I Fucking Hate Hollywood

I hate Hollywood.  I hate movies.  Or rather, I love movies, but god damn do I hate making movies.  Or I hate failing to make movies, which is what a job in Hollywood really is.  Get up every day, go in to work early, leave late, and completely fail to make movies.  Or fail to make a good movie, fail to make a movie that makes any money, fail to get a script where it needs to be, fail to get a director attached that would make the good version of this one in a thousand good script that you by some miracle managed to find and whip into shape, fail to get an actor attached who could do a role in this script with this director justice and who simultaneously “means enough at the box office” both in America and in certain oversees markets where we will need to presell foreign distribution rights to cover the anticipated cost of publicity and advertising or prints and advertising, whateverthefuck “P & A” stands for, or fail to get that actor interested at the exact time when he is available and the director is also available and a similar movie idea has just made enough money that people with financing, that it’s fresh enough in their memory that making this movie seems like a good idea to them, failing to get this fucking perfect syzygy aligned at the exact right moment so that this package can get together and stay together even though every single element of it, without any one of which you are completely fucked, and every one of which is completely flighty and mercurial and scared and constantly second-guessing themselves and being told do leave your movie and go do another movie by some other hustler who is way better at convincing these people to do things than you; who absolutely needs this person to do some other thing so they will make more money and have a nicer car and get laid more, and this person has no compunction whatsoever about lying, unlike you, which, let it be said, this Hollywood world has not completely stripped you of your humanity; you are still basically an honest person.  Which is just another way of saying you are not completely committed to this job in a world where absolutely everyone else is and you really just don’t give a shit.  This person got up five minutes earlier and got to the actor or director or financier you need five minutes before you and lied five per cent more convincingly so next time you better get up ten minutes earlier and lie ten I per cent more convincingly and be ten  per cent less of a decent human being and suddenly we’re all working some mathematically impossible amount of hours in the day, all of which we spend hustling and lying and setting the best and most human parts of ourselves on fire and chasing some hot comic  book that is exactly like another hot comic book that got made into a movie that was, while terrible, a movie that will help absolutely no one and be exactly no one’s favorite movie from childhood in ten years.  But something made money last week so now we have to make a movie exactly the same as that one. Even if it’s fucking Kirk Cameron converting the Jews to bring about the apocalypse. Whatever it is.  We just gotta get a movie made.

Why the fuck did we all come out here?  It was either to make great movies or to do coke and get laid.  You can’t do coke and get laid anymore if you have this job.  Bartenders do coke and get laid. You, with your stupid degree-from-a good-college career type job; you can barely even have two glasses of fucking chardonnay without getting in too good a mood and slanting your judgment on the five spec scripts you have to read later that night.  You don’t have time to have a hangover and you don’t have time to be around women naturally, and you thought this job was going to give you some kind of status  but dude, no one gives a fuck.  People are way more impressed with a guy who owns a bakery or something,  or a guy who struck out on his own and made a youtube video that got more than ten thousand hits, even though it’s about as funny as a fucking holocaust documentary, at least this guy got out there and did something actually creative with his fucking life.  Not like you.  Not like you combing through mountains of crap that you just know is going to be terrible but you have to do it anyway because what if. What if this is the one in ten thousand things that’s actually good; or what if the agent who sent it to you has the next one in ten thousand things; you better read this shit he sent you real fast and pass politely so as not to piss him off, and you better hope it doesn’t sell, because then maybe you would have been the one who got this thing set up. And all the women you’re around are frigid sexless drones.  Any attractive woman is an actress, and no actress wants to fuck you.  An actress wants to fuck the same guy who plays bass in a shitty band that every one else wants to fuck; the guy who wrings out a dish rag at the bar she gets to drink at late because she doesn’t have to get up and go to work in the morning.  Not like you.

Anyway.  I should have had a life where I made something meaningful.  Or at least something satisfying, where I could look back on my work and say “I made that.”  Even if “that” were a fucking sandwich, it would be an improvement.

Tags: hollywood, kirk motherfucking cameron, monday, my fucking job