Same young dreamer, same old dream-factory
Frederic Raphael
NAKED HOLLYWOOD by Nicolas Kent BBC, £15.95, pp.256 Two key words in the title, guys, how can we go wrong? And a major television series to push on the open door! Nicolas now even interior aitches are being dropped — Kent's unlined portrait on the flyleaf promises that he is the latest kid to imagine that he can strip more clothes from a victim than it ever bothered to put on. All the standard stories are new to him: his epigraph parades Oscar Levant's remark about the real tinsel underneath as if moss were not growing in the old crack.
It is not long before Babylon is men- tioned, although a look back at Kenneth Anger's classic rake through the muck might have warned that this orgiastic tag has been tied on Hollywood before, much more stylishly and more venomously and by one who knows his canyons from his boule- vards. But then Mr Kent is a producer, and disposed both to lick and to join 'em, which scarcely makes for a mordant text. He rushes in where Angelenos have been treading for years, torn between the urge to condescend and to be up and coming. Like nearly every television journalist, he con- fuses an interview with the famous with original research, however often the same replies have been given to the same ques- tions.
He describes L.A. as if his clichés were straight from the mint. Jet engines scream and jumbos shudder to a stop. What the stewardess says about seat-belts is repeated in italics, as if for the hard of seeing. The newly arrived passengers are said to 'blink in the sunlight. .. 15 minutes after the jet's wheels have hit the tarmac'. Actually, you never see sunlight between jetway and side- walk, except through blink-resistant glass, and it usually takes a fat hour even for limeys as important as Mr Kent to clear customs and immigration.
`I don't give a damn if you're an endangered species.'
The romance of the open freeway is much exaggerated. The dreamworld of which Reyner Banham wrote with infatuat- ed enthusiasm 20 years ago now demands wideawake attention most of the day and night. The traffic has increased so thickly that Californians rarely roll home on their customised wheels. Mr Kent seems unaware that violence, born of frustration (and too many Joel Silver movies), is more common on the jammed freeway system than delusions of perpetual motion. His book is dated, for all its promise of up-to- the-minute garbage; being a television pro- ducer, with a list of available interviewees, is no guarantee of insight or wit. Beverly Hills is often now sunless, in the perpetual shade of the high-rises which are Manhattanising L.A., but the new boy fails to observe the changing landscape or life- style because he arrived only this term, for all his prefectorial airs.
Naked Hollywood makes more of a case for attention when it begins calling witness- es, even if some of those rounded up are such addictive box-chatters as to amount to professional informers: Gore Vidal parades a 1964 grievance about Franklin Schaffner's credit on The Best Man, while making valid, if antique, points against the (h)auteur theory which has done for direc- tors what stilts do for clowns.
In his hunt for authentic local game, Mr Kent flushes out the usual unshy little fel- lows, all of whom keep their clothes on while posing naked•. Ned Tanen is pho- tographed looking like someone composed entirely of scar-tissue, which he may well be, after fighting for top studio jobs for longer than it takes to remember what masterpieces he has sponsored during his tenures. Mr Kent neglects to dish any dirt on any of his subjects, though whether this is due to instinctive chastity or jobhunter's prudence is the subject for a major series about Motivation and the Modern Inquisitor (soon to be a great book too). The breathlessness with which the obvi- ous is unearthed from its very shallow grave may pass for evidence of industry, but earns no prizes for intelligence. Does anyone need to be told that some agents have clout and that Mike Ovitz is cloutier than most of the others put together? (Put them together and they will immediately fracture into newly acrimonious, acrony- mous clusters.) Mr Kent's lack of savvy leads him to lap up the fastest food and take himself for a connoisseur. In his inno- cence he fails to put one and one together and notice that John Schlesinger's Honky- Tonk Freeway was mutilated (so Jimmy Clark, the editor, suggests) by the same Mr Tanen at whose feet the interviewer sat without the smallest suspicion of clay. The nakedness on parade here has noth- ing to do with full frontals, but with the machinery of production: pull down Hollywood's designer pants and all you find are nuts and bolts. The business is a business; this tautology surprises and horri- fies one generation after another, but there it is. To affect to take the lid off The Industry without finding occasion to talk once about drugs (the unsecret reason for many fluctuating careers) or Jews (it took their arrival to make Disney, where Gentiles Only used to be the rule, the num- ber one outfit) is to trip round the Studio Tour and claim to know the jungle back- wards. As for the Japanese takeover of Hollywood, who was it who said it was merely a matter of crossing the tees and slanting the eyes? It was Larry Gelbardt, but Mr Kent was not there to hear him. He was probably talking to Arnold Schwarzenegger's P.R. people.
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