Los Angeles
THE $26 billion foreclosure settlement deal announced this month arrived in the final throes of Hollywood’s annual awards season. It also arrived too late for my neighbor, a screenwriter and director who moved out of her two-bedroom house the week before last, after her bank foreclosed on the property.
There had been no “For Sale” sign, no telltale rental tenant, no evidence of anything untoward in our canyon neighborhood, an enclave of writers, directors and actors. I saw nothing until the night I stood on my front steps, my heart in my mouth, and heard her sobbing scream — “I’m 47 years old, and I am going bankrupt!”
Now she is gone, another “statistic,” as she put it when I went next door to say goodbye as the movers loaded the last of her belongings. Her eviction follows that of our mutual neighbors, actors on a well-known soap opera forced out of their house in a foreclosure in a driving rainstorm four days before Christmas. Their dark, vacant houses, emblazoned with the public notices taped in the windows like shameful scarlet A’s, are holes in the hidden, fraying social fabric of Hollywood, where a vast majority belong not to the 1 percent but to the 99.
Of the 11 million Americans under water on their homes and facing foreclosure, more than two million reside in California. None of the Hollywood guilds keep records of how many of their members are among them, but several unions and charitable performing arts foundations report an increase in members applying for emergency housing assistance. When two of my three immediate neighbors have been foreclosed on, there are undoubtedly untold screenwriters, actors, directors and others quietly, invisibly struggling to keep their homes.
Beyond the hype that culminates in the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday, Hollywood is contracting, battered by the same economic forces reshaping the rest of the country. Moviegoing attendance hit a 16-year low last year. The industry is beset by rapidly changing business models: the free fall in DVD sales unmitigated by digital streaming, the independent film market that is a shadow of its former self. It all adds up to less. In Los Angeles, the number of television dramas produced last year dropped by 11.5 percent; reality shows were down 1.8 percent and sitcoms, 12.8 percent. On the feature side, the number of movies filmed here declined by an enormous 26.4 percent in the final quarter of last year.
What is less visible is the human toll of all that downsizing — the working actors, directors, writers and others like my foreclosed neighbors, trying to maintain their guild memberships, their health insurance, their mortgages. In the industry’s perverse social code, where appearances are everything, such private struggles are kept well hidden not only from public view but also within the industry itself. Failure is an affront to the accepted logic that, no matter what, Hollywood remains a lodestar of self-invention.
“People have no idea what’s going on in Hollywood now,” a prominent industry blogger told me recently when we met at what had been a favorite industry watering hole, empty that night. “There’s so little work, everyone is living off the money they made in the ’90s,” she added. “But they’re acting like nothing’s changed.”
What I heard in my neighbor’s screamed confession was the cracking of Hollywood’s social code, which insists that no matter the private terrors, one is always “great!” We are in foreclosure, we are screaming in the night, but we are awesome in the light of day and on our Facebook pages.
I wasn’t friends with my neighbor, but I have lived in Los Angeles long enough to know the accepted mores. When we said goodbye, I didn’t tell her I had heard her that night. She told me she was worn out from two years of wrangling with her bank, one of those named in the settlement deal. She was moving on, she said, moving in with a friend in some other neighborhood. In her Twitter feed, there is no mention of her foreclosure or even her move.
But I am left feeling what I feel too often now in Los Angeles, an inchoate, uneasy impermanence, where it is possible to feel untethered from even the seasons. It’s what I felt when I saw my other neighbors, the soap-opera actors, evicted with their crying child, their soaked belongings crammed into the back of a borrowed van, their dark, empty house with the holiday decorations still in the windows. It is their faces I see when I read about the foreclosure crisis and the multibillion-dollar settlement that will do nothing to restore my neighbors to their homes. Or to themselves.
They were all working professionals with many credits to their names. And they may be again. But their banks wouldn’t bet on it. And I’m not sure the town does either. People still come to Hollywood with dreams of reinventing themselves. But the reality is much crueler and not so different from that in the rest of the country, where millions do not dream of reinvention but simply long to become who they used to be: people not forced from their homes in the driving rain or crying in the night that they are going bankrupt.
On Sunday, I will watch the Academy Awards with my absent neighbors in mind. I will remind myself it is winter. But tonight I will stand on my front steps, the air sweet with night-blooming mountain laurel, and I will not hear my neighbor scream.
Hilary de Vries is an author and screenwriter.
