Insistent thumping accompanied by the gruff measured grunts of a man permeated the uncomfortably thin walls from the room next door of Hollywood’s flagship Sunset Blvd. Motel exotically titled ‘The Saharan’. With its rainbow desert palm neon sign outside promising unsuspecting travellers 3-star service with a smile and with the convenience of ‘Rockin’’ Ralphs (a 24hour grocery store infamous for its rock ‘n roll clientele) across the way, it never occurred upon checking in that ‘service with a smile’ actually started at the Seven Veils strip club a mere 20 paces adjacent to the motel and ended with a twenty-buck per hour room.
Now, don’t get me wrong I pretty open-minded, hell on a previous trip to Los Angeles my writing partner and I had booked into a cute 2 bedroom holiday rental over in Los Feliz where midway into our second week the apartment directly above us had been leased to an ‘independent film production company’ for a couple of days. By the sounds of things I can tell you now, they weren’t making a Bambi sequel. Unless Bambi was the buxom blonde in the satin gown I happened to pass one day heading to my rental car, in which case I don’t think I’ll be taking my nephews to see that one when it comes out straight to dvd even though my writing partner and I had a good laugh over it.
No, what made The Saharan so very cringe worthy wasn’t the near ritualistic banging next door, nor was it even the pleasant tactility of the carpet underfoot, or even the fact that this was the third room we had been moved into and yet still the toilet was blocked and undergoing a severe beating by a hefty Hispanic woman, we’ll call her ‘Rita’, and her plunger. No, what made that fleeting hour in The Saharan one which I’ll not soon forget before we fled to greener and safer pastures was that not only was ‘Rita’ up to her elbows in plunger duties in perfect sync with the plunging activities next door, but I was struggling to keep a straight face at the sheer comical and deeply ironic nature of the whole situation. For huddled into the corner and bent near double on her twin bed Hannah, my writing and producing partner of 3 years, was on a call to a ‘big-wig’ film studio executive desperately trying to hear the ‘time’ and ‘place’ for a meeting we had scheduled earlier by performing her own plunging duties of a finger thrust into an ear and fielding the awkward questions the zoo noises filling our room must have raised.
Grinning I couldn’t help but find this funny and when she noticed I was enjoying this far too much she shot a pointed glare my way which just made me showed more teeth. How she remained so composed throughout that conversation, I’ll never know. As she hung up ‘Rita’ brisked past from the bathroom and in broken English mumbled, “Toilet work now”, as she passed out through the door. Straight faced and quietly annoyed, Hannah rolled her eyes back to me while cursing under her breath about the noise next door.
“Well?” I asked. But she just raised an eyebrow and cocked her head at me keeping silent. Payback I think, for taking pleasure in her previous discomfort. I gently pushed again for an answer and after a brief moment I thought I wouldn’t get one when suddenly the storm cloud across her face parted in a cheeky smile. Hannah wielded the page she had been scribbling on throughout the phone conversation like a trophy. “Pink Taco. 8.30. Beverly Hills.” I couldn’t help myself, this was it. After weeks of pounding the pavements and cold-calling industry professionals, we had secured ourselves a meeting with a representative of a big player studio. I pulled Hannah into a rough hug, we fist bumped and jumped around the room like a crazed idiot. “Livin’ the dream! YEAH BABY!” we exclaimed in unison mere moments before an almighty thud shook the wall from the other side and room dropped to weighted silence. Hannah and I shared a look. “Let’s get the hell outta here” she said. I couldn’t agree more. Snatching our bags we made for a quick exit and a full refund.
No way in hell were we going to stay here for the full week, or another minute for that matter. We had a world to conquer. A few desperate calls later and a helping hand from lady luck we were driving away from The Saharan and its shifty types up into the Hills where we were to stay in a friend’s abandoned house rent free for the week. Our friend had moved out due to a recent ‘domestic’ which resulted in his 42inch television thrown through the window. All very rock ‘n roll, but that is another story. The house itself was perfectly located beneath the Hollywood Sign up on Beachwood Canyon and though it was bare save a sofa, a few scatter cushions and packing boxes littered around; it did have a fridge full of soda. Some would call it living the dream. I call it ‘flying by the seat of your pants’.
Looking back now a few years on, I have come to regard this moment as being one in which defines the way in which I view Los Angeles. Everyone who comes to Hollywood with stars in their eyes and the dream in their heart at some time or another is going to have to hustle for their lives and turn tricks to survive. It is as simple as that, and for a creative trying to make it in the City of Angels, it is just a way of life. Some sell their bodies, others their minds and more their souls. It is a hungry city filled with hungry people and it just depends where on the food chain you sit as to whether you chew or get chewed. I have come to understand the world and human nature well enough to know had the cards been dealt out any differently I could just have easily been that Saharan companion for an hour or another ‘Rita’ somewhere plunging a blocked toilet. A chicken carcass discovered one day when out shopping, fully devoured and shoved behind some boxes in the cereal aisle of ‘Rockin’ Ralphs’ can attest to that. It is a hard reality to face, but to survive in Hollywood you need to become a commodity and you need to be enclosed by a network of people who become your tribe in the foreign land you’ve found yourself in, people who become the guardians of your heart, who help to keep your feet firmly on the ground and keep you straying too far off the path. I have been lucky enough to have found my tribe, because without them Hollywood would have swallowed me whole.
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to write. More importantly, to tell stories. There was never a reason for it, just a deep rooted compulsion to question everything and make new discoveries about the world so that I could better understand. Tackling life with a healthy curiosity is what sets a writer apart from the rest of the world, a curiosity which has gotten me into more trouble than I can count, all starting back in ‘85 with a shoebox tape recorder my parents bought for me when I was four. I would spend days filling it with childish imaginings, blissful hours wasted in worlds of my creation to the point I would rather spend time on the recorder and in my head than play with my real friends outside. I don’t think it helped that we moved around a lot when I was growing up, something that continued well into my teenage years, and making friends only to lose them again was a tough reality to face as a kid.
It is in our nature to adapt to the world around you, the way I did that was learning to keep myself entertained and for all intents and purposes that shoebox tape recorder gradually became my best friend. Something I have observed with life, it doesn’t matter how attached you are to something, if it stops working you instinctively want to know why. So getting back to the point, one day my shoebox recorder suddenly stopped working. I didn’t know why, only that none of the buttons would work and there was a strange whirring noise being emitted. Finally I thought to open the cassette door and discovered tape guts everywhere. Now, a normal child would run to their parents with the poor offerings of the broken machine in hopes that mom or dad could fix it, make it all better again and bring your best friend to life. Worst case scenario they bin it and if you’re really lucky, they’ll buy you a new one. But from a young age I was taught that ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’ and knowing this I knew there wouldn’t be a replacement. My first thoughts were ‘I can fix this’ and thus proceeded to ‘borrow’ my fathers’ tools and perform open-circuitry surgery. The more I tried to fix it, the more I destroyed it. I couldn’t help myself, I was completely riveted by the mechanics of it and before I knew it I had more screws and pieces of molded plastic than I could account for.
Dare I say, it was never quite the same again, and in those days a firm hand from my father was suitable punishment for such a crime as in all reality this was one time he could have repaired the recorder quite simply without taking it apart. In all the years since, I don’t think I’ve ever learnt my lesson. I might have replaced the shoebox recorder with an expensive laptop/ipad/smartphone but when any one of my many trusted gadgets fail me, I’m quick on the draw to open them up and have a little tinker inside. Luckily for me my tool skills have greatly improved over the years. Well in most cases anyway.
Tackling Hollywood or any creative industry can be liked to tackling that tape recorder. A healthy dose of curiosity and a certain degree of courage must be employed in order to take those first tentative steps into the unknown. For me, it was November 2008 and having just graduated from Film School earlier in the year, it was time to test my steel. Hannah and I had met 2 years prior, and had been writing a rock ‘n roll screenplay set in 80’s Los Angeles and Berlin. The story followed the ‘Gutterpunk Kings’ a band trying to make it out on the Sunset Strip but were falling apart due to tensions between band members and waning interest for their music. Desperate to hold onto the dream, the band go to Berlin to take part in a ‘Battle of the Bands’ competition where they are forced to confront the internal rifts threatening to pull them apart if they are to stand a chance at winning the recording deal. ‘City of Paradise’ seemed to be a fitting paradigm for what Hannah and I were trying to achieve; that constant struggle to make the dream a reality but doing it none the less because you believe what you have crafted will touch the hearts and minds of the people around you.
So, with no money outside that of a credit card, no network of contacts out in Hollywood and armed with a story we believed in, we took the plunge and flew into the unknown. It was singularly the most terrifying and yet exciting moment of my life. It was an 18 hour transatlantic multi-stop flight that saw us landing at LAX close to midnight. After snatches of sleep over the last 36 hours, I climbed behind the wheel of a red Ford Focus rental and discovered it was more a go-kart than a car. Pulling around the car park of Budget a couple of times, I finally got the hang of things and literally hit the highway. From that moment on we hit the ground running, cold-calling agencies, production companies and making corporate connections in a bid to garner interest in the project. We made the Sunset Strip our regular haunt, befriending the bouncers at each of the main venues and earning VIP privileges in return. Being a part of the beating heart of Los Angeles was an unforgettable experience and in truth quite intoxicating. Within days we were rubbing shoulders with some of rock ‘n rolls greats, sharing drinks over stories and over the weeks we kept going back to soak up the world of the story we had written and to capture what we had experienced. It was an incredible time and Los Angeles was still new and filled with wonder for us, as it remains to this day. Work became play and play became work until 20 hour days was the norm. When it came time to go, we had secured the first stage of Gibson USA as a future marketing partner and we were in ongoing talks with some heavy industry hitters. Sheer will, determination and tenacity had brought us this far, now we just had to get back.
Over the course of the next 2 years we would come and go again. Always with barely enough to get us there in the first place after pulling retail to clear the credit cards and get back out there. Each trip to LA has brought us closer to making our dream a reality. Each time we didn’t quite know how we would make it work and yet each time, somehow we did. Putting the long hours into creating a product and learning on the trot how to market that product as a viable commodity has meant meeting some incredible people and making some lifelong friends. This was all made possible back in 2010 Hannah and I secured an investment for £25,000, no small feat in a world under economic strain, and returned to Los Angeles for our 4th and what was to become, longest period spent there.
Beg, steal and borrow seems an apt phrasing to describe our time in LA. The apartment we were staying in resided in a historic building greatly publicized by the management to have been owned and occupied by none other than Charlie Chaplin. Off the elaborate stone laid antechamber, fitted with assorted plants, cherub fountain and staged sitting room featuring a baby-grand piano more in tune with keeping to the theme of space than holding key, a white door kept locked stood inset beside rows of wall mounted tin mailboxes. The curious placement of a black lacquered sign fastened to the door indicated it to be the ‘Chaplin Room’. Supposedly the very room Chaplin himself spent his days developing his act. Whether this is true, only those who have the access to the room know. I’d like to believe it true, but in Hollywood you’d be hard pressed not to find smoke and mirrors down every turn. One thing is certain, Bret Michaels, frontman of the 80’s hair band ‘Poison’ lived one floor up from us and two apartments down stands the ‘Fontenoy’ a striking art-deco structure with a blazing red neon strip light setting it apart from everything else and famously housed Johnny Depp and Nicolas Cage in their hungry years. It was always wildly comforting to know I was walking in the footsteps of giants when strolling the dapple tree sidewalks into the tourist trap bustle along Hollywood Blvd.
Living in Hollywood became a fine tuned acrobatic display of malleability and dexterity. Chasing new leads and strengthening older ones is a fine balance of work and play. There are lows, as with anything, but the highs are stratospheric. Having legendary guitarist Slash slip into a your booth at a small live venue bar can be pretty mind-bending, as can being handed an ‘Ace of Spades’ calling card from Lemmy of Motorhead. Kicking back with Guns ‘n Roses drummer Matt Sorum over at his boutique clothing store and sharing a Canters Deli burger with original Guns ‘n Roses drummer, Steven Adler.
Living the high life by day meeting executives, investors and agents then by night filling our shoulder bags on a toilet roll run along the Sunset Strip. Musicians. Mayhem. Good times. Down times. Ordering extra large pizza then eating it out the fridge for 3 days because money is short and the last dime in your pocket has to go towards parking over in Beverly Hills when the next meeting comes up. Cockroaches the size of battle tanks become your least favorite neighbor while high speed police chases and High Definition body tackles happen just outside your window.
Crazy people. Strange people. Broken people. The streets are filled with them. Colorful lights and neon nights. Magenta sunsets and towering palm trees. It’s a diet of coffee and cigarettes. Pen to paper. Fingers to keys. It’s Jack Daniel’s and Coke. It’s the life of the place. The way it hums and speaks. It is the music. The bustle. The calm. Its molten grid of streetlights, traffic lights and tails lights looking down from heights of Griffith Park. It’s the heat. The desert wind. The chilly nights. It’s the magic. The illusion. The rabbit in the hat. It’s taking a chance. Living life to the full. It’s the dream from gutter up. It’s the legacy.
This is the Hollywood way…
SN
Hollywood Gutterpunk 