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In my mind, I imagined L.A. to be skyscrapers on the beach. Of course, that's not what it actually looks like. And growing up watching 'Beverly Hills 90210' and 'Melrose Place,' I always had an obsession with L.A. and California in general.
It's easy to look at South Central and say, 'That's a bad place,' and it's easy to look at Beverly Hills and say, 'It will be a cakewalk,' but it just exposed me to a different set of problems. Both sides relate to each other more than they think.
A West Virginia 10 is a California 4. Or at least that's what legend tells us: The Legend of Dr. Feelgood. Plastic surgery has a permanent home here, which is why Nancy Pelosi loves our Botoxed beaches. Beverly Hills looks like a moving Madame Tussauds.
In Beverly Hills, around 3 P.M. on Bedford Drive, a strange rite occurs. All the men and women who have had facial surgery leave the their surgeons and walk up and down the street bandaged like mummies in Prada, waiting for their loved ones to pick them up.
I lived in Beverly Hills for years. I always had a line, 'I hate the rich.' From what I witnessed after living there for 15 years, these people just don't raise their kids. I used to see the lineup of cars in front of the schools and it was all the nannies.
I live in Beverly Hills and I'm proud of it. The only things I miss are pie and mash shops and football games. I've lived in America longer than I lived in England. When I first got here, it just felt right to me. I like the open space, and the weather's great.
I remember being at the premiere of 'Beverly Hills Cop II' and the tremendous reaction from the crowd outside, then going to a party at a hotel afterwards where the speakers were blasting 'Shakedown,' a song from the movie. That felt like a show biz moment to me.
There have been things over the years that didn't work. 'Body Of Lies,' directed by Ridley Scott, which I did with Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio, is a really tight action thriller, but when it opened in the U.S. it was number two to 'Beverly Hills Chihuahua.'
In 2007, I went to work in Beverly Hills as an intern at The Collective, a talent management agency. I'd been scouted for the job because of a blog I'd started in college and because the blogger-turned-author I worked for, Tucker Max, was producing a project with the company.
I once attended a birthday party where Danny Kaye dropped in to entertain the birthday boy and his guests; I was sometimes taken for lunch on Saturdays by my father to The Brown Derby; and my favorite meal is still the Cobb salad in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
I paid my way through school doing set construction for film and television. I'm a member of Local 44. I was a construction coordinator on 'Beverly Hills 90210' for 4 1/2 years and ran their whole construction program. I did two other pilots as a coordinator for Aaron Spelling.
I use the 'Too Faced Chocolate Bar Eye Shadow' Palette every day. I've tried a bunch of stuff, but this is my favorite. For eyebrows, I use the 'Anastasia Beverly Hills Dipbrow' Pomade in Dark Brown, and for mascara, I don't use anything else but 'Urban Decay Perversion' Mascara.
There are a lot of people in Beverly Hills who come from the Middle East, who are very much a part of the Beverly Hills fabric, and their kids grew up with the privileges of Beverly Hills. And yet they still have to deal with a lot of the prejudice against them for being foreign-born.
Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. When I ride through Beverly Hills in the early morning, and all the sprinklers have turned off, the scents that wash over me are just heavenly. Being House is like flying, too. You're free of the gravity of what people think.
When I first heard about Beverly Hills Chihuahua, I thought, no. This, this is ridiculous. And then you read the script and you close the script and you go, "They aren't going to be able to do that with real dogs. How are they going to do that?" You're going to see the strings. But they did.
I did not have a car in high school and neither did Angelina. Try to imagine. You go to Beverly Hills High, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. Even the cheapest car that anyone has is brand new. All my friends are well off. I have a movie-star father and no car. It was debilitating.
My siblings and I, we were raised on TV and films. Not a day went by that we weren't watching one of three movies - 'Caddyshack,' 'Animal House,' 'Beverly Hills Cop' - on rotation. Our comedy, our personalities were set watching 'Sesame Street': these really sort of wacky, Jim Henson-y characters.
When I finally came to the United States, I was forced to get a job right away. I spoke no English - none. I started working as an aesthetician in this beautiful boutique salon in Beverly Hills. Being an aesthetician didn't require an elaborate vocabulary in English. My first client was Cindy Crawford! I swear.
I get my highlights touched up with Susan Henry at Shades in Beverly Hills. She developed hypo-allergenic hair color products with no ammonia because she's allergic to others; she's an incredible colorist. She does balayage instead of the foils, and I'll go and she will do my entire head of highlights in an hour.
I have a strange fascination with the Midwest. I'm waiting to find out that my parents are actually from the Midwest. I grew up in Beverly Hills, up the street, and I just feel comfortable there. I've shot in Minneapolis, in Detroit, in St. Louis, in Omaha - they would say they're the Plains, not the Midwest - and I love it.
If you're strutting around Beverly Hills and hitting up these big industry parties every night when you're not making movies, then it's going to eventually consume you. But for me, I live most of my life in Boston. I do things no different from the way my buddies back home do them, except when I go to work, I go to a film set.
When I was a teenager, in the '80s, it was 'Dynasty.' It was 'Beverly Hills, 90210.' And those were fantasies. Those weren't reflective of my experience. And I think we all want that; we all want to see ourselves, our story told, something to relate to, to help us and know that we're not freaks, that our experiences aren't odd.
I went into a Beverly Hills shop to buy an attache case. They had 250 cases on their shelves. I asked an attractive saleswoman if they carried one made of belting leather. She said 'no.' That was the end of the conversation. She made no attempt to show me another case that would provide equal service. I didn't buy an attache case.
I remember, my freshman year of college, sitting in my TV room at the end of my dorm hallway with one other girl watching the premiere of 'Beverly Hills, 90210.' And then, a year later, walking into a room packed with college students watching '90210,' and I thought, 'I wonder what it must be like to be part of a phenomenon like that.'
When I read the script for '90210,' I thought, 'Boy, this is very superficial,' and it was. I mean, the pilot was all about the glitz and the glamour of Beverly Hills, the obnoxious kids, and the fish-out-of-water story of Brenda and Brandon Walsh. I couldn't discern from that first script that the show would become very issue-oriented.
When the riots happened in L.A., they didn't go to Beverly Hills to trash Rodeo Drive. They trashed their own neighborhoods. It's one of those tragedies that we always see in riot situations, where the only thing that they can lash out against is the stuff that's right there in their own communities. They destroy the very things that help them survive in their own community. There is a level of futility in that.