Not For The Faint Of Heart

I have a vague idea and it’s not easy to describe. So…the connection to HOLLYWOOD BABYLON and this movie….is for me, easier to describe when I add a recent book about Hollywood called FULL SERVICE. There is also a documentary that I recommend based on the book and it’s authour called SCOTTY AND THE SECRET LIFE OF HOLLYWOOD.

The book and doc recall a service station run by a former marine who was hit on by Walter Pidgeo. He went home with Pidgeon, they fooled around and this guy realized there was a need and a bare-bones structure he could enhance for hooking up gays, lesbians and movie stars who had to keep their sex life secret in order to work in the public.

For me the comparison of the forbidden dark side of HOLLYWOOD BABYLON and FULL SERVICE is that the audience is kept away from the personal lives (to sell movie tickets) and is also in denial. In denial in order to keep this sheen of glamour and the good life alive for many movies that depend and propagate this good life to the masses.

Sure a lot of people were open-minded about Roc Hudson. But even today how many people could handle that Sepncer Tracy and Kathern Hepburns scandal wasn’t that they had an affair while his wife and children lived down the street. It’s a scandal because they were each others beard, or cover for their sexuality as gays? I’m sure in my job with fairly conservative customers they would not believe it for a second. Their cover up was using a scandal to cover a different scandal. Quite brilliant. It’s like Hugh Grant getting “caught” having a blow job. Hey…after that no one said he was gay anymore.

So..in OUATIH Tarantino is creating an inversion. Everything is an inversion from a movie poster being turned on it’s side to make amural. To the hero wearing moccasins when really it was the bad guy Manson who wore moccasins, to Di Caprio playing a version of Pitt. That is just three but the most obvious one is the ending. And the title “once upon a time” in “hollywood” not LA. But hollywood.

HOLLYWOOD BABYLON was considered forbidden as it exposed the things that showed the ugly side of the business and lifestyle.

And Tarantino has done this with inversion and fantasy ad the genre of retro and period piece. He is saying something about our shock over Harvey Weinstein….and that this sort of squalor was always in Hollywood. Not just now and using the Manson murders to highlight how rosy did you think being in Hollywood was? There has always been sexual casting crunch, people trading their souls for work. This is why I compare THE CANYONS to this “hollywood expose” genre. Tarantino has invented a fresh way to present this genre of scandal, corruption and revealing it to the innocent masses.

Anyways just hoping other people will see this movie and it is so brilliant and wonderful

One thing I forgot to say is that of course IT IS HILARIOUS!!! It is so much fun and funny!

CORMAC McCARTHY: “It’s so strange; I never knew what happened to him. I saw Richard Gere in New Orleans one time, and I said, ‘What ever happened to Terry Malick?’ And he said, ‘Everybody asks me that.’ He said, ‘I have no idea.’ But later on I met Terry. And he just… he just decided that he didn’t want to live that life. Or so he told me. He just didn’t want to live the life. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the films. It’s just, if you could do it without living in Hollywood.”