Terrill
Lee Lankford is one of the funniest and most opinionated people I
know. He’s also got a long and torturous track record in Hollywood,
the result of years of grunt labor in the deepest, darkest pits of
the industry in a variety of jobs—screenwriter, second unit
director, production manager, director, actor. Some of these films
he’d probably rather I didn’t mention, some of them are not to be
missed (if you can, check out the excellent “South of Reno,”
featuring a small role for an unknown named Billy Bob Thornton) and
at least one of them exists in a mysterious cinematic quantum state
between the two: the sublime and ghastly “Hollywood Chainsaw
Hookers.” These days Doc Lankford walks a classier stretch of
Hollywood Boulevard than before, but it’s those low budget days
that formed his take on the Damned Movie Business. If you ever get a
chance to talk to him on the subject you’re in for a very
entertaining earful.
If you don’t get that
chance, the next best thing is reading Blonde Lightning. I first read
it years ago in manuscript form, when it and its companion novel
(“Earthquake Weather,” also available as an e-book and equally
worth your time and coin) were a single entity. In these books he
nails a certain dank, desperate corner of LA life that’s home to
those who are part of the Industry but not entirely accepted within
it, who are obsessed with said Industry while being treated brutally
by it, who loath it without being able to pull away from it. It’s a
lot like a mutually destructive romantic relationship (and the books
are full of those, too.)
I read it for the third
time not long ago, and it struck me once again as one of the truest
accounts I’d ever read of Hollywood culture. Certain Movieland
fiction—Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories, John O’Hara’s The Big
Laugh and Michael Tolkin’s The Player are all good examples––never
really get old, because even in the face of massive tumult in
technology and in the culture at large, the human forces of artistic
ambition pitted against greed and sheer lust for power never change.
The technical details of the filmmaking in Blonde Lightning are, in
this digital age, already the stuff of history; the story told
therein will still be fresh in eighty years.
--Scott
Phillips
