Our Greatest Export

I have begun to notice that animals are afforded a greater importance than human beings in Los Angeles.

Witness the audience at a showing of the film “Apt Pupil.” More people gasped at the sight of the disgruntled Nazi, portrayed by Sir Ian McKellen, shoving a cat into an oven than responded to footage of World War II atrocities or the bludgeoning of a local homeless man by a teenager.

Isn’t this a strange truth behind the facades of our Southern California lives? Haven’t we all enjoyed sharing tales of ill-mannered, unprincipled actions of the locals? Weren’t people queuing up at Brentano’s to meet that local-girl-made-good-by-being-bad Lewinsky? As a transplanted Easterner, I remember the couple who called an hour before the first dinner party I held here. They couldn’t make it. Surveying the elaborate meal in progress,

I was disappointed, but also concerned. I asked if everything was all right. Sure, they said. They were just tired from playing volleyball at the beach all day. While their rudeness angered me at first, I did get a slight joy from realizing how different I was from these people in L.A.

Alas, I have come to understand that, like an accent that wanes far from home, the powers of discriminating behavior will erode unless recalibrated with frequent escapes from Los Angeles. Without them, one can “go local” and begin to accept the unreturned phone calls and people with triple-booked schedules as the norm.

It was with this in mind that I approached a recent trip to Park City for the Sundance, Slamdance, Slamdunk, et al, film festivals. Seeing the polite, morally superior Utahans deal with the feral actions of “movie people” would infuse me with a fresh sense of righteousness. I recall vividly when, soon after moving to Los Angeles two years ago, I watched an ex-girlfriend and aspiring d-girl berate a Park City hotel employee over an airport pickup error. The way she tried to humiliate the desk clerk reminded me of how she treated restaurant staff in Los Angeles. I wondered if her sense of civic pride compelled her to take her rudeness on the road.

So as I boarded a Delta flight to Salt Lake City in hopes of garnering some buzz for a short-subject film I’d made (a nutty little comedy about a naughty Jack Russell terrier), I was looking forward to watching the mobile-phoned Hollywood herd charging into the quiet mountain hamlet. As chance would have it, I was seated next to an agent on the plane. The pile of a week’s Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter issues should have been indication enough, but it was his uncanny way of hogging the armrest and blocking the overhead light that truly indicated his station. My East Coast sensibility told me to shove back and grumble later, but my burgeoning Angeleno attitude told me that I shouldn’t take it personally. He might be useful. I asked him for a lift to Deer Valley since I had no idea where it was. He obliged.

Deer Valley, nestled in the Wasatch Mountains, was a beautiful sight in the smog-free alpine air. No wonder Mark Twain described Utah as “a land of enchantment.” (For the record, he also noted its “awful mystery.”)

Once deposited in town, I spied two women clad in what appeared to be Versace strolling with their well-groomed dogs, a scene seemingly plucked from Beverly Hills. Then another L.A.-like oddity: A Range Rover pulled up and two unnaturally tan men with identical Rogaine-replenished coifs appeared in full-length fur coats, accompanied by equally bronzed bottle blonds in arctic white furs. They didn’t seem to be associated with the film industry, or earth for that matter. All of Main Street stopped to gaze.

Ringing the town were new mansions and other developments being built at breakneck speed in a boom bolstered by the Salt Lake City Olympics of 2002. In Los Angeles, the hillsides of Hollywood are littered with cardboard-quality homes built over the decades for the newly minted wealth of a growing entertainment industry. In Utah, I discovered, many of the new winter palaces are riddled with the same sort of inferior construction. Floors seem to move underfoot and conversations upstairs are easily heard downstairs.

After settling in, I paid a visit to the museum at the Park City Silver Mine Adventure. Here, in the middle of the mountains that made the Hearst family rich, stands a monument to the hard-working backs broken underfoot. It had lifelike figures, a bit like the Hollywood Wax Museum. We see a mom in her checked dress serving biscuits to dad and the kids in their overalls before they burrow down to an early death in the mountain.

On a happier note, Park City boasts a number of decent restaurants, and the better ones have even managed to tame the ravenous Hollywood beast. Not only do they lock everyone into a pricey prix fixe, but they charge your credit card regardless of whether you show up. This practice fosters a greater turnout for reserved seating than most Los Angeles establishments could ever entertain. For the Hollywood animal, manners and wallet seem to go hand in pocket.

My $55 prix fixe, alcohol-not-included, three-course dinner at Park City’s finest restaurant was good, except that the waiter failed to tell me they were out of the white truffles that are allegedly served on the wild mushroom soup. After smelling and tasting the dish, I asked and the waiter disclosed that the kitchen had run out the night before.

I returned the next night with friends. When I asked that evening’s waiter if the truffles were available, he replied indignantly that they of course had the white delicacy for which every diner was being charged. At that moment, however, the previous night’s server passed by and corrected him. Faster than you could snort like a truffle pig, the two went off to a back room and argued, leaving the diners to wallow in mystery until the verdict arrived: no expensive truffles, same fixed price.

When our foursome finished dinner, the check appeared with charges for more desserts and cappuccinos than a table of 10 could consume. We asked for a correction and, at that point, feeling a bit mistreated, also asked the waiter to remove the charge for a foul-tasting grappa we had sent back for another selection. He replied that the restaurant doesn’t accept wines being returned to the bar. As an occasional wine and restaurant critic, I couldn’t fathom this policy at the, allegedly, finest restaurant in town. My objection culminated in a gesture worthy of the movies (e.g. “Showgirls”): The waiter tried to shove cash into our faces.

By now I was truly disgusted, and a little embarrassed. With the table chattering on about the the brutality of our server, I looked up to spy the chef outside, joyously hurling icy snowballs at anyone who sought to avoid the crowd out front and enter through the side door. Among those trying that entrance was a friend who had been inside all evening but had gone out briefly.

When I tried to help him in, the cook screamed, “This isn’t Hollywood!”

Of course not, Hollywood has white truffles, its cash machines almost always have cash, mobile phones rarely connect you to people you’ve never met (or whose accent you’ve never heard), and cooks hardly ever scream at out-of-towners.

By its very nature, Hollywood and its lifestyles cannot be kept in situ, since its lifeblood is the ability to infiltrate every community in the world and convince it that a certain film or television show mirrors the audience in some way. The most effective way to accomplish this is to conform both the show and the audience for a better fit. Judging from what I saw through the prism of Sundance in Utah, the program is working.

Obviously overburdened by the festivals, Park City was fast becoming a doppelganger of that celebrated dark side of Los Angeles. I was happy to leave, to head back to my daily zoo in the most authentic artificial city. Perhaps L.A. people aren’t so different after all. Or, maybe, media exposure has people everywhere becoming more like (using the collective here nearly chokes me) us.