This idea of Los Angeles’ massive communal roll of the dice is essential to Didion’s understanding of the city, that cloud on the land, and especially the entertainment industry. “The place makes everyone a gambler,” she writes in her essay “In Hollywood.” “Its spirit is speedy, obsessive, immaterial.” She describes how “the deal” or “the action,” the way the project is financed and who profits from it, is the true story of any movie, and it’s over before production even begins: “the picture is but the by-product of the action.” She even goes so far as to write off any attempt at film criticism because “a finished picture defies all attempts to analyze what makes it work or not work: the responsibility for its every frame is clouded not only in the accidents and compromises of production but in the clauses of its financing.” Alice Bolin on Joan Didion and Los Angeles, Britney Spears, Play It as It Lays, Dateline, and treating life like the crap game that it is: the.blvr.org/1o5rUaP
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 15:19:59 +0000
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