Rainy's coming at the exact right time.
Passed apartment complexes on Franklin Avenue between Vermont and Wilton, and saw two huge banners. Romero is over at my place today and says he thinks Rainy can get a place with two bedrooms for $1500 a month, since he's been hearing $1400-$1700. In the past three weeks, Romero has been a runner on a TV show, a stand-in for the week-before prep of a TV show, and been over at a production company near the Getty Center logging vid. He's making $20 to $25 an hour, and he's not really trying. The real estate is so scary right now that apartment buildings might start offering the sort of incentives you always see on the east coast: first or last month free. The house down the street from me selling for $1.1 million is down to $900K and still nobody shows. The paradise I'm in went for rent for $2800, and is now down to $2700 a month, and seven people came today to see the place and not one bite. So the timing is good; work, and dented rent.
I totally 100% disagree about the LA burbs. From Glendale to Irvine, not sure what the point is of trying to do a mailroom break-in unless you're part of the proletariat effort on the street. Get in the gritty parts, East Hollywood. Every neighbor is a struggling musician (or a bad musician), or a grip, or a frustrated PA with 17 unfinished scripts. Mr. Night can find his way among these people and rise as quick cream. And his wife is also a writer on the make! So he's got support and attitude at his elbow. I'd advise a drop into the tacky side of tinseltown and ignore the yuppie impulse to nest in Silverlake or Los Feliz. Can he handle K-town? Can his family handle K-town? My pal Jyl just put in her app at the Gaylord, where the studios start at $850 and a two BR might be $1700; but renovated to catch the yuppies falling back down the rent ladder, adorned with faux marble and actual wood.
The worst thing about Los Angeles is the stultifying ugliness of the place, save the palms and blooms. There is no architecture; the tiny 15-shop strip malls are a blight everywhere; as Robert Crumb points out, the wires stringing every block and pole together in a web of linear pollution; dilapidated molding and uncaulked windows in crumbling facades; a skyline nobody recognizes; the ugliness is appalling. But opportunity hides all like lava flowing from Heaven. He'll meet people, suffer with them in neighborhoods easterners would call back-alleys. Rainy will have an instant identity as a shark, roving, seeking a break, and there are gigs galore here, whether you talk or write. And my point about the ugliness is that it is ugly in Studio City or Van Nuys, Sherman Oaks or Glendale (especially Glendale), so why not be where the desperation is keenest and most dense? That's Hollywood. Not West Hollywood. Not West LA. Jyl live sin apartment 201 in a castle building on Wilton; Raymond Chandler lived for a decade next door. Her whole building is a writer's block; chairs and coolers on the roof where the denizens gather to get stoned or emote over scene 35 or talk the producer talk of the $50-million idea they had in the shower. And if somebody's got something, they share up on her roof; a single contact is everyone's contact. You can make a movie for $100, as Jyl did, and get it shown at a comedy club, as Jyl did, and get a quote of support from the creator of one of the biggets names in kids' TV, as Jyl did, all on the strength of networking your rooftop.
That doesn't happen in the burbs of LA. Seems to me people driving in from Pasadena or Burbank or living near Santa Monica or 8 blocks off the beach in Venice are a little better off, 9-to-5 lives, at that quasi-exec level of $58K per year looking after a single project for eight months until NBC or the 23-employee prodco declare the project dead. If he chooses it after a year here, that steady route to a nice plateau in Hollywood is possible, with a seven-year dedicated effort. But I would start in the seediest part, where the blood pumps thickest in the heart of tinsel dreams.
I didn't write this for Rainy's benefit, since I am being recalled to Manhattan as I write. I've done my 40 months. Got a ton of material, a ton of contacts, lots of choices, and Senegal waits in September, Belize or Holbox and the whale sharks in August, LA in October, Glacier National Park in November, all of it paid for by walking around Lalaland with my ears open and eyes alert to dreamers. I'm writing it for any writer who is just about off the fence except for the butt, leaning in this direction; fall off and come out, work like a dog, and have a life nobody can imagine back home.
I would write about my last three days here, shooting a Lolita who is being followed by a director named Toback, convinced hers is a genius sort of life despite its apparent depravity, making arrangements to make an impossibly artistic doc about a single song by a dynamic Nashville star who tonight, right now, is auditioning to play Cash on Broadway, and then today treated by four Iranian-American businessmen to lamb and eggplant lunch and a $50 spree in a Persian bakery as a reward for my bursting bubble by bubble their plans for a $100-million movie and inflating instead a tiny $75K "Big Chill" knock-off in Las Vegas next spring, shot in Farsi, of which I am being given absolute, complete, total free license to write and frame as I please. That's Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Also all of it impossible without coming out here. But I won't write about all that in more detail because these three days are no different than any other three days out here.
Congratulations, Rainy, for picking the perfect, best, appropriate, bull's-eye moment to crash here: Now.
(And I will anticipate moans of disapproval from readers who think I am another Billy lying his way to delusions of self-grandeur. [I readily admit to that anyway.] Perhaps I have a verbose and shady charm which propels me personally, and that my sort of good chance will not befall just any one and I should not make it sound so easy and blase, except that I see everyone in more or less my position, initially: the blossom blows away when the writing is not done, or when the writer follows either cliche or fortune, but the opportunities are quantifiable and constant in a way Arizona cannot imagine. And the writer who writes, who actually scribbles, and who speaks with conviction [important] and confidence [absolutely critical] about his dreams is quickly lauded and noticed and promoted here in a way that would stun the associate editor of the Greater Phoenix Medical Group monthly newsletter. If you have the stuff and can strut, my god, it's a joke. That peacock in poetry is the golden goose nobody dares to kill in Lalaland. So it's up to each writer to staple his originality into the marketplace, and Rainy will be right here, in the market, perhaps without booth or buying power, but in the smells and trading of entertainment; every stroll builds confidence, if the writer is willing to write, willing to declare and defend, willing to create. If it's all theory, an elaborate disguise of self to balance the uncontrollable desire for safety, well, that can be done in Oshkosh or Orlando, no problem, or on five-day vacation breaks from the International Fertilizer Review, and there would be no need to court a sudden plunge in comfort by moving to Los Angeles. But Rainy writes, and the writer has just made the perfect move; he destroys complacent structure to obey an impulse of self-expression. How can a writer deny himself this necessity? Whatever his accomplishments previously, he is now followed every step by a shadow of himself demanding action and wit to survive and thrive. Can he remember every day of the first week of last February? He will always remember every day of the next few weeks as he steps off the plank into self-respect. Fire or failure?)
