After a brief false start, the expedition to read all of Julia Phillips' You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again is about to begin. Page 1. Faux third person narrative about Phillips' current life. Johnson, fresh from his attempt to finish all 1200 pages of James Clavell's Noble House, keeps our spirits high. Wickerstaff, part of the ill-fated War and Peace expedition, has agreed to be our guide. Good men, all...
People have been writing about film virtually since the art form began. Fannish magazines were devoted to silent stars like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein wrote theoretical papers for art journals. Interestingly, film criticism didn't really exist before the 1950s in Europe and the 1960s in North America, an indication of how much resistance there was to the idea of film as a medium for serious artistic expression.
It wasn't until the 1980s that much critical attention was given to the film industry...
Page 54. Julia at Holyoke. Dogs get skittish at quote from Emily Dickinson. They have some instinctual knowledge that Phillips is overreaching. Otherwise, spirits high. Johnson suggests we eat dogs to shut them up. Laughter all around...
In the 1980s, several books came out which explored the business of making movies. One of the first, and still one of the most entertaining, was William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade. The book was a firsthand account of Goldman's experiences as a writer on such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men. The first half of the book was devoted to a scathing, often hilarious dissection of the various players in the film industry...
Page 139. Julia works on Taxi Driver, Fear of Flying and a UFO picture with Steven Spielberg. Miller is the expedition's first casualty: he was caught unawares by long passages of childhood memories. He seems over the worst of it, but we are now a bit behind. Johnson thinks we can make up the lost time by skimming over the next few pages...
Around the same time as Adventures in the Screen Trade came Indecent Exposure, David McClintick's look at the David Begelman affair. Begelman, the head of Columbia Pictures, was caught forging people's signatures on checks; a coverup ensued which involved many senior workers at the company. This journalistic effort is a little dry at times, but offers a strong indictment of the way power is wielded at a major studio.
Other explorations of the film industry soon followed. Final Cut details the disastrous filming of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, which destroyed United Artists. The Devil's Candy describes how one of the best books of the 1980s, Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, was turned into one of the decade's worst films. Fast Fade describes the career of David Puttnam, a successful independent film producer who was nearly destroyed by his year as head of Columbia. And, of course, there was Julia Phillips' tome...
Page 218. Martin Scorsese is hassled by studio executives to soften Taxi Driver. Vast fields of bitchy, black personal invective stretch out before us. I begin to be daunted by the difficulty of our enterprise. Miller still not fully recovered. Johnson suggests we eat Miller to shut him up. Laughter all around...
These books combine the natural interest people have always had in films with the money lust of the 1980s. Their portrait of Hollywood is uniformly grim: costs spiralled out of control because of the hubris of directors, the cowardice of studios and the open greed of everybody involved in the industry. This dramatically escalated the paranoia of filmmakers, who were put under increasing pressure to have a financially successful film. As the need for success grew, however, films were getting worse because people in Hollywood were more concerned with making deals than making lasting works of art. These books captured the crushing pressure of working in Hollywood...
Page 337. Principle photography on Close Encounters nearing completion, marketing ideas required. Phillips uses Mario Andretti as a noun. Morale never lower. Miller brings out his harmonica, starts playing John William's greatest hits. We make Miller eat his harmonica. Laughter all around...
The most recent of these books, Fatal Subtraction, is about a legal suit which may open up the Byzantine bookkeeping methods of the major studios to public scrutiny. This may make it one of the most interesting books on Hollywood's business. It may also be one of the last. The greed of the 80s has given way to the austerity of the 90s, driving fascination with business underground. Even Premiere Magazine, which started in the mid-80s with a lot of background stories on the film industry, seems to be moving towards a more mainstream package of profiles, interviews, history and trivia. This is unfortunate. For one brief moment, the corrupt soul of the Hollywood dream machine was laid bare for all to see...
Page 411. Julia laments over her hard luck with men. Decide to abandon expedition. Open warfare has broken out among the members over the issue of which suitor was best for Julia. Wickerstaff leads the group which believes she never should have broken up with Michael Phillips. Johnson and the others think Mister Wald was right for her at that moment. Things got ugly. Very ugly. In despair, Miller ate himself. Nobody laughed.
We will, of course, find our way back to civilization. Back from this beautiful wasteland of barbed wit and confusing narrative structure. Some will say we failed, but I do not see it that way. For, wherever there are the weak, the hungry, the downtrodden, they will know our lesson: that at some time in the past there was a rock of sanity in this crazy world...a beacon of goodness -- a shining example to us all...a Hollywood!
