Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I worked in the mail room at CAA when I was in high school. I worked in the literary department, too. That was my after school job, believe it or not: I would read manuscripts and then evaluations on whether or not I thought they'd make good movies. Which was fascinating and kind of hilarious to me at the time.
You look at the absolute scorn that gets poured on a fallen celebrity, whether it's Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan or Marlon Brando, or Elvis when he got fat. They're not allowed the dignity of ordinary failure. And I think that plays into people's notions about Los Angeles, too. It's not allowed to be a regular city with problems.
We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogating in a novel. That probably accounts for what some have called the book's "sweeping" feel, but I don't know that I set out to be cinematic. I wouldn't know how to do that in a novel, specifically.
The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.