Just had cause to be reminded of one more LA peculiarity, “afterparties”. It was totally normal, might even be a planned & scheduled thing to leave one event and go to another that almost might be an unwinding from that one, event 1’s planners are totally not responsible for and can now enjoy, etc.
Whereas basically anywhere else (not Vegas or the Indio Valley, party-wise they’re part of Greater LA) “wow this party’s winding down, better ask everyone if they know of any other parties or bars people are going to” is actually a kinda pathetic alcoholic thing to think
Like not much came of my 20s and if I could still regret things the sense of finite lifespan might have me wanting those years back, but I kind of like the fact that Kontextmaschine just incongruously makes LA references sometimes.
“Obviously, the ‘Twilight’ IP was the star there,” said director-producer Aaron Kaufman, who has worked with a number of alums from the vampire-human love story. “The shift to promoting IP over stars may have sounded like a good idea because IP doesn’t overdose or tweet about Nazis. However, this shift has left the cupboard bare when it comes to next-generation stars. This is an issue now that the IP stores have been cleaned out and all that’s left is Tube-Sock Man or whatever Marvel has yet to make.”
This article points to the DVD → streaming transition as a pivotal moment in the decline of the star system for producing and marketing movies, but treats this as a purely technological shift (streaming = greater market segmentation and less marketing for a given release largely due to the nature of the medium) instead of also a shift in property relations. If a star is a leading actor who audiences have a relationship with over an extended period of time, it’s worth thinking about the role that ownership of home video might play in maintaining an actor’s relevance outside the release window of any given film… ‘90s Kids Will Remember™ when watching a movie at home meant picking something off your shelf of VHS tapes or DVDs, and as a result there were movies you watched over and over again years after they came out, not just because they were good but also because they were what was there. Do you know how many times I’ve seen Troy or The Chronicles of Riddick? Not even stone cold classics, just good mid-tier action films that will hold up to a bunch of rewatches. Would I think about Brad Pitt or Vin Diesel in the same way if I only saw their movies in the month or two after release?
The wider selection of streaming isn’t a bad thing in principle, but it means so many movies and TV shows just vanish into the ether after release and are never given the chance to develop that kind of long-term following. They don’t even have to be removed from the service, just buried under the endless deluge of new content. Merchandising 101: if you never see something with your eyeballs, you won’t think about it, and you won’t watch it. If you do happen to remember a movie from a few years ago you’d like to watch, in principle it’s probably available, but there’s no guarantee it’s on the streaming service you subscribe to, and those things rotate every few months. It’s never going to be ready at hand in the way a DVD (or a file on your external hard drive!!!!!!!) would be.
This too damages the long-term star-building potential of movies, on top of the lower marketing budgets and the subordination of actors to IP and the fact that frankly studios know you’re not going to rewatch anything so things aren’t made to hold up to a rewatch. (Just look at “no spoilers” fandom culture and the plummeting multipliers for theatrical blockbusters for confirmation of this strategy and its effects.)
Shortly after leaving Hollywood I remember the thing was “packaging”, agencies would assemble actors, directors, and scripts from among their clients, thus claiming territory (and capturing money and influence away) from studios and producers, how’d that go?
And for whoever’s hammering my inbox, no, when I was Hollywood I did work with a management company that had a line in kids/teens but really I didn’t see any dirty stuff
the “dirty, exploitative” gossip I heard was how aspiring stage moms would pay to go to “talent expos” in, like, Hawai’i, where agents would be paid to fly in and sleep with EACH OTHER and have a vacation and AT BEST some of these kids would get a chance to move to LA to try to make money for the agents
for all that there WERE hypersexual 14-year-olds with moms who vicariously enjoyed the attention
and the most earnest stage parents who would bend their morals - I remember an evangelical family who didn’t want their elementary-age angel in stuff that said mild curses, but when Scientologists solicited him for an internal campaign that paid, and I called up saying “you probably aren’t interested but it’s my job to ask?” they were like “welllllll”
The sexualization is probably hardest on girls 14-18 in part because of all the “protective” regulations on young actors, as the result of which they’re part of a set-aside-from-normal life system to accommodate, with all sorts of structures and dynamics and local elites that don’t really interact with anything outside of it, but at that point the parents aren’t a load-bearing part.
But to complicate, actresses that age are selected on being able to (sexily) appear younger, for characters of that age you just cast runty 18-year-olds with a lot less regulatory hassle.
Like not as if without regulation child stars wouldn’t be enmeshed in a parallel world full of scumbags, but point being the existing system was co-opted long ago and is in no way a relief from that.
And for whoever’s hammering my inbox, no, when I was Hollywood I did work with a management company that had a line in kids/teens but really I didn’t see any dirty stuff
the “dirty, exploitative” gossip I heard was how aspiring stage moms would pay to go to “talent expos” in, like, Hawai’i, where agents would be paid to fly in and sleep with EACH OTHER and have a vacation and AT BEST some of these kids would get a chance to move to LA to try to make money for the agents
for all that there WERE hypersexual 14-year-olds with moms who vicariously enjoyed the attention
and the most earnest stage parents who would bend their morals - I remember an evangelical family who didn’t want their elementary-age angel in stuff that said mild curses, but when Scientologists solicited him for an internal campaign that paid, and I called up saying “you probably aren’t interested but it’s my job to ask?” they were like “welllllll”
The sexualization is probably hardest on girls 14-18 in part because of all the “protective” regulations on young actors, as the result of which they’re part of a set-aside-from-normal life system to accommodate, with all sorts of structures and dynamics and local elites that don’t really interact with anything outside of it, but at that point the parents aren’t a load-bearing part.
But to complicate, actresses that age are selected on being able to (sexily) appear younger, for characters of that age you just cast runty 18-year-olds with a lot less regulatory hassle.
Something that sticks with me so well I’ve almost certainly posted about it before is once in LA I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, where they’ve got the walk of fame stars in black terrrazzo with glistening silver inclusions, and I was behind this really stereotypical midwestern tourist family in front of me, puffy overweight with fanny packs, and the dad said to the others “Look, the streets really are paved with broken dreams.”
The actual area there is like big buildings of a ratty but architecturally ambitious 1930s newsie-ass city with one-story retail from when it was the main streetcar corridor of LA since then turned over to tourist trinkets and seedy (with a bunch of old independent motels, it was apparently a major prostitution corridor from the 70s until just before I arrived) low rent stuff
Like the managers I worked for were at literally the corner of Hollywood & Vine, and they did a lot of stuff with child stars and I have to think part of it is that all the flyover stage parents would hear that and draw associations with glamour that everyone actually in the industry knows haven’t been current since the early 1950s
Something that sticks with me so well I’ve almost certainly posted about it before is once in LA I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, where they’ve got the walk of fame stars in black terrrazzo with glistening silver inclusions, and I was behind this really stereotypical midwestern tourist family in front of me, puffy overweight with fanny packs, and the dad said to the others “Look, the streets really are paved with broken dreams.”
I was gonna say “like Angelus you know the Catholic devotion” before realizing how unhelpful that is so in terms of local English pronounciation I’ll just post a Bad Religion song
Los Angeles and the whole area was settled by Hispanophones but the existing LA culture comes from Anglophone migrants with no prior contact with Spanish orthography or pronunciation, so there are actually a ton of shibboleth place names today
Given your background, do you have some interesting thoughts about the Writer's Guild strike?
I was in LA for the ‘07 strike, and I remember it was mentioned that the overwhelming share of membership was not currently working or likely to work again, it was people who had sold one unproduced feature script, and that actual working screenwriters a “pencils down” mandate might affect cast a minority of the votes on striking or contract acceptance. I don’t know how that stands now – I’d believe the feature market buys fewer specs, it sure never makes anything original now – but there might be something there
ALT
