California Dreamin'

I'm still troubled by one L.A. memory: A dirty morning crashing hard on blow in that Hollywood apartment above Franklin Avenue while my then-wife was in rehab. I was wrecked and alone on the wrong side of night with the sun rising on my flawed existence through fake French doors that opened to the sky. Century City sort of quivered in the distance to the west ... faint flashes of the Pacific beyond. A gray L.A. morning, but eerily clear.

Through an east-looking window I froze on the beautiful Spanish-revivalist tower and neon of the Alto Nido apartments. That's where failed journalist-turned-scriptwriter Joe Gillis lived, William Holden's character in the Hollywood-consumes-Hollywood classic Sunset Boulevard. It felt more real than it should've in lovely old Tinseltown, in its spectral visions of dead silent-film stars and alcoholic casting agents and spent scriptwriters, in the bars, arched entries and flora-rich hills that lie east of La Brea. Man, I didn't stand a chance against a city so full of cocaine and self-belief. 

My little scene felt like a title sequence in a film adapted from a lost Hubert Selby Jr. novel, maybe one in which the protagonist ultimately self-immolates or something. God, I thought, how does anyone win in this shithole? 

I was a cliché. 

 

Aside from using L.A. as launch pad into a screenwriting career, Cole Haddon is conspicuously opposite old Joe Gillis. Instead of floating face-down in a swimming pool, he's still expressively fresh-faced — slightly cynical maybe, but barely sullied. And, aside from a handful of music and film publicists he'd "met" via e-mail, which doesn't mean jack, he really didn't know anyone in L.A., except a college bud and a dude in a band.

When he left Detroit not six years ago, I refrained from revealing my earlier personal experiences, but I told him that everyone and their grandpa writes movies and TV in L.A. — that's what the time between AA meetings is for. I don't think he understood. (Hell, I don't even think he drinks.) I sympathized because pain and suffering are harder on the innocent saps — they never see it coming.

Well, I'll be damned if Haddon didn't move to L.A. and become a rising screenwriting star, a kid "to watch" who film producers want to meet. (He's even getting married to a lovely screenwriter-producer.) Haddon is a writer with Hollywood heat whose "team" includes a killer manager (whom he met through his future sister-in-law) and a set of agents.

Even Thomas Jane, the star male prostitute of HBO's hit series Hung, is a Cole Haddon fan. He wrote me saying that Cole has what "we in Tinseltown have come to call 'an authentic voice.' He's not trying to copy anybody. Yet there is also something old-fashioned about Cole's work — a touch of the pulp novelist between the lines."

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