Camp Hollywood

Many people will enjoy “Camp Camp,” a book of photos and essays about summer camp, as a hilarious, touching study of awkward adolescence. Those people are idiots. “Camp Camp” should be studied as the greatest guide ever to how Jews get jobs in Hollywood.

The book, created by the people who put together “Bar Mitzvah Disco,” was supposed to be about American camp life in general. But it turns out that the people who most want to write about their camp lives -- or anything about themselves -- are Jews, including director Ivan Reitman, “Freaks and Geeks” creator Paul Feig and MTV President Doug Herzog. This was fine with me because, as a Jew who didn’t go to sleep-away camp, I have long suspected that I was missing the really high-level Jewish networking opportunities. If getting those chances means spending my future weekends mastering canoeing and archery, I’m willing to do it. Though I wonder if Native American kids spent their summers learning to shvitz and play canasta in order to one day run casinos.

After studying the book, I focused on the photo from Camp Modin in 1980. It demonstrates that by age 11, the kids at Modin had mastered the basics of not only the bowl haircut but networking. Standing side by side are future Hollywood players David Wain (of MTV’s “The State” and Comedy Central’s “Stella”), Stuart Blumberg (Ed Norton’s producing partner and writer of “Keeping the Faith” and “The Girl Next Door”) and Craig Wedren (composer on “School of Rock” and “Wet Hot American Summer”). When I asked “Camp Camp” coauthor Roger Bennett how this one tiny camp in Maine produced so much success, he said it “was a machine created by Lew Wassserman to make your town run on time.” People who write books think Hollywood runs on time.

I asked around and found out that Wain’s cabin of about 20 kids also housed comic book artist Barry Deutsch, jazz bassist Avishai Cohen and designer Laser Rosenberg -- though his name suggests that even without the camp influence, he wasn’t getting pushed into the doctor-lawyer choice. Robert Smigel (creator of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and “Saturday Night Live’s” “TV Funhouse”) was a counselor that year. And director Shawn Levy (“Cheaper by the Dozen,” “Night at the Museum”) was a camper a few years older. I’m sure CAA agents are spending summers working there as counselors.

Wain, who directed and co-wrote “Wet Hot American Summer,” a 2001 camp movie, said he’s always running into old Modin campers in media and entertainment. He views camp less as a massive networking seminar than a chance to develop skills useful in the entertainment industry. I assumed he meant group meals and discussions that last late into the night but go nowhere. “Camp fosters your creative growth and individuality,” he said, “because there was nothing to do. We were supposed to play sports, but that wasn’t going to happen.”

Writer-producer Blumberg says that Wain used camp to test the weird little sketches that would have gotten him ostracized at his Ohio junior high school but are the basis of the material he today has turned into movies. “Hollywood is a business, but it’s driven by freaks. The freaks got their freak on first in camp,” Blumberg said.

Wedren, the film composer, says that without Gentiles or any other kind of cool people around, campers got celebrated for the kind of idiocy that gets you fired from a normal job and yet makes money in Hollywood. Camp was filled with plays, musical performances, color war contests and, from what I can tell from the photos in “Camp Camp,” a Milton Berle-amount of cross-dressing. Also, big ambition. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’ll change the lyrics to some popular songs.’ No. We were going to totally take over the world,” Wedren said. If Sunnis and Shiites decided to determine control of Basra by staging a color war in which victory hinged on putting on the best skit, Muslims would dominate network television in no time.

But despite all their pleas that not much networking went on at camp, it’s suspicious that Wain has acted in Blumberg’s movies, that Wedren has done the music for Wain’s films, and that I have not worked for any of them.

I’m thinking of starting a camp for Jews in their mid-30s who are struggling in entertainment. I think it will be easiest if we just go back to holding signs and walking in circles in front of Paramount.

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jstein@latimescolumnists.com