A Star Is Born

I came for the fantasy.

Last night I stumbled into Felice's house and she was watching "A Star Is Born" on TMC. I was instantly hooked because this is the way it was, when the stars were bigger and life in Los Angeles was better.

I spent the latter half of the seventies at the movie theatre, back when releases opened here and in New York and many films never made it to the hinterlands. But it wasn't only the new flicks, but the ancient features at the revival house, the Nuart, the La Reina, the Beverly. I'd drive all over the Basin, from Van Nuys to Los Feliz to Hawthorne, to see movies that could not be viewed any other way.

And I loved it.

This edition of "A Star Is Born" is not the most famous one, that's the original, from 1937, but the story remains the same. Someone living in obscurity wants to make it and someone who already has has peaked. And that story never changes. People believe their problems will be fixed if they're embraced by the entertainment business and gain an audience, I certainly did.

Movie studios used to be like Google. Places you could view the exterior of, but could never get inside. But the Hollywood dream factories were about story, not technology, and the story off screen was as important as what ended up on screen. To get on the lot was to tingle, to enter the soundstage was to make your jaw drop. This is where it all happened.

Same deal with the recording studio. With its long board and isolation booths. You couldn't cut anywhere else, this is where it happened, and it mostly happened in Los Angeles.

Where there were no smartphones, no one tracking your every move. The east coast establishment pooh-poohed the west coast, saw it as secondary, so if you lived in L.A. you were free.

Do you know what that means? That means you never ran into people you grew up with, or went to college with. And in a fluid society it didn't matter where you graduated from, or if you did so at all, everybody was reinventing themselves, trying to climb the entertainment ladder.

Disconnected from the tentacles of old society you were set free to dream, to make your fantasy become a reality.

This is why we came here. When being a contract player, or even an extra, didn't guarantee stardom, but did evidence your inclusion. Movies ran this town.

And then came music. Sure, Capitol Records was on Vine, but the L.A. scene burgeoned when they built that ski lodge in Burbank, housing Warner/Reprise. The attitude was different from CBS. It wasn't about suits, and it was all about creativity. If those ads by Stan Cornyn didn't make you want to move here, you didn't see them. To hang with these hipsters bringing us Hendrix, Zappa, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. These people drove our culture. That's right, music took over from film, which was hobbled by television, which knew not what to be. Suddenly it was more about the individual than the group, and the individuals emanating from Warner/Reprise showed a beacon and changed the world.

And watching "A Star Is Born" you see the cars. Yesterday I got my new issue of "Automobile" magazine. And I'm wondering why I still get it. Cars are now niche items, at least those talking and salivating about them. That passion is from a bygone era where movie stars were larger than life.

It used to be about story. Then it became about explosions. That's what money will do.

And in music the same thing happened. CDs and MTV made companies and performers greedy. They didn't want some of the money, but all of the money.

And then things changed, the same way they did for Norman Maine, he interrupts Vicki Lester's Oscar speech to implore his old compatriots to give him a job. That's what we're all looking for, a gig, some work to make our lives meaningful.

But today the labels employ so few. And the acts can't make much on recordings. But the truth is life changed, the old days are never coming back.

In this iteration of "A Star Is Born" there's television. Showing a prize fight, telecasting the Academy Awards, you can see the camera. The movie companies could see it coming but didn't know what to do about it, kind of like the music companies in the twenty first century.

But we've got new centers of attention. Today everybody is a star, at least in their own mind. Video cameras come in phones. You can post your clip on YouTube for free. You may not garner an audience, but the hope remains.

But it used to be you had to come to Los Angeles to have hope. Movies were expensive, as were records. Only the exalted few got to play.

But now that everybody can play the game has changed. Facebook and Google control the world. And even though they reach as many people as the movies, actually far more, they too employ few.

But they're new and exciting, they're cutting edge.

But they don't happen in Los Angeles.

I guarantee you fifty years from now we'll be nostalgic for today. Our little hobbled smartphones, our giant flat screens that one person can't carry. Life will be better, but something will be lost along the way. That's how it always is. Change ushers in something more ubiquitous that's new and exciting, but some soul of the past is left on the scrapheap.

Kind of like album covers and liner notes. They're not needed in the twenty first century, but that does not mean we don't miss them.

And maybe you don't get this yet. Maybe "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" was made before you were born. Maybe you missed the golden age of film known as the seventies, when directors pulled power from studio heads who believed they'd lost touch and created films we not only went to, but talked about.

Maybe you've listened to Led Zeppelin, but you don't know what it was like to hear "Communication Breakdown" on the radio, buy the album and discover "Dazed and Confused." You were alone in your bedroom, unable to text or e-mail, to post your excitement and luxuriate in groupthink, you had to go to school, talk amongst your friends, get them to come over to experience the vinyl. And then go to the show where you could connect with your heroes.

I don't want to go back. The boredom of yore was intolerable. You'd sit in your house with your couple of channels, bouncing off the wall, finally emanating from your abode to go somewhere, anywhere, to connect with people and feel part of society.

And you'd go to the record store and see all the albums you could not afford.

But that was back when you could drive to the record store, or go to a movie in Woodland Hills on a whim. When there was a rush hour, but it didn't last all day long.

Which is all to say I fell down the rabbit hole last night. I was brought into a world I recognized but was unfamiliar with. And that's how it always was, getting in your car, parking and waiting for the lights to come down and reveal a feature you knew so little about.

Kind of like coming home and breaking the shrinkwrap on a record. It was a journey into the mind of the musicians, that you took alone, but ended up feeling so close to the makers on.

Those were the good old days. And so are these. Enjoy them while you can, they're not forever.


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