It’s not casual. It’s not romantic. It’s all business: How Hollywood made sex just another day at the office.
It’s another Friday night of flesh and fantasy in Los Angeles. The movie theaters are packed with tentpole fare and, in the summer’s latest development, the seats are more than a little vacant. The streets of Hollywood are bumper to bumper and, for that matter, owing to that ass crack-revealing denim augmented by the ubiquitous lower-spine tattoo referred to by hipsters as “bumper stickers,” the sidewalks are bumper sticker to bumper sticker. It’s as if this part of the city has become one big advertisement for lack of imagination. But even this is not the main show.
For that you need to drive a little west into Beverly Hills, where you’ll find any number of examples, but none so clear as at the Four Seasons hotel. There in the driveway, handing off a convertible Rolls to the valet, is a nipped-and-tucked movie mogul silverback with not one, but two tits-on-a-stick twentysomethings.
And inside, past the velvet rope, the bar is packed with the throb of industry. There are tracksuit-clad hip-hopping bigwigs drinking with a tussle of the Von Dutch-wearing talent or want-to-be-talent boys (each with that perfectly disheveled ’70s haircut and ridiculous trucker cap). There are agents and producers in their suits and ties, and junior agents and junior producers in their suits and ties.
Plus, in a fine example of copycatting that only this city could conjure, there are people who are nothing in terms of this world but have come out pretending to be something and, depending on the something they are pretending to be, they, too, are dressed in their respective uniforms.
And, of course, there are the women. But unlike, say, the rest of the city, where the women seem to be a desirable commodity and thus somewhat unapproachable, the gals at the Four Seasons are as much a part of the menu as any of the selections found in the kitchen. The seats to the far left of the main bar are supposedly reserved for the high-priced call girls, but why bother with them when milling around the room are those you can have for free?
At the Four Seasons, there’s a simple geography at work. Folks in the business occupy the seats. Those who stand, stand because they want to be in the business. And while once there was a time when you could fuck, date or love your way into this business, these days — and everyone in this room knows this — that door has long been closed.
So all of this begs one simple question: If everyone in this room knows that you can’t fuck your way into this room, why are these folks still here? What the hell’s going on?
This is a story about sex, dating and relationships in Hollywood. It’s a story about how the private lives of those who conspire to make movies end up influencing the movies that get made and how those movies end up influencing American culture. It’s a story about the past and present, since we cannot escape the then any more than we can escape the now. Mostly it’s a story about what happens when business and pleasure mix and become indistinguishable.
“There’s so much business pressure these days that you need results that much quicker,” says Gigi Grazer (Brian’s wife and author of “Maneater: A Novel”). “If you can get something out of your date — a merger of some kind — that’s even better than sex.”
Ask any industry veteran and the stories just start pouring out.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been out when, not 10 minutes into our romantic dinner, my date starts pitching me,” another respected screenwriter says. “I had one guy tell me that we were going to have a great relationship, we were going to do so much business together.”
So common is this phenomena that a language has evolved to describe it. This is one of the few cities in the world where the phrase “upgrade” refers to ending a relationship for the purpose of beginning the next one with someone more powerful. And those in power can’t seem to resist exercising it.
One well-respected agent tells a story about a relationship he had with another agent. “She was great, she was adorable, I really liked her,” he says. “And one morning, after spending the night at her place, I stole a file from her kitchen table, photocopied it and snuck it back later. It never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong. I thought this was just how the game was played. It was only when I was turning the information over to my boss that I realized what a horrible thing I had done.”
The experiences of young talent are a catalog of business and bad behavior. “An hour into my first date with (a known producer), he told me he couldn’t bear to live without me, that he had to find a way to get me on his next shoot,” says one actress.
And that’s on the mild side. There are men in Hollywood whose job consists entirely of bringing attractive talent to dinners in the Hills, where the only other people present are aged producers. “They’re not even discreet about it,” she continues. “They just come right out and say it: ‘How badly do you want a career? Go away with me for a weekend in the Caribbean and come back with a part in a movie.’ ”
These days our personal lives here are governed by strange rules. “You go out in this town and guys don’t even hit on you, they expect you to do all the work because they have all the power,” says another actress. “When you do actually go out with these guys, they expect so much more sexually so much sooner. What should be a goodnight kiss becomes a guy unzipping his pants and trying to make you grab his dick.”
And as far as dating tips go, they’ve gone beyond extreme. Grazer’s advice to any man having casual sex in Hollywood is to “make sure you throw the condom away yourself,” thus ruling out the possibility of a financially motivated unwanted pregnancy via turkey baster.
So how did we get to this point? To answer that question you have to look to the past and, this being ADD-ruled Hollywood, that past begins about 30 years ago. Back then, halfway through the freewheeling ’70s, Sydney Pollack helmed “Three Days of the Condor.” There are about three minutes of this movie that sum up so much else. Near the start of the second act, CIA operative Robert Redford kidnaps innocent bystander Faye Dunaway. Not 10 minutes later, with scant evidence of chemistry between them and nothing ahead of them but a long night in a cramped apartment, they have sex.
Seeing it now, it’s a shocking coupling, but back then it made perfect sense, not because sex was something that happened with vicious alacrity in the real world, but here in Hollywood — in the lives of producers and directors and writers and agents and every other industry denizen you might think to ask — when two people were faced with the possibility of an otherwise drab night, they just went for it.
In the ’70s, sex wasn’t like today,” says Andrea Eastman, who spent most of that decade at Paramount and IFA and is now at ICM. “People worked really hard and played really hard and if those two things overlapped, well they overlapped, but it wasn’t part of anyone’s master plan and it wasn’t any big deal. There was a lot of sex, but sex was just an extension of what went on. Mostly, there was just great camaraderie among very passionate people having the time of their lives.”
According to Eastman and, for that matter, a great number of people who were there, that sense of visionary playful abandon has been washed down the drain of history, replaced by power politics and all the forms of insecure behavior it engenders.
“Many people are really rude today,” agrees a contemporary in the industry. “In the ’70s we all rooted for each other and tried to help each other; that doesn’t happen as often anymore. Now, the stakes are so high, there’s so much pressure to do a great job. Relationships have become full of back-biting and maneuvering.”
Role reversal
The reasons behind the freedom of the ’70s are many: women’s lib; the end of the Vietnam War; drugs; and, especially for this crowd, the fall of the studio system. Filling that gap were the auteurs who were heavily influenced by foreign filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni, whose “Blow Up” contained the first female full-frontal nude shot.
In the past five years, the objectification has been weirdly reversed. We’ve seen much more of Harvey Keitel’s, Kevin Bacon’s and Ewan McGregor’s private parts lately than Heather Graham’s boobs.
This reversal has little to do with cinematic evolution and everything to do with the personal politics of those in Hollywood. In an industry with so much money on the line, the heavy betters love the fresh face. While this manifests most overtly in casting choices and the implied potency that comes from having a younger lover — Demi and Ashton, anyone? — the reason we’re seeing so much cinematic cock wagging lately from the over-30 crowd is a not-so-subtle reminder that men over 30 still have a cock to wag. Now it seems the only time we see a naked woman onscreen is when someone like Katie Holmes needs to break with her sanitized WB past and march brazenly into a new future. All of which points to the notion that nudity is not an expression of sexuality or who we are, but an expression of how we do business.
And how we do business, at least for many, is through sex. “Sex has always been part of this business,” says Mike Medavoy. “We sell sex appeal here, that attracts a certain type of person. I know one producer who works only because he can bring women into the equation.”
And these days, for every producer who’s still in it for the skirt, there are 10 more who just want to stay in the game. It’s those guys you see at the better tables at Dolce or Shelter or Bar Deluxe — a scene brought to you by the makers of Viagra — some pimping producer parading around a nubile talent young enough to be his granddaughter. That display isn’t even about the sex that might occur, it’s about being seen with talent for purposes of implied virility and the business that might result.
While this kind of interplay between the public and the private has been around since Hollywood has been around, what happened in the ’70s was the arrival of a clear roadmap of casual wantonness. With the 1975 release of tentpole harbinger “Jaws” and the realization that blockbuster movies were a possibility, corporations started paying attention to Hollywood.
Out rushed the auteurs and in rushed the conglomerates, who put power in the hands of the only people they understood, the accountants of the industry: agents and producers. They made gods out of geeks whom, until this happened, were thought of as the necessary evil of the industry.
The early ’80s, still rampant with easy morals and heavy drugs, were what happened when that evil got unleashed. These were people who didn’t have as much sex as everyone else in the ’60s and ’70s, but, as they began to accrue power, they latched on to the idea of that much sex as their newfound right. Naughty behavior switched from being an extension of the personal — something you did, if not in private, at least in the back of a club — to an extension of business. One assistant remembers walking into her boss’s office (a, shall we say “very, very, very big producer”), during his lunch hour to be treated to the sight of him getting a blow job from a hooker while a highly regarded director sat across the room, watching and masturbating.
Soon the mixing of business and pleasure in the work environment became a commonplace activity for those occupying spots near the upper end of the power spectrum (men and women). Wantonness became yet another macho posture that could help one’s career. As the decade progressed, in Hollywood’s own version of the trickle-down effect, such actions became part of the typical behavior of those lower down on the food chain, until we get to where we are now: people not just used to this behavior, but expecting it. “It’s like something straight out of ‘Bowfinger,’” one actress says.
The reasons for such decadence are perfectly summed up in Roger Kumble’s description of industry executives in his early ’90s play “D Girls”: “They’re all high school nerds who always lost out on the cute chicks.… And you know what? It’s pay-back time.” Pay back in the ’80s was easy to come by because the corporations who bought up the industry had yet to get a handle on the business, so abuses of power were possible. Because of this, those days were, as summed up by one high-placed insider, “the last time it was really possible to fuck your way into a job.”
These days, Kumble points out, “this business is so hard to succeed in, why risk it over a piece of ass?” But strangely, while it’s no longer possible to trade such favors, the lack of ethics that pervaded the ’80s has solidified into a business ethic for our time. Countless casting-couch stories still abound, starting with the lowest assistant on the totem pole and going all the way up to heads of studios, but with so much on the line, few have jobs to offer. Because of this, there are just as many stories about women who offer themselves up during an audition in exchange for a part.
And while the ’80s and ’90s produced films wrought with this new amalgamation of sex and power — two words: Joe Eszterhas — it was the new millennium that produced the Marty Bowen-inspired agent scene in “Adaptation,” in which the character says, “See that girl? I fucked her. See that one? I fucked her in the ass,” revealing that bragging after the act is much more important than the act. Ruthlessness in business — a quality required by today’s work climate — is best displayed by ruthlessness in one’s personal life.
“Everyone has an agenda,” says one agent, “even people who don’t have an agenda at all have agendas. I’ve met a number of different women — smart, charismatic women — who have nothing to do with the film business. But they’ll find out I’m an agent and two weeks later they’re calling me up, wanting to sleep with me, not because they’re doing anything that I can actually help them with, but because someday they might be doing something I can help them with and, just in case, they’re hedging their bets.”
Which goes a long way towards explaining why call girls still get frequent calls, even after the Heidi Fleiss and Divine Brown debacles of the ’90s.
“You want to know why prostitutes are so popular in Hollywood?” asks one publicist who has had a couple of serious A-list relationships (one that ended for this very reason), “because every person in these people’s lives wants something from them. They can’t separate business from pleasure because no one will let them. They’re not paying just for sex, they’re paying for the girls to leave afterwards.”
All which brings us back to the question of what’s happening at the Four Seasons. “Even though everyone knows it’s impossible to sleep your way up anymore, everyone thinks they’ll be the exception to the rule,” says yet another actress (and still, despite her frankness, even she thinks she can be just such an exception).
As the ’70s and ’80s gave way to the ’90s and the now, as the stakes got even higher and jobs harder to come by (as they are everywhere), the mixing of business and pleasure has become codified. Now people don’t just fantasize about their dream job, they fantasize about being able to use sex and relationships as a way to get that dream job.
These days, most industry people looking for real relationships are looking online. “But that’s just more fantasy,” says Gigi Grazer. “There’s hope on the Internet, but there’s none in the face-to-face world.” And in line with this move toward virtual make-believe, the movies that are coming out these days all emphasize this same trend.
“Sex has become so polluted in Hollywood that it rarely shows up in the movies we see today,” says film historian Neal Gabler, author and senior fellow at the Lear Center at USC. “And romance has been displaced into the movies because there’s none in real life.”
Gabler points out that the romance visible in films like “Alex and Emma,” “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” “Two Weeks Notice” and “Maid in Manhattan” is beyond formulaic. “In the land of sex,” he says, “romance is unfathomable, so we get phony romance.”
Interestingly, the cinematic heyday of the ’70s was produced by a particular combination of personal morals and business conditions that, at least in part, look like they’re returning. A number of executives talked about their fondness for exclusive swingers parties held in Hollywood Hills mansions as proof of the return of freewheeling morals. Drugs, especially cocaine, are also back in vogue.
And with the tentpole failures of this summer — which was a driving force behind such a smorgasbord of lousy PG-13 fare — the industry looks poised for a return to adult movies. Already, a more mature look at sex has once again reared its head in both indie and European fare such as “Secretary,” “Sex & Lucia” and “Y tu mama tambien.”
Does this mean our personal lives are going to get better? Who knows? But at least it means the movies we see to distract ourselves from the mess of our lives might do just that.