Made in L.A. Vol. 6: Hollywood Adjacent

Introduction

Los Angeles is a familiar sight in film and television. Look closely and you’ll recognize oddly alien rocks as the setting for a science fiction blockbuster or a beachside high school immortalized in a coming-of-age cult classic. In a time before CGI and megabudgets, filmmakers valued this diverse landscape and endless sunshine, splicing together L.A. and Anywhere USA.

There is no defining L.A. without including Tinseltown. Captured on celluloid and projected around the world, Hollywood has defined its own representation, rarely allowing a glimpse behind the lens. The Hollywood dream shapes the lives of Angelenos in ways both seen and unseen. You could call it a blob and run from it in horror, or point and laugh at its absurdity. And still, it will enter your dreams and hypnotize you with visions of the possible and impossible, the hilarious and terrifying.

Geographically, Hollywood is not a city but a neighborhood. Conceptually, it is not a place but a mindset, a process, a capitalist logic, and a state of mind. Ambitious creatives flock from far and wide to this urban basin, eager to one day see their name in the credits. Many are unprepared for the vastness of a city with the population of a small country. In a place of cultural juxtaposition, Hollywood’s on-screen homogenization often fails to do justice to those who live here. But we are dazzled by the spectacle, too.

As adversity rattles the entertainment industry and challenges its hard-working community, Hollywood feels as though it’s undergoing a different kind of seismic shift— broken business models, accelerating climate change, and a nation falling into chaos shape our transformation. Importantly, though, people here resemble the terrain; beautiful, unique, and resilient. For every person who works in the movies, there are thousands who carve a different path. Together we complain about the traffic, the lack of rain, and the drive-thru line at In-N-Out—united as proud Angelenos. Should our city be threatened or harmed, we feel collective grief, for it is not they who are diminished, but we.

The Made in L.A. anthology series has historically steered away from Hollywood as a subject, the booming voice of the industry having spoken enough for itself. The business is not just the final product for your consideration during awards season. Filmmaking is a craft, a vocation, a career. For every crew member who leaves the set at the end of a twelve-hour day, there is a story of how they got there, of how they will survive the next economic shift. Sometimes the best stories come from Hollywood-adjacent spaces, where what matters is finding the best street taco vendor, free parking spots, a friend performing onstage for the first time, or a place to listen to live music.

Hollywood may not represent Los Angeles on its own, yet the City of Angels does not exist without the mythology, the symbolism, and the love of make-believe. May that passion burn brightly for decades to come.

With our best wishes,

Made in L.A. Writers

Sara Chisolm ★ Gabi Lorino ★ Allison Rose ★ Cody Sisco

Where She Wants to Be

Raya Yarbrough

For one whole year, I taught a stripper how to sing. Not exactly a stripper, more of a discount burlesque dancer. Very little clothing that never came off.

I met up with her in a high-rise condo on Wilshire Boulevard once a week. It was part of that manmade mountain range of multimillion dollar properties that line Wilshire Boulevard, leading up to the country club. Like many of them, her building was a high-end residence with a quiet air of abandonment. Every time I entered the lobby, I passed the unused, weary couches. Same pastel art on the walls. No music in the elevator up.

Entering the apartment, the first sounds of life were the intermittent soft tweets of a bird, somewhere out of sight. This sound receded under the welcome of Her Manager as he led me down a hallway into a common room. It was 2008, but the apartment retained its eighties’ angular interior design. The rug used to be white, now it was giving old Shih Tzu. It was a tight-knit rug that always looked frazzled and confused because it thought it would be 1987 forever. The kitchen bar was positioned diagonal to the far wall and almost perpendicular to the window. Long blinds connected the oatmeal ceiling to the rug, and its slats clicked like hanging dominoes.

Among these architectural angles, I waited for her to appear. I set up my keyboard between the pleather sofa and the large television and noticed every right angle had been countered by something acute or obtuse.

Anna was always prompt. She arrived in uniform: a skimpy tank top, a flouncy, schoolgirl-adjacent mini-skirt, platform high heels, and microphone headset. She had yellow-blond hair and a pale face with a bit of acne on the hairline and some dry skin at the tip of her nose, a result of skin medicine of some sort—this was an imperfection we shared. She was a work-in-progress, though she was already amply shaped and had a natural beauty, which is why she was the jewel of the whole pop star-in-training grift.

Anna had an airy, sweet, thin soprano. Good pitch. She took every note I gave her about breath support and tone placement and incorporated them into the rhythm of her gyrating pelvis. The gyration never stopped. For a solid hour and thirty she ran scales, puffed air through diaphragmatic aspirations, buzzed eeeeeee and aaaaaaah and oooooooh vowel reverberations through her nasal bones. I could see she felt it in the maxilla. She chirped and exhaled, all while stirring the pot with her hips, in sling-back three-inch heels.

When we got into her performance repertoire, the singing was inseparable from the motion. She was like a pump organ: no sound without undulation. Her songs had the hot-kitten pubescent sparkle of Katy Perry, cut with the retro lust of Samantha Fox. Electronic beats and synth gave out hooky, repetitive melodies about beckoning love, teasing love, everything except giving love. The vibe was unintentionally dated. It was as if they had the budget to pay someone to write the music but not for modern drum and synth samples—like 1995 trying really hard to be 2005 with equipment from 1985.

The music matched her movements. Her body reflected the text in wave after wave of enticement and desire, with no endgame. Her hipbones formed figure eights in the air. Watching her technique, my hip sockets suffered vicariously. Despite the relentless, repetitive movement, her core—I mean the core of her disposition—was solid. Under the turquoise eyeliner and the above the bounce of her chest, she possessed an immovable, laser-like sense of calm.

★

As the weeks rolled on, we got to know each other. Anna had come from the Midwest to Los Angeles with her mother, who had gone back home. She’d responded to an ad placed by Her Manager, the guy who now paid her rent. There were three bedrooms off to the right, for three other young women. Her Manager oversaw all of them, under strictly enforced rules about dating (none) and some sort of financial agreement for his support. At the beginning of each lesson, he would lean over the diagonal kitchen bar to observe, then he’d retire to another room to tend to the publicity machinations of soft-core girly shows.

Anna seemed oddly free within this circuitry. She had the tenacity of those who travel across the country to find Hollywood and the naiveté to believe in a thing called pop-star training. We were close in age, and sometimes the line between friends and teacher/student felt blurry. We laughed a lot, and I was fascinated with her, a real-life Barbarella. A musical sex alien, to whom I must teach the musical ways of my people. She was a true believer in the Big Showbiz myth. My photo negative. I’d grown up in Los Angeles surrounded by the business of Hollywood, yet I never had the chance to buy the dream. You feel it, the energy of it, but it’s so constant that you don’t recognize the weight of it until you meet someone who has yet to bend under the pressure.

Weeks became months. Months of the pastel art in the lobby. The couches, spotless, unused, weary. Silence in the elevator. The ghostly chirps of an invisible bird, down between the couch and the TV, where Anna swiveled, and chirped, and ran scales. She memorized the saucy lyrics, written just for her, and she began to embody an alter ego, not far off from the actual Anna, but with more flip, more sizzle.

★

The day of her show arrived. The performance space was on a side street off Sunset Boulevard. I drove the boulevard slowly, remembering when my dad lived on Hollywood Boulevard, when I was eight years old. In the eighties, we would come to this part of Sunset for various stores or restaurants.

This was where the prostitutes used to walk—between Fairfax, down past Guitar Center and Famous Amos, all the way to La Brea. Some were transexual, and I remember taking note of their prettiness, mixed with their slender androgyny. As a prepubescent girl who did not yet possess feminine curves myself, they all seemed like alluring women to me.

I let my eyes wander the relatively unpopulated streets. I found the side avenue. The venue was a tiny, black-box theatre with bars on the door. I almost drove right past it, because the curbside lighting was haphazard and jaundiced. I had a bad cold. I arrived just after Her Manager, and we sat on chairs in a short hallway. Men began arriving. All men. All solo. Each one entered with the same dark countenance that darkened when they saw the other men. They’d come to be alone with a fantasy.

I sneezed. The dark herd of men shifted their eyes towards my noise. I looked down at my feet.

Once Her Manager opened the doors, the crowd shuffled through, and I found a seat in the way back. I didn’t want to be too close to the stage because I knew I was going to be blowing my nose. The stage was bare. With all the work they put into the music, I expected more of a production, but Anna was to be the production. She was the product.

The lights dimmed, and the backing track began. Anna appeared from between the curtains at the back of the stage in a swish of pink, her lower half in full swing. White baby-tee under a plastic, pink, plaid, schoolgirl jumper. After her first number, she did a little monologue about herself, her likes and dislikes. Finally, she turned her back to the audience and bent over to peek under her skirt. She smiled over her right shoulder and said, In case you were wondering, they’re pink!

Anna gyrated through four songs. It was the same dance again and again. I began to watch the crowd for signs of boredom, but they were as engaged as ever, transfixed in hulking, profound stillness. By her third song, my nose had started going like a faucet, and I’d gone through a whole pack of tissues. I tried to sniffle quietly, nobody appeared to notice. In fact, the audience, this dark block of men, was unresponsive to anything. Outwardly. The theatre seats held shadow, resembling a communal confessional.

Thirty minutes in, I was out of tissues, and my cold was getting worse. I had to go. I slowly stepped down from the black-painted theatre riser, grazing my tights on it, I tiptoed around the corner, next to the sound booth. I apologized to Her Manager for having to leave early. He nodded and walked me out.

Her Manager thanked me and followed with, "When are we gonna get you up there?

I laughed, as if we both knew it was a joke, and he laughed too. We both knew he wasn’t joking.

★

After the show, I continued with Anna for a few more months. One of the last times I went to coach her, I heard that tweeting bird again. I asked her about it, and she turned on her heel and cheerily disappeared into her room. She came back out holding a cage containing a blue and green parakeet, chittering to itself.

Here she is. Anna smiled.

She set the cage on the kitchen bar top, and having paused her pop-star training, I saw a different shade of Anna. She was still. Her face was easy and natural, enchanted with the bird.

While Her Manager was out of earshot, I wanted to tell her that this life was not the road to pop stardom. I wanted to tell her that this road was a dead end. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to give her life to this rug, and these blinds, and those straps that cut into her pinky toes, and that Lucite platform click against the linoleum. I wanted to tell her that those rows of shadow men were only a fraction of the people who could love her, if she wanted to do something more—but she was in a rare place of serenity.

Do you ever let the bird out?

Sure, all the time. She opened the wire door and reached in. A tiny claw grasped her pink acrylic fingernail. She lifted the bird out, and it flew up to a bookcase, facing the window.

Does she want to go outside? I asked.

Anna smiled. She’s where she wants to be.

WagWorld

Jacqueline Berkman

I looked up, and that’s when I saw Will. Though of course, he wasn’t yet Will to me, just another beautiful L.A. man, tall and lanky with a golden, Jesus-like mane of hair.

Hello, miss! he said. Care to hear about WagWorld Rescue? He was holding a clipboard, and although he stood next to a playpen with two pit bulls and a sad-eyed German shepherd, I was convinced he was part of a reality TV show. I looked around for cameras.

Sure, I said. I was at the Farmers Market, loading my tote bag with heirloom tomatoes and kale and the other salad must-haves that my idol, Delilah, had cited in a recent Vogue listicle. I fluffed my hair and took a couple of steps closer. I’d love to hear about it.

He looked relieved, or surprised, and took a breath before launching into his speech.

Awesome! I’m Will Hinkley, founder of WagWorld. What’s WagWorld? We’re a foster-based rescue organization for dogs. We find our rescues in a variety of situations—humane societies, high-kill shelters— He leaned in close as if he were about to tell me a secret. Sometimes lying in the middle of the road. That’s what happened with Daisy Duke over there, he said, nodding to the shepherd. Hit by a car and left for dead when I found her. See for yourself.

Before I could decline his offer, a picture from his cell phone camera was in my face. Daisy Duke sprawled across the asphalt. Fur matted with blood. Her right paw was gristly and raw, like a discarded chicken bone. It was horrific.

I was moved, and my eyes stung with tears. To be fair, it was a particularly bumpy time in my life. I had moved to L.A. three months before to pursue a job as a production assistant in the reality TV world. My dream was to work behind the scenes on Day-to-Day with Delilah, but I was open to any gig. It wasn’t exactly working out. I didn’t have experience in the field, but every entertainment industry advice blog I’d read stressed that this didn’t matter. Entry-level roles didn’t require expertise but flexibility, a can-do attitude, and a willingness to pitch in where you were needed. I had nothing but a can-do attitude. It was a point I’d belabored to studio executives in my cover letters, and to the viewers of my morning Instagram and TikTok videos, which were daily reels consisting of sun salutations and positive affirmations. But I had nothing to show for my efforts except a tiny apartment I shared with two Craigslist strangers and a part-time barista job at a cafe with an impressive selection of non-dairy milk.

It wasn’t a glamorous life, but it was an expensive one, and I was running out of money. At nights, toggling between reruns of Day-to-Day with Delilah, different losers’ profiles on dating apps, and my depleted checking account balance, I’d started to wonder if I’d have to move back to Fresno, a town that could never accommodate all of the dreams I had.

Perhaps it was because I was in all this turmoil that Will’s story about Daisy Duke had such a profound and unexpected effect. I felt like I had jumped into ice water, the perpetual racket in my mind suddenly gone. It was the first time in a long time I had been completely absorbed by something outside of myself.

Aw, don’t cry, miss. Will pulled me into an embrace. What’s your name?

Jess, I said, nestling against his shoulder. His hands felt warm against the small of my back.

Jess, Will said, repeating it as if the name itself held wisdom, the key to life’s mysteries. It’s okay, Jess, he said. He released me and stepped over to the playpen, where he gave Daisy Duke a couple of belly rubs, then showed me the jagged pink smudge of a scar running down her leg. See? he said. Daisy’s fine now. She got the surgery she needed; her story will have a happy ending. But there are lots of other animals out there, Jess, that unless we intervene—well, they won’t get their happy ending.

I know, I said. There was an expectant pause before I realized he was probably waiting for money. I foraged in my purse for a crumpled $20 bill that was supposed to be for gas and dropped it into the mason jar he was using for donations.

Thank you so much, Will said. Would you like to join our mailing list?

Of course, I said. Will was a beautiful man, and for that alone I would have joined the mailing list. He handed me a clipboard, and I neatly wrote my phone number and email address.

Fantastic, Will said. We can always use more helpers at the rescue. If you’d be interested in that.

I smiled at him and the panting pups in the playpen. It felt like a transformative moment—I couldn’t remember the last time my heart had felt so open. But working at a rescue was not what I had moved out to Los Angeles to do. I couldn’t let distractions get in the way of my plan.

I told Will that I was super busy with work. But you know how to reach me, I said with a smile and an implied wink. I was doing my best to be coy. But being coy has never been my strong suit.

Three days later Delilah formally announced her Companies for a Good Cause contest on Instagram, and in a flash I could envision the winning video, scene by heartfelt scene, featuring Will and his WagWorld pups. I called him and pitched my idea.

★

At the film shoot three days later, I was energized and full of purpose. It was noon, the sky was Easter-egg blue. The cul-de-sac was quiet and guaranteed easy parking. We had been strategic about picking this North Hollywood cul-de-sac, selecting it for its proximity to the office and a freeway underpass. It had just the right amount of crushed cans, candy wrappers, and cigarette butts to convey an atmosphere of disarray without being so foul-smelling or disgusting that it would be unbearable to spend a few hours filming there.

Ooo! Looks like we just got another $100 donation for the microchip campaign, said Heather, the high-ponytailed intern from USC. She was sitting in the back seat of the WagWorld van with Rosie, petting the sweet dog’s scraggly head as she scrolled through her phone. "Do we even need to do this fake film shoot? We have so many real and actually exciting initiatives going on as it is."

This shoot is not fake, I said. Even though I’d only been working at WagWorld a few days, I felt this was true: the shoot was a symbolic representation of the rescue’s larger story. We can’t just be sunshine and rainbows, you know. When you’re one applicant of many, you need to say something dramatic to stand out.

It’s true, said Will. He sighed and adjusted his baseball cap. I mean, I don’t like it any more than you do, Heather, but the fact of the matter is that we’re entering a contest, and judges love sob stories. And we need all the money we can get.

Ugh, but it’s all so cheesy, Heather said. And Rosie’s scared.

Rosie’s fine, I said. It’s a dead-end street. Another key reason we had chosen the cul-de-sac was it reduced the danger to the dog of cars whizzing by. I looked to Will to back me up on this, but he was sullenly staring into the distance. Clearly, tough love was needed. Look, guys, we need to nail this, I said. If Delilah likes the video, it could be our big break. Do you have any idea what that means?

I looked at them and waited,