Everything Now by Rosecrans Baldwin

Author:Rosecrans Baldwin [Baldwin, Rosecrans]
Language: eng
Format: epub

5.2    Los Angeles probably has no single unifying dream besides the straightforward desire to be loved or not die in an earthquake—or perhaps not feel so alone in the vastness of the immense slouching shapelessness—but if there is one narrative that outsiders pin to the city-state, stocked with clichés but also some essential truths, it is often the dream of Hollywood.

No matter what industry a citizen works in, the entertainment business often feels like an alien ship hovering over the county, spewing out chemtrails that breeze around the world. Film, television, music. Icons of celebrity culture and “reality programming,” including the Hollywood sign itself, erected in 1923 as a stunt to promote a real estate development. It was viewable from our block. Every day I watched tourists pose outside our house for a picture with the big abstraction—that embodiment of fame, stepping into the limelight, becoming “like the Hollywood sign itself, instantly recognizable,” as Leo Braudy put it in The Hollywood Sign.

And yet the vast majority of Los Angeles has no more connection to “Hollywood”—the business, not the actual neighborhood—than the average moviegoer in Shanghai, except maybe the one time they saw a famous actor running errands. (A weekday morning, Ian Ziering, from Beverly Hills 90210, pushed a cart through the parking lot of a grocery store on Sunset and Fairfax, and a man lying on the sidewalk remarked loudly, “Looking big, Ian!” Ziering shouted back, “All natural! Protein, yo!”) The actual neighborhood of Hollywood wasn’t home to studios and stars, but instead many smack addicts, many two a.m. men looking to pay a little extra for a little extra, not to mention a long-standing Latin community, also elderly Russians. “We were still ethnic here,” Karolina Waclawiak wrote in How to Get into the Twin Palms. “When people walked by, they would point at the windows and say things like, ‘Why are they drying their clothes outside? Aren’t they afraid they’ll get stolen?’”

Of course, “Hollywood” was still very big business, big icon, big macher. And, in its own way, “Hollywood” was L.A. and the sign was L.A., and the people who worked in “Hollywood,” the business that had for a long time mostly taken place in villages and neighborhoods scattered around the city-state that weren’t named Hollywood—Toluca Lake, Burbank, Culver City—were also L.A., though those people often spoke as if everyone else in L.A. worked in the business of “Hollywood” too, which could be off-putting. As though everyone had friends in common from college in Middletown, New Haven, or Boston. Everyone had spent years afterward in Brooklyn or Austin. Everyone likewise communicated to one another in a way to suggest, whether or not they liked the work itself, that they didn’t live in earthbound Los Angeles so much as in Hollywood’s hovering citadel, a flying vehicle that occasionally drifted away to Atlanta, or Vancouver—or Park City, Utah—affording first-class views and snacks to those with union cards. As Carey McWilliams once wrote, “Where motion pictures are made, there is Hollywood.”

So Hollywood was

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