March 29, 2013
7. RELENTLESS COMPLIMENTS
When you first talk to someone in LA, they”re so flattering you wonder if the mirrors work at your house. I don”t care that I”m ugly but when people say, “Oh my God, you look AMAZING,” I start to wonder if I”m in an area with different standards of beauty than the rest of the world. Later you come to realize what that really means is, “Hello.” It’s the same in business. You”ll write a pilot or map out the idea for a screenplay and you”re told it’s the most incredible thing on Earth”by the client! So you start making plans for the next six months and don”t know you”re fired until you see it in The Hollywood Reporter. Looking like a hairy turtle with AIDS means I”m used to rejection, but I”ve seen writers go into deep depressions because they put all their eggs in one project’s basket and never considered that some square-toed shoe would step right into the center of the thing. Shit, LA is so backwards and disorganized, it’s not unusual to walk into the place the project was commissioned and discover the entire staff has been replaced. Nobody has a job there for more than four months and I suspect it’s because they are all incompetent.
8. THE AIR SUCKS
The atmosphere is so dry in LA, you have to order a Big Gulp just to get a sip. It feels like Mad Max in an outdoor shopping mall and every time you inhale through your nose, your nostrils stick together. Venice is refreshing, but being asked for a cigarette every 13 seconds is not. Santa Monica also has air that’s not in a desert but that’s just one street and a beach, which is freezing cold.
9. CELEBRITIES
I”ve slowly started to realize that acting can be fun. Writing a story and having it come to life is also pretty exciting, but being famous? What kind of person is attracted to a lifestyle where most of your day consists of strangers interrupting you? When people get really famous, they”re like burn victims who instantly quiet a room and make everyone uncomfortable. Famous people are freaks. That’s why Tilda Swinton is sleeping in a Plexiglas box outside MoMA right now. The reverence these people get is even more disturbing. An actor is merely repeating lines he read an hour ago, and he’s doing it the way the director told him to a second ago. It’s not a craft. It’s karaoke without singing. Even the director’s job is overrated. All he’s doing is watching TV live and noticing when he doesn”t like something. You know who else does that? Oh, everyone.
10. IT WAS SIMPLY NOT MEANT TO BE
You start to wonder as you walk around in this blindingly sunny nothingness, “Is this place supposed to be a city?” It’s like Vegas without the casinos. Just desert air with dying plants (fed by someone else’s water) and cement buildings built to be torn down. The movie Battle: Los Angeles is a $70-million apocalypse film about aliens destroying the City of Angels. I guess it scared some people, but most of us (including people in LA) watched the city burst into flames and thought, “Good.”
