Hollywood.

Posted by Pointman on October 21, 2017 · 58 Comments 

As a lad, I always had a scattering of odd jobs around the neighborhood. Whatever needed fixing or replacing, nailing, brutalising back into place or just duct taping together so it’d work again, I was your ready kiddo who’d give it a lot of elbow grease and the old school try. It might not have been great work at times, but I was a willing serf. One of my regulars was a rather severe woman who ran a boarding house and therefore put a lot of work my way. I’d learned early the value of regular trade.

If there’d ever been a husband around, he’d probably withered and died under the acid rain deluge of the sort of horrific tongue lashing only women of a certain type can deliver. I’m sure it would have been a mercy killing in the end.

Nobody ever messed around with that woman – ever. Or at least climbed back into the ring for a second go at the untamed shrew from hell. Yassum mam was always the best, most prudent and fairly much the only policy on Earth when dealing with the elemental force of nature the likes of which she was. To be fair, she always divvied up on the spot for any job I did around the place. I never had to chase her for money. She was good in that way.

I was always careful to stay in my hutch like a good little terrified rabbit who knew his place, so we got along okay.

Mostly she worked to the usual formula. Provide the service and they pay you afterwards. Stay the night, settle up the next morning. There was one exception to that rule; show people – actors and actresses. They always had to pay in advance. There was a theater nearby on the green which I think is still there. As a matter of fact, I bought tickets for one my sisters for her birthday as a treat in order for her to see her first ballet for real. I wanted to give her that gift. Swan lake in miniature, as I recall.

She was that sort of girly mad about the Degas sketches of the ballerinas in training and the whole ballet thing in general. I was more into Miss Lala at the cirque Fernando and action sketching, just getting that line right at the first stroke of the charcoal. The one perfect shot. The best I could afford was way up in the gods and she promptly got vertigo, so there you go – no good deed goes unpunished. We didn’t even make it to the interval because of the barf threat overhanging the people down below but she still loved Edgar’s paintings, so there was no lasting damage done I believe.

Anyway, in one of those little zero social skills silences that occasionally occur with such people as the landlady, I asked why the “theatricals”, as she named them, had to pay in advance. “Because they’re all thieves, tarts, pimps or harlots” was the curt response as she machine marched onward to brutalise her way through the rest of her day. A few years down the line and after a few encounters with the theatricals myself, I sort of came around to her rather harsh way of seeing things when it came to them. The play is the thing, they’re just the people speaking the words someone else has created and put into their mouths.

They are ephemeral creatures of the moment, who’ll always go with what’s stylish and trending. Their interest will last just that long and be exactly that enduring. What’s today is soon yesterday and before the sun drops, it’s already a long gone yesterday. There’s always style, but rarely any substance. You learn to enjoy their show face, but you never trust them an inch.

That naked craving for attention is demeaning but you eventually realise they can’t help themselves. You see it, understand it and see that massive fault line running through their personality. It’s all about wanting people to look at them. Beautiful, delicate creatures who have not much else in the way of survival stratagems. In the end, they think it’s their sum worth and as the looks disappear, they tend to pull the pin on the grenade in one way or another. It’s rarely true, but persuading them of that mistake is nearly impossible.

They don’t focus on you, but each other because a professional is only ever interested in the real opinion of another professional on the performance. That’s their blind spot. They’re intuitive, tactile, touchy feely, but any train of thought beyond the momentary is a fleeting achievement. It’s all about show rather than substance. Hollywood is suffering its worst year in a quarter century and doesn’t know why because Hollywood only talks to Hollywood these days.

They’re going to have to get back to talking to ordinary people. They’ve totally lost touch. The Weinstein thing is illustrative of that lust to get their name further up the ladder. They all went with Harvey because he was useful in the furtherance of their career, but it’s now mete to loudly proclaim their victimhood, anything to get their name into paragraph one of the newspaper.

Weinstein was never unusual, what is though is the outing of him. They all knew and scurried around to protect him as if their life depended on it, because their careers did. Somebody who once worked as a producer in Hollywood decided to pull the plug on him and them.

Gather around and watch the piglets rush to judgment, scream and denounce each other, and tear themselves apart just to get themselves one more step up the ladder of notoriety. That’s the nature of the beast.

©Pointman

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