.
They saw regular people convinced they were leads in this sprawling saga. People from all walks of life who swore Steven Spielberg and Harvey Weinstein were watching at any given moment. I eventually managed to pinch myself out of hypnosis and to see it as well.
The free limousine service offered by my hotel would take me as far as one mile in any direction. I giddily took advantage of the opportunity and asked the driver if he’d ever had any famous clientele. “I picked up one of those ‘Dawson’s Creek’ kids two weeks ago,” he enthusiastically responded. “But the bitch didn’t even tip,” he then grumbled as I hid my wallet
In a feeble attempt at schmoozing a little later on, I asked the coordinator of my press junket (a Bostonian barely two years older than me) how he’d gotten his job. “I’ve been interning my way up to it for three years. Now, they finally give me a lunch break during my 10 hour day.”
I can’t say that I was sad to leave. I almost missed the kind of people that cower from the blowing wind, watch the sidewalk for ice and walk with a purpose.
If I am meant to work in the entertainment industry, I’d at least like to be fully conscious that I am doing so at the outset, because if I’m destined for LA, I don’t think my arms will be able to handle all the pinching.
