Hollywood Confessional

The Man Who Peed on Me

• Ninth Way Media • Season 2 • Episode 13

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Motorcycle chases. Labor abuses. Unsolicited bodily fluids. Just another day Hollywood?

In this week's episode, a small arms and demolitions expert enters a different kind of battlefield when he takes a job as a production assistant on a film run by a notorious low-budget producer. But neither earthquakes nor legal problems nor a $50-a-day flat rate can deter this intrepid confessor. Join us as we hear how, despite crazy obstacles, he hustled his way to the top of the industry... only to discover he wasn't where he wanted to be.

We also have a very special guest this week! Hollywood historian Andrea Van Landingham, author of Hollywood Horrors: Murders, Scandals and Cover-Ups from Tinseltown, joins us to talk about the history of Hollywood and whether it's doomed (destined?) to be a crazy town. Don't miss it!

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Hollywood Confessional is a Ninth Way Media production, produced by Meagan Daine and J.R. Zamora-Thal.

Sound Effects and Music provided by Zapsplat and Pixabay.

Keywords: filmmaking podcast, film podcast, screenwriting podcast, entertainment podcast, Hollywood, filmmaking, writerslife, actorslife, setlife

Speaker 1:

In the name of cinema and TV, espirito streaming amen. Hello Hollywood, faithful welcome back to the Hollywood confessional. I'm JR Zamora Thall.

Speaker 2:

And I'm Megan Dane. Thanks so much for joining us. You guys, we have a quick update from our last episode. We were talking about how we were kind of trying to decide whether we're going to continue airing episodes that use voice actors or whether, in solidarity with SAG-AFTRA, we were going to maybe do something different.

Speaker 1:

We've recorded some fantastic episodes and we want to share those with you, and we're standing in solidarity with SAG by not recording with actors until the strike has been resolved. So all episodes that you hear of our normal show were recorded before the strike, and we're going to supplement our episodes by having interviews with people who are making Hollywood a happier place right now in strike times.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love it.

Speaker 1:

So be on the lookout for those coming up. But this week we have an amazing confession from an interesting time in Hollywood history.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and speaking of history, here's a little history for you guys. There's a lot going on in Hollywood and elsewhere right now, and it's all about labor. So here's a little history of the labor movement. The history of labor in the US basically started in 1866, year after the Civil War ended with the founding of the National Labor Union, and one of the main things that they were fighting for was to try to get an eight hour workday. 1800s it was all about the unionization of railroad workers. And then the late 1800s, there were iron and steel workers. 1900s, garments, textiles. In the 1910s, mine workers were unionizing, then in the 30s, there were auto workers. Teamsters came around in the 60s, there were federal workers and farm workers, food workers in the 80s, teachers in the 2000s, and 20 teens then jump all the way to today. We've got the Hollywood Labor Union's writer's Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA on strike, as well as a number of others in LA and beyond.

Speaker 2:

On Friday there was something to update you guys about. There was a meeting between the WGA negotiating committee and AMPTPs had negotiator Carol Lorne Bardini, and the ostensible purpose of this meeting was to discuss whether we were going to reopen negotiations. However, wga made it clear before they went to the meeting that our position on all these matters still stands. If we're going to be negotiating, it means that you are coming to the table with something different. And then they get there and they find out that there is nothing different and none of these issues are going to be addressed, that we need addressed and therefore it was a little bit of political theater and we're not, unfortunately, hearing any more about negotiations at this point. And finally, the 100th day of the writer's strike is Wednesday, so it will have already passed by the time you guys are listening to this. We will have passed our 100-day mark, which is insane.

Speaker 1:

It has been a long strike and, honestly, that email that we got from the WGA outlining what happened at the meeting with AMPTP, it was discouraging because I really thought that maybe this was progress, but at the same time I am not at all disheartened. I'm ready to strike until we get what we deserve.

Speaker 2:

It was an interesting experience because for me, I am, I guess, kind of naturally naive and I want to believe the in things, I want to believe that good things are happening, and so my natural inclination would have been, when they said, let's have a meeting, I would have been like, oh my God, we're having meetings again, negotiations, yay, that's progress.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I was starting to tell people the strike was ending. I thought it was over.

Speaker 2:

Oh man, I so hoped. But just from like talking to people who are around for the 2007 strike, they had already kind of cautioned me like don't, don't get your hopes up. There is a playbook that they follow. There's kind of a Lucy in the football type situation where they're going to make you feel like hey, we're doing this, and then it's like no, jk. So you know, while I remained hopeful, I still I had that in my head and that kind of helped me not be too disappointed when I found out what happened.

Speaker 1:

I eventually learned. The 0708 strike lasted about 100 days and they went back to the negotiating table after 21 days. So there's 79 days of them negotiating, and so it was a little crazy of me to think that we'd be done with this thing by Labor Day.

Speaker 2:

I think I think you just made me cry. J Look, at the end of the day, like what we're experiencing now is nothing compared to what people had to deal with with all these other historical strikes and labor movements that I was mentioning. Strikes actually used to be incredibly dangerous. I mean, we're out there on the picket line every day walking in circles and that's kind of a bummer and it gets hot. But like in 1914, during the mine workers strike on John D Rockefeller's mines, the National Guard and militias came in and machine gunned the tents of the strikers.

Speaker 1:

You know, my grandfather was a copper miner in New Mexico and they, when they would go on strike it would get really dangerous. And he used to tell my mom's stories about, you know, people getting murdered at home so that they couldn't organize the strike. Oh my god, horrible things happening.

Speaker 2:

Thank God we don't have to face anything like that or any of that kind of opposition, at least not yet. But you know there is still opposition. There always is, and that's why labor as a whole has to keep fighting, because that's the only way you can make progress. And as soon as you stop fighting, then you start to regress and have your rights very slowly taken away and your way of life eroded.

Speaker 1:

All right, to stop this from getting too dark, we're going to take it back to Hollywood history. Specifically, I'd like to welcome Andrea Van Landingham, author of Hollywood Horrors, murders, scandals and coverups from Tinseltown.

Speaker 2:

Hi, thank you for having me. We're so excited to have you here and now. What we need you to do is give us an entire history of Hollywood in a one or two sentence log line please.

Speaker 1:

Or you can just tell us about your book.

Speaker 3:

Awesome, I will do the latter. So Hollywood horrors is my attempt to kind of illuminate the space between fantasy and reality in Hollywood, especially during the Golden Era. It's just, it's a collection of short stories designed to take the reader a little bit deeper, goes a little bit past an intro to old Hollywood, so it helps to have a little bit of familiarity. But it's supposed to be fun. I mean for as dark as a subject matter can get its anthology style. So you pick a story, you start reading. You don't have to commit to the whole thing in order, although you can, because it builds on itself and sometimes there are reoccurring characters. And how did you get?

Speaker 2:

interested in this subject matter. I mean, you know we were talking a little bit earlier. You are a set dresser, you're in the business, but how did you get into the history and start writing?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So for me it started really early on. I was kind of a weird kid super into Marilyn Monroe. I remember being at Ross's Dress for Less with my mom and I found a.

Speaker 3:

I found a coffee table book on Marilyn Monroe and that was my first, at least visual, introduction to her as as a concept, right. So I begged my mom to get me this book and that was the beginning for me. I was super obsessed. I got into her story and from there I started watching her films and wanted to learn more about her life and that kind of spider webbed out into wanting to learn about then her co stars and then this person and that, and it's just been this great curiosity of mine throughout life.

Speaker 2:

I love that and, yeah, we, we love the, the sort of structure of your book with these anecdotes. I mean, it's very much like what we do here on the confessional, where it's like one sort of juicy story and then you know, and that's an episode and then carry on to the next. And so we are really excited to have you here Because we want to share with you this particular confession that came in to us, which is about a very interesting time in Hollywood history.

Speaker 1:

A time that I'm upset that I wasn't a part of.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, I mean, you know, in a way I am and in a way I'm like I'm pretty glad that one like the chapter has closed on that, whatever.

Speaker 2:

But yeah it's, it's a little story that we are going to listen to you, with you and see you know kind of what your thoughts are on it and how it fits into like Hollywood history as a whole and like these kinds of crazy times and crazy town that we live in. And so it's called the man who peed on me, and I don't know if we need any further introduction. What do you think?

Speaker 1:

Let's step into the confessional booth.

Speaker 4:

Forgive me, father, for I got peed on by a producer and went right back to work for him, and I have no regrets.

Speaker 1:

Why do I feel like I've already heard this one?

Speaker 2:

Except the no regrets part. So tell us how it all went down.

Speaker 4:

Well, from the age of seven I always had to have some kind of way to make money, whether I was raking leaves or splitting wood or at the chicken farm collecting eggs. Whatever money I made I would put it in the coffee can on the back of the fridge Same place. My father put his paycheck every week. My father, he drove cement trucks. He got laid off every winter and he would drive snow plows and things like that. Then one year a film came to our town. My father got hired to drive on the film because he was in the Teamsters Union. He talked about it all the time Like oh, this time, when I was on the film at Craft Service we had lobster tails at lunch. He got to meet Danny DeVito and Gregory Peck. He had a blast with it.

Speaker 4:

So because of that experience I knew filmmaking existed, but I never thought I could do it. I assumed you know, you got to be born into that, you got to know somebody. So when I was a teenager I joined the military and became a small arms and demolitions expert. I went on three active deployments and after about four years I got stationed at f***ing. And while I was there I dated a girl from town who was attending film school. By this time I was feeling like I couldn't be a good soldier anymore, like I didn't want to be good at it anymore. Some of the guys I looked up to that had been in for 15, 20 years. I saw where their lives were. I mean, don't get me wrong, they were amazing soldiers, like real life superheroes. They had three, four ex-wives, kids. They couldn't stand. I didn't want to take that road.

Speaker 4:

So right when my girlfriend was graduating film school, I got out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. She wanted to go to Los Angeles to make movies. So I said, yeah, let's do it. We packed up the car. We had 500 bucks and two bags of clothes and we drove across country to LA. While my girlfriend was in film school she had worked as an intern on a movie. Producers really liked her. So they said as soon as you graduate, look us up in Los Angeles, we'll hook you up. So of course she called them when we moved out and they were good to their word.

Speaker 2:

Oh wow, happy plot twist.

Speaker 4:

They were like you know what we did love you, you were amazing. We're not doing anything right now, but a friend of ours needs a production assistant over at f***ing studio. So she was like great, she takes the job and on the first day of work I'm going there to drop her off because we only have one car. I pull up to the gate and ask the security guard, where should I park? And he goes are you the new PAs? And I said yes, yes, we are. And that is how I got my first job in the film business.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome.

Speaker 4:

And my girlfriend was really freaked out. She was like you're going to screw this up. I was fresh out of the military so I knew how to use the walkie. I knew how to say copy and what 10 100 meant. I didn't mind the hours and, you know, when they wanted me to set up 12 tables for lunch, I just grabbed them all out of the truck and I set them up Super easy for me. I loved it.

Speaker 4:

The first couple of weeks I was staying with a relative in San Pedro and my girlfriend was staying with the producer she met in film school. It was January of 1994. We'd only been there about six days and one morning I had a pre-call. I was supposed to be at the studio at four in the morning and then there was an earthquake. Oh shit, it was the Northridge earthquake. I felt it, but I was pretty far away from the epicenter at the time. So I was just like okay, so that was an earthquake, it's just something that happens here. And I went on to work but the crew wasn't showing up. As I later realized, this was because it was actually a really big earthquake. Highways had collapsed and people couldn't get to work. So I called from the studio up to the main office and I'm like, what should I do?

Speaker 3:

Only a few crew members are here and they told me get whoever you can that can operate a camera, send them out to wherever they see smoke and shoot B-roll.

Speaker 2:

Oh my god.

Speaker 1:

Cut to night of the living earthquake.

Speaker 4:

So we finished that first film in about a month and at the end of it the Keyset PA comes up to me and goes hey, man, you did a really good job. We've got another film starting next week. Do you want to be on it? I was like, dude, that'd be awesome because I need a gig. So he goes great, they're making me the second. Second I want you to be my Keyset PA For real. Yeah, man, just pick three other guys and have them start next week.

Speaker 4:

So you know, I'm like him him and her talking about my girlfriend and he goes oh no, no not her man.

Speaker 3:

No one liked her.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

And that was how I got my first promotion. I had to fire my girlfriend.

Speaker 1:

I hate to ask this, but how did she react?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, because if my boyfriend got a promotion like that, he probably would not live to make another film.

Speaker 4:

She was not overly ecstatic. But you know what it's funny? Because eventually I met other people and she met a lot of people through me. So she was able to find other work that way and we worked on some projects together. So that wasn't the end of the line for her. It was just the end of the line at Honestly, I think everyone faces their end of the line at sooner or later. But at the time I knew nothing about who was. I knew nothing about filmmaking. I'd never seen a movie set. All I knew was he made a lot of movies and I loved it.

Speaker 4:

Coming fresh out of the military, this job was almost a life-saving experience for me. The military was really difficult. Like I said, I went on three active deployments I spent a lot of time in. So transitioning to civilian life it was not going to be easy. But going right into working you know, 18 hour days, six days a week, the kind of crazy pace we have in production when everyone is just kind of scrambling to get everything done that reminded me a lot of military life. You know, beyond that I was just happy I was getting paid. Most people who started at Weren't paid. Wait what? Oh yeah, they had stacks of resumes like four or five inches thick People from film school who wanted to work for them. They would go through that stack and be like, well, we're not really hiring anybody, but we'll take some interns on, maybe we'll pay you on the next one. But they would never pay them on the next one.

Speaker 2:

Okay, Now we're getting into asshole territory.

Speaker 4:

My rate was 50 bucks flat. It didn't matter if it was an eight hour day or a 28 hour day, 50 bucks flat. There was no overtime and at first when my girlfriend and I were both working, that was fine. We found a place to move in together. Rent was 450 a month.

Speaker 2:

The good old days.

Speaker 4:

The building was kind of messed up due to the earthquake, so the gas wasn't working.

Speaker 2:

The bad old days.

Speaker 4:

And for a while we didn't have water, so we didn't actually have to pay rent for a couple of months. Holy shit.

Speaker 1:

By today's standards, that's actually a nice landlord.

Speaker 4:

I was on that second film for another month and it was just me working, so literally half the income. My girlfriend hadn't found another job yet, so when it ended we had a week or two off. I just remember being home and it was the weekend and there was no food at all in the house, I mean like no ramen, no bread, nothing, just a bottle of cold water in the fridge. So I was like, hey, we got to go to the store, we got to get some groceries. And she was like we can't.

Speaker 3:

All the money we have has to go to bills.

Speaker 4:

We have piles of cash on top of the paper to go get money orders, because neither one of us even had a checking account. And I was like well, okay, listen, you know what we're going to do. We're just going to take like three bucks from each bill and that'll be $15. And we're going to go to the grocery store and get like a dozen eggs and a loaf of bread and maybe some ramen. So we went with our $15 to go buy some groceries and as I pulled the card out, there was a white envelope no writing on it.

Speaker 4:

I picked it up as soon as I felt it, I knew it had cash inside of it. I didn't even open it. I gave it to the store manager said hey, I found this in my cart. We went, did our shopping. We got the whole six pack of ramen, the loaf of bread, a dozen eggs. We tried to get peanut butter too, but it was too much. I had to put the peanut butter back and we're leaving the store and the guys like amen, no one came to claim this and he handed me the envelope back and I don't know if it was 200 bucks or 500 bucks, but it was like all the money in the world.

Speaker 2:

Oh, wow.

Speaker 4:

We bought like an entire block of cheese and tortilla shells and ground beef and had tacos. I honestly don't know if we would have made it if it wasn't for that, you know.

Speaker 2:

Wow. So just to get this on the record was making films with like earthquake, B roll and unpaid labor. You were one of the lucky ones who actually got paid $50 a day, but you still weren't making enough money to buy peanut butter. Why did you work for this dude?

Speaker 4:

Well, by the time I was working there, he was a little long in the tooth and he wasn't very involved in the daily operations. What it was famous for, though he would come down to the studio, be all blustery and fire somebody. Sometimes he would just fire the first person he saw, and people told us you know, if that happens, just go home and come back tomorrow. Oh my God.

Speaker 1:

So what was he like when you first met him? Did he try to fire you?

Speaker 4:

No, he didn't try to fire me, but I was at the studio one day. I knew he was going to be coming in and I didn't know he was there yet and I was using the restroom. I was at a urinal and the door opens and in comes an. In comes to use the urinal next to me. At first I was in a state of shock like, oh my God, it's right next to me, stay cool, stay cool. We're standing about three feet apart and he proceeds to urinate all over my feet.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely not.

Speaker 4:

He wasn't even facing the urinal, he just peed on my feet.

Speaker 2:

On purpose by accident.

Speaker 4:

I don't know. I never looked up. I just finished what I was doing, flushed, washed my hands, went to wardrobe and got a new pair of shoes. Wow, here's the thing. So many people at b**** were starry eyed. They came out here with big dreams. They wanted to make great movies. They would talk about Coppola and De Niro and whoever else. But I didn't have that vocabulary and I didn't have those aspirations. I just wanted my 50 bucks. I never had any aspiration for any position above the one I currently held, and every time I got a promotion it was never like a thing that I was personally bucking for. It was something that somebody who was working there asked me if I would do so.

Speaker 4:

By the time I finished that second film, I'd gone from Keyset PA to Second AD. People were bouncing off, they would get a better gig and they would just disappear. And by the last week of it, something had happened. Where I was doing the daily production reports, I was using the laptop which at the time, in 1994, was not a common ability and I learned how to use movie magic, which was this software for breaking down scripts. Somehow, news of that got back to the line producer there and then one day I got called to a meeting at b**** house. It's Sunday morning, the meeting is in his backyard and he's got this table that's like 14 feet long. He's sitting at one end with a full spread and at the other end there's a pitcher of water with one glass for the three of us Beautiful.

Speaker 4:

It explains that he's been paid $2 million from Showtime to make a series of 18 movies. He's also been paid $2 million by a guy named B**** to produce two seasons of a TV show. So we're going to spend $2 million total to produce all 18 films and the TV show, and we're going to need production reports that make it look like he actually spent $4 million. And that's when I found out I was being promoted to production manager.

Speaker 3:

Thank God, that's so shady.

Speaker 4:

So we get back to the studio and these two producers and man, those guys were wacky. The things they pulled were insane. F*** and f*** say we're actually going to make 19 films and the 19th film was going to be theirs. Oh my God. We're going to use the money and I'm going to do production reports that make it look like everything's kosher, but instead of renting equipment, they're going to use f***'s money to buy the equipment and then lease it back to him.

Speaker 1:

This is absolutely insane or genius. I think I'm getting a lot of ideas.

Speaker 4:

So my next job was basically being the production manager Sitting in his office breaking down 18 scripts and movie magic so that they could get ready for the series for Showtime. We make that upfront lump look like it's actually a bunch of small lease payments so that f*** and f*** can get all the equipment, grip trucks and cameras and all this kind of stuff. So I'm doing it and I'm thrilled because now I'm getting paid $50 a day, but on three different films. So I'm getting $150 a day and I think that I am rich. This was guerrilla style filmmaking and I was having the time of my life. One of the things I found out early on someone told me one of the biggest problems we had on location was police coming in and trying to bust up the shoot. So I started going to locations on my motorcycle and after police showed up I just grabbed the mag and take off, because you don't want to lose the footage while you just shot right.

Speaker 1:

This may be a dumb question, but is making a movie usually a crime?

Speaker 4:

Right. So after that happened a couple of times, I started to be like what's going on? The police keep asking for this thing called a film permit. What's a film permit? Oh no. So finally I got the number for the permit office and I called them up and the prices for the permits were just insane. There was no way we could afford this. Like a one day filming permit was as much as I spent for the entire production for a week. But they also gave me the list of permits that had been granted for like the next month.

Speaker 4:

Actually, the idea was you don't want to do any duplicate work. You know if some big, huge studio movie is already booked at the Santa Monica Promenade, you don't want to bother pulling a permit for it because they already have it. But I got in my mind that, wait a minute, I know where they're going to be filming, right, so we'll just go adjacent to that and pretend that we're the second unit. So that's what we would do. You know Whatever's filming like by the LA River, we'll go down there and when the police come we'll just tell them we're second unit. They got the permits down there in base camp and as soon as they get out of sight. We'll just hop out with a camera and everything.

Speaker 2:

This is equal parts brilliant and disconcerting. Like JR and I clearly have a love for this crazy kind of stuff. I think we all do in this industry, but did it ever concern you that you were doing things that were illegal or potentially dangerous?

Speaker 4:

I left home when I was 14 years old. I didn't speak to my mother again until just before I turned 18. I had to join the army because of some legal problems and I had to have her sign the papers. I didn't speak to my father until I was 21. And if you were to describe my life between the ages of 14 and 21, the terms illegal and dangerous would constitute most of what I did. So by the time I was making movies, it seemed a lot more like you know, I wasn't stealing anything, I wasn't hurting anybody. We had some drugs, but not felony amounts, and, to be honest, none of us had any concept of how the film industry worked. We kind of invented a way to make movies from the ground up and we did things that we thought were making things safe, like ratchet strapping the operator to the back of the moped so he wouldn't fall off when he was doing a tracking shot, because he needed both hands to pull a focus. Oh my, god.

Speaker 4:

But you know, compared to jumping out of an airplane over Sarajevo, it seemed really safe to me. So in the end we finished those 18 films. And it was going to be a month off because the stages had to be struck and whatnot. And then BEEP had let me use their equipment to help somebody do a music video. It was just some friends of mine, guys I had worked with there. A lot of people knew about it. But there was a woman who had wanted to be a line producer. But when I got the production manager job instead of her she was pretty upset. So when she found out about the gear she goes and blows the whistle to BEEP.

Speaker 3:

She says and BEEP are robbing you. They stole your money. They bought all this gear and they're taking it from you.

Speaker 4:

And she said I helped them, thinking she was going to get all of us fired and ingrease her to the boss and become the big line producer. And it worked to some degree, except when BEEP called the IRS or the police or whatever. They tried to seize everything. They come down, lock up the studio, they bar me out of the office, but I'm not there and the equipment's not there. I've got it out in the desert. So meanwhile the front office guy calls me up and tells me what's going on. He says don't bring this stuff back here. So I finish up the music video and call BEEP, and BEEP I say hey, what do you want me to do with your stuff? They're like we don't have any stuff. Beep took it all and I say no, he didn't, I got it and that is how I became a line producer.

Speaker 2:

Holy shit. No, this cannot be real. This is not real.

Speaker 4:

I am not joking. I dropped all the stuff off down near San Clemente somewhere and the producers gave me a referral to a job at another studio and I kept going from there. Film made about a $500,000 worldwide, so that was a pretty good kudos, and I started to get more line producer jobs. I was really happy because by now I was making a lot of money. For the first time in my life I could just buy whatever I wanted in stores. I could see my parents a bunch of expensive gifts at Christmas time and at work people were listening to me. I don't mean it like self aggrandizing, but I felt like people looked to me to provide them with guidance, you know, and I really enjoyed that. My idea of progress was to be able to work on bigger and bigger shows, to manage larger and larger budgets, and I felt like I was getting pretty good at it. I had a lot of friends at the time. We went to all the cool clubs in Hollywood and to all the big parties. We were having the time of our lives.

Speaker 4:

Eventually I had to quit drinking and give up drugs, but back then it was game on all the time. But then there was my girlfriend, the one I came out to Los Angeles to be with. She'd gone to school for filmmaking and this was her dream, but she wasn't having a lot of success with it. Meanwhile, I was this big, dumb, drunk army guy that kept getting hired again and again and Was having more and more success. I couldn't really enjoy the success I was having with her because it was making her feel more and more inadequate, like she had failed at something. For all intents and purposes, our relationship had ended the day I fired her. We stayed together for another couple of years, but finally it was just time to go. So we split up.

Speaker 4:

And then I had to run a bad luck. I Did a film called had a great cast, but the star on the way to the rap party got in a wreck and broke his leg. He got a huge ass lawsuit because he was supposed to be doing some other movie at the time, and when you're the line producer on a situation like that, it's not a good look. I got another job after that on a film produced by a talent manager named. During post-production it was discovered that one of the accountants at his management company had embezzled millions of dollars. That included taking money from the actors trust fund that provided the salaries for the film that I was line producing. So the FBI came in and took all the filing cabinets and that was effectively the end of my ability to line produce.

Speaker 2:

Oh, wow. So what did you do?

Speaker 4:

I was hustling. I did TV commercials. Then I got into representation for a while. A Management company hired me to do packaging. I got to the point where I was doing really well at it. I developed my own clients. We were making a lot of money. I bought a house in Santa Monica. I didn't even know how to buy a house. I didn't get a mortgage. I made money and Used that money to buy a house in Santa Monica. This is why people miss the 90s.

Speaker 4:

You know I was also drinking so much and doing so many drugs at this point, partying every day, and I got to the point where I really didn't like who I was. I felt like I was just constantly trying to chisel things, like a parasite that just lived off talented people, and all I was trying to do was find the next person I was going to exploit. I'd also met another woman during this time and gotten married. Things started going bad. Her parents considered me a drunken, alcoholic, drug-abusing mess, and they were right. So we decided to get divorced. I lost the house, wrecked my motorcycle, I was pretty much off the handle, drinking and abusing drugs, and then I just decided I'm out. I tossed my wedding ring and cell phone into the ocean and left California with the intention of going back to New York and Just drinking myself to death. I Just had a little more money. Everything would be okay If I had a nicer place, if I had a cool car. And you know, you get these things and as soon as you get them, you just move the goalposts down and I got to the point where I had all of it, every single stupid thing I could imagine having to make myself happy, and I was still miserable.

Speaker 4:

Around that time my father got sick with cancer and my mom asked me to come home and help with it. I don't know if that's really why she wanted me to come back or if she wanted me to get help, but that's what I ended up doing. It took me almost three weeks to cross the country. When I finally got back home, you know, it was really Familiar, much the same as it had been when I was a little kid Better or for worse and I remember thinking to myself this is the place you worked your whole life to get away from and now there's nowhere else for you to go. They always talk about how you have to hit bottom. That was the last door on the street. To me there was nowhere else to go, because if there was anywhere else to go, anything else to try, any other hustle could have tried to hustle, I would have done that.

Speaker 4:

But now I was back where I started and for the first time in my life, I think, I was willing to accept somebody's help. I always had to have the bright idea. You know, I got this. I can figure a way out, but finally I was willing to admit I Don't know what to do about this and it turned out there were people there who were willing to help. My father and I didn't have a good relationship at this point, but he he was an interesting character. He got sober when I was young. He helped the Teamsters establish the first drug and alcohol program for any union in the country. He never said a word to me about it, but every single person that he had helped to get sober made it their business to help me stop drinking.

Speaker 2:

Wow that's incredible.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, and then he and I had a good chance to bond over that, you know, go to meetings together and share that. So eventually, you know it was nice. By the time he passed away you were in a really good place and I ultimately was able to move back to Los Angeles and get back into the industry in a healthier way. My dad was born without the opportunities that I had, just like my children are being born with better opportunities than I had. They won't have to go through a lot of things that I went through. But if they want to get into this crazy business of ours one day, I would love that for them. I really wouldn't that's awesome.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for sharing your stories with us.

Speaker 2:

We hope you and your children will go on to create in peace. All right that was insane that might now be my new favorite story of all time.

Speaker 1:

As our guest. Andrea, what did you think of that one?

Speaker 3:

Oh, my goodness, I really felt for that character, for the, the relationship dynamic and Seeing as how they came out here together.

Speaker 2:

It was her dream and it isn't the industry just like that, sometimes the people who really excel in it it's not always the person whose dream it was, yeah, so true, and you know, another thing that I was, that was like on my mind as we're listening to it, is the issue of pay in Hollywood, and I really wanted to get your perspective on that, because here's a character who comes out to Hollywood in the 90s and is making 50 bucks a day for like an 18 hour day, and he was happy to do it too happy to do it, yeah, and a lot of people working on these films not getting paid at all, and so you know, having read some of your book, I noticed that there's some like there's some carryover, like this is kind of a thing in Hollywood, right.

Speaker 3:

Yes, even today. What struck me is seeing how much this industry, this machine, is in service to the bottom line, and it kind of always has been, and that carries over to today. I really think it really started with something as small as like a Nickelodeon. Right we go and we put our little nickel in and we see the little show and you're telling me that's not just a cartoon channel.

Speaker 3:

Right, yeah, it's, that's how it started. It's always been. You know, put your, put your nickel in the machine and Once it evolved into this cinematic Industry that we have now, it really grew in service to that. So the Contracts that the studios would create back in those days were very much designed to be Exploitative and it was looked at as a privilege to be in this industry, right? So, even then it was such a privilege to be talent. They were groomed, they were, you know, sent to Elocution classes and dance classes and they were really owned by the studio.

Speaker 3:

The stars, I mean the contract players and they had this set amount that they were going to be paid every week, and to a small town Girl from maybe Montana, that seemed awesome up front right, you talk a lot about Mary Pickford in your book.

Speaker 1:

I know she was super famous. Did she have any power to negotiate for herself, or was it even at the that the very top? Was Everybody getting exploited at that time?

Speaker 3:

so I like this question because Mary Pickford actually was influential in Kind of bargaining for a little bit more power for the stars, and that happened not really because of Mary Pickford but because of her mom who was her manager. Oh, interesting, yeah, so this momager Phenomenal that we see so much today. It is a tale as old as time it really is especially here.

Speaker 3:

It is so intrinsic and baked into the way things are done here. So her mother was by all accounts super feared and and respected and she was not to be trifled with.

Speaker 2:

They did make some gains in that, in that realm, as far as pay, wow so basically what we need to do now to get what we want out of our contracts is everybody invite their moms. So you were talking about the contracts and how they were designed to exploit people, basically to Give them the bare minimum so that the studios could make the maximum. Do you feel like there are moments in time when that changed, or they're like like keystone moments when suddenly things were different, the power shifted a little bit more in the artist direction?

Speaker 3:

In a way. Yes, once the studio system kind of collapsed and we went into the new Hollywood of the 60s 70s, it did open up in terms of the studios no longer had ownership of production, distribution, everything in-house, but then it turned into more of a freelance culture, which is what we have today. So it did shift in that way to favor, you know, greater autonomy for crew members, for talent, for everyone all around. But it didn't change quite enough, because we do still see that somehow it's been worked in such a way that the greatest profits will continue to go up to the top of the food chain, so to speak. Right.

Speaker 1:

Somehow that always happens, just stop. When I was reading some of the chapters that you sent over, one of my favorite things was how they referred to Hollywood as an artist colony and sort of wondered if, just by virtue of being an artist, we are all debauchers and when you put us all in one place, it is the center of debauchery.

Speaker 2:

Right like is there any hope for us? Basically, it's what we wanna know.

Speaker 3:

I remember seeing a quote when I was doing my research for Hollywood horrors and it was about someone talking about the difference between the filmmaking in New York versus when it came to LA. And they were saying something like oh you know, in New York City you kind of take for granted that your neighbors are gonna be respectable, like doctors, lawyers, people like that, but in Hollywood they're all just maniacs, drug add-old crazies, which it's kind of funny it has turned out to. There's a through line there. So I don't know if creatives are inherently a little wilder, maybe we are, maybe just to be desirous of being in this industry. We might be a little crazy, so it might be true.

Speaker 1:

Through all this research, what did you learn to be true about Hollywood?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So I was very stricken by how two things are true at the same time. How much has changed in Hollywood and also how little has changed? So many of these old stories very much sound like things that could have been happening today, or it just looks a little bit different. The themes are very much still the same. Oh, interesting. Can you give us one example? I am thinking of one particular example. It is the story about the Grey Stone House in Beverly Hills owned by the Doheny family here in LA.

Speaker 4:

You've heard the name Doheny before.

Speaker 3:

That one, like a couple other of my stories here, have this element of something crazy happens a crime, a murder and the people that get called first are not the police. There is an element of damage control. So in this story at the Grey Stone House there was a murder that happened in that family in that house in the 20s and it was several hours before the police were called. The DA was very comfortable with this family at this time and this was a very media savvy family so they had some time to think of a story. I guess would be my most cleanest way of saying it for this podcast's purpose.

Speaker 1:

No, no, we want the dirty yeah maybe we need to get in touch with the Doheny see if anybody needs to unburden their soul.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, but that seems to be true in so many of these stories the Gene Harlow story, the Lana Turner story there is this element of media savvy where they're able to control the story that gets out about these crimes that happened, especially when it comes to the studios protecting their assets.

Speaker 4:

They will do that.

Speaker 3:

And they have this insane partnership with law enforcement and it sounds all very conspiratorial but it is super true.

Speaker 2:

There is a huge well of power in this industry that comes from who controls the story. So I am super excited to read more of your book, and this is once again for our audience Hollywood horrors, murders, scandals and cover-ups from Tinseltown by Andrea Van Landingham. We're gonna get our ass to a bookstore. It is available, you said, at the last bookstore, at Powell's, couple of indie places, as well as even regular old bookstores, but we are going to buy this thing and it's a physical object that we are gonna hold in our hand, and Andrea is gonna be available for autographs, I'm sure. Yes, always. Yeah, Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, and where can people?

Speaker 3:

follow you. Yeah, I'm just on Instagram A-N-D-R-E-A-V-A-N-E-L-L-E. Andrea Van L, or you could just look up my name.

Speaker 1:

And you can follow us, too at FESUP Hollywood on Instagram and Twitter.

Speaker 2:

And we will be back Hollywood Faithful in two weeks with a new episode, and it's gonna be something different for us. As you know, we always do these shoutouts. It's gonna be a full episode of shoutouts to people who are currently working their asses off to make Hollywood a happier place. So you're not gonna wanna miss it. Lots of warm fuzzies and we are really looking forward to it. So we will talk to you then, but until then, Create and peace.

Speaker 3:

All right, nice All people are so happy.

Speaker 1:

The Hollywood Confessional is produced by Megan Dane and JR Zamorothal. Our cast for this episode Cody Vaughn, uzo Chajoke, shira Gorellic. Special effects provided by Zapp Splat and Pixabay. Hollywood Confessional is a ninth way media production. Follow us on socials at FESA Hollywood.