throwingheat

We are never far away from the filmy embrace of the cinema, or the tittering laugh tracks of TV, and their suggestive power in our lives. We live, we breathe, and we Tivo for these celluloid and videotape mothers of us all. Along those lines I’d like to introduce you to a concept you may not be familiar with, but that has been flowing all around you for a long time, like gamma rays from solar storms, or teenagers heading out the front door. This concept happens to be Hollywood’s supervising paradox, and it’s a secret better kept than Rock Hudson’s Rolodex.

It goes something like this: Here in Los Angeles, the original Mecca of the entertainment universe, the capital of film, where the world is re-imagined in colorful and ingenious ways a thousand times a day, the primary goal of this prolific and artistic industry is not art, or enlightenment, or even cheap entertainment. Rather, it is the manufacture of the word “no.” That’s the product that occupies 98 percent of the daily pitching, lunching, and glad-handing that passes for business as usual in this town. This is an elegant twist of irony, this idea that the thing we crave is responsible for such a nonstop ticker tape of rejection. But it’s true, and it infiltrates everything that moves or speaks in Hollywood.

One you have become alert to the signals of denial, you’ll notice it everywhere. In L.A. there is high demand, for sure; it takes an awful lot of content to satisfy the vast marketplace. But there is a staggering excess supply of every element necessary for film, video, or stage production, from the CEO of the major studio to the skinny writer with the sure-fire script in hand to the unpaid intern backing up craft service (the sacred snack table found on film and television sets). Yet each of those stations is simply (to appropriate a classic phrase from Murray Mednick’s The Coyote Cycle) “the living tip of the long line of the dead.” In other words, for every paycheck that is issued in this town, there are at least 500 sofa cushions being flattened or unemployment cases being initiated.

“No” manifests in a multitude of ways. Probably the most common of these is ‘the stretch’—the interval between the time an aspiring phone call is made and the time it is either returned, or there is a 7.0 earthquake (that’ll stop anything, including the World Series), or one of the key figures in the aspirant’s concept moves to Nova Scotia and becomes a scripture-spouting lobster fisherman. The stretch is a cauldron of human evasion with no beginning or end, bubbling over with offstage climaxes and significant events that douse the importance of whatever is on the aspirant’s mind or in the aspirant’s contract. It is endless activity devoted to anything and everything except positive commerce. The original caller experiences the stretch as an orbit around the dark side of a distant planet, where optimism disintegrates into a long, strange silence. In that communication void the patient original caller begins to harbor dark images about his or her future while ‘round the long, smoky bend, where business flourishes as usual, the respondent merrily meets with a personal trainer, shops for a house, has plastic surgery, and goes skydiving.

Anyone acquainted with the stretch is also familiar with “the feint;” it’s an all-inclusive deal. The feint refers to the false enthusiasm with which a performance, pitch, or application is accepted by a Power What Is. It is a spring shower of feel-good pellets raining down on the hopeful petitioner, followed by an abrupt return to blank indifference and determined amnesia. The feint is the performance by which the judgers are judged, and they pride themselves on their exuberant excess—think Ari Gold when he wants to clear his office. The following phrases are typical markers for this reliable denial device:
“That really reminded me of Marty Scorsese’s early work. When his retrospective opens we’ll have to go.” (Here the arrow of friendship has been shot high in the air, off the top of a sand dune on beachfront property, on a 30-degree arc tilted toward Hawaii).
“I was moved. It took me someplace special.” (I went to see your play and sat in a lousy seat. But I fixed it by complaining. Then I left during intermission).
“I want to read it again.” (I’m going to make everyone on this floor read it, and I might call you back someday if I can find anybody who understands it).
“It’s a really lovely, heartwarming idea.” (Your idea is for suckers).
“One more draft and you’ve got a huge hit.” (I suggest you bring Preston Sturges back from the dead and have him take a crack at it).
“Wow! It’s great to see you working!” (I have absolutely nothing to say, but I say that in all sincerity).

Misdirection is another tried and true deviation from the affirmative. If you have ever been frustrated by the dense maze of a large company’s voice mail system, imagine that system spread among a thousand buildings within a radius of 30 miles from the Beverly Center, the approximate area of the Hollywood “studio zone.” Now imagine that you are attempting to have a live conversation with someone in a position to move your career up three levels with one exhale. You were only dabbling in junior varsity frustration before. By the time the system is done unbraiding your hope and tossing you around from office to office where they never heard of you—or anybody whose name you might be inclined to drop—you’re going to feel like a salmon that has swum upstream for nine months only to find that the spawning grounds have become a Bucca di Beppo. The person you need is nowhere to be found. Will never be found. Probably doesn’t even exist. This is an existential horn blat, kind of like the driving directions you get from down-Easters: “You wanna go wheah? Well, I hate ta break it to ya but you can’t get theah from heah…”

Getting the idea? Once you warm up to it, you’ll develop a sixth sense about the big NoNo. Stand on the patio of any industry hot spot and listen to the clinking, chattering buzz. People leaning tanned ears toward their tablemates, nodding profusely, eager to catch every utterance, take it home in a doggy bag and start the world anew. The laughter! The simpatico! The sweet aroma of potential profits! But watch and listen with discerning eyes and ears. That fit of giggles over in the corner was no more genuine than the rug on the head of the guy who produced it. The hugs. The handshakes. The European pecks on the cheeks. All as artificial and full of air as a squirt of Redi-Whip.

See now, that’s how it really works in Hollywood. Because, as any industry veteran will tell you, “Nobody ever got fired for saying ‘no.’” And you can fit more of that word on the bottom line.