Passing Through the Flame Read Free Page B

seemed a year and a half ago: a full-sized living room, a dining-room-kitchenette, a bedroom, and a second bedroom for the 16mm movie equipment he had brought from New York. In New York, he had paid a higher rent for a ratty little loft with hot and cold running roaches. How wonderfully Californian it had all seemed then! Four rooms in Hollywood, in fact three blocks from Hollywood Boulevard itself, plenty of parking spaces, wall-to-wall carpeting, walnut veneer and vinyl furniture, the little breakfast bar, a built-in garbage disposal, theatrically beautiful women walking all over the place. The Golden West, where everything was open and friendly, so sunny, spacious, and wide!
    A year and a half later he was living in a four-room plastic furnished apartment on a seedy street in downtown Hollywood, struggling to meet rent he couldn’t really afford, to keep his Rambler alive, and doing this by working in so many porn films for so little money that he hadn’t been able to do anything of his own since he came out here.
    And nothing had changed but the camera angle he saw things through.
    “When the time comes,” he repeated bleakly.
    “You’ve got to believe in yourself, Paul.”
    “Oh, I believe in myself,” he said. “I can write, direct, shoot, and edit a film better than most of the stumblebums in this town. I’ve got boxes of trophies and a medal or two from colleges and cinema magazines and two-bit festivals and the print of the world’s best unreleasable feature film to prove it. What I don’t believe in is this lousy town. Thousands of television hacks driving down to pick up food stamps in their Porsches, and you’ve just about got to ball George Meany to get in a union, and even then the initiation fee would be more money than I could raise. The studios are dying, and if anyone without a track record tries to raise the money for an independent production, they come after him with butterfly nets. But don’t get me wrong, I love show business!”
    Paul was startled by the anger which had suddenly boiled over. I guess I hadn’t ever faced the hopelessness dead on before. To get to direct or write a movie, you have to have directed or written a movie before. To even get in the front door, you need an agent. To get an agent, you need a track record. Catch-22 wherever you turn.
    “If you’ve got star quality, sooner or later that big break will come,” Velva said, her violet eyes all earnest. “And when it does come, you’ll make the most of it, because what’s inside you will shine through and everyone will see it. I’ve got that star quality, I can feel it all through me: and you’ve got it too, Paul. When you’re a star inside, you know it. Can’t you feel it pulsing out of you?” She gave him a savage hug.
    Paul felt a queasy emptiness in the pit of his stomach. Christ, what pathetic stuff her poor head was filled with! The crazy certainty that she had “star quality,” whatever that was, and the awful reality that she had no more real talent than any one of a million other beautiful women who came to Hollywood thinking that stardom was a certainty. How long would she continue to smash that beautiful face and body of hers against the reality of the town and her own limitations? Would she end as a high-priced hooker or luck out and marry some fat TV producer with a cigar bigger than his dong? Or would she end it all in an ocean of reds?
    And Velva was a nice girl. She really was. He liked her. But her blind belief in the inevitability of her own stardom rubbed his face in the futility of his own existence, the sappiness of his coming to Hollywood at all.
    “Why did you ever come out here, Velva?” he asked.
    “Where else would you go to become a movie star?”
    Paul laughed. Where else indeed? All at once, his sense of superiority dissolved. How different were they, really? Velva came to Hollywood to become a Movie Star, and I came to Hollywood to become a Film-maker. She’s been told