Shots in the dark: Hollywood—where big dreams die or live even bigger

I made my first trip to Los Angeles in October 1986. I rented a beaten-up Pinto and, not knowing what else to do, drove around for days in the slipstream of other people's imaginations. I became, for example, the Jim Morrison who. crooned "L.A. Woman": "Well, I just got into town about an hour ago / Took a look around, see which way the wind blow / Where the little girls in their Hollywood bungalows / Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light / Or just another lost angel..."

Determinedly corny, I drove east on Sunset Boulevard and north from La Brea, so I could be Raymond Chandler's private detective Philip Marlowe, who, on his long meditative drive in The Little Sister (Vintage Books), takes that route into the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County. Marlowe has a case he can't solve involving two sisters from Kansas--one a prim but dangerous nobody, Orfamay Quest; the other a movie star, Mavis Weld. He is falling in love with Weld knowing she is socially beyond his reach, which fuels his sexual disgust with her kind. "Behind Encino," Marlowe bitterly observes in this poison valentine to Hollywood values, "an occasional light winked from the hills through thick trees. The homes of screen stars. Screen stars, phooey. The veterans of a thousand beds."

I also drove west on Sunset so I could step into my own private film noir, as Bryan Ferry, assuming a heartbroken persona, does when he sings "Can't Let Go": "It's a winding road from Cuesta Way / Down Sunset to the beach/Though Canoga Park is a straight safe drive / It's too far outta reach."

I suspect Ferry had been reading The Little Sister when he wrote that number, its tortured refrain--"There's a madness in my soul tonight--echoing Marlowe when he says to himself, "You're not human tonight." And Los Angeles will make you go mad if what you're seeking there is something you'll never find--celebrity, riches, happiness with a lover who's in love with someone else, an infinite spiral of sexual satisfaction.

Pretending you're someone else in L.A. can be a highly paid vocation, but those who fail at it may find themselves trapped by the need to keep pretending. Recent Hollywood movies have shown how small-town girls with visions of stardom can be crushed by their illusions. The Kim Basinger character in L.A. Confidential (1997) has given up hopes of acting to become a prostitute for men who imagine themselves sleeping with Veronica Lake. In the back-to-front world of Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts' suicidal actress, rejected by her movie star girlfriend and the Hollywood system, dreams of becoming a newly arrived starlet acclaimed as a hot talent, and happily in love with her brunette inamorata. But when the dream breaks, she is, like the blonde junkie-hooker glimpsed in the film, just another lost angel.

The new Auto Focus, Paul Schrader's urbane but sour biopic of Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane, is rare in that it tracks the disintegration of a leading man in L.A.--compelling though it is, the movie might prove as welcome as the John Belushi tell-all, Wired (1989). Crane (Greg Kinnear at his best) was a Connecticut DJ-married with kids-whose hobbies included playing the drums, photography and perusing girlie magazines when he first lit out for Hollywood. Schrader shows this alpaca-and-polyester-clad naif falling in with Mephistophelean hipster John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), who introduces him to strip clubs and an endless string of willing women. He becomes a sexaholic obsessed with logging his encounters in photographs and, eventually, with the latest video equipment supplied by the codependent Carpenter. Crane's swinging lifestyle costs him two marriages, his career, and his life.

Although Schrader's movie is narrated posthumously by Crane, inviting comparisons with Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), it is more a critique of '60s-style sexism than an attack on Hollywood. Yet the film comes most vividly alive in the re-created lounges of the Sunset Strip-hothouses for appetites that leech and suck like exotic plants. Watching the film, I kept wanting to say to Crane, "Drive away from there-like Bryan Ferry drives away from Bel-Air in "Can't Let Go"-"and never, ever come back."

Graham Fuller is Interview's Film Writer at Large. Above (from left): Willem Dafoe and Greg Kinnear in Auto Focus; Gloria Swanson and William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. Photos: Frank Masi/Sony Pictures Classics; Photofest/Paramount Pictures.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
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