LA Totally-Not-Confidential (Because This is a Newsletter)
Last week, my wife Audrey and I took a vacation.
If you happen to be my perennially-overworked podcast co-host Elliott Kalan, this would be your cue to say “from what?” His view (at least as expressed on our show) is that I’m a man of leisure, spending all of my time at Nitehawk repertory screenings of movies with titles like Bikini Razor Blade Carwash Vixens while eating grapes off a palm frond that’s also fanning me (the two plants have, of course, been specially hybridized for my hedonistic benefit).
Danifact.com ranks this four Pinocchios. While I do see a lot of trashy screenings, I’m also constantly working, be it for our aforementioned podcast, its associated live and streaming shows, multiple low-or-no-paying newsletters, or various spec writing projects I keep quixotic faith might pay off someday (or at least lead to paying work). While I can’t deny that it’s nice to control my own schedule, and that my job is easier than, I dunno, mining coal for ice truckers to truck to deep sea fishing trawlers or teaching kindergarteners to be nurses for other teachers in a teacher warzone, being your own boss isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It comes with a lot of unpleasant psychological junk. After all, the boss is the guy everyone hates. And now that guy’s YOU.
If you work a traditional 9-to-5 it provides (or should provide, though the modern world’s done its best to fuck this up) some manner of buffer between work and private life. You clock in. You clock out. And you worry (or don’t worry) about the appropriate stuff depending on which half of the clock you’re currently on.
Meanwhile (and don’t get me wrong – I’m extraordinarily grateful for the freedom my current setup provides) working for yourself comes along with a lot of deep shame and anxiety. Or it least it does when "yourself" is "myself." I can't speak to other people's mental issues. I just know that if I feel like I haven’t accomplished enough, or the “right” sort of things in a workday, I'm a real goddamn pill. I feel the need to be working on something at all times, and a lot of deep anxiety about whether I, personally, am going to mismanage the actual paying work I get, until it totally disappears; or whether the non-paying stuff I’m doing on faith is a waste of time that will get me nowhere.
Even now I apparently can’t write a damn personal essay about taking a vacation without justifying the idea of "me taking a vacation."
Which is sad, because – judging by how absolutely transformed I feel – I really needed it. I feel SO much better. I'm talking borderline life-changing better, and it's making me think that 90% of the recurring issues in my life may have been from unexamined stress. And the doubly-sad thing is, I suspect that’s not particularly special or unique to me, and I wish we lived in a world where stress wasn’t so damn easy to come by. Particularly, like, right now.
But let’s steer away from sadness into the fun stuff. And it’s appropriate I use a driving metaphor to make my awkward transition, because last week’s vacation was to sunny Los Angeles, home of the traffic jam, smog, and breathing in smog during a traffic jam.
LA has historically been looked down upon by New Yorkers, and I gotta be honest – I’ve never really understood why. I really dig the place. Granted, for a long time the only time I visited was back when I worked for The Daily Show with John Stewart, in the years when Emmy nominations rained like Old Testament frogs. So I used to wonder if that was the reason I enjoyed it. It’s easy to like a place when you’re there to get treated all fancy and maybe get a shiny statue on TV that makes you erroneously believe that you'll never have to worry about getting a job in entertainment again. Yet I still really like Los Angeles, even now, when I feel like someone mostly on the outside of showbiz, desperately looking in (like real Angelenos!).
The old rap against LA is that it’s “got no culture,” but that’s just your garden variety NYC snobbery. So in the spirit of giving the finger to that hoary old saw (and you should really throw out that hoary old saw before you get tetanus), and because this newsletter is (among other things) about pop culture, here’s a rundown of the stuff we did last week that fits into the “cultural” box.
That’s right! Culture only! Sorry “seeing friends” and “eating great food” and “karaoke” and “thrifting” and “seeing a beautiful garden” and “hanging out in the motel pool” and “sitting in the motel hot tub” and “sitting in multiple tubs of various heat levels at the Korean spa.” You were all great, but you’re not what we’re discussing here.
What ARE we discussing? Well, in vague chronological order:
The Academy Museum
I’d heard some negative word about this place, and even Audrey's verdict was “Eh, not as good as the Museum of the Moving Image” (which is fair), but maybe I just benefited from having no expectations. For me, museums loosely fit into one of two camps:
- Actually-good ones. These have deep-bench collections; significant artifacts or works of art, illuminating, intelligent, or idiosyncratic curation; detailed historical context; or some combination of the above.
- "Fun” ones. They’re interactive! They’re poppy! They’re about something light ‘n’ zippy! Maybe there's an Omnimax Theater! They make you want to take pictures to put online to fill some ill-defined interior void!
My only ask is that the museums from group one not be too boring, and the museums from group two not be TOO dumb.
For me, The Academy Museum was just dumb enough. Sure, its big first floor centerpiece is essentially the installation art version of one of those Oscar broadcast montages where the thesis is simply: “Movies! Those sure are great, huh?!” and there were some exhibits that were truly a whole lotta nothing (I swear their cyberpunk exhibit was like five props and another empty montage).
However, their showpiece Jaws exhibit had some really fun interactive stuff, including a miniature reproduction of the “Bruce” shark that you could make chomp and thrash by pulling various levers, and a station where you could use your phone’s video camera to recreate the Vertigo-style push-zoom on Brody when there’s the attack on the beach.
Much of the rest of the Jaws section was admittedly “a little thin,” but this is also coming from the perspective of a guy who’s read Carl Gottlieb’s Jaws Diaries and watched the documentary The Shark is Still Working, in addition to other behind-the-scenes stuff over the years, so maybe I can’t expect something revelatory and new. That was saved for the exhibit on production designer Sarah Greenwood, of films like Atonement, Anna Karenina, Sherlock Holmes, Beauty and the Beast, and Barbie. That exhibit benefited from its sharp focus on production design, a specific aspect of film production that’s both wildly important and less discussed. The Barbie section was particularly engaging, both because the tactile “toy” quality of that world translated especially well to an exhibit (the scale models – oh the scale models!), but also it intelligently conveyed all of the creative decisions that went into designing the world.
The New Beverly Theater
I’ve written a lot about rep screenings in New York, but what of screenings on… THE OTHER COAST? Do they even know about movies in Los Angeles? I hear they’re more of a theater town.
The New Beverly is famously owned by Quentin Tarantino, and, slightly-less-famously, is the sponsor of a podcast I enjoy, Pure Cinema, which devotes one episode a month to going over the New Beverly’s upcoming calendar. This is the episode I skip. I love movies and I love podcasts, but c’mon. All this will give me is rep screening fomo.
Tarantino’s touches inside the theater were minor – a poster here, a copy of his novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood there. His influence on the New Beverly calendar were more major – the week we were there was mostly taken up by double features of Thema and Louise and his own Reservoir Dogs.
We were attracted to one of the weirder double features – a pair of films starring Tony Curtis: one I’d never heard of called 40 Pounds of Trouble and the little-loved sequel The Bad News Bears Go to Japan. I’d wager that’s the Tarantino influence – the man loves a bunch of stuff from the 60s and 70s that I usually find a lot more interesting to read about than actually watch, but I’m glad for his distinct curatorial influence. A lot of stuff that plays in rep screenings in New York (at least at the Brooklyn theaters I haunt the most) tends toward cult pictures and sleaze of the late 70s and 80s – a lot of what used to be called “psychotronic” movies and under-the-radar genre movies that have since gathered a reputation, or dumb 90s entertainment that have become millennial classics via rewatchability and Hollywood’s increasing inability to provide fun original escapism, their former stock in trade. Tarantino and his (presumably close) programmers seem to provide a different flavor, tossing in other sorts of discarded and forgotten films, and bless them for the variety.
Anyway, we were pretty tired from traveling and didn’t stick around for the second movie, which started at 9:30 pm (aka 12:30 am New York time), but here’s my review of 40 Pounds of Trouble, cribbed from my own Letterboxd.
3.5 Stars – An odd picture that I enjoyed at least a half a star more than I might've otherwise, but it was my first time seeing a movie at the New Beverly, which was a delight.
Mashes some cynical, surprisingly-realistic stuff about gambling and running a gaming establishment (that genuinely almost felt like the goofy 60's comedy version of Scorsese's Casino), together with a sentimental "playboy has heart melted by adorable moppet" tale that's often quite funny by virtue of how well Tony Curtis reacts to/plays off of the kid.
The movie climaxes with a chase scene through actual vintage Disneyland locations that goes on so unconscionably long that I went from charmed, to annoyed, back around to laughing at how insistent it was on having them run through as much stuff as possible. And the whole thing was, improbably, directed by Norman Jewison.
Also, Suzanne Pleshette is on hand to do the same thing she did in the last movie I saw her in (Disney's Blackbeard's Ghost), which is to be WAY sexier than you expect in a dopey 60's family comedy. Or maybe I'm just horny for Suzanne Pleshette.
Jumbo’s Clown Room
When our friends Chris and Sarah stopped by New York earlier this year, they encouraged us to visit them in LA; and, while walking to get a late night snack, some variation on this conversation occurred (edited for simplicity/clarity/my terrible memory).
CHRIS: Ooh! We can take you to Jumbo’s Clown Room.
DAN: Jumbo’s… Clown Room? What?
CHRIS: It’s kind of like a strip club, except no one takes their top off.
DAN: It’s a non-nude strip club… called Jumbo’s Clown Room?
(calling ahead to the others)
DAN: Hey Audrey, Chris is telling me about some clothed strip clu–
SARAH: Jumbo’s Clown Room? I already told her about it!
(end scene)
So, clearly there’s a lot of buzz about this clown room. Judging by the knowing response of basically anyone passingly familiar with the city that I mentioned it to, it’s an LA institution, and I am the one who is the clown.
Gotta admit – I see why. I’m hardly a frequent strip club attendee, but I’ve been to others in the past, either with a woman I was partnered with (fun!) or a bachelor party (gross!), and my least favorite thing about them is feeling like a leering creep. The non-nude, less transactional (plenty of tips but no lapdances) nature of the Clown Room really felt more comfortable, with a mixed crowd full of more couples like us/our friends, or groups of lesbians than you’d normally see at such a thing. Instead of creep vibes, it just felt like being in a dive bar where several towering goddesses donned thongs to perform pole-dancing feats of strength and acrobatics. You know. Clowning around.
The Warner Brothers Studio Tour
We opted for the “TCM” version of the tour, which was mostly “TCM” in that it started with a 6 minute video of Turner Classic Movies hosts doing a stiff version of clowning around where Ben Mankawicz is apparently too excited to talk about Casablanca for the other hosts who wince like, “Here he goes talking about Casablanca again!” as if ALL of them aren’t constantly creaming themselves whenever someone shows any interest in discussing Casablanca.
So the TCM version featured 100% more Ben Mankawicz than the standard WB tour. And it probably featured about 30% less mention of Friends. I say 30% less because there was still a surprisingly lot of Friends on the “classic movies” version of the tour, which I assume means that the regular tour is AFATT (All Friends: All the Time!), but it was still fun.
I think our TCM version came with some small extras, like a walk through the Warner Brothers prop warehouse, but the main draw was just getting to wander some of the backlots, like the street where Pee-Wee disrupted Twisted Sister in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, or the street where papa Peltzer bought Gizmo the Mogwai in Gremlins (right next to the alley where Spider-Man had his upside-down makeout sesh, which is the same alley where Prince only wanted to see you laughing in the Purple Rain, which I assume was different rain than the rain that went up Spidey’s nose).
Even fantasy movieland isn’t free from harsh reality, though. Our tour guide pointed out that the plaques on the various soundstages tended to not commemorate many significant productions past the very early 2000s, saying that it’s because it’s “too expensive” (aka studios don’t want to pay living wages and governments don’t want to regulate) to shoot in Hollywood anymore. Ha ha ha (wipes bitter tears from eyes) SHOWBIZ!
Driving
What’s that? You say driving isn’t a cultural experience? SOMEONE hasn’t been to Los Angeles.
But, fair, I guess. I mostly wanted to include this because we rented a car in LA and drove ourselves around, which doesn’t sound like much, but I’m proud of it because Audrey just got her very first driver’s license as someone in her middle-late 30’s, and I basically hadn’t driven in 20 years because when you live in New York there’s really no need. Trains + buses + your feet will get you anywhere you need to be, with far less honking. Still, tooling around LA for a week and surviving (including a little terrifying nighttime freeway driving) reminded me of cars’ appeal. Getting behind the wheel and delivering us somewhere safe made me feel like a REAL ADULT in a way that’s surprisingly rare for me, even in middle age. So god bless it.
In the words of Randy Newman: “LA? Yes. I am really quite fond of it.”
For earlier posts, check out the archive. In my other life, I’m a podcaster. Listen to my show The Flop House, here. In my other other life, I’m an Emmy-winning comedy writer. If you’re looking to staff, get in touch! And if you love the newsletter, you can always consider tipping me, by enrolling in the paid tier!