Daydreaming About Hollywood

In my fevered creative dreams, Hollywood is a lot like a little piece of Korea known as Haebonchon. HBC, as it's also called, is the main oegugin (foreigner) ghetto in the city and it's a tight knit little community to say the least. Some people love it, some people hate it and I'm somewhere in the middle.

It took me forever to get used to what I refer, politely, as "ghetto politics." Things move really, really fast in HBC. I, being a poor boy from Southside Virginia, had no clue for a long, long time what the heck was going on amongst the "power elite" of this microscopic group of people.

Now, I do, and it blows my mind.

I call it the "Who shot John" effect of human interactions. When you're wrapped up in the HBC mentality, you care who talked to whom and who sat with whom for how long, etc. And don't get me started about what's going on behind closed doors.

Despite all that, I actually really like HBC. It's fun how you have microcelebrities in the hood and how everyone knows everybody, not to mention how you often see the same person six times in one day unless you actively avoid them.

This, in my imagination, is a lot like Hollywood.

I imagine within the confines of Hollywood the same stuff goes on. I imagine it as a high powered ghetto for "creative types" with a lot of money and spare time. And, occasionally, they go nuts in a really public way.

I also like how it's possible that movies are made simply because two people run into each other on the street. How cool is that? I love stories about how someone made it into a movie because of that right-time-right-place situation. Take, for instance, the dude-in-the-suit of Alien. Wikipedia says:

• Bolaji Badejo as The Alien, the titular antagonist of the film. A Nigerian design student, Badejo was discovered in a bar by a member of the casting team, who put him in touch with Ridley Scott.^[33][34] Scott believed that Badejo, at 7 feet 2 inches (218 cm) and with a slender frame, could portray the Alien and look as if his arms and legs were too long to be real, creating the illusion that there could not possibly be a human being inside the costume.^[14][33][34] Stuntmen Eddie Powell and Roy Scammell also portrayed the Alien in some scenes.^[14][35]

How cool is that? One day, you're sitting in a bar having a drink, the next day, you're inside one of the most horrific monsters in movie history. (It helps to be 7 feet 2 inches tall and thin as a string bean, of course.)

Why don't I move to Hollywood and try my luck? I would, but I don't have the dough right now. So, for the time being, I just go about my business and write and daydream about Alien...