Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights
Stein, Ben
which is the assumption that modernist artists are unimpeachable cultural heroes. Second, even among those convinced of the movement's accomplishments, there is a growing weariness with the endless...
...We come back refreshed, happier...
...It's their most trusted ally in the region...
...It takes us from the fall of 1985 to early summer, 1986...
...Over 25,000 people were ruthlessly killed...
...in the Middle East...
...What's that...
...The Soviet Union is, of course, desirous to see the U.S...
...No, in Lolita...
...Because Syria realizes that it's only Israel that stymies Soviet hegemony in the Middle East and insures U.S...
...Its political and military aim is the destruction of Israel, the establishment of "Greater Syria", and the elimination of any influence of the United States in the immediate area and in the Persian Gulf...
...They are an escape, and as J.R.R...
...In the same way, the movies allow us to imagine and prod us to act...
...I hope you are thinking of doing Mars...
...There is mortal enmity with Iraq and its leaders, which has caused Syria to make common cause with non-Arab Iran in the destructive Gulf War...
...His little girlfriend...
...T here are other, pleasanter moments in the diary—particularly when Stein talks about children or animals...
...Elimination of U.S...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989...
...In a small way, but still in a way, I am part of the enterprise which builds commensurate with man's imagination...
...S tein's most successful attempt to say, in general terms, why—in the end—working in Hollywood is so grand, is a little manifesto in which he pronounces filmmaking the last American frontier...
...Over and over, he meets students who have sharp minds, but who wouldn't know Rasputin from an orangutan—children who "went to schools that babysat but did not teach, watched TV instead of reading books, and planned only on the future being better than the past...
...Doing research on modern education, Stein sits in on classes at an L.A...
...Then I don't know...
...In one well-turned passage, a studio head has called Stein to tell him how much he loves a script, only to discover that he has made a mistake and called the wrong writer...
...His election precipitated the Civil War...
...Still, most Americans don't quite know what to make of it...
...Syrians consider Lebanon to be part of their own country and have now virtually occupied and annexed it...
...But that was a job...
...influence in the Middle East is where Syrian and Soviet wishes intersect...
...That terror is conducted by Syrian organizations sponsored by or affiliated with the government, or indirectly through "clients", primarily the Palestinian, Iranian and Libyan terror factions to whom Syria extends warm hospitality and support...
...He has a vision of what he is trying to do with his life, which he tenaciously and passionately holds dear, even flaunts...
...Stein's diary, however, is about reality...
...A boy with a blue leather jacket and his girlfriend with orange hair and orange tights called out to me, 'Hey, buddy, buff car.' " Stein so unaffectedly loves the feeling of driving a great car and being noticed in it that we are carried along with him, charging through Beverly Hills in a red Porsche, drawing looks from beautiful girls...
...I have been beating my brains out against a cement wall here for ten years when I had lifetime job security in the East...
...Unfortunately, his blues are, for the most part, convincingly blue, too...
...This includes the most advanced Soviet fighters, the most advanced missiles, and major capability in chemical weapons, the most formidable and sophisticated air defense system, a tank force greater than that of France and England combined, and a promise by the Soviet Union of atomic weapons for "when the need arises...
...On two separate occasions, Stein meets girls who don't know the difference between Washington State and Washington, D.C...
...I include my tax-deductible contribution in the amount of Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America PO...
...high school and gets invited to the prom...
...Mostly, these are teenage girls...
...T. asked sharply...
...No wonder the man takes on Lolita...
...But we are not sure just what role it plays in the Middle East...
...They enable us to pursue these goals and to publish these messages...
...Give me a hint...
...he believes "this is not foolishness...
...Like the movies that are Stein's business (just called "the industry" by those who are in it), his diary is full of glittering surfaces, seductive looks, and sentiment galore...
...The Gettysburg Address...
...Its purpose is to combat media inaccuracies, through public education and publicity...
...influence in the area and in the Gulf region...
...the sentiment doesn't ring true, the boom mike protrudes, and we realize Stein is playing a role, delivering lines...
...In 2001...
...it feels real...
...Stein rolls on and on with it like a poorly edited rush, until we realize the man is not kidding...
...The movies are about illusion...
...Stein shows us the wonderful transformation that comes over these people who live "in a linoleum and vinyl waiting room preparing for eternity": A flood of animation washes over them...
...Here is a conversation between Stein and his youthful assistant, Sara, who claims to be "good in history":"Do you know what great national event Abraham Lincoln presided over...
...Syria claims large areas of lbrkey...
...This ad has been published and paid for by r. YES, I want to help in the publication of these ads and in countering anti-Israel and anti-Zionist propaganda...
...They reach out their hands for the fur...
...Abraham Lincoln was president during the Civil War...
...One entry in particular, in which Stein walks alone up a hill in Santa Cruz, delivers a heavy-handed sermon on the mount that draws an extended analogy between religion and "the established church of American life, the Cinematic Faith...
...Who would ever want to go with something like that...
...And this is a shame because when Kenner gets off his modernist high horse, he's rarely less than fascinating...
...Thirty years...
...The Vietnam war...
...We Syrians are not afraid to push the button", says Defense Minister Mustafa Was...
...But we come back...
...When Stein is more specific, he is more convincing...
...Stein has connected with something real, and he shows it to us...
...No, I mean what great national catastrophe...
...Syria is in conflict with every one of its five neighbors...
...No, I mean more like what was the event of which the Gettysburg Address was a small incident...
...Well, it worked out pretty well for Stanley Kubrick," I said...
...Stein, as a maker of dreams, is delighted with his calling: I am only a tiny player in the game...
...Stein corrects the studio man, outlining the script Stein had actually sent, then records the executive's reaction and the ensuing discussion: "You mean that thing about the congressman having the affair with the college girl...
...Much of the book, though, is made up of nicely realized moments...
...W ith first person narrative—especially diaries—you cannot always trust the writer...
...But they reserve their most brutal terror against those suspected of internal opposition...
...It is in war-like conflict with every one of its five neighbors...
...It's moments like this that keep me waiting for Kenner's next constellation...
...John Hughes, the teen-film director, was impressed with Stein's plain, nasal voice and asked him to do a ten-minute monologue on the most boring subject Stein could think of...
...Humbert H. Humbert and Lolita," I said...
...I don't remember any of that older man-younger woman stuff...
...Stein, unmistakably, is telling the truth here...
...Stein is by turns confused, saddened, and titillated by the California children with whom he loves to hang out...
...I have no realistic hope that the afternoon on Stage 16 will change my life...
...How old is the United States of America...
...If Stein gets a bit carried away with his gaggle of groupieingenues, it is because there is so much to get carried away with...
...Their eyes snap into focus...
...In 1982, President Assad put down a rebellion in the town of Hama...
...Kenner even supplies a lively parody of what this might have led to...
...James was so taken with Wells's science fiction that he suggested collaboration...
...American movies are precisely "foolishness...
...He played a (now somewhat famous) monotoned social studies teacher...
...The interests of the Soviet Union are global and those of Syria regional, but their aims coincide...
...The pioneers could dream of and attempt to make real a better, happier life...
...flu...
...The production of texts about texts has become all too industrial, tireless, and mechanical...
...F or all the enticing side attractions, If the diary is principally concerned—sometimes desperately concerned—with life under the Hollywood big top...
...Yes, the master of fine consciences on a bike...
...Stein, like all good cultural critics, is a moralist...
...Through the nasty, brutish greed and meeting-lust of Hollywood, Stein makes out the wispy, luminous edges that are faint but sure evidence of the hidden power of the movies—and of the town that makes them: "The point is that the dream is always there, mixing seamlessly with the real, so that no one truly in the business knows where the fact ends and the fantasy begins...
...Syria uses terror against Israeli and Western targets, or against Arab elements that do not conform to the Syrian policy line...
...His is a plea to Hollywood and for Hollywood—not to lose the dream, the essential promise, that anything is possible and everything will work out in the end...
...Suddenly, HOLLYWOOD DAYS, HOLLYWOOD NIGHTS: THE DIARY OF A MAD SCREENWRITER Ben Stein/Bantam Books/$7.95 paper J. Anthony Daniel Wm deserve a factual look at . . . Syria and the Middle East Can it be a force for peace in the area...
...The idea of America, of the vast frontiers, freed those who came, and those who imagined themselves coming, from hopeless mediocrity...
...Syria enthusiastically cooperates in the effort to dislodge the U.S., because the U.S...
...Today was different...
...He remains bewitched by modernist difficulty, an acolyte serving the willed mysteries of a few early twentieth-century authors...
...Ironically, Syria has great understanding of Israel's role as defender of Western interests...
...Their torpor vanishes...
...He loves dogs—perhaps a bit too much (Stein's relation with his German short-haired pointer Trixie is, well, a trifle lurid and unseemly...
...When was that...
...Stein has not lost his eye for that old Hollywood shtick, nor his ability to characterize—and completeJ Anthony Daniel is a student of film production at the University of Southern California...
...At the end of his performance, the cast and crew gave him a standing ovation...
...Parts of the book we just can't buy...
...No, not the Vietnam war...
...and its ally Israel stand in the way of the dream of "Greater Syria...
...He's able to show how Wells's first novel cut across both social and aesthetic class lines...
...Syria is the most destabilizing influence in the Middle East...
...It is not a novel disguised as a diary...
...Stein delivered a hilariously tedious lecture on the Smoot-Hawley tariff act...
...What are the facts...
...Perhaps the best entry in the book concerns his day on the set of Ferris Bueller's Day Off...
...Who are they...
...Tolkien noted, there is nothing wrong with escaping from a poorer to a better world for a while...
...Paul that all Cretans were liars...
...Despite the glister that is not gold, despite the occasional solipsistic rapture, we believe him...
...Sara asked suspiciously, as if I might be making it up...
...Well, it was about eighty-seven years after the founding of this country...
...Bullfeathers...
...Our overhead is minimal...
...T. asked...
...The Gettysburg Address...
...But their main fury is directed against Israel, because it represents an intolerable "non-Arab presence" in the area, because it has wrested the Golan Heights from Syria, but mostly because it is (rightly) perceived as a bulwark of Western influence and civilization, both of which Syria totally rejects...
...Syria's immediate military aim is to build to "strategic parity" with Israel...
...retreat from the Middle East, enabling the Soviet Union to extend its dominion over the entire region, which is close to their own strategic "soft underbelly...
...It made a lot of money...
...And that is why, in the end, we trust that what Stein is saying is true: the diary is just imperfect enough not to be illusion...
...Over the years, Syria has launched many armed incursions against Jordan and it is only the threat of being confronted by Israeli military force that has prevented Syria from attempting a full-fledged takeover of that country...
...The girl-children don't seem to have any difficulty with Sexual Attraction 101, however...
...Like an early D. W. Griffith short, sometimes he is very long on pathos and a bit contrived...
...lb that end, it has so far acquired over $19 billion worth of the most advanced and sophisticated Soviet armament...
...Your tax-deductible contributions are welcome...
...A Porsche 928 is the mechanical embodiment of Stein's turmoil...
...A S My name is I live at In State—Zip Mail to: CAMERA, P.O...
...It would also give them control over the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf, the lifeblood of the Western world...
...Syria perceives of terror as a legitimate tool for furthering its national objectives...
...Who...
...Much of the diary is a roller coaster ride from the poised, emotionalheights of such moments to the stomach-wrenching twisting and turning of trying to make a living in Hollywood while avoiding disillusionment...
...His discussion of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) in A Sinking Island is a case in point...
...He curses and worships the thing...
...Syria is the leading ally of the Soviet Union and the outstanding enemy of the U.S...
...Stein's ability to capture this vision in words is not entirely trustworthy...
...Sure, Ben Stein tells us in the first sentence of Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights: "This diary is authentic...
...People in some book, or what...
...Stein calls this low-down feeling the "L.A...
...That was really a sick idea...
...It was a war...
...It was not altogether disagreeably unfitting, rather, given the case, all too unbeguilingly not to be evaded, that his lot, as it presented itself to Camshaft, was to be, at the final tick of the dread clock, to close fingers precisely his and to close them precisely on the trigger of the afterburner...
...Syria is a "client" of the Soviet Union...
...Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work and for these messages...
...Syria has been much in the news lately...
...The Civil War...
...Syria doesn't clearly come into focus...
...He spendstime at nursing homes, taking abused dogs to visit neglected old folks...
...Their hands stop shaking...
...My work here, sporadic as it is, is pioneering on the frontier...
...ly debunk—with one deft stroke...
...It comes and it goes," he says, "depending on what you have to do that day or whether you are just going to be spending another day wishing you were Michael Eisner...
...Most of the time, the damned car is broken, but when it runs . . . "Can't beat it with a stick...
...It's a movie...
...This is what I do know: on most days I wonder what I'm doing in Los Angeles, why classmates from college who cannot add and subtract are making ten million dollars a year in junk bonds, why I have never even been invited to be a member of P.E.N...
...Sara looked bewildered...
...how I am going to pay the pool man, and why I have wasted my one and only life...
...About Humbert H. Humbert and Lolita...
...The New York Times said President Assad ". . . turned half the town into a parking lot...
...After tracing its origins in pulp fiction, Kenner speculates tellingly on its parallels with Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published four years later...
...Box 590359 ^ San Francisco, CA 94159 CAMERA is a tax-deductible, non-profit educational 501(c)(3) organization...
...He piles detail on detail for horrifying effect, as when an old acquaintance (now a talent agent) graphically describes fellatio in a closet...
...terror is the most pervasive aspect of the Syrian regime...
...So, we believe him...
...In what...
...Stein faithfully records his friend's words and his own amazed and fascinated replies to theman (who, California style, ends every description with a question...
...Second, even among those convinced of the movement's accomplishments, there is a growing weariness with the endless din of ever subtler commentaries and ever more prurient biographies that continue to follow in its train...
...We hear about Syrian involvement in terrorism and know of its hostility to Israel...
...The Syrian regime is one of unmitigated terror, of human rights violations, of ruthless persecution of political and religious minorities — especially, of course, the pitiful remnants of the Jewish population, who are not allowed to emigrate and are kept as hostages in the country...
...This is my birthright as an American...
...But that is rather like the Crete telling St...
...Let me in there...
...That was sick...
...Ben Stein wants to stay...
...It is the Cuba of the Middle East...
...But not for Kenner, apparently...
...It deserves a closer look...
...This would enable Syria to wage war with Israel, if necessary without the assistance of any of the other Arab States...
...Sometimes Stein makes his point not by terseness, but by excess...
...We learn of Henry James bicycling over to Wells's home...
...I sure do," Sara said...
...Box 590359, San Francisco, CA 94159 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 43 the old woman who was in a trance is alive, alert, connected with the warm affection of the moment...
...The principal enemies of the USSR and Syria are the United States and Israel...
...That is the glory of Los Angeles life—the ineluctable mingling of what is and what could be if life were a dream...
...Stein captures his response concisely and with power: I have no idea whether my scene will stay in the movie...
...Yet despite it all, the diary hangs together, moves briskly, and entertains...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
