AMERICAN DREAM, AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
A 35th Anniversary Celebration Honoring the City of Contradictions
In the summer of 1989, living in my own home and working a semi-comfortable first-job as a magazine editor in the southeastern part of the country, I up and abandoned it all in favor of a move to Los Angeles. In the then-recent wake of my mother’s death at the too-young age of 58, I felt the need to shake up the life she’d given me — to seize the days that she no longer could — by finally scratching a long-held itch to work in Hollywood.
I arrived 35 years ago today, on the same August Sunday that morally and follicly challenged brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, in a bloody inheritance grab, shot and killed their wealthy parents as they sat watching TV and eating ice-cream in the family’s Beverly Hills home. (Strawberry, I think.)
Murder. Greed. Family dysfunction. Toupees. Junk food.
All in all, not a bad introduction to the town.
The move had actually come in two shifts, the first by plane to scout out a place to live, the second by car once an address was secured. Both marked my first real exposure to California, discounting (as I prefer to do) the brief visit to Orange County relatives when I was 11, remembered chiefly for the Unfortunate Incident en route to a tour of San Juan Capistrano, when the swallows returned just about the same time my lunch did all over the backseat of Uncle Jack’s Cadillac.
For the scouting phase, I narrowed the search to one area — Studio City — because I was told it was both centrally located and small-town manageable and because according to the end-credit sequences of the TV favorites I was weaned on — Mary Tyler Moore, Gilligan’s Island, My Three Sons, and The Wild Wild West — it was where TV was actually made, at a place called CBS Studio Center. When on my second day of driving around I discovered that Studio City was also where the real-life Brady Bunch house was located, the one seen in all the sitcom’s many establishing shots, I knew I’d found my new home. I signed a lease for a small apartment around the corner.
The driving phase commenced a few days later back across the country, behind the wheel of an wheezing Mazda hatchback– house emptied, furniture shipped, parties completed, good-byes said, IRA liquidated, stomach knotted, bowels blocked. Before I pulled away, a friend handed me a copy of the latest Newsweek, its cover devoted to The Golden State and its coverline screaming CALIFORNIA: AMERICAN DREAM, AMERICAN NIGHTMARE. The following Sunday, after a long and lonely drive in a car so tightly packed and windows-blocking that I dared to change lanes only at night when I could be aided by surrounding headlights, I pulled up to my new Studio City apartment right around the same time, it turns out, that Jose and Kitty Menendez’s own American dream was coming to its nightmare end eight miles away.
The duality that is California revealed itself as soon as my second day. I pulled into a gas station and got out of my car just as an argument that had evidently begun inside between cashier and customer spilled out onto the blacktop, with the customer huffing and puffing and shouting his way back to his car and the cashier literally chasing and ranting after him.
“Sir! SIR!?” screamed the foreign-tongued cashier at the guy’s tail-lights. “Fuck ah-you, sir! Fuck ah-you!”
Fuck you, sir.
And there it was: a polite middle-finger.
How curious, this City of Angels.
I gave myself four months for discovery and exploration, and not single day disappointed. Every lesson learned seemed to go against the grain of what until then I knew to be right and reasonable. Around the time my funds were drying up at that four-month mark, I lucked into a job as a TV-producer’s assistant through the one quasi-connection I had in town.
I was fairly lousy in the role (“Do you want me to answer that and find out who it is?” was my first-day question when the office phone rang), but the boss, one of the town’s smarter writer/producers enjoying later-in-life success after a earlier acting career, believed in paying it forward. She opened the door on an 18-month tutorial on the business behind the business I wanted to join. This included allowing me to sit in on her notes calls, where one morning I got to hear a high-ranking studio executive say the following to her, without a trace of irony or self-awareness: “I read your script, but I don’t know how I feel about it since I’m the only one who’s read it so far.”
The boss also wasn’t shy about chastising me to the point of beration when there was a good lesson at hand. One morning at the office, reading in the newspaper about a studio/writer compensation squabble, I weighed in with the foolishly self-impressed line “It shouldn’t be about the money.” And before I even got to the end of the sentence, she lit into me. “WRONG, Jim!” I heard in a stern tone totally new to our relationship. “In this business it’s always about the money. Because money equals respect. Don’t forget it.”
I never did. And directly and indirectly both she and the job helped to pave the way for the realization the next year of my own American Dream — no nightmare involved — when by dint of time and timing and circumstance and patience and luck and a bit of the self-advocacy that I loathed execcuting I managed an actual interview at CBS that turned into an actual job offer to join its actual programming-executive staff. Where for the next fifteen years spanning two vastly different decades that themselves spanned two vastly different centuries I had a front-row seat on the world of network television — the very world that had captured my interest, my time, and my heart as a child.
It was a lottery-win of a job. I knew that. Every day, I knew that. (To this day, I know that.) In a building — Television City, the name of CBS’s headquarters— named for the one thing I most loved. I remain awed that it even happened, as I remain grateful to every single person who helped played a role in seeing that it did, as well as all those I worked with and alongside those years, inside and outside of that building.
Today there’s very little of the medium that I recognize. (Not a criticism, just an observation.) Even Television City doesn't exist anymore, sold for parts not too long ago. (Not a criticism, just a heartache.) By my count just about the only thing that 1989 TV has in common with 2024 TV is America’s Funniest Home Videos and The Simpsons, each of which started in the former and are still in production in the latter. (Trivia Alert for those who keep track of such things — and we know who we are: America’s Funniest Home Videos and The Simpsons have now each been around 42.16 percent as long as commercial television itself .)
It’s all part of something called change. Which happens. Always has. Always will. To everyone and everything. But that doesn’t mean it’s not, at times, painful. Especially lately. Not just in the looking-back-at-a-certain-age-when-it’s-sort-of-over kind of way, but also in the what-are-we-leaving-for-the-next-generation? kind of way.
You think we’re confused and sad? Talk to the twentysomethings of today who’ve rowed ashore on their own dreamquests, unable to make heads or tails (or careers) of the daily shifting landscape they’ve found. An excerpt from an email I received this very morning, in fact, from a recent college grad I’ve come to know and try to advise:
“I’ve been following all the news. And it just feels like TV and movies are dying. Maybe it’s just doom and gloom on my end, but it honestly doesn’t feel like the industry will ever again be what it once once, which is what made me want to work in it in the first place. Truthfully, it makes it very disheartening to want to enter.”
Alternatively, there’s this from a young agent I spoke to a few weeks back: “This town is toast.”
It’s all hard to hear. TV was many confusing things when I showed up 35 years ago — an era of significant near revolutionary change of its own, with those of us showing up and wanting a piece of it unsure how exactly we’d fit in — but it never seemed over. It was never toast.
Still, as the rest of us did in one way or another, the next-generation arrivals will find their ways, I sense. I hope. It’s worth it to go in pursuit of a dream. Against even greater odds than Newsweek suggested I’d be facing when I arrived here August 20, 1989, I’d do it all over again.
Because the dreams last longer than the nightmares.
