“One thing all of those authors had in common with each other, but not with me, was that they had led lives that were worth writing about. … What the hell had I ever done? Nothing. Oh, wait, that’s right, I’d taken my GED test and graduated high school two years early. Wow!”
—Josh Becker, GOING HOLLYWOOD, pages 90-91
“I’d rather be Ed-fucking-Wood than not be a filmmaker.”
—Josh Becker, GOING HOLLYWOOD, page 161
I am always personally annoyed when I find that the reputation of a creative work is clearly based on what the audience was expecting, rather than on what they actually received. The clearest example of this I can think of is a cinematic one: In 1982, a very creepy, original horror movie about a satanic toymaker and his attempt to murder thousands of children on the 31st of October was released and immediately upset all of the folks who went to see it. Not because it wasn’t scary or well made, but because its title was HALLOWEEN III and they went to it expecting to see a continuation of the Michael Myers saga.
Despite the fact that it’s the only film even tangentially connected to the franchise that comes close to being as good as the original, it remains thought of as a betrayal and disappointment by many fans who have given it a 3.7 rating on the IMDb, even though most of them would celebrate it as a classic ’80s cult film if it had been released solely under its subtitle of SEASON OF THE WITCH.
I tell you this not just because it is my habit to waste people’s time by bringing up irrelevant trivia whenever I can, but because when our editor asked me if I would be willing to review a new book called GOING HOLLYWOOD by Josh Becker, I said “yes,” based on the expectation that I would receive a goofy, entertaining look at life on the low-end of the show-business food chain by the guy who made the truly terrible ALIEN APOCALYPSE.
For those of you who haven’t seen it (that is to say, most of you), this 2004 film is best known for starring cult icon Bruce Campbell as an astronaut/osteopath who returns home from a space mission to discover that the planet has been taken over by man-sized alien insects (any resemblance to PLANET OF THE APES is, I’m sure, entirely coincidental). Made by the Sci Fi Channel in Bulgaria, ALIEN APOCALYPSE is so blatantly preposterous that it actually takes a second viewing to appreciate that along with its terrible costumes, abysmal special effects, bland camera work, lamentable acting and atrocious dubbing, it is also very badly written.
In other words, it’s exactly the kind of cinematic disaster I love to read about. True, I had already listened to the film’s anecdote-filled DVD commentary (where I should have heard alarm bells ring when Becker admitted that the film’s derivative plot lived inside his head for 16 years before he got the chance to film it), but I was optimistic that Becker had many more hilarious B-movie tales in his repertoire, and the resulting book would be well-worth my time.
It was this expectation that caused me to suffer some confusion as I started reading and was surprised to find that nearly a quarter of the way into it, Becker had yet to get near a film set and was instead still just a 18-year-old movie fan living in a small apartment across the street from the Paramount studios in 1976. A quick trip to the Internet soon made it clear that my expectations had been unfounded. Becker had indeed written a book about his life as a director, titled RUSHES, but that wasn’t the book I was reading.
Instead of an entertaining, behind-the-scenes look at Z-level filmmaking, I was instead reading a coming-of-age memoir about a kid who moves to Hollywood from Detroit, has sex with various women, gets some menial jobs, meets some fellow film fans, does a lot of drugs, struggles to create something that doesn’t suck, and then is eventually inspired by Jack London to hitchhike to Alaska to have an adventure he is certain will make him a better writer. Confronted by this, I had to immediately overcome my disappointment and make a conscious effort to judge GOING HOLLYWOOD for what it actually was and not what I had hoped it would be.
Now, in a happier, sunnier, rosier world, this is the paragraph where I would go on to say that once I got over my misconception and began to judge the book on its own merits, my experience vastly improved. Sadly, this is not the case. If anything, it made me dislike GOING HOLLYWOOD that much more.
Just as ALIEN APOCALYPSE is a textbook example of how not to make a low-budget science-fiction movie, GOING HOLLYWOOD is an equally perfect example of how not to write a memoir.
It may seem that I’ve already been quite harsh toward the book and its author, but the truth is that I am holding myself back as best I can. Since we live in an age of Google Alerts and this is a small-press title unlikely to get many other critical evaluations, I am aware that there is an almost certain chance that Becker is going to read this at some point and so I am taking pains to say nothing here I would not willingly say to his face. And while I won’t go so far as to suggest that the following diatribe can be accurately described as “constructive,” it is sincere and honestly felt.
Anyone who chooses to attempt the blatantly narcissistic act of chronicling their own life is required, for the sake of their audience, to meet one of two obligations: They must either have lived a life of such genuine accomplishment that it deserves to be documented, if only for the sake of the historical record, or they must be gifted with a skill for storytelling that is able to transform their personal narrative from a mundane recounting of uninteresting events into a unique and entertaining commentary on the foibles of the human condition. Becker, sadly, comes up short on both counts.
By narrowly focusing on a year of his life where his only genuine accomplishment was an act of futile juvenile bravado (the hitchhiking to Alaska), Becker is forced to recount every incident from that year that managed to remain wedged inside his brain. Thus, 50 pages into GOING HOLLYWOOD, the reader has already read graphic descriptions of the only time he had sex with his former girlfriend, his first visit (of two) to an Asian massage parlor, his frustrating night of blue balls spent with a disturbed former classmate, and his brief affair with the stripper down the hall.
This wouldn’t be so bad if Becker were a skilled writer able to transport these moments beyond their PENTHOUSE FORUM origins, but he isn’t, and by the time the stripper comes into his life, it seems like an oversight that he doesn’t introduce her appearance with the standard “I never thought these stories were true until this happened to me.”
Even more problematic, though, is the constant description of drug use in the book. Have you ever found yourself waiting at a bus stop or sitting in a bar and suddenly locked into a conversation with a 50-year-old guy with long hair and a jean jacket who hasn’t changed his appearance or lifestyle since 1982? Inevitably, in the course of that conversation, he’ll start recounting how hard he and his friends used to party back in the day, as you sit there with a frozen smile wondering when that stupid bus or your friends will finally arrive and save you from this torture.
Becker’s tales of drug use aren’t quite that bad, but they do possess the same quality of attempting to extract admiration from pathos. He clearly wants us to be impressed by the amount of illicit substances he and an acquaintance consumed in a cross-country trip from L.A. to Miami, but rather than reach levels of Hunter S. Thompson-ian hilarity, the only feeling he creates is relief that they didn’t kill anybody in an accident along the way.
The road-trip sequence also serves to highlight the difficulty Becker has in selling the veracity of his material. Although nothing much of consequence happens in the book, often what does happen feels made up. The dialogue frequently rings false and moments feel forced to support the book’s themes. I have no doubt that these people existed and these incidents really happened (although it does seem like a minor miracle that he is able to remember any of them, considering how much drugs he ingests), but in the same way he cannot convince us that alien insects have taken over the world in ALIEN APOCALYPSE, he fails to make his own life story seem real.
If there is a lesson to be learned from GOING HOLLYWOOD — and I believe that there are lessons to be found in even the worst of books — it is that a personal story is only as interesting as the author’s ability to tell it. Around the same time I read this memoir, I started listening to actor Stephen Tobolowsky’s wonderful podcast THE TOBOLOWSKY FILES, available on iTunes. Several of Tobolowsky’s stories are set in the exact same period and setting as GOING HOLLYWOOD, yet couldn’t be more different in their approach and affect. Becker’s book also made me revisit Paul Feig’s hilarious SUPERSTUD: OR HOW I BECAME A 24-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, which manages to describe the painful realities of life after high school with a skill, humor and honesty GOING HOLLYWOOD completely fails to achieve.
The difference between these two works and Becker’s second memoir is really as simple as the difference between Edward D. Wood Jr. and his hero, Orson Welles. One was a master storyteller and the other was happy to just be making movies, no matter how much they might have sucked. By the end of GOING HOLLYWOOD, Becker concludes that it’s more important to make art than to study it, but the truth isn’t that simple. The great filmmakers and writers are inevitably the ones who have done both.
When I finished GOING HOLLYWOOD, I felt sadness. Sadness that I wasted my time with an inferior piece of writing; sadness that I would have to hurt the author’s feelings when I shared my honest thoughts about it; sadness that the book ended where it should have started; and sadness that my disappointment with Becker’s second memoir would stop me from ever reading his first, which I expected to like so much more. —Allan Mott
Related posts:
- The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry
- Hollywood Jock: 365 Days, Four Screenplays, Three TV Pitches, Two Kids, and One Wife Who’s Ready to Pull the Plug
- Hollywood Crows
- Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops
- The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God
