Déjà Vulie

I have a feeling that I’ve been here before—Hollywood, I mean—and things didn’t go so well. Maybe I was a failed starlet who hurled herself off the Hollywood sign. I could have been a hat check girl at the Trocadero who knew too much and got disappeared by the mob. Then again, it mightn’t have been so dramatic, my grand Hollywood entrance, my disappointing Hollywood exit. Perhaps I just had enough of wanting too much and not getting it, wiping the stars from my eyes and hopping a bus back home. Even after marrying my childhood sweetheart and settling into a life of championship hog calling, Hollywood haunted me for the rest of my days. I died a broken woman, clutching one of the gossips rags I’d secretly bought with my egg money and stashed in the root cellar.

Details aside, there's got to be some explanation for my undying fascination with Hollywood of yesteryear. I told Jerry J., that I only want to see properties built between 1920 and 1949. Oh, how this amused my big Hollywood realtor, my eliminating the rest of the century from the pencil slim pickings in my price range. I love looking at vintage pictures and old maps, I patiently explained, dating back to the days when Charlie Chaplin had the only studio in town and there wasn’t anything else on that stretch of LaBrea except a vintage Texaco station and Pink’s Hot Dogs. I know those streets. I don’t know why.

The good old-fashioned glamour of it all is so much harder to stumble upon than these familiar landmarks, even in my neighborhood, where a "star sighting" is little more than a cruel joke. What the hell do I care that Paris Hilton dissed Tara Reid just down the street at Hyde? Or that some fat rich kid named Brandon Davis thinks little Lindsay Lohan has too many freckles on her hoo-hoo? Who are these people, anyway? They’re not stars—they’re even actors, not in any verifiable sense of the word—with nary a memorable piece of filmmaking among the bunch. They can’t even come up with any good scandals nowadays, since a fender bender, a stint at Promises or a mean letter from a producer just don’t cut it in this girl’s book. Think Johnny Stompanato, dead. In Lana Turner’s bedroom. With her unstable teenage daughter allegedly holding the knife. You can still feel the drama unfolding sitting in their red vinyl corner booth at Formosa Café, another place that felt oddly familiar to me the first time I drove by.

Yesterday, I stole away alone to a matinee at the Arclight, and stepped into a past that I’m finally a part of, even in this particular life. I saw previews for Hollywoodland, produced by a guy I recently met with on my spec; and The Black Dahlia, whose writer, fellow blogger Josh Friedman, pokes his head in here from time to time. Oh, never mind that the former movie was shot in the streets of Toronto and the latter on a soundstage in Sofia, Bulgaria. They both felt like personal memories, like escorted tours back inside the real Hollywood, the one that seduced me so many lifetimes ago, the one I never managed to shake. Best of all, the feature I saw was a big sweeping bodice ripper, the kind they just don't make any more, starring my current boss. I’m finally working with a real live movie star and all I can think of is the dead ones I never met. Then again, maybe I did.