TV Writing, Movie Acting
More Social Observations in Large Coastal Cities
Rejected titles for Available for Parties1:
Hey Siri, Is Expired Cialis Dangerous?
The Michael Jordan of Reading the Internet
Hey. HEY
The Opposite of 9/11 [So]
The Movie Click, By Adam Sandler [Ouch]
Goy Vey! [Dude]
The Michael Jordan of Being White[NO]OnlyFans for Sapiosexuals[Please]The Matt Yglesias of Divorce[I walk through the valley of the shadow of death]Eczema City (to the tune of “Sex and the City”)[From the windows]The Bible 2[To the wall]
Choice of phrasing from last week’s blog which haunts my waking life:
“relative paucity of daily trash-hurdling” [POR QUE WHY]
I don’t need my name in lights / I’m famous in my Father’s eyes
- Overheard on Christian rock radio, 6/5/22
“Cali—great place to visit” - Biggie
The question precedes the city, waiting in the San Fernando hills as patiently as future fires.
Will the Movie Actor come to the party?
The host, with a shrug: “He said he was coming.”
🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏
It’s a month ago and I’m at a birthday party in North Hollywood. Technically, I’m crying in the bathroom. While it’s true that I’ve had a tumultuous few months—
—I think I mostly just needed to eat.
When I get out of the bathroom, the living room is deserted—the party itself is out in the backyard—and the TV is playing a losing coach’s press conference, presumably basketball.
The coach is saying, “You don’t always get the outcome you want. That’s part of being a man.”
I decide this means I should get over myself and go eat a catered taco.2
🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏
The backyard is busy with midcareer television screenwriters, predominantly women, and a loose man known as Penis Bailey. I find the writers excitingly intimidating; I do not speak to them.
In a movie, the midcareer television screenwriters (M.C.T.S.) would be played by Catherine Keener circa Being John Malkovich; Parker Posey circa You’ve Got Mail; Awkwafina (presently); and the disaffected BFFs in White Lotus3 five years from now.
Collectively, I want them to yell at me in a sexual way, but in real life they’d be more likely to yell at me for misspelling their name on their Starbucks cup.
Imagined mid-coitus quotes from M.C.T.S.:
“Psyche”
“This is the black-and-white part of the infomercial, isn’t it?”
“Do you smell that?”
“Should we get started?”
[Ashton Kutcher pops out of closet]
“And into the grid of two hundred million” – George Trow
The Movie Actor arrives toward the end of the party, in gathering darkness, M.C.T.S. gathering back toward their cars.
🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏
All the best and worst things about Los Angeles flow from one fact: it is a monoculture. Which is to say, there is exactly one kind of career considered impressive there: jobs in The Industry. (Note definite article.)
Meanwhile, trying to impress people with your job at parties in New York is like running up the down escalator. You can try but you shouldn’t. (It’s why the best line in The Big Short is when Ryan Gosling’s smug investment banker breaks the fourth wall to complain that his character would never actually attend the finance-bro party he is being depicted attending; “I had fashion friends.”)
In New York, the random person you’re chatting up is unlikely to be impressed by your particular context-of-striving; as the great Austin Shotts observed, you might think it remarkable that you’re a managing director—at 32!—but your interlocutor is worse than unimpressed: they’re bored. They were born for one reason: to be the greatest editorial-photoshoot backdrop painter to ever live.4
Now, do people in New York talk about their jobs? Constantly. Is “What do you do?” usually the first question? Naturally. But it’s a mirthless exercise. Every time I’ve been excited by someone’s answer and told them as much, they were already midway through a well-rehearsed self-deprecating retort. In this way the ritual is complete.
🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏 🦖🌴🍏
In L.A., when someone is Very Successful, you already know about their job before you meet them; their work is not to be discussed during pleasantries (and is likely not to be discussed at all).5 This is not for sinister reasons. Since New York is a free-for-all of many dissimilar contexts-of-striving, each mutually unintelligible, telling a stranger in Brooklyn what you do for a living involves pleasantly low stakes. For professionally fancy New Yorkers, the upshot to the difficulty of impressing people is the near-certainty that those people will leave them alone.
You can tell where I’m going with this.
In 1980, George Trow wrote an essay about the world wrought by mass culture; the essay, which attracted a cult following in the subsequent decades, is called “In the Context of No Context.” The only context necessary to be impressed by Movie Acting or by TV Writing is to be alive—which is no context at all.6 No wonder they’re wary of sweaty randos.
It was in the context of the Context of No Context, then, that I met the Movie Actor, doing my level best to sweat less.
“It’s about cowboys! It’s about doctors! It’s about cowboys who want to be doctors.” – George Trow
If you are able to help this project exist, join the astonishingly non-zero ranks of paid subscriber(s) to Available for Parties. My favorite things to write about tend to put me at odds with, well, jobs.
Think of it as supporting the arts without sUpPorTiNg tHe aRTs.
For now, all new posts are free; eventually some will be paywalled.
SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.
And then there are the titles I deemed unacceptable for this list—the meta-rejected titles if you will—which include:
Forgive Me Tom DeLonge
Is the Roof of Your Mouth Okay?
Scott Storch Redemption Arc
The Julia Allison of Being a Man
Amo Schumer, Pet Detective (like if Amy Schumer was a boy and I’m him very good)
Personal Vietnam
It’s not my party; I can’t cry if I want to—a cultural reference by Alex.
Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O'Grady, big shouts to the team behind Google, the web page.
In the aggregate, the effect is analogous to the experience of the high school valedictorian who gets to college and realizes, to their horror and/or exhilaration, that they are surrounded… by high school valedictorians.
This ritualized social denial echoes the infamous L.A. dress code for the upwardly mobile: the more money you make, the more imperative it becomes that you dress like an absolute homeless person. Look for bindles to come back strong in Spring ‘23.
Trow talks about the “pseudo-intimacy” between entertainers and the entertained; today one hears the same thing described as a “parasocial relationship.”