Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Tinseltown
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Dear Ben and Brit,
Hope all is well on the home front. Los Angeles is grand.
I’m writing from my hotel’s rooftop garden restaurant. I have a clear view of the famous Hollywood sign as if anyone has any doubts about where they are.
Moviemaking is the marquee industry here, and nothing about it is subtle. From the top of the Capitol Records building a flashing light spells out “Hollywood” 24 hours a day in Morse code.
I took the Paramount Studios factory tour today. Forrest Gump, Titanic, True Grit, Saving Private Ryan, Roman Holiday were filmed at Paramount. For fascinating fun. On par with the General Motors assembly facility in Kansas and the Philip Morris tobacco plant in Virginia. Remember how much we all loved those tours?
Do you know why big-name actors are called movie stars? The Paramount logo—a silhouetted mountain bounded by 22 stars—signifies the original 22 actors and actresses under contract to the studio in the 1920s. Soon after, every major actor was called a movie star. Bore your friends with this trivia, if you like.
The entire industry is built on magic and mystery, artifice and trickery. What we see on screen is a mirage of illusions and lies. Like hiding your dirty laundry under your bed when I ask if you’ve cleaned your rooms.
When the unsuspecting hero is thrown hard against a brick wall during a back-alley mugging, the bricks are painted foam. The wrenching sound of a breaking bone in a barroom fight is, thanks to audio engineers, celery stalks snapping.
A boat captain battling the high seas navigates through white caps made by tossing detergent into a backlot swimming pool. To avoid poisoning the cast with carbon monoxide, passing cars on a city street are pushed by hidden stagehands.
In steamy sex scenes, the slurpy kissing sounds are dubbed by stirring mayonnaise with a spatula. In the signature song and dance number from Singing in the Rain, to make the rain more visible to the camera lens, the studio used watery milk.
In the movie The Godfather, Marlon Brando is reading his lines from a cue card taped to Robert Duval’s chest. The phrase ‘space shuttle’ was coined by Star Trek writers, and later used by NASA.
A naked starlet with fake boobs (don’t even think about it, Brittany) swimming in a crystalline pool is captivating, but counterfeit. The camera angle hides her flesh-colored thong.
Stepping into a movie house is like going on a vacation—or maybe it’s the other way around. Movies and travel are entertainments where I pay to be deceived, to be transported to new and different worlds.
Whether watching a movie or touristing in a far off land, I’m not permitted behind the cameras. Never allowed to view the world without its makeup. I see only what the world wants me to see. But for that brief moment, I daydream about living another life, being another person.
When that happens, that’s when it hits me, hits me hard, that I am so lucky that I get to be your dad. You are my movie stars.
Love from Tinseltown, Dad aka Clark Gable
