On a Warner Brothers press junket to Los Angeles Alex Dodd found a flip side to the dream factory
For someone as hopelessly addicted to the glittery escape of celluloid as I am, the prospect of a trip to Los Angeles had me surfing waves of fantasy. Images of wild, wild Nicholas Cage cruising down Rhodeo Drive … Marilyn Monroe blowing kisses on that starry boulevard, of Zsa Zsa Gabor sipping Martinis on Sunset Strip … of pink poodles on nine carat gold leashes … invaded my dreams on the interminable flight across the Atlantic to La-La Land.
“Expect Bramley,” my filmmaker friend had warned, in a kind attempt to prevent a crash landing. So I tried to see it: Zsa Gabor on a suburban Bramley backdrop, mascara and concrete, glamour, glitz and linoleum-floored delis.
Of one thing I was certain: LA would be all about contradiction.
This hunch was based on a film I’d seen. One of the most prescient looks at a future world came to me in the form of Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 nail-biter Strange Days which was set in a milieu of out-of-control race riots in Los Angeles at the dawn of the new millenium. Technology is the new drug and people deal in illicit memory chips.
The hero, played by Ralph Fiennes, junks out on chips recording idyllic days skateboarding on Venice Beach with an ex-lover who’s currently whoring for the techno mafia. It’s a world sated on its own product, starved of authentic experience and desperately trying to produce the Next Best Thing from its own used-up regurgitations.
And I’m travelling straight into the heart of the beast. As a guest of e-tv – who’ll be featuring a host of the hottest new sitcoms straight out of La-la land in their new summer season – I’m headed for Warner Brothers’s international press junket. This is how the media giant sells its latest products to the global village. The village comes to America.
Cruising into LA from the airport, I am struck by how similar it is to Johannesburg. This excites me. Some of my favourite cities are ugly. And this is all concrete highway, graffiti and ghettolands, punctuated by strange lines of artificial-looking palm trees.
Not unlike sectors of Soweto, this is no doubt the territory from which the East coast-West coast rap war shoots its way into public consciousness. But like South Africa, Los Angeles is one of those clefts on the world’s surface where the divisions of race and class have been unsuccessfully poly-filla-d.
Mansions and mayhem are the order of the day, and snow white Beverley Hills palaces are sheltered from unwanted knowlegdge about the darker world below. As a junket guest this is also pretty much my last glimpse of the world that lurks beneath the illusion of Friends, Two of a Kind, Jesse and Hyperion Bay. I’m on my way to the dream factory.
We have the weekend to play and Saturday night takes us to a mod French eaterie along a strip of Bohemian outlets opposite the Celebrity Scientology Centre. My prize sighting is an old artsy bookshop called The Iliad aptly situated next door to a video chain store known as Odyssey.
Next we hit a funk and soul club called Kane or rather we’re hit by the cold fact that, no matter how distant adolescence is, you can’t get into a club in LA without an ID.
We strike a deal and have our boogy, but there’s a theme emerging here. No cigarettes indoors (even at a notorious rock club like Whisky-a-Gogo), no clubbing with no ID and a list of 13 rules before you can even dip your big toe into the hotel pool. In one night I encounter two police interventions – the one a drug bust up a dark avenue, and the other an arrest in a shopping centre garage captured on video by a passerby with a handycam.
>From day one, the feeling begins to grow. I am in a highly regulated society. LA is a like a police state. At any given moment you feel watched. Careful what you do with your bubblegum, baby. At Warner Brothers I find myself having to tell a large security man called Wesley that I’m going to the loo – oops, I mean rest room.
The wierdest thought crosses my mind and it’s a dangerous thing to say … but it occurs to me that with all our lawlessness in South Africa we have a great amount of real freedom. Crime is the price we pay and we all live in scary proximity to becoming the next story behind a statistic, but, my god, we know what our freedom is.
It’s something we’ve fought for and something that’s enshrined in our Constitution. My feeling in America, was that the state had slowly and politely encroached on individual liberties with paternalistic promises of protection and peace. And that what has been bartered away is an instinct to protest, to stake a claim for individual liberty. The average citizen struck me as a real yes man – as saying yes to each and every regulation that comes his way, whether it be standing in the right queue or leaving it to the lefty journalists to disapprove of American bombings in the Middle East.
Culture, of course, plays a crucial role in mass anaesthesia – the images, stories and sounds that make it to wide scale distribution are clearly controlled by the information giants who hold the keys to increasingly inaccessible technological modes of dissemination.
All this big brotherdom is enough to drive you to drink and, indeed, we end up on a crawl along Sunset Strip past the chic, futurist Mondrian hotel where patrons pull up in limos wearing Agnes B and Isaac Mizrahi. The doorman’s polite rejection on the basis that we haven’t booked is more like a euphemism for: “Sorry, but you look like shit.”
We pass tables and tables of designer-clad diners on the glitter embedded pavements, waltz past a drum `n’ bass club that serves only vitamin cocktails and oxygen. Here, the most grabbing dcor feature is a deeply ironic projected image of a laughing chimpanzee.
After a frenzied session at fabulous store called Booksoup that stocks everything from Japanese movie scripts to marginal erotica, we move on to Johnny Depp’s famed club The Viper Room. (River Phonix took his last breath on the pavement outside.)
Here begins a night of wickedness that kicks off with a kicking performance by Rolin’ Bolan and the Brothers Bounce. Rolin’ is the son of the legendary Marc Bolan of T-Rex fame – one of the original glam rockers (see story on Page 3).
But before we have a chance to get up close and personal with Rolin’ and the brothers, we’re whisked off by a member of another band called Tangerine (he tells me their sound is “American Britpop” – see what I mean by Strange Days) to a place called the Burgundy Room – a long thin bar that plays Fifties porn movies on the wall to a cowboy music soundtrack.
We ask the barman to watch our Budweisers and run down the road to a gay bar called Spotlight for tequilas. Here we meet one of the most fabulously fabulous drag queens with a tongue as sharp as his nails and as salty as the olive in his Martini. Back at the Burgundy Room a “specialist electrician” with a lightbulb tattoed on his biceps teaches me how to square dance …
Warner Brothers the next morning is a world to be reckoned with. Fake shop fronts and individual studios the size of my block of my flats fill a lot as big as a village in the Transkei. Holy Moley!
This is where it all happens. This is where the whole cheesy world of sitcoms comes to life. This where Jennifer Aniston and George Clooney do their nine to five. Where American reality gets put into a mysterious mixer mincer shredder liquidiser and comes out the other end as … you guessed it … American reality ripe and ready for consumption by Danes and Argentinians and Dutch and Germans and Japanese and … us. Watch this space for more news of sitcoms coming to a screen in your lounge this summer.