Once, Hollywood was a fair imitation of a larger world - more glamorous and complex, more intellectually open and artistically creative, than just about any random collocation of streets and residences in the Great Bland Plain of the United States.
Today, Hollywood is a town of grotesque has beens, boring white men, aging corporate properties, some fine younger actors too late to the game, bad taste, misplaced sobriety, tedious venality and dignity borrowed from other people's suffering. So small has Hollywood become that it thought to invite Woody Allen, a wreck of a dead comedian, to introduce it to New York. New York had to be featured, since it was the set last September of a greater blockbuster than anything Hollywood ever dreamed of.
Confronted with the Periclean eloquence of Poitier, the moguls saw what they missed - the possibility to command dignity, not steal it. Attempting to follow Poitier with Streisand and Redford was both miserable showmanship and proof of the enduring irrelevance of White Hollywood.
Hollywood is no longer as large as L.A., let alone the U.S., or the Net. The new hall is small, the new corporate leadership, smaller. The end of Hollywood is the same as that of other American brands: the failure to play, to discover, to imagine and to love. As Michael Fraase says in When Elephants Dance,
Corporations create nothing; they’re consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I don’t know about you, but I’m not much pleased any more.
The end of Hollywood: a solipsistic hallucination on a small screen which no one is watching.
