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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The ultimate irony is that you have your heroine fall in love with a cop.
Well, no, no. Did I say she was in love? Did I say that?
You did not.
[Laughs.] She slept with him. That's all. That's all that's happened so far. One of the questions I started the book with was: What produces a hard-boiled woman? When men are hard-boiled, they're hard-boiled for specific reasons. A woman gets hard-boiled because of sexual trauma, because of abuse in the past, because ... she's like Scarlett O'Hara. She looks at the world, it's a man's world, and she grows a shell. So this was my version of doing a hard-boiled woman. Without it being a completely unanalyzed hard-boiled woman.
What was the initial spark for "The Ticket Out"?
I had started writing a column for the L.A. Weekly called "Weird Sister." It was a creative leap for me, because it wasn't reviewing movies. I could write about whatever I wanted to write about. Then I met James [Ellroy], whose work I did not know when I met him, and he was telling all the unhappy journalists who talked to him to write a novel. One thing led to another and I was suddenly married and moving to Connecticut. I was going to continue the column but I realized it wasn't enough.
I should also mention that when I was a columnist I wanted James to take me around and show me Black Dahlia sites. I'd never heard of the case [a notorious Los Angeles murder from 1947], but I read his book ["The Black Dahlia," 1987] and was so impressed by the way he treated Elizabeth Short [the murder victim] that I started thinking about violence against women differently. Because the normal feminist discourse on violence is that we are the objects of violence, we are the victims of violence.
Right. And of course most murder victims in crime books seem to be women.
Yes. So what does that mean for the women who are living, who have managed not to be killed? What is it like not to be the object of violence but the subject of violence? And I find that in many mystery novels and crime novels written by women, they act like it's the same thing for a woman to find a woman killed as it is for a man to find a woman killed. But for me, any woman who finds a woman who has been murdered, it's got to throw you back on yourself: Why is she dead while I'm alive? So I went into the novel with these two questions in my mind: Why are movies bad and how do women get dead? And it somehow ends up being the same answer. [Laughs.] I don't know what the answer is but I'm sure it's connected. [Laughs.]
Why Hollywood?
Well, I was there. I obviously consider it important for a certain period of my life. When I first started at the job I really just thought I was hotter than shit. Even though the L.A. Weekly is definitely fringe, and never aspired to be part of the industry. But you're close to that energy, and you feel it all the time and it's pumping a little into your veins. It's a kid thing -- to take your energy from something like that.
I finally realized after two or three years that there was some profound philosophical bankruptcy in what I was watching. I myself became unhappy and started to feel empty, started to feel like this wasn't giving me its energy anymore, and wasn't reflecting what I believed. Not just on the women front. You know, you can criticize the movies for being sexist, for sure. But just in terms of a degraded view of human possibilities, of human behavior.
So to feel that kind of loss and disappointment you must have had very high hopes for the movies to begin with.
That were completely neurotic. [Laughs.] I mean, why do people look for meaning outside of themselves? It isn't there. I had a tremendous amount of psychic energy invested in movies: Movie history and sexy movies and art movies. Movies are stupid. They're not reflecting anything in particular, except for maybe the end of civilization. [Laughs.]
Is the nasty old mogul Joel Silverman in your book really based on [late MCA head] Lew Wasserman? One of your reviewers suggested you had to wait to publish your book until Wasserman died, as if he might have sued you for defamation of character. Does that have any basis in reality?
Absolutely none. Lew Wasserman was at one time the most powerful person in Hollywood and continued to be a presence up until his death.
And did in fact ruin movies.
He didn't ruin them. He didn't care about them. That's the whole thing. What people don't really understand is Hollywood is run by a lot of people who don't care about movies. They're just making money. And they use that money, like Mike Ovitz, to buy beautiful art collections. [Laughs.] But no, I mean, Joel Silverman is just a type.
