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MALICE IN BLUNDERLAND Aubrey Malone
‘You can take
all the sincerity in Hollywood,’ Fred Allen emoted, ‘place it in the
navel of a fruit fly, and still have room for three caraway seeds
and the heart of a producer.’ Gary Busey said
there are only three things you needed to know to make it in the
movie capital: ‘Learn to cry, make your own salad, and die in slow
motion.’ Melissa Mathison added, ‘It used to be a great town. My
mother used to let us off on Hollywood Boulevard to play. Now you’d
never see your child again.’ William
Faulkner said it was the only place in the world where you could be
stabbed in the back while you were climbing a ladder.’ Wilson Mizner
hissed, ‘They almost made a good picture there once but they caught
it in time.’ Moss Hart
called it ‘the most beautiful slave quarters in the world.’ Lauren
Bacall added, ‘It’s the only place in the world where an amicable
divorce means each party get 50% of the publicity.’ Uma Thurman
claimed, ‘Even the air is dishonest there.’ The Italian director
Michelangelo Antonioni mused, ‘Hollywood is like being nowhere and
talking to nobody about nothing.’ Those of us in
the audiences, meanwhile, sit watching our plaster saints from
darkened pews, removed momentarily from the world we have to go back
to when the lights come up.
Malice in Blunderland
deals with the bitchiness, the sleaze, the mendacity, the wildness,
the feuds, the typecasting, the failed marriages and the hypocrisy
of Tinseltown’s plaster saints. |
