Hollywood’s Real Horror Picture

There’s no getting around it, L.A.’s still an industry town. When residents talk about “the industry,” we know that it’s entertainment, either movies or television, they’re referring to. Movies and television are to L.A. what steel used to be to Pittsburgh and autos used to be to Detroit. An oft-repeated, almost cliche that’s mouthed knowingly and consistently by cinema professors at such institutions as USC and UCLA goes something like this: “Say what you will about the Louis B. Mayers, the Warner brothers and even the Harry Cohns. . . . The moguls of Hollywood’s golden era cared about movies.” The archetypal cinema prof will then continue this tack by jumping to the present, when movies are being produced by multinational corporations that “care only about quick profits.”

The prof is more right than wrong. While no one who ever met any of the moguls would accuse them of being Oscar Wilde-like aesthetes whose sole objective was to create art for the sake of art, they did exercise a firm control over their products. Every tourist who goes on the tour at Universal will have pointed out to him or her remnants of the Rome that was re-created in the early ‘60s for “Spartacus.” When I was a kid growing up in suburban New York, I’d spend Saturday afternoons seeing Victor Mature fighting lions in ancient Rome’s Colosseum. I’d see Stewart Granger as a highwayman in Restoration England. Gene Kelly would be dancing on the Left Bank of Paris. I didn’t know that I was looking at sets on the back lots of 20th Century Fox (now largely high-rent Century City) or MGM (which has no lot of its own). I didn’t care. Aren’t movies supposed to be about the suspension of disbelief?

Let’s suspend our disbelief further. In fact, let’s turn it inside out. Let’s create a scenario. Scene: A typical small town in California. Time: Now. Plot: “Ghostbusters” meets “Casper.” Where can we find a typical small California town? How about Wellington, New Zealand? (“Nothing to Be Afraid Of,” Calendar, July 14).

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Why Wellington, New Zealand? Well, we’ve got a Kiwi director most Americans have never heard of. We’ve got a cast whose members aren’t among the high-priced A-list echelon. American actors? Mostly. Michael J. Fox is Canadian, but that’s just about the same thing these days. And he’s always been convincing as a kind of latter-day Mickey Rooney all-American boy. How about casting the ingenue? Trini Alvarado. She’s been in movies since she was a kid. Remember the 1994 remake of the American classic “Little Women”? The one filmed in British Columbia? The one with Winona Ryder? Yes, but Alvarado was in it. Maybe you missed her when you went to buy popcorn. And then we’ve got John Astin. Gomez Addams? Perfectly cast, he plays a ghost more than a century old.

So we make a movie that takes place in a “typical” California town and film it in New Zealand with New Zealand crews. After all, American unions are getting a bit overpriced. It has worked in television (“X-Files” FBI Agents Mulder and Scully running all over the United States, which is really Canada; how paranormal can you get?).

So while our film technicians line up for their unemployment checks in North Hollywood, there are some very happy studio execs at Universal busily counting their profits. And there are even happier New Zealanders who were able to ride their bicycles to the “typical California town” of “The Frighteners” in Wellington. “Frighteners” director Peter Jackson has said that he doesn’t want to film in the United States. He’s next slated to do a remake of “King Kong,” which of course was originally set in New York.

Gore Vidal once said: “You can only sell your country once.” We’ve sold it cheap to Japan in exchange for the automobiles, electronics and steel we used to produce in the United States. Now perhaps the most American of commercial art forms--the motion picture--is being farmed out to workers in other countries who work cheap. Many “American” film studios are now subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Now it’s time to off the little guys (and women). The ones who live in the Valley and depend on their film technician salaries to feed, clothe and educate their families.

Then let’s drive over to Forest Lawn or Hillside Memorial Park and visit the graves of the late movie moguls. The ones the archetypal USC/UCLA cinema professor says “cared.” If we listen carefully, we might just be able to hear them whirling in their graves. Maybe this is the real scenario of “The Frighteners.” Get ready to be scared out of your wits. You’re losing your jobs!