Los Angeles: a necessary evil?
Thinking of moving to Los Angeles to further your screenwriting career? Imagining that it might take say, just over one year here before you’re signing confusing WGA membership forms and choosing which cocktail party in the Hollywood Hills to attend first?
The days of stepping off the train in Hollywood, eyes alight, clutching a satchel full of dreams are a sepia-toned memory. The entertainment industry has grown too big and too competitive for sentimental stories of being discovered at the gate of Warner Brothers or at the soda fountain. In fact, the starry-eyed, very young writers who uproot from afar and land in LA specifically because they think the act of simply being in Los Angeles will help launch them breaks the Wave-inatrix’s heart. There they are, hundreds if not thousands of miles from home, in a strange city where everyone is hustling something and the cold truth is that the city doesn’t give a damn about your writing ambitions and now visiting your folks on the 4th of July is a serious consideration because airfare is so expensive. Rouge Wavers, don’t put yourself in this position because you’re guaranteed to be lonely and disappointed.
Los Angeles is most definitely not for everybody. But Wavers, if you are craving an adventure and willing to give it as long as it takes, it might be the move for you. I’ll tell you what my experience has been:
Raised in Northern California, the Wave-inatrix was suckled at the teat of Hating Los Angeles. Or Smog Angeles as we used to call it. Or Smell-LA. And now, much to the dismay of my nuclear family and some friends, I live in the midst of the most shallow, smoggy, over-crowded, vain, pointless place on earth. And I love it. Back where I used to live, the tree-lined streets and brown-shingle homes, the organic bakeries and cheese co-ops all gently bathed in the fog that drifts in off the San Francisco Bay held me in its thrall for many years. In fact, somebody just remarked that I have a “Berkeley vibe”. I take that as a compliment. But Wavers, as Randy Newman said – I love LA.
I know it’s wrong and that it runs counter to everything I was raised to believe, but I recently realized, four years after my move here and after dozens of conversations during which I defended LA to its most ardent haters (New Yorkers and Northern Californians) I stopped in mid-defense and realized – but that’s just it – LA is a mess! It is a big, sprawling, dirty, crowded mess! And Wavers, after having spent the majority of my adult life in the Bay Area, it is refreshing. I know – that sounds odd. I love the Bay Area but there’s something a little provincial about it at times. It’s so clean, so ordered, so - well – somebody has to say it – precious. Now settle down! The Bay Area tends to take itself pretty seriously to which I say – get over yourselves! Nobody can argue against the fact that San Francisco is the greatest, most beautiful city in the world. Or that the Elmwood neighborhood in Berkeley is not the epitome of intellectual, laid-back, funky coolness.
But for me, living in LA feels like living a little closer to the bone. I like the busy freeways and streets in the morning as Angeleno’s head to work and face another day. We all face the same dry, smoggy heat, the 405, the constant, hovering helicopters and the imminent threat of a major earthquake. We all deal with the tourists on Hollywood and Highland and the flying palm fronds and runny noses when the Santa Ana’s kick up. We are all living together in this huge, sprawling, strange city, side by side.
In the past when I lived in the Bay Area and visited LA, all I saw were strip malls, clogged freeways and blondes with plastic surgery. Now I see the Armenian store in the strip mall, which sells six kinds of feta cheese and tarragon flavored soda. I see the murals and graffiti on the streets of East LA; I see the Latino, Armenian, Persian, African-American and Asian communities living colorfully and nervously side-by-side. I see the surfers and the actors and the people who work at my local 7-11. Yes and there are the studios and Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this town after four years but it’s clear to me that LA is way too big to be utterly defined by The Business.
As for those who cast aspersion on LA, everybody needs something to beat up on to make themselves feel better. Which is not a philosophy the Wave-inatrix has much regard for. We all hold certain beliefs about the world and we create experiences to prove our beliefs correct. I believe Los Angeles is a city as full of vitality as variety and as populated by surfers as by teachers and truck drivers. I believe there is a certain creative energy here which is palpable and I believe that Fazel at the Rose Market has the best feta on the Westside.
The bottom line is you don’t have to live in LA to be an aspiring screenwriter. That’s why we have email, the phone and the internet. But it really is an advantage, make no mistake. Relationships are everything in the entertainment industry and being here enables you to build community and to thusly network. However, the Wave-inatrix also believes there is no substitute for determination, whether you live in Kansas or Dubai or the UK; so don’t consider Los Angeles a necessary evil or a stumbling block.
Do not buy a bus ticket to Los Angeles thinking that your mere presence here will guarantee career success. There are no guarantees after you arrive except that you will develop a white-hot hatred of the 405 freeway, a deep curiosity about the line at Pinks and a keen interest in the air quality charts.
But for many, being here makes one feel like part of a struggling tribe; there’s a certain camaraderie in the collective dream seeking.
If you choose to come to LA, come for the creative opportunities and stay for the life experience. If you’re too settled in your current life for a move or just can’t imagine living here, then by all means stay where you are and find other ways to build community – whether that means plugging into your local creative community or whether you can manage to attend the Creative Screenwriting Expo, The Writer’s Studio (through UCLA) various pitch-fests or other opportunities out here in LA.
The fundamental truth is that you need a fantastic script – whether you live in Silverlake, Santa Monica or Poughkeepsie. Write joyfully and ardently, Rouge Wavers, and live in an environment that makes you happy.
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2 comments:
I know exactly how you feel. Here's a moment from my Hollywood book -- Rachel, the heroine, has just returned to the city from Paris:
Los Angeles might be ugly and toxic but it bristled with opportunity. Vast eddies of circumstance massed and shifted like the weather systems that moved in off the Pacific, nets of coincidence that could catch you up or bypass you indifferently. And everywhere there were the signs of frenzied efforts to control those forces: the
actors lugging their portfolios, the deals you heard being made at the next table in any restaurant, the rustle of computer keyboards drifting from any open window, reminding you that you weren't working, like a pulse under the sun-baked skin of the city.
Then there were the real lines of power, masked and insulated but visible everywhere: the Mercedes limousines with the tinted windows, the movie stars looking eerily smaller-than-life, browsing in Westwood bookstores, and the plush offices in the high rise buildings of Century City and West Hollywood, the tangled cables and parked trucks and forests of lights where another commercial or cop show was being shot, anywhere in town.
And the studios themselves, the secretive, discreetly guarded citadels with their lavish (temporary) offices and their hangar-like sound stages and marked parking spaces, encampments closed and quiet and aloof in the midst of the fevered city. They were so tantalizingly close, you lived together with them in such a queer, impersonal intimacy that any sudden good fortune seemed not only possible but imminent. The city was charged with a million separate optimisms, most of them lunatic and futile but all of them ardent, all of them self-assured and tireless, including her own. So, it wasn't home, but Rachel was at home there, an American girl in what was at this point in time, the most purely American city of all, consecrated to commerce, inundated with immigrants, all of them driven, all of them dreaming their crass and greedy American dreams.
I love it too.
i moved out a year ago from the east coast, not for the sole reason that i thought i *had* to be here to make it. but making the big move made my commitment to screenwriting as a new career and profession that much more concrete.
obviously, i haven't missed the snow this winter. on the other hand, i haven't quite come around to seeing behind the generic strip mall facade that pervades so much of LA. maybe some day i'll come around to loving it. right now i still feel a part of it but not really *of* it, if that makes sense.
like any other place to live, there's a lot to recommend and a lot that could be improved.
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