Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

Later, standing with him on the footbridge that crossed the A40 Western Avenue, and looking out north-west across the RAF airfield, I felt so happy to have escaped London that I was moved to embrace Freeman and cup his globe of white curls in my hand.

‘Steady on, feller,’ Nick said, but before he could disengage I was shocked by the frailty of his thin back. ‘You’ll be OK,’ he went on gravely, ‘so long as you’re prepared for Laurel Canyon.’

I realized he had been granted a deeper insight than my own, and as we went on across a half-landscaped golf course, then into a nature reserve shaded in with un-coppiced beeches and cross-hatched by reed beds, I nerved myself to ask him what he knew. Yet couldn’t — and so we reached Uxbridge and the same little boxes of ticky-tacky we had left behind in Northolt, then the Hobbiton of its suburbia, then the redbrick carcerals of its office blocks — and still I hadn’t spoken.

I left Nick at the tube station, standing by a half-century-old train indicator that promised a Metropolitan Line departure for Finchley Road. Stumbling on from one tepee of streetlight to the next, I missed him acutely. Morgan Freeman’s was the last familiar face I would see until I met up with Ellen DeGeneres in Los Angeles — unless, that is, I counted James Bond’s.

* 24 Hour Psycho (1993) by Douglas Gordon is a video installation that slows down Hitchcock’s Psycho so that it lasts for twenty-four hours.

*Of whom more later.

I had booked a bed and breakfast on the south side of the town. I’d been able to tell on the phone that the woman of the house was played by Brenda Blethyn, and now that we were standing face to face in the atrocious vestibule of her bungalow, I was glad I’d soon be rid of this supporting cast of British character actors, who, after all, had no traction in Hollywood.

I paid Blethyn in cash as soon as she’d revealed to me the converted garage lumbered with a double bed, a smoked glass table, a widescreen television and a partitioned bathroom. She waggled the banknotes in her hand, and my gaze skimmed past her creased top lip to bury itself in a massy spruce that writhed in the darkness.

‘Y’know, you remind me of… you remind me of — now, who is it you remind me of?’

‘I dunno, David Thewlis? Or maybe… Pete Postlethwaite?’

‘No, it can’t be, I’ve never heard of either of ’em.’

‘Well.’ I was barely civil. ‘I can’t possibly assist you to remember the name of someone I know nothing of to begin with, now can I?’

But she ignored this comment. ‘My husband and I don’t stop in the bungalow, so if you pull the door of the room to when you leave in the morning that’ll be dandy. You’ve breakfast things in the fridge there.’

Milk puckering under cling film, indescribably obscene . Soon after that I heard the flutter and crunch of her Vauxhall Corsa pulling out of the drive. It was a minor part for Blethyn, and, as I made myself a bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, I wondered why she’d taken it on at all — I’d offered to send her a cheque or cash up front, and then she could’ve left the key under the mat for me.

At 2.00 a.m. I began my preparations, naked in the bathroom, working the special forces camouflage stain into my skin from the hairline down — face, neck, arms, hands, cock and balls — but by the time I reached my ankles the gunk had run out and it looked as if a bear had been shitting incontinently in the bath. Of the life of man the duration is but a point, its substance streaming away .

I tiptoed through the sleeping dormitory town, not moving freely until I had crossed the M25 by a footbridge and was heading north on a wooded path beside the Colne brook. The predawn sky draped over Iver Heath, the clouds a peignoir, the stars jewels gelid against its blue-black skin. It must have been freezing up there, because a plane taking off from Heathrow unzipped a distrail with its passionate heat. The cumulus gaped, the night moaned, and I streamed away through the long grass, leaving a long swathe of misplaited blades behind me that pointed the way to Iver, a hamlet that had had been ravished so many times by the camera, all the specificity had been sucked out of it.

Beyond the houses, across Pinewood Road, the birches of Black Park were doubly silvered in the sidereal light. Over fifty films had been shot among these dense thickets and drives choked with fallen boughs. Black Park had been a wood in Wisconsin, a forest in Slovenia, the Siberian taiga — it was a hack woodland actor, ever ready to put on its pine-needle overcoat and make a multiplex believe. It was perfect cover — they’d never look for me here, where millions had already looked, unseeing.

There was a fence of course: savage tridents and coiled razor wire; in among its loops Hal’s touring company dreamt on their poles, rapid-eye movements laying down the beat for their lullaby, ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer doooo…’ I dug down quickly into the leaf mould and earth — then I was in, loping from one shadow to the next. I’d cased the joint thoroughly and wasn’t anticipating security — they were tucked up in their kennels, watching reruns of Baywatch with their comedy dogs.

Even in the starlight I could see the faded lettering — Clennam & Sons: Importers of Fine Fabrics and Silks — and the floral-pattern wallpaper exposed by the wrenching out of the carious house next door — except that there never had been one. With its stacked windows — dormer, upon bow upon bow — and steeply pitched roof, the set for the BBC’s latest TV adaptation of Little Dorrit was as familiar to me as my own childhood home — and so the perfect place to hide until dawn, when I could mingle with the techies, chippies and sparks. After all, no one ever looks upon the classics with fresh eyes, especially tired security men on minimum wage.

Inside there was silence, half a room and no staircase, the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapour . I waited in the fake Victorian business premises until day came, pink and dewy, and with it a red and sweaty security man, played by Ray Winstone, who, led by an Alsatian, barrelled straight towards me from the direction of the sound stages. An extra would’ve been one thing; an actor like Winstone was quite another. Self-preservation took over: I scrambled out the back of the set, ran ducked down behind the half-hovels, then sprinted across the open lot.

Would, I wondered, Ernõ Goldfinger, the architect of Trellick Tower, have been amused by this: a sign reading ‘Goldfinger Avenue’ slapped on the side of a Brutalist hangar? A reference not to him directly but to the Bond villain named after him — by which he had not been amused. I pelted down the avenue and, spotting an open side door into E Stage, shot through it and found myself inside a replica of the mausoleum at Chatsworth — a rotunda, surrounded by pillars, which was familiar to me from many happy visits to the estate as a guest of the Devonshires.

I pushed on into the depths of the Stage, passing through bedrooms, dressing rooms, halls and a solarium — all of which belonged to Chatsworth but had been disarticulated to suit the logistics of shooting the interiors for The Wolfman , which began summarily in a blaze of lights that sent me diving behind some velvet drapes. When I peeked out the body doubles for its three stars — Anthony Hopkins, Benicio del Toro and Emily Blunt — were drinking coffee and chatting about last night’s television.

My hand discovered a spirit level, and shouldering this I stepped out from my concealment and into a replica of the main hallway of the house. At the head of the marble staircase, between two stone lions, a dog handler stood with two Dobermanns on leashes, while an assistant swung a flail, provoking them to rear up and bark. I ducked behind a Grecian urn, although I needn’t have worried: only the dogs were in the shot being framed by an assistant director.