Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

‘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 seemed 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.