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Hollywood, the big metaphorical town that showbiz lives in, is what it produces - an entertaining story. Here, reality is what you claim it is. The facts don’t matter to people nearly as much as your ability to make them suspend their disbelief. Just as obsessive compulsive disorder is a debilitating mental problem which can be fantastically useful in some professions (computer programming or detective work, for example), compulsive lying is a plus in L.A. Hollywood is a city where a con man can make an honest living.

This month’s Wired magazine features an article about the intersection of Hollywood and the Iranian Hostage Crisis of the late 70s. The CIA, needing an effective cover story to smuggle six people out of the country, hit upon the idea of a production team. They would be location scouts for an independent science fiction film. In order to make the cover work, they drew up canadian passports for the hostages, but that was just the beginning. They enlisted the help of star make-up effects man John Chambers, who had won academy awards for his PLANET OF THE APES designs. Chambers had been peripherally involved in pre-production on a project called LORD OF LIGHT that had gone south when one of the producers embezzled all the money.

The CIA took out ads in Variety, conducted a few interviews, and did everything that anyone does when they’re trying to attract investors to a movie, only this time the goal was to purposely not make a movie. Having created their backstory, the team sucessfully went into Iran at the height of the Ayatollah’s revolution and whisked the hostages out under the noses of the airport security forces.

But more importantly they created this phantom movie. Usually all a producer needs to call themselves a producer is the intent to make a movie. These guys had everything except that. They had an office (in fact, they had Michael Douglas’ old office from THE CHINA SYNDROME) they had storyboards, they had letterheads and press clippings. They had buzz. They also had a roomful of headshots from unemployed actors, scripts from writers, resumes of every type from all kinds of people. The CIA was in the movie business, pure and simple. They could have gone all the way and made the movie without much more trouble.

They say that Steven Spielberg got his first directing contract in an interesting way - he was taking the Universal Studios tour and he simply peeled off from the group, found an empty office and set up there. He was making calls and setting up deals for three weeks before anyone realized he had no right to be there. By then they figured, what the hell, kid knows what he’s doing. It sounds implausible but I can tell you it’s not.

When I first came to this town in the mid-eighties, my friend Bill and I used to sneak onto the lots. You probably can’t do this nowadays because everyone’s more afraid of terrorists, but here’s how it went down then. We’d dress mature (we were in our early twenties at the time) and park near the lot, say Universal. We’d go around lunch time when there was a lot of foot traffic. I’d carry a blank manila envelope and we’d breeze past the guard throwing around industry jargon. “How’s the pickup looking?” I’d ask. “I think we’re in turnaround,” he’d reply. “I still gotta hear from Cannell’s guys.” The guard, who’d rather not slow down touchy showbiz people, would usually leave us alone.

They we’d walk around the backlots, admiring the props. Once we had tuna sandwiches at the Warner Brothers Commissary and afterward, Bill threw up on the front porch of The Brady Bunch house. Another time we stumbled upon Ward Cleaver’s headstone and spent a good half hour devising a credible way to get it off the lot with us. Ultimately we decided not to. Leaving that prop there is what separated insiders like us from common thieves.

We even managed to shoot some clandestine home movie footage on the city street from HELLO DOLLY.

The point is, show business seems impossible to break into but it’s not. It’s incredibly easy. It seems difficult because if it didn’t, well, everybody would do it. All you need is the ability to believe that you’re already in showbiz and they just don’t get it yet. Once you get in, you may realize that the hours are brutally long, that the money isn’t nearly as good as you’ve heard, and you’re only having a tenth of the sex you thought you would, but it’s not difficult to be an insider. It’s just annoying.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 9:04 am and is filed under General, Motion Pictures, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.