GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Chasing Immortality in Hollywood.
The indie financier graveyards are full to the brim with the corpses of wealthy entrepreneurs, Texas oilmen and Bay Area tech bros mostly, who thought they could find immortality by beating the house in the movie business.
The movie business has always attracted the world’s biggest dreamers, and certainly no one ever comes to Los Angeles hoping to “make it average”… we come here to make it Big. But if we are going to spend our lives chasing immortality to the exclusion of all else, the question of whether or not the movie business can actually deliver that immortality becomes an important one.
Certainly Tom Cruise has achieved immortality, right? And what about Michael Jackson, who has a blockbuster movie about his life in theaters right now… surely MJ achieved immortality?
Well, maybe.
Bing Crosby was once a massive crossover star in both the movies and in popular music, just as Michael Jackson was… so much so that he was even caricatured in a 1950 Bugs Bunny cartoon aimed at kids. But ask someone under the age of 25 who Bing Crosby was and the best case scenario is that they maybe kinda mighta sorta recognize his name from the Christmas songs they hear on the radio once a year. As with Bing Crosby, it’s entirely possible that there will come a time when “Tom Cruise” and “Michael Jackson” will be names future generations may have heard before, but which no longer carry much meaning for them.
And of course the Cruises and MJs of the world make up the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1%… most of us here in Tinseltown are not Movie Stars or Pop Legends, and the list of executives, producers and agents whose names are remembered long after they march off to the great movie premiere in the sky is a very short one indeed.
The business of Hollywood is, as Jerry Maguire once said, “an up-at-dawn pride swallowing siege.” It is a 24/7/365 business in which agents and managers get calls (and texts) from their clients late into the night and then again first thing in the morning long before most Americans’ alarms have even thought about going off. It is a business where American studio movies shoot in Budapest and Bratislava, where night shoots go from dusk-till-dawn and production craftsmen don’t see their own beds for months at a time. And where studio executives stay up into the wee hours pouring through scripts in a futile effort to stay one step ahead of the development flood. And in all this mania and mayhem, there is often very little time, to say nothing of headspace, to chase the one kind of immortality that is actually real and measurable.
As Kyle Smith wrote in his 2019 article, “The Great Forgetting:”
These days, in a cultural sense, the only two pre-1960 singers who still linger in the memory are Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Bing Crosby, as Terry Teachout recently pointed out in Commentary, has more or less disappeared. A case could be made that, in addition to being one of his era’s most popular singers, Crosby is the single most popular movie star in Hollywood history. Certainly he is in the top ten. Today he survives in the memory of specialists and historians and suchlike boffins. To the broader populace, the words “Bing Crosby” no longer have meaning.
Looking back on his four decades as a movie critic, John Podhoretz points out that even if you go back only to the 1980s, hardly anything survives. People still talk about Back to the Future and Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Princess Bride (but not E.T., the biggest hit of the decade). Rain Man not only swept the Academy Awards in 1988 but was the biggest hit of that year, selling the equivalent of $380 million in tickets in today’s dollars. Bring up that movie in a classroom today and I suspect the reaction will be the same as if you brought up Mickey Rooney or Shirley Temple. Step forward, 1990s movies, and report to the vaporization facility. You’ve got a few years left, but only a few.
Ironically, modern-day Hollywood seems like one of the worst places to chase immortality. And in any case, Mark Manson wrote in his 2016 book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, “when our immortality projects fail, when the meaning is lost, when the prospect of our conceptual self outliving our physical self no longer seems possible or likely, death terror—that horrible, depressing anxiety—creeps back into our mind. Trauma can cause this, as can shame and social ridicule. As can, as [Ernest Becker, the author of The Denial of Death] points out, mental illness. If you haven’t figured it out yet, our immortality projects are our values. They are the barometers of meaning and worth in our life. And when our values fail, so do we, psychologically speaking. What Becker is saying, in essence, is that we’re all driven by fear to give way too many f*cks about something, because giving a f*ck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death. And to truly not give a single f*ck is to achieve a quasi-spiritual state of embracing the impermanence of one’s own existence. In that state, one is far less likely to get caught up in various forms of entitlement.”
