The Real and the Unreal

"First of all I should introduce you to its author. I knew Bill quite well. He was a magazine writer who specialised in long narrative pieces. I met him after I went to work at The Los Angeles Times when I was covering the business of Hollywood. One of the things you learn when you cover Hollywood is that better than half of what you are told and probably three-quarters of what you read about the industry are lies. Dating way back to the teens, as soon as movies became big business, an industry grew up around Hollywood – the public relations industry. One of my former editors at The Times liked to refer to them as the Silent Killers. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . A big star – somebody of Clark Gable’s proportions or, translating it into today’s terms, Tom Cruise – is a big investment. You can’t have them behaving like a real human being and getting into trouble. Especially not the kind of trouble that movie stars get into because they have unlimited access, unlimited resources and so many sycophants around them telling them that they can do no wrong. So publicists created myths that were swallowed by newspapers, more often than not, hook, line and sinker. Nobody really knew who the stars were, at least not until long after they faded from the silver screen. What Bill Davidson did in The Real and the Unreal was pull back the curtain on who these people really were. It was a daunting task because everywhere you go, everyone you talk to will try to prevent you from getting to the truth. Clark Gable gets drunk, races his car down Sunset Boulevard and hits somebody who later dies. The idea that the general public would find out that Rhett Butler was a functioning alcoholic and guilty of manslaughter would be terrible for the studios. A phalanx of publicists will prevent you from reporting it. Back then buying off cops was relatively easy to do. Davidson said so in print and was never sued. The stories in The Real and The Unreal have stood the test of time. If you wanted to wade through public records and track down the same people that he did you would come to the same conclusions. The entertainment industry is still quite important to the economy of LA. Southern California, with its year-round sunshine, was always a big draw, given the limitations of old-style cameras and the controlled conditions preferred for shoots. But over the past quarter-century technology has levelled the playing field between LA and other cities. Many cities have entertainment industry outcroppings that have taken away from LA. All of the big studios are still there, as well as the recording industry and to some degree television, although New York rivals LA in that regard. But I don’t think that LA has maintained the monopoly it had when Davidson was writing or even in the eighties when I was reporting. That’s one of the reasons why, to my mind, LA has lost an awful lot of cachet."