Diary

Entry 2

“Famous people are crazy,” explained Matt Eddy, a screenwriter I met yesterday on the set of a movie called Synergy.

“Do they start out crazy or does fame make them crazy?” I asked.

“Paul has a theory,” he said, referring to Paul Weitz, the writer and director of Synergy. “He thinks that fame is like this really powerful drug. Some people can handle it, some people can’t. The easy part is when it’s peaking. It’s the comedown that’s hard.”

I’ve only been in Los Angeles for 10 days, but this theory makes a lot of sense to me. In the same way that other cities have been ravaged by certain drugs, L.A. is in the grip of a fame epidemic. Like cocaine, it used to be the drug of choice for a privileged few, but now it’s gone mainstream, often in a very adulterated form. The kind of notoriety that comes from appearing on a reality show, for instance, is the equivalent of crack. In effect, a few unscrupulous pushers have worked out how to cook fame in a microwave, and as a result an entire generation of Americans has been decimated.

Chris Weitz sizes up Sasha for a possible role

I was on this movie set because I was at Cambridge with Chris Weitz, Paul’s brother, and he’d invited my wife and me to lunch. Chris and Paul have directed a number of movies together, including American Pie and About a Boy, but Paul is flying solo on this one. Chris and Paul aren’t famous, exactly—at least, not outside Hollywood. They’re more like fame dealers. Except they don’t sell it. They simply give it away to people they like.

I witnessed the effect of this firsthand when my ex-flatmate, Euan Rellie, was on the receiving end of their munificence three years ago. Chris and Paul created a sitcom called Off Centre for the WB network; the show was loosely based on Chris’ experience of living with Euan in New York in the early ‘90s. In a gesture that was designed to please Euan, more than anything else, the character that was based on him was actually named “Euan.”

By sitcom standards, Off Centre was wildly successful, running for two seasons, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the tiny amount of fame it injected into Euan’s central nervous system turned him into an overnight junkie. His wife, a New York fashionista named Lucy Sykes, does a hilarious impression of Euan eavesdropping on two strangers at a party and miraculously finding a pretext for bringing up Off Centre: “I couldn’t help but overhear that you were talking about Friends, which is a bit of a coincidence because I was a character in a sitcom once. Does the name ‘Euan’ ring any bells?”

Attention casting agents: Sasha is available for work

I shouldn’t be too sniffy about this because if Chris ever based a character in a movie or a television show on me, I’d be just as bad. Indeed, I took along Sasha, my 9-month-old daughter, to our lunch yesterday, in the hope that Chris would persuade his brother to find a small part for her in Synergy. She’s not bad-looking for a baby. A very pretty girl once peered into Sasha’s pram and said, “She’s cute and yet she looks exactly like you. It’s a paradox.”

I’m a terrible hypocrite. Several years ago I wrote an article chastising Demi Moore for getting her infant daughter a part in Striptease, on the grounds that fame isn’t something celebrities should thrust upon their children, yet here I was trying to do exactly the same thing. That’s the trouble with this drug. As soon as you get the faintest whiff of it, all your principles go out the window. I had turned into a slobbering maniac, like Homer Simpson spying a plateful of doughnuts.

Of course, there are perfectly rational reasons for pursuing fame, not the least of which are the incredible perks that come with it. Over lunch, Chris told me about a Hollywood poker tournament he’d taken part in recently in which the winners of various heats got to compete at a top table for a prize of $50,000. However, when it came to the celebrities in the tournament, the rules didn’t apply. “They got to sit at the big table, even if they failed to win their heat,” he said.

I asked him if celebrities were always allowed to win in Hollywood, irrespective of the game. For instance, if he was playing one-on-one basketball with Tom Cruise, would he let himself be beaten?

“I certainly wouldn’t foul him,” he laughed.

Rodney Liber in Dennis Quaid’s trailer

Another, more familiar perk consists of the palatial trailers that stars get to hang out in on the sets of movies—and Synergy was no exception. When Rodney Liber, an executive producer, overheard me asking Chris about this, he offered to show me the inside of Dennis Quaid’s trailer. (Quaid is the star of Synergy.) As he gave me a whirlwind tour, he checked off the various mod cons that qualified this as a “star trailer”: step-up bedroom, full-sized fridge, make-up station. It was roughly the size of the apartment I used to share with Euan Rellie in New York. Incredibly, though, Rodney said it was fairly modest compared to some of the others he’d seen. It was a “single pop-out,” meaning it could only be extended in one direction, whereas some stars had “quadruple pop-outs.” In fact, one of the celebrities he’d worked with had insisted on four trailers: a “star trailer,” a “make-up trailer,” a “work-out trailer,” and a “friends-and-family trailer.”

“He had them parked in a circle so they formed a little compound,” he said.

I wonder if Sasha would get her own trailer if she was given a part in Synergy? I can imagine some huge nursery on wheels, complete with fur-lined crib, gilt-edged playpen, and marble changing station. I’m not sure what I’d feel if my daughter was mainlining fame at the tender age of 9 months. Probably a combination of vicarious thrill and green-eyed envy.