Book Review : Tossing Off a Perfect Shot of Hollywood

A Hollywood Education: Tales of Movie Dreams and Easy Money by David Freeman (Putnam’s: $17.95)

In keeping with this paper’s policy of full disclosure about the relation of book reviewer to book, I have two things to say about “A Hollywood Education” before I get started. This reviewer has done her doctoral dissertation on the Hollywood novel: By 1963 I had read more than 500 examples of the genre, never cared if I read another word on Hollywood, and could easily place almost every novel into an unattractive category. Only Ludwig Bemelmans’ “Dirty Eddy” and Gavin Lambert’s “Inside Daisy Clover” appeared to defy this categorization; every other novel, no matter how artfully done, seemed the same, the same, the same.

So David Freeman’s “A Hollywood Education” did not get an easy reading. The second thing I need to disclose here is that I sat beside David Freeman once at a dinner party, but didn’t make the connection until I was more than halfway through the book. It was very much like Lois Lane sitting next to Clark Kent for all those years: How was she to know he was Superman, when he never gave her the slightest hint?

Simply Put, a Knockout

Consequently, when I say “A Hollywood Education” is the best book anybody has written about Hollywood, ever , better than anyone else’s book, it’s not empty rhetoric. This book is a knockout. It’s amazing. It’s profound. It’s cruel and kind and records things about the movie business--directly and indirectly--that have never been put into print before.

Freeman’s decision to make this volume a collection of short stories (more accurately, tales ) is his first instinctive triumph. In Hollywood, time is measured by the breaks between movie takes, and everyone on a set is forced--by the imposition of arbitrary leisure--to become a storyteller. The short story is the Hollywood art form, almost as much as the film or the miniseries, and the taller, sadder, sillier the story, the better.

What Freeman does here is just go hog-wild with these stories. For one thing, he’s the first--to my knowledge--to deal with the influence of family on the movie business in a way that isn’t stereotypical or stupid. The mad yearning of a self-made, nouveau-riche arriviste to associate himself with a third-generation Hollywood aristocrat is the subject of one story. The touching account of two mad Jewish brothers, estranged by the (outrageous, Hollywood) death of their beloved mother, managing to be reconciled only when one brother attempts to turn the death of the other into a major feature film, is the theme of a second on “family ties.” They’re perfect narratives, so much so that the reader gets both skeptical and worried: How’s Freeman going to pace himself? How can he get any better?

But with a crazy tall tale about a British literary lion and an American rewrite man--told, because it’s a “foreign” story, with subtitles--he gets even better. “Another Bottle of Petrus,” with its wild comedy, its undercurrents of grinding tragedy, recalling, as it does, Steve McQueen’s death, and reminding us that everyone--no matter how rich, how famous, how outrageous--has death waiting just outside the door, is perfect.

Sharp Insights

There are four other absolutely perfect stories in this collection. One, “Muscle Burn,” has to do with an uncouth boy from Brooklyn, who, through a series of impossible circumstances, becomes a millionaire exerciser to the stars; one of those sadists who come to the house and torture celebrities into the artificial shapes of youth that they need to make a living. This man gets rich, dies a little more each day from loneliness, and makes one friend. Perfect.

In “Walking Through the Fire,” a screenwriter learns to do just that, achieves a fleeting serenity and a better disposition, but remarks, at the end: “I’ll tell you, don’t order a halo for me yet. Not everything’s changed. MGM still won’t take my phone calls. No matter what I do or how hard I try, I still can’t get ‘Passing Fancy’ made.” This kind of talent is throwaway and almost arrogant: Other writers have plodded through 500-page novels trying to get the connection between fantasy and reality, the occult and the ordinary, out here. Freeman just tosses it off.

In “The Senator and the Movie Star,” the relation between sex, power and money is looked at carefully and sadly. This is Freeman’s most ambitious story and it’s so meticulously composed that it won’t leave your mind. You keep trying to figure out better, happier endings for these characters, as though they were real. And they are real, realer than real: Perfect.

And there’s a story, “Above the Line, Below the Line,” that combines elements of Los Angeles life never before put into a story: a grumpy, unemployed stunt man, a fatuous avant-garde fine artist and our annual Santa Monica brush fires. That story alone tells as much about chance, luck, madness and the movie business as Fitzgerald and West put together.

Personal Favorite

My personal favorite, though, is “Monkey Business,” about a wretched independent producer who tries gamely--through thin and thinner--to finish a very-low-budget movie about a “signing” gorilla. This classic has variations in Hollywood; one remembers the tales of the “wolf wrangler” who hired out everything from wolves to German shepherds trained to snarl on command to finally--for working with extremely timid actors--a stuffed wolf head on a broomstick.

Freeman doesn’t exaggerate, he isn’t mean, he doesn’t take cheap shots; he just goes for it. This is one book in a thousand, this is the very best of its kind.