I should have stayed home and Fame Junkies

It was hellaciously hot here in LA this weekend so I stayed out of the sun and read two books.

First I completed McCoy's I Should Have Stayed Home. I was wrong in my assessment of the roommate Mona. She was not a hooker. Rather, she was a wise yet idealistic rabble rouser who rallied for the Screen Actors Guild. Of course she pays a price once the producers sign an agreement with SAG. Mona gets the best speech in the book as she rallies against the influence of the fan magazines and how it sells a false dream of easy stardom to the naive out in the hinterlands. The protagonist Ralph is the embodiment of naive--a young Southern hunk who comes out to Hollywood to become a star despite having no life experience and a thick Southern accent. Ralph's innocence and naivety are sometimes grating but by the end he finally wises up though his predictament is bleak.

Once I finished "I Should Have" I read Jake Halpern's 20007 non fiction book Fame Junkies. The book is divided into 3 sections. The second part and the least interesting, is focussed on personal assistants of the stars and various others who feed off the world of celebrity. The third part focuses on fans--those of the casual US/People/OK readership and the fanatics who latch their identities to a particular performer. In Fame Junkies, Halpern profiles a die hard Rod Stewart fan who has a room set aside as a Rod shrine, travels all over the world to see Stewart in concert and is a prime force in getting Stewart a star on the walk of fame. Her husband admits that if he hadn't force himself to become a Stewart fan, their marriage would have dissolved long ago. The chapter on the Rod fan made me realize (again) that for some people, star worhip is a religion and if anyone makes fun of this worship, you'll be courting the same sort of rage that devout Muslims express when a Danish paper publishes cartoons of the Prophet.

However the first part of Fame Junkies held the most resonance for me, given what I just read in the McCoy novel. Halpern examines the world of talent conventions/cattle calls where parents pay lots of money for their children to perform for agents. Sadly, very few of the kids are tapped for a follow up appointment, yet many of the kids and their families believe that stardom is just around the corner. Many of them, just like the characters in I Should Have Stayed Home, get their ideas of how the star system works from media, in the case of The Fame Junkies, shows like ET and Access Hollywood. It's all rather sad and pathetic.

I guess if I land a permanent job with the Guild and end up fielding phone calls, I should keep the lessons and portraits of the McCoy and Halpern books in mind as I'm going to be dealing with them.