Little has changed in the movie business from three decades ago when nepotism, sexual harassment and racism ran rampant. 3,837 words. Illustrations by Mark Fearing.
Hollywood — Fall/Winter 1988
The sign on the door read: CAPITOL PICTURES, OFFICE OF THE CHAIRMAN.
The Chairman, Leo Moody, often joked that when the Board of Directors finally got around to shit-canning him, they’d save money by not having to change a name.
I was sitting in Moody’s outer office, across from his long time assistant Marie Liotta, who was at her desk sorting the morning mail.
From inside Leo’s office we could hear him hollering into the phone.
"He shouldn’t be doing that," Marie said to me.
"Doing what?"
"Yelling like that. You know he had surgery."
"What surgery?"
"Vanity surgery. He had his neck done."
I didn’t say anything.
there stands in silent solitude a lonely Oscar statuette. It carries no name plate. And its hollow eyes stare in gilded oblivion at the countless people who pass it every day without so much as a moment’s curiosity. The award belongs to screenwriter Harper Monroe Farrow, yet it’s never been claimed. That’s because there is no such person, male or female, living or dead. Of this I’m certain.
he could bear the shower’s needling on his body and steady his hands to shave. But then when he had been thirty neither could he have afforded to drink as much each evening as he now drank; certainly he would not have done it in the company of the men and the women in which, at forty-eight, he did each evening, even though knowing during the very final hours filled with the breaking of glass and the shrill cries of drunken women above the drums and saxophones the hours during which he carried a little better than his weight both in the amount of liquor consumed and in the number and sum of checks paid that six or eight hours later he would rouse from what had not been sleep at all but instead that dreamless stupefaction of alcohol out of which last night’s turgid and licensed uproar would die, as though without any interval for rest or recuperation, into the familiar shape of his bedroom, the bed’s foot silhouetted by the morning light which entered the bougainvillaea-bound windows beyond which his painful and almost unbearable eyes could see the view which might be called the monument to almost twenty-five years of industry and desire, of shrewdness and luck and even fortitude: the opposite canyon-flank dotted with the white villas half hidden in imported olive groves or friezed by the sombre spaced columns of cypress like the facades of eastern temples, whose owners’ names and faces and even voices were glib and familiar in back corners of the United States and of America and of the world where those of Einstein and Rousseau and Esculapius had never sounded.
