It's hard to say exactly when it started, the d-girls in tight black dresses from Penn, the agents with degrees from Yale, sitcom writers from Harvard, up-and-coming young executives who knew each other at Brown, staying out all night at parties at someone's brand-new million-dollar house in the Hills and stopping off for breakfast at the Hollywood Coffee Shop before climbing back into their sleek BMW convertibles and Toyota Land Cruisers with glassed-in cabins that let you ride high above the freeway traffic as your assistant, who graduated college three or four years after you did, patches through your calls to your car. Some date the beginning of the great migration to the stock market crash in 1987. Others say it started in the early 1980s with Michael Ovitz, who turned the Creative Artists Agency into the Hollywood equivalent of Goldman, Sachs, and with Jeffrey Katzenberg, who invented the title "creative executive" at Paramount. Or with the writers from the Harvard Lampoon who got rich writing jokes for Saturday Night Live.
But the tide really hit this decade, and it is now clear that what Wall Street was to the 1980s, or Washington was to the 1970s, Hollywood is today: the land of milk and honey, the creamy center of the American pie. The equation of Wall Street and Hollywood is more than an easy journalistic trope. Last year, the Hollywood entertainment complex employed more Californians than all the giants of Cold War aerospace combined, and exported more goods than any other American industry with the exception of defense. Hollywood movies, like television shows, are less a form of art than multi-million- dollar launching platforms for a mindnumbing variety of products -- from the film itself, to cable rights, to foreign rights, to the underlying value of theater chains and TV networks, to school lunchboxes, T-shirts, and the commercial products featured or advertised in the shows from Fruitopia to Reebok to IBM on up.
No wonder all the flights to Los Angeles are full. And if Hollywood is the Wall Street of the 1990s, then the talent agencies are its investment banks, entrepreneurial centers that trade access to multi-million-dollar properties like Sylvester Stallone and Jim Carrey -- the stocks and bonds of the movie business -- to institutional investors like Universal Studios in exchange for a l0 to 15 percent cut. "We can really recruit and draw from the best graduate students and undergrads in the country who would ordinarily go to work for Paul, Weiss or Morgan Stanley," says Jeff Berg of International Creative Management, one of the three major talent agencies that serve as post-graduate training grounds for aspiring Ivy League moguls. "And that's because there's a career path now, and a terrific financial upside if they get it right."
With his bright-blue pinstriped shirt and squash-player's build, his left foot clenching and relaxing beneath the soft polished leather of his shoe as if he were engaging in some special form of calisthenics, Berg looks every bit the banker. His sentences are filled with words like "secular" and " cyclical" and "structural," whose reassuring solidity makes a nice contrast with the lowslung SoHo couches and sunbleached walls of his office in Beverly Hills.
The reality that young assistants encounter once they start working at the agencies, however, is nothing to write home about. They begin their days by studying the trades for signs and portents that their bosses might have missed, like the news that "Dreamworks SKG has paid $ 650,000 against $ 900, 000 for Mousehunt, a comedy by Adam Rifkin," from the Hollywood Reporter. If, as a group, assistants are understandably reluctant to tell their parents all that much about their own day-to-day duties, taking their bosses' suits to the cleaners, buying birthday presents for their kids, a stint at one or another of the agencies remains the Hollywood equivalent of an MBA, offering aspiring young players an unrivaled opportunity to listen in on their bosses' phone calls and make valuable contacts throughout the industry.
Those who lack the ambition, or the personal armor, to make it at ICM or William Morris often migrate to the slower-paced world of the movie studios, where the pay is lower, the days are shorter, and the bosses rarely as abusive. Jan Finger is a vice president at Imagine, the production company of director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer. On an average morning, she reads new scripts, tracks the progress of scripts around town, and passes judgment on the proposals before her. "I didn't go to film school," she explains, as we sit by a bookshelf lined with bound scripts whose titles, written in magicmarker letters on the spines, suggest they have not and will never be made. The variety of generational archetypes Finger suggests -- the junior-associate-in-a-law-firm haircut, the thirtyish-editor miniskirt, the assistant-press-secretary-to-theHouse-minority-whip smile -- is an accurate reflection of her place in Hollywood.
"After I graduated from Harvard," she remembers, "I traveled through Europe, and I was in Venice when the Crash of '87 hit. I remember reading about it in the Herald Tribune. And everyone I knew was getting fired. So my friend Betsy went home, and I stayed in Europe and I ended up in London, where I worked as a coatcheck girl in an eating club." Why is she here? "I'm here because I like stories," she decides, as if choosing from the menu of possible answers before her. "And because I'm spoiled -- not extravagantly spoiled, but spoiled enough to do what I want, and to know that I am not going to starve."
Beyond the great migration to the land of palm trees and hefty paychecks, one does not have to look very far to find evidence of a larger cultural shift at work. After all, people made money in Hollywood -- lots of money -- in the '80s and '70s too. So why Hollywood? Why now? The answers can be found, as is usual these days, in front of the tube. Perhaps the most outstanding feature of the moment is that the lines between fact and fiction, between personal experience and televised narratives and characters, have ceased, not to exist, of course, but to serve as a useful tool in interpreting everyday American reality. After six hours of daily exposure to television beginning at birth, it is little wonder that the characters and storylines have become real to us, shaping our habits and expectations with a thoroughness that the fathers of the medieval Church would have envied. "The conditions of response to the performer are analogous to those in a primary group," observed the social psychologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in an article published in the mid-1950s, just after television was born. "The most remote and illustrious men are met as if they were in a circle of one's peers." And in a public sphere made up of billiondollar summer movies, celebrity trials, political spectaculars, and other broadcast narratives, minutely shaped and focus-grouped and polled and linked to overarching themes and telling personal moments -- from the release of Men in Black, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to last year's GOP convention, to pretty much the entire span of the Clinton presidency -- Hollywood has become our true center of cultural gravity, the fixed point around which the rest of American life revolves.
Even the cultural gatekeepers seem to have given up and joined the rest of us in front of the tube. "Over the last two years, I've come to think of Andy almost as a friend, someone I know nearly as well as the people I actually work with, somebody I can count on," wrote Charles McGrath in a cover story for the New York Times Magazine that treated TV cop shows and their authors with the same yearning intensity that previous generations of critics brought to Joyce's Stephen Hero. If there is something comic in the notion of Chip McGrath, editor of the Sunday Times Book Review, former fiction editor of the New Yorker -- mandarin of mandarins, in other words -- mooning over Detective Andy Sipowicz of NYPD Blue and savoring the producer Steven Bochco's "baroque, mannerist phase," it is hard to find any convincing arguments for why young writers should spend their youth out in Iowa writing coming-ofage novels with printings of 5,000 copies instead of writing for tens of millions of viewers, McGrath included, at salaries that would have made even Hemingway blush. If the literate culture of the American Century -- artistic, intellectual, political -- rested on a pulpy pyramid of popular magazines and newspapers from True Story to the Saturday Evening Post, today's literate culture resembles a much smaller pyramid that has been turned on its head. Reading and writing are tools of an elite: The rest of America watches television. What would the young Norman Mailer do? Or Philip Roth? The question is purely rhetorical. They would do what any other sensible person would do -- take the first flight out of New York and sleep on someone's couch until they found an agent who could find them a job on The Tonight Show or Married . . . With Children.
Which is not to say that creative challenges, of a certain type, are not to be found in Hollywood. "This business necessarily assumes a very average level of intellect and education," one agent observes from behind the sliding- screen doors of his office in Beverly Hills. This agent occupies a particular niche in town: He is a conduit between executives in Hollywood and book publishers and agents back in New York. "In literary fiction," he explains, " derivative is bad. In film and in television, derivative is good: 'It's a lawyer on the run, The Fugitive meets The Firm. It's Three's Company, except the women are men, and the John Ritter character is black.'"
The creative act of writing for television, in other words, bears very little resemblance to the traditional image of the quietly vibrating lonely young writer locked in a struggle with his demons. Sunset Gower Studios, located in a neighborhood of run-down two-family homes on the fringes of West Hollywood, is home to Paul Simms, who graduated a year ahead of me at Harvard and is the creator and executive producer of the NBC sitcom NewsRadio. " So what's your angle?" Simms asks. "Wait. I know. Too much, too soon. No," he decides, tugging on the collar of his unwashed black turtleneck. "It's the money -- with Paul Simms's multi-million-dollar salary, you could feed the starving children of Somalia for a year."
Simms is only the most obviously successful of the current cohort of writers from the Harvard Lampoon, whose alumni rule the sitcom roost the way alumni of Harvard's Porcellian Club ruled the investment banks, the State Department, or whatever universe it was to which WASPs in their starched white collars once aspired. That the field of situation comedy is ruled by Harvard graduates is by now an ancient piece of cultural trivia.
What distinguishes Simms from the younger Lampoon writers in T-shirts and baseball caps, competing for turns at the Sega Genesis racing game hooked up to a pair of largescreen TVs in his office, is that he didn't come straight out to Los Angeles to write for television. He began his professional life in New York, working a two-year stint for Spy magazine after graduating from Harvard in 1988. "I was living in a one-room apartment on 13th Street," Simms recalls of his apprentice years writing for print, " which was excellent, because the apartment I had before was like a three-room apartment with five roommates, and it sucked. You know how it is. You buy one record a week and you choose that record carefully. And the other thing is, just about everyone else at that level had some kind of income from their parents. I wouldn't say they were all trust-fund people, you know, but they all had some kind of cushion that I didn't have. Because to do that two-or three-year apprenticeship, you know -- the entry-level job -- you get paid next to nothing. And if you can't afford it, there's always someone else who can."
In a perfect world, of course, whatever sensitivity to real-world problems recent Ivy League graduates might lack -- what it's like to struggle and fail, to live from week to week, to be an adult, to have children, or to educate children in the public schools -- would be more than made up for by the upsurge in funny, literate movies and shows that would follow their arrival in town. Despite a few actually funny shows -- The Simpsons is funny -- the late 1980s and the 1990s have been an almost unrelieved low point for Hollywood, an era of frantic, manipulative, big-budget shlock that requires ever-increasing doses of sex, violence, and hype to lure audiences into the theaters. You don't have to spend your evenings reading Proust by candlelight to be embarrassed by what passes for American culture today. Nor do you have to be much of a genius to note the coincidence of a Hollywood that subsists on empty, worn-out formulas and the flood of Ivy League graduates west. In the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, the men and women who ran the studios, wrote the scripts, and stood behind the cameras were surprisingly representative of the audiences that sat in darkened theaters across the country. They came from all over. The writers were older, and most of them had worked at other jobs, in other places, before moving to Hollywood to write for the movies.
With little or no experience of what it feels like to live in this country as an adult, without private schools, swimming pools, and million-dollar houses in the Hills, Hollywood now, of course, relies on stock characters and lowest-common-denominator cliches to get its message across. Nor is Hollywood alone. While cultural differences among Hollywood, Washington, and New York still exist, what seems most interesting about the present moment is the degree to which the once-enormous differences in culture, style, and tone among the capital cities of our mediated republic have blurred together, lost in the common fog of sound-bites and formulas produced by the same, increasingly homogeneous group of people -- well educated, rich, conventionally liberal in their politics, increasingly cut off from the lives of people unlike themselves.
These days, however, when you listen to the cultural elites talk about themselves and the United States, you find find evidence of an enormous contempt for the unseen audience that consumes what they produce. In Washington, the audience exists as a trend-line in opinion polls, or as faceless data from focus groups. In New York it barely exists at all. In Hollywood, the audience comes in two additional forms as well: sitcom tapings and previews. For sitcom writers, tapings offer a chance to hear how a live audience responds to the jokes that seemed so funny to the cast and crew during Wednesday afternoon's walk-through. In the movies, this cultural democracy takes the somewhat less direct form of preview screenings conducted by the National Research Group. "No matter the age group, they all look like enemies," writes the director Sidney Lumet, whose gritty appreciation of proletarian life in New York does not seem to extend to preview audiences in Hollywood. "Little old ladies from retirement homes in Sherman Oaks mingle with forty-year-old musclemen whose beer bellies hang over their shorts . . . The trim houses and neat lawns [of the surrounding neighborhoods] seem to have nothing to do with the cretins waiting for admission."
The view from the other side of the velvet ropes is equally unappealing, alternating between abject worship of the famous and the ferocious desire to see them fall. The combination of dependence and resentment that the celebrity culture breeds was best captured by Frederick Exley in his classic A Fan's Notes, the writer's account of his obsession, through his own personal failures and traumas, with the All-American football star Frank Gifford (himself a recent victim of the institutionalized resentment that Exley captured so well 30 years ago). "'Despise him?'" Exley writes. "I'm certain my voice reflected my great incredulity. 'But you don't understand at all. Not at all! He may be the only fame I'll ever have!'"
What Hollywood shows us, then, is the division that characterizes American society today in its clearest, most easily read form: The division between a distant elite that produces and manipulates images, and the unseen mass audience that passively consumes them. If this division is without precedent in our history, however, equivalent social structures have existed in other places at other times. "The expressive nature of the Balinese state," writes the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali,
was apparent through the whole of its known history, for it was always pointed not towards tyranny, whose systematic concentration of power it was incompetent to effect, and not even very methodically towards government . . . but rather towards spectacle, toward ceremony, toward the public dramatization of the ruling obsessions of Balinese culture: social inequality and status pride. It was a theatre state in which the kings and princes were the impresarios, the priests the directors, and the peasants the supporting cast, stage crew, and audience. The stupendous cremations, tooth filings, temple dedications, pilgrimages, and blood sacrifices, mobilizing hundreds and even thousands of people and great quantities of wealth, were not means to political ends: they were the ends themselves, they were what the state was for.
The idea of a social order devoted to the production of expressive ritual imagery for a mass audience, it might be noted, struck many academics as a bit of an interpretive reach when Geertz wrote Negara in 1980: Less than two decades later, the resemblance between the Balinese theater state and America today makes Geertz's argument seem like ordinary common sense. So if your daughter just turned down a sure thing at Goldman, Sachs to bring some fast-talking Tony Curtis-type his coffee and Danish, or if you just graduated from Harvard or Brown or someplace similar this June and your parents are giving you a hard time about moving out to L.A.: Relax. The weather is great. The money is better. And, in the end, what is the '90s in America all about, if not the delightful, half-embarrassed frisson that comes with graduating from an expensive college and finding a job like Tom Hanks's in Big, where you can play all day and get lots of cool stuff to watch at home on your VCR? It's like never growing up at all. And what in the world could be better than that? ,
David Samuels is a contributing editor to Harper's.