Back To Work: Oscars, Mansions and Filmmakers

It was on account of the fact that I had read something about there being the greatest recession since the great recession, that I decided it was time to go back to work. I didn’t want to admit it to myself but I thought that probably the fact that I had been doing water aerobics with the old ladies at 9.15 each morning, instead of being a worker bee, had something to do with it. And so I decided to give class a miss and get down to it. I got to the pool the next morning at 7 a.m. upon which I had to mingle with all of those morning people who were all bright and cheery and couldn’t wait to engage in conversation. I pretended that I was a shire horse with blinkers on and that I couldn’t see them. Pool men were diving in their underwear to look for Cynthia’s long lost earings which she would wear to the pool and lose almost everyday. Beach boys were laying out striped towels and a man was pretending to trim the palm tree, except that I knew it was a fake. As I passed the old ladies on the way out, I got to tell them the temperature of the pool, which was always the biggest news about these parts (once a journalist always a journalist), and then I set off to work. I walked right along the shoreline carrying my laptop under one hand as the surfers wandered by carrying their boards under the other. I passed a sound man who walked across the vast stretch of sand, carrying a large microphone in one hand and a recorder in the other. When I got to Venice Beach, I headed up Rose Avenue to look for Marisco’s Mexican food van, which had been recommended to me by none other than the chef from the Four Seasons. I ate a taco and sat down at the Rose café to do some work. I already had one assignment to track down a long lost Arab filmmaker known to be hiding somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. His name was Flamingo Ryan and he was thought to be hiding in the Goldwyn Mansion, which Sam Goldwyn, Jr. insisted wasn’t true. Just to be on the safe side, I headed back along the beach jumped in my car and drove around the hills asking everyone I saw if they had seen Mr. Ryan. As I approached the Goldwyn Mansion, I saw a man in a long dress and seven women in belly dancing gear sneaking around the side entrance. Supersleuth Lilly had done it again. I approached Ryan with my voice recorder and he broke down in tears and said he hadn’t been seen in public since his last film had made only $300 at the U.S. box office four years ago. I assured him that it was quite alright and gave him and his entourage a lift to the airport. He said he was going back to Palestine to be part of the new Palestinian film movement. That evening I headed to the Four Seasons Hotel where I met a composer called Maury Yeston who had written the musical Nine. $100 worth of champagne later, we were riding the elevator up and down, opening his Vanity Fair invite multiple times just to make those who didn’t have one jealous. The next day it was the Oscars and so I climbed in my car once again and got to the red carpet at 10 a.m. to watch the set up. Men in jeans were still rolling out piles of carpets and placing flower pots around the edges of the entrance, as presenters in long dresses gave Oscar pep talks to distant audience. I took a photo of a giant Oscar statue being unwrapped from its wrappers and interviewed some of the audience and left to pick up a Pink’s Hotdog to take to the guru. As the presenters were hanging around for hours on the carpet, we went hiking and did Chigong in the middle of the park and then pretended we were in the film Jules et Jim and rolled around on the grass. Then we did what any sensible person does and watch the ceremony on television whilst eating Indian for dinner.

Anyone Chasing The Newspaper Business Is Making Silent Movies

“Anyone chasing the newspaper business is making silent movies,” said the Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn, Jr. in a recent conversation in which he encouraged the launch of this blog.

And he and his family should known. Goldwyn, Jr., the son of Samuel Goldwyn, is just about the best person to talk to in such a crisis as the one that newspapers are facing today, as he is able to look back at the old days and forward to the Internet-savvy future, “which is something that we are trying to figure out ourselves,” he says. “People have very short attention spans today.”

After a frustrating morning planning my escape from the business altogether, Goldwyn, Jr.’s line seemed to sum up the situation in one: Journalists, the silent movie stars of today, must move into the Talkies’ equivalent of the Blogosphere, or else…

The bureaucracy involved in getting an interview from a studio hadn’t helped. “Hollywood has become too corporate,” I declared, run by “yes men in suits.” (A request to interview Helen Mirren had turned into a series of robotic emails, involving hurdles and referrals that would have topped getting the okay to get into East Berlin.)

“In the old days the studio wouldn’t speak to you without permission” says Goldwyn, Jr. “No one just picked up the phone to Louella Parsons,” he adds, referring to one of Hollywood’s fabled gossip columnists. “In the old days you couldn’t get a story. You had to deal with the publicity office. Things are much freer today.”

We got onto the very nature of the press today when indeed multiple sources abound for information which can often appear on little-known websites in nano-seconds. “Communication is so fast now,” he says. “Information is out there instantly and there is no time to correct it. People are just protecting themselves. Companies are often public and stock can go up and down on a story.”

Indeed. Goldwyn, Jr. reminded me what a tough business this is by referring to his past. “When people interview me they always ask me to tell them anecdotes about the stars of old,” he says. “I always tell them that my father was an independent producer and what I remember is the celebration in our house when he was able to pay back the money he had borrowed to make a film to the bank.”

Goldwyn, Jr.’s words reminded me of another truth uttered by Filippo Timi (Vincere), last year’s best actor winner at the Venice Film Festival, in a recent interview confirming that no one ever escapesthe film business.

“It is like the Coliseum when you wanted to be a slave just to be part of it,” says Timi. “Maybe we can think of the industry like that. All of the people who work in the industry are like slaves to the industry. We all say that we are going to leave but we like it too much.”

For the full Timi interview see: http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100107/ART/701069970

About the Author:

Liza Foreman is a former staff reporter for Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and now writes freelance from Los Angeles and Europe for the NYTimes.com, The International Herald Tribune, The Times, The National and Hollywoodwiretap.com