Goin' Hollywood 2: The Squeakuel

That's me on the right.

The summer after my junior year of high school, I attended a weeklong filmmaking camp at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Leading up to the camp, I was really excited about what it meant for my future; at that point, I had already written a (godawful) screenplay, and my thinking was that in the course of this sojourn to the southland I’d be able to pitch it to the various film industry professionals who’d be teaching our classes, or at the very least network with like minded individuals who would probably be the next generation’s Spielbergs and Scorceses (or Bays, in a pinch).

When I got there, I found that most of the people doing workshops were F level Hollywood burnouts or complete outsiders, trying just as hard as I was to break in, and my classmates were mostly rich brats from the Midwest who wanted to get away from their parents long enough to get wasted and hook up. Needless to say, this camp crushed all of our dreams – I didn’t make any headway on my quest to become a famous writer, and we were so heavily chaperoned that none of the other campers could sneak off campus to use their fake IDs or get anywhere within boning distance of one another.*

*Not that I know of, at least. Nobody tried to fuck me, I’ll tell you that much. Except for some weird, slutty girl from Missouri, who has forever sullied my opinion of that state.

The one thing I did learn from that trip was that I was never going to move to Los Angeles. The crusty, jaded old screenwriters they’d pulled together for the workshop, no doubt enticed by the promise of a hot meal and a complimentary bottle of Wild Turkey, had nothing but bad things to say about the Hollywood studio system. They told us spiteful tales of the beautifully crafted screenplays they had turned out, only to see the studios buy them for peanuts and then completely rewrite them into lame teen sex comedies.* To hear them tell it, moving to Hollywood was just a good way to get closer to the industry that would take the delicious fruit of your creative labors out into a back alley and shoot it deader than Batman’s parents.

*Remember SpaceCamp? Apparently SpaceCamp was going to be totally sick until the studio fucked it up.

Plus, everything I’d seen of Hollywood on the various motorcoach tours they gave us between classes didn’t do much more to entice me. The air was hazy and we spent hours in traffic to see old film industry attractions that were at all times grimy and surrounded by crackheads. Believe it or not, there was a time that I didn’t like living in Oregon; a time that I thought it was a lame, boring place. After that trip to LA, I came home and realized that I truly did live in The Greatest Place On Earth™, and I haven’t looked back since.

What turned me off the most, though, was my impression at the time that the whole town was built on shit. Not literally, of course – like most cities on the West Coast, it’s merely built on broken promises made to the Native Americans who once lived there, along with a light dusting of their tears and broken dreams.

Hollywood, as I saw it, was built on shit in a more abstract sense – people went there to break into the film industry and sacrificed everything to get in, and the lucky few who made it in seemed to promptly forget their roots and start shitting on all the unlucky outsiders as they climbed the ladder. And yet all the outsiders we talked to in LA, the struggling actors leading our tours and teaching our classes, the ones who told us that we had to sacrifice all dignity and be as nice as possible to every rude and disrespectful producer and agent who spat on us, couldn’t stop smiling and talking about how Hollywood was where dreams came true.

At the time, it looked like Hollywood was a great place for your dreams to come true if your dream was to spend your entire life being relentlessly derided and mocked. Fortunately, I met Mike two years later, and I’ve been able to live my life of endless derision and mockery without having to leave the Willamette Valley.

So when I tell you that I’m subletting an apartment for two months and leaving for Los Angeles this coming Wednesday, know that I’ve clearly given the matter some good, hard thought.

The fact is, I changed my mind – thanks to the poor nature of the filmmaking camp I’d gone to, I had the wrong idea about the industry. Yes, there’s a lot of assholes in it; some of them are assholes because their job necessitates it, and others are assholes because they’re assholes. But what I realized on my most recent trip to LA, right before I left for England, was that the film industry is also chock full of really, really nice people.

The writers’ assistants who interviewed me at Brothers and Sisters were a laid back, jovial bunch, and all of my cousin’s friends on the set dressing crew were just downright friendly as all hell. When I wound up on the Desperate Housewives lot, the fucking director of the episode pulled up a chair and gave me some headphones so I could watch the shoot, and I cracked jokes with other crew members about how grating Eva Longoria’s laugh can be. The following day, Gene’s friend Amanda, the one who got us onto the Desperate Housewives set, invited us over to have dinner with her family, all of whom work in costuming for film and television. Right away they welcomed me into their home like I was one of the family.

At one point, Gene and I were talking to Amanda’s father, who emigrated from Hungary after World War II and wound up working as a costume designer in Hollywood for a good 50 years – he’s recently retired and now works as a character actor, primarily in commercials. We were just BSing about the industry, and I shared my Eva Longoria encounter from the previous day, and then Amanda’s dad totally knocked my story on its ass by casually recounting how in the 1960s he helped The Beatles choose the clothes they wore on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As he told it, they were so thrilled with the clothes he found for them that he wound up hanging out with them for a few days afterwards.*

*”Did you smoke any weed with them?” Gene asked. “Nah!” Amanda’s father snorted. “None of that. We did a little sniffy-sniffy, though, if you know what I mean…”

The thing is, as big and scary and gangy as LA is, so many of the behind the camera folks in Hollywood seem to be one big, welcoming family. As misguided as it sounds, that looks like an industry where I’d be well taken care of, and to be honest, I just can’t wait to get down there.

Truman Capps would like to clarify that he hasn’t gotten an answer from the people at the Emmys yet – he’s just going down because he knows he’ll have an internship no matter what. And because this stinger wasn’t very funny, GIANT BALLSACK.