Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall

by Will Self

  ‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ the crowd chanted, while the security detail that had ushered these, the stars of the new Myers comedy vehicle, The Love Guru, across the road, were now frantically trying to get them back. It wasn’t the cars that were the problem – their drivers sat, docilely accepting the mêlée – it was the crowd, which, having filled up the forecourt of the theater, came coursing between the stalled vehicles, a human torrent with waves of faces.

  Rising unsteadily to my feet, I addressed my fellow patrons: ‘C’mon, people!’ I struggled to make myself heard. ‘This is lunacy. Justin Timberlake! Mike Myers! Jessica-fucking-Alba? These are not big stars even by the standards of our Lilliputian era – seriously, no one’s gonna riot over them.’ I waved my arm wildly and knocked over my cup. Earl Grey leapt into the Houellebecqalike’s lap. He leapt up crying, ‘Roi du cons!’, grabbed me by the throat and began dragging me off the terrace.

  Before I toppled into the millrace of sentiment, I was gifted with a moment of clarity: I saw that the bald boys had succeeded in corralling the money back on the far side of the boulevard, while the crowd that whirled around Grauman’s had swollen mightily, its turbulence of bodies enveloping the stalled vehicles and washing up against the fronts of the buildings to twice head height. I saw that the people closest to me were highly individuated – I had only to look upon them to know all about them.

  Valerie Schultz, a dental hygienist from Portland, Oregon, a tad overweight, a jet-bead bracelet buried in her wurst folds, a cold sore on her full lower lip, had been date-raped in 1984 and became pregnant. She gave the child up for adoption, but two years ago he tracked her down. He was angry, almost illiterate – he’d run away from foster parents in Cedar Rapids to join a biker gang. Valerie got him on a methadone programme, but he still drank – and when he drank he beat her, hence the yellowy-blue stippling of a bruise on the flap of belly exposed as, bobbing in the mob, her T-shirt rides up.

  Bob, Duane and Kerry-Anne – I can smell their separate savours as they sibilate ‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ But, just as anonymity shades in notoriety, so the further my eye roves the more stereotypical the faces of the crowd become. Then I’m being tossed and buffeted, bouncing off a belly over here, receiving a clout from a stray fist over there. As I am pitched up on to their heads and shoulders, the cacophony of moans, catcalls, shrieks, chants and applause becomes overwhelming. From up here I can make out small islets of the recognizable – a Tin Man with an oil-funnel hat, Elvis mouthing, ‘Everybody let’s rock!’ – but these are surrounded by visages, the eyes, noses and mouths of which are no more differentiated than the funiculae, mandibles and compound eyes of a locust corvée.

  To begin with I assume that it’s my own proximity that can imbue these anthropoids with individuality – but I’m soon disabused, for as the agitated waves sweep me away from the terrace of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, the crowd becomes more cloned. By the time I’m two blocks further and being scraped along the stone rendering of the L. Ron Hubbard Gallery, I’m surrounded by a swarm whose faces are smooth convexities of flesh, gashed with slots from which issue a monotonous drone.

  My clothes are ripped to shreds, blood flows from cuts on my chest and thighs – unless I can gain a place of safety soon I’ll be torn to shreds by the computer-generated mob. Think – think! The clones may be frenzied but they move only where preordained by their creators; if I can read the currents and cross-currents perhaps I can go with the flow? I note the alignment of the Orange Grove sign with a palm tree: that bearing should take me towards the Roosevelt Hotel. I twist and slip sideways into the tide coursing back towards Grauman’s; then, as it draws level with the tree, I push hard at a head with both feet and reach for the trunk ... only to be swept backwards by a rush heading the other way.

  Horrified, I realize I’m in the van of a flying wedge charging straight towards a horde going in the opposite direction. Their impact flips me head over heels, and as the two columns grind against each other I’m twirled again and again, as a spar is battered by a weir. ‘JussstinJussstinJussstinJussstin!’ The pressure increases – if I’m sucked into an eddy I’ll be trampled to death beneath the clones’ feet, which, despite their binary DNA, are rigid and hard. My ribs are cracking, my shoulders and hips disjointing ... I fight it, kicking out to keep my feet on the ground. Another moaning rush, ‘JusssJusssJusss!’, and I find myself in a calm spot where the pressure slackens – although now I feel a terrible stabbing pain in my lower back. It’s strange, given that the forms that surround me have no more angles or projections than mass-produced souvenir Oscar statuettes ... I can’t turn but manage to twist my head: a very skinny kid wearing a Lakers cap has his sharp shoulder digging into my kidneys. Shocked by this reindividuation, I pan about and see that, yes, others of the homologues are becoming distinguishable, with here a shock of brown hair, there a scattering of freckles, over there a beaded dreadlock.

  It must be that whoever animated the scene anticipated action here requiring a close-up. I crane to see under the peak of the boy’s cap – he’s as vague as a ghost, so, having laboriously freed my arm, I swing on him, a clumsy haymaker that comes down on top of his head and with a yelp he goes under. There’s a further wild surge that washes me into another calm pool; this time I’m facing a young woman who sobs hysterically. Her cotton print dress has been ripped from the neckline to her waist – her brassière as well. Her breasts would be beautiful, were it not that one of them is missing a nipple. I push back to give her some room, but every time I move she moves with me, insinuating her leg between my thighs. I’m becoming aroused – until the girl spasms violently and her blonde bob lifts to reveal that she has no ears. ‘Stop it! Fuckin’ quit!’ she yells – but it isn’t me that’s bothering her, it’s the clone behind her, whose blank screen morphs into a goatish leer ... then I see that he has his hand up her dress, while he dribbles on her bare neck.

  My arm is still aloft, so I grab his ear – another action that’s obviously been anticipated, for it’s as well formed as an anatomical drawing. I squeeze it as hard I can and twist, but it isn’t long before skin melds with cartilage and the ear disappears back into a slick egghead that’s borne away from me. At least the young woman has escaped, although when I try to pick out her blonde bob in the crowd it too has been subsumed by the pixels ... Another spasm passes through them; I find myself within an arm’s length of a signpost, a second spasm and I grab it, am swung up and round into the air ...

  A final view of Hollywood Boulevard crashing with waves of sound: ‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ The pagodas of Grauman’s soar thousands of feet into the sky, as do the other, less ornate buildings, all of which have been subjected to the same crude multiplier. In the deep trough between them the crowd ripples, and there’s a last sensation of buoyancy as I float on this lake of doppelgängers before a providential swirl carries me into the gloomy inlet of the Roosevelt’s lobby.

  I stared at my idol face in the tarnished pool of an old mirror for a long time, yet there seemed no evidence of the ordeal I had just survived: my clothes were intact; my baseball cap was clamped firmly on my head. True, my expression was a little wary, but even as I looked a familiar superciliousness crept back in from the edges. I sniffed deeply, sucking up the ineradicable odour of old hotel – dust and static electricity – then padded back towards the stairs that led down to the reception desk.*

  Between square pillars I could see that the tables were already laid in the restaurant, glassware and cutlery gleaming on dark wood. I checked my watch: 7.16 already – I had better get ready fast, or I’d be late for my dinner with Bret.

  *After I had levied my Mastercard and signed the form, here, here and there, the receptionist clicked his fingers for the bellhop. I tried to say that I didn’t require any assistance but the words crumbled on my tongue, and for what seemed like several hours I was suspended in a reverie during which I surveyed an entire alternative history for the North American landmass. One in which the second wave of
colonization was from the west, in the tenth century ce, and by Arab traders who then converted the Native Americans to Islam, occupied the entire continent, established a caliphate, rapidly industrialized and then in the seventeenth century mounted a war of conquest against the sleepy European backwater where the Reformation – not to mention the Enlightenment – had yet to occur.

  7

  My Dinner with Bret

  ‘Is the asparagus fresh?’

  ‘Well, it’s in a soup, so it’s been, like, puréed.’

  ‘But was it fresh when it was puréed?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘What about the halibut?’

  ‘I can assure you: that’s definitely fresh.’

  ‘Definitely?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  Fresh the halibut may have been, although this was still the type of restaurant where dead fish were laid out for boning on squared-off mounds of clapshot or polenta. Over Bret’s shoulder the dun dining room of the Roosevelt seamlessly merged with the deeper and wider murk of the Spanish Revival lobby, where an enormous crystal chandelier dripped wanly, scarcely illuminating the exposed ceiling beams, let alone the mezzanine level cornice with its pattern of desert blooms.

  There had been some manoeuvring before we were installed by our own square pillar, which, like all the others in the restaurant, had been boxed off at head height by interior designer Dodd Mitchell – although probably not personally.

  ‘I don’t want to sit next to anyone in this town,’ Bret had explained to the maître d’ after rejecting the first two tables offered. He was wearing a cool-looking cream linen suit and a positively chilly blue silk shirt. Ray-Bans poked from his display pocket, and when he canted sideways on the banquette suede loafers poked out from beneath the table. He was being played by mid-period Orson Welles – neither the obese, sherry-swilling old roué who had taken on Busner’s role, nor the young Welles who had impersonated the writer back in the mid-1980s, at the summit of his notoriety.

  I didn’t know who’d taken me on this evening – and Bret was giving nothing away. I thought it unlikely that Postlethwaite had been racketing around Manhattan in the nineties, which was when I’d got to know the author of American Psycho, but it was possible Thewlis had been there for raucous dinners at Elaine’s, big drinks in the small hours at Mary Lou’s in the Village, then dawn upchucking from the East River, glimpsed nauseously by vampires doing lines of cremains off somebody’s butcher block in someone else’s apartment.

  In those days Bret had struck me as high, wide, handsome and more than a little bumptious – this was forgivable, given that he was scarcely thirty and already with the masterpiece of Citizen Kane to his credit. Now he seemed leaner – the Welles glimpsed only briefly on camera during the shooting of his Rockefellerfunded South American travelogue, a fiasco that had ended up way over budget. Perhaps it was this that had winnowed him out?

  He finished ordering with a run through the white wines available by the glass, before settling reluctantly on a Zinfandel.

  ‘And for you, sir?’

  ‘Me?’ I was flustered, and as my Adam’s apple scraped in my dry throat I flashed back to the $1,000-per-night poolside cabana where I had checked myself out obsessively in the mirror before this rendezvous. What madness! How could I have forgotten the thinning hair, the pocked cheeks, knobbly knees and hairless ankles? I was Postlethwaite, of course, and no matter how many Kiehl’s bath products I lavished on myself there was no possibility of my seducing Bret, I mean, I was hardly his type. ‘Uh, I’ll have ... the same as him.’

  It was the pathetic non-order of a subaltern of style, who knows nothing and so uses the quince spoon to ream his pipe.

  Two pools of thick soup soon lay before us, inscribed in truffle oil with the worthless autograph of the sous-chef. ‘A script is a commodity,’ Bret was saying; ‘nothing more – oftentimes a hell of a lot less. It’s no longer simply a case of “to the victor the spoils”; the actual craft of screenwriting has become having the balls and the connections necessary to get your credit.’

  He stopped speaking and began paddling his fibreglass face towards the soup. I already regretted having given him the whole death-of-film shtick, although at least he seemed to think it was a metaphor – and when I’d contemptuously observed Postlethwaite babbling my lines, I’d held back from admitting I was in Hollywood to find its killer or killers.

  ‘But, Bret,’ I said, ‘you’re a native Angeleno, your own books have been filmed – isn’t The Informers in production right now? – you must feel an affinity for the industry?’

  ‘Industry? It isn’t an industry any more, man, it’s a fucking business. I tellya, if I’d’ve known the whole extent of the bullshit I was going to get caught up in, I never would’ve come back – and now there’s this other crap, the writers’ strike.’

  ‘Why did you stay?’

  He sighed, an expiration that was mouldering in its dead civility: ‘Phew ... Money, dummy – I need the money.’

  Welles and Ellis – they seemed like a failed anagram or a botched palindrome. Certainly, Welles had never bettered this performance, what with its re-uptake of inhibited diffidence, its Mesolithic tedium vitae. I recalled that shocking first sight of him as Captain Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil, lunging up from his squad car, his saltpan of a face mottled and cracked. He was only forty-two when he wrote, directed and acted in the movie, yet the taint was already on him: green grave weeds, rotting at the edges. Did he see then how it would all end up, with his final role being the voiceover of Unicron, the planet-eating robot in the first Transformers movie?

  The waiter came across and took our soup bowls. The restaurant had filled up with hay-hair honey-skin blondes in knock-off couture squired by men fully suited. Still, with no climate variation to speak of all four seasonal collections could be spanned by a few degrees: if the temperature fell to seventy, couples began promenading Sunset togged up as Nanook and Nyla of the north. The waiter returned with the halibuts and a bottle of Powerade tucked under his arm. I was about to remonstrate with him when he swerved aside and plonked it in between the tête-à-tête at the next table, so that it hovered in my own mid shot.

  ‘Whoa,’ Bret muttered, ‘the hard stuff.’ Then he went on about the death of film as he teased out fish bones with the tines of his fork: ‘I don’t think you’re right, there’s always dynamism in movie culture, whatever the mechanics of production. Even now with this, like, avalanche of product there’re still innovative things getting made.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, Knocked Up – didya see Knocked Up?’

  I groped in the mildewed reticule of my memory and came up with, ‘Um, yeah, sorta slacker comedy type thing. Not bad.’

  ‘Not bad? It was a whole new approach to formula pictures like that. You should read the New Yorker review – actually, it was more like an essay—’

  ‘By Anthony Lane, right?’ I simpered disparagingly, while thinking most of what follows.*

  The Love Guru

  Billboards advertising this movie’s release dominated my circumambulation of the Los Angeles basin, and during my 120-mile, week-long walk I must have passed scores of them depicting the Canadian comedian in a fake Bhagwan beard and the orange robes of a sannyasi, sitting cross-legged, one hand grasping a yellow flower, the other held – incorrectly – in the Varada Mudra pose of Theravada Buddhism: palm out, thumb and index fingers touching. Myers was, it transpired, welcoming moviegoers into an entertainment that – even by his own unexacting standards – was a pile of shit: impotent sexual innuendoes, incontinent scatological jokes, bigoted intercultural gags – The Love Guru had ’em all.

  I assert this, but when I eventually saw the movie in my local hot-buttered multiplex, I realized I was in no position to judge it, for so long had I been out of the celluloid loop. Sure, it was shit – but then for all I knew all movies were shit; either that, or, given that cinema was the world’s dominant narrative medium, the silvery mi
rror in which Humanity viewed its own raddled features, perhaps those features were themselves daubed with shit.

  Besides, I was not insensible to the halo effect, whereby the new work of any given filmmaker is surrounded by the penumbra of his or her earlier efforts. In Myers’s case, The Love Guru came haloed in shit, because I’d disliked his movies from the very first time I’d seen one, on a flight back from New York in June 1992. I suppose if I had the exhaustive critical intelligence of an Anthony Lane, rather than the planet-devouring negativity of a Unicron, then I might reserve my judgement (both then and now), not having seen the original Saturday Night Live sketches on which Wayne’s World was based. But I appeal to your own better judgement: would it really have made any difference?

  Sixteen years ago I failed to find any charm in the two provincial bohunks and their amateurish cable TV show. My companion on the flight, Charles Hudson, was, however, happy to lose himself in the fartantics of Myers and his co-star Dana Carvey for 94 minutes. Then we talked, drank vodka miniatures and I smoked. Strange to recall how cigarette smoke looked in plane cabins: the ghost of a smirch in the rapidly rarefying atmosphere; it’s something my own children will never see, although they may well live to witness the extinction of mass air travel that my own generation saw evolve – all those dinoboeings, choked on their own tailpipes.

  We drank many, many Smirnoff miniatures and decompressed from our Stateside trip in the acrid fuselage. On our first evening in Manhattan the crack vials had crunched under foot as we made our way downtown to go clubbing. Late that night I had to wake Charles up and ask him for a sedative – I knew he had some, old-school things, chalky little manhole covers inscribed with one of those Big Pharma coinages – Evaqual? Navarolt? Intephrine? – that make anxiolytic medications sound like the bastard offspring of a Turkish fisherman and a planet-eating robot.