Maria Wyeth came to Hollywood for the identical reason as the rest of us: to escape from someplace else. When we meet up with her in “Play It As It Lays,” even though, the actor’s hometown of Silver Wells, considering the fact that swallowed by a missile assortment in the Nevada desert, has regained a particular attractiveness, “the restorative electricity of desolation.” Soon after all, her moms and dads are lifeless, her relationship is disintegrating, her youngster is institutionalized, her job is in absolutely free slide. Only her father’s suggestions to her, that existence alone is a crap video game, has held up more than time. “Everything goes,” she laments. “I am operating extremely tricky at not imagining about how almost everything goes.”
The Final Hollywood Bookshelf
“Play It As It Lays” ranks No. 1 on our record of the ideal Hollywood publications of all time.
Yet stasis, implacability, mark Joan Didion‘s 1970 novel as absolutely as modify. Its defining motif — in the variety of freeway cloverleafs, coiled rattlesnakes, every day routines and calendrical rhythms — is the spiral or loop, and with it she paints the picture of an market in decay, saturated with copycat motion pictures, predatory adult males, hacks and hangers-on. In fact, the most remarkable part of Didion’s portrait is not the ruthless precision with which it renders the movie small business then, but the clarity with which it corresponds to the movie business now. If you have at any time experienced your agent dodge a assembly or encountered a device publicist managing interference on a scoop or been a third-string visitor at an exceptional celebration, you have previously lived out a scene from “Play It As It Lays,” which is to say that the damaged Hollywood it depicts is decidedly our possess. Its only serious anachronisms, to today’s eyes, are Maria’s snobbish swipe at Television set writers and the $1,500/thirty day period rent on her household in Beverly Hills.
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The novel endures thanks to its keen understanding that lots of people in this town see flicks as a metaphor, a proxy for other forms of forex: the tax crack, the blind item, the phone sheet, the high horse. What true filmmaking does take place in Didion’s cautionary tale can take put “off-screen” — on area, in the desert, for assignments about which even the haziest detail is withheld. Hollywood’s coin of the realm is not function, but employment not expertise, but good results not images, but the power they suggest, or are unsuccessful to. On the down slope of near-fame, Maria ought to confront the point that it is not her have title, but those of the gentlemen in her orbit, that can open doorways, fix issues, have excess weight. “Just maintain on,“ snipes a younger actor with whom she has a run-in, sensation that weight bear down on him. “You never informed me who you were.”
It is quick, with AI-generated slime creeping via the cracks in our defenses and stories produced by battalions of workers disappeared at will, with its middle class hollowed out, its influence on the wane, its bravest voices hounded by politicians and philistines, to yearn for the Hollywood of yore. But “Play It As It Lays” indicates that this kind of nostalgia is misplaced, even counterproductive. In just about every era of Hollywood record, its “citizens” — writers, actors, directors, crew customers producers and publicists, craft expert services and help employees critics, cinephiles, movie star-worshipers the earth in excess of — have experienced battles to wage, existential threats to prevail over, and for us to search for consolation in the earlier abdicates our responsibility to the upcoming. Every single generation gets the Hollywood it deserves.
Easier said than accomplished. Didion’s Hollywood is a wanderer’s oasis, or it’s possible mirage, and reckoning with the difference is Maria’s affliction, and by extension our have. Examining “Play It As It Lays” at 19, ensconced in movie school at USC and contemporary from selling my very first piece to West, the Los Angeles Occasions Magazine, for $1 for each term, I could not understand how one particular falls out of contact with their goals — the dreaming and the carrying out, at that age, happening nearly in tandem. Now 37, a 12 months older than Didion was when she posted the novel, I see the trouble in reverse: The accomplishing, so typically compromised by the practicalities of life, by limitations of time and income and electrical power and option, succeeds only in knocking the desires even more out of attain.
There is, of program, a different option. By the conclude of the novel, Maria facts a new dream, of exiting the freeway of her life to can Damson plums and Sweet India relish with her shed daughter, Kate. No matter whether this is last but not least her oasis or just another mirage is remaining to the reader to guess, but if you, like me, have at any time harbored the fantasy, you have by now learned the ethical of the tale, which is that escaping to Hollywood turns out to be the easy section.
As for the rest, I maintain coming back again to the information my own father gave me, which I like to feel Didion and her heroine would appreciate: There is no these issue as a free lunch.
