Hollywood Nights

By Tom Poehlmann

Bud Wyler goes to live in Hollywood after his life falls apart. The city of Hollywood is not where movies are made. It’s a dilapidated section of a sprawling metropolis, home to street people and other derelicts. Bud finds a job at the Chinese Theatre, meets Rita Scott, an aspiring young actress, and finds lodging with Mad Dog, a drug dealer and part time hustler. Building a new life from scratch, Bud finds solace in helping panhandlers on the street, then tries to help Rita find a life beyond the pointless auditions that occupy her time. But the dream has too deep a hold on her, and she turns to Mad Dog for drugs and comfort. Goaded by Lana, a transvestite in a wheelchair, Bud works through his grief and finds a direction for his life, even as Rita and Mad Dog are destroyed by their fantasies. Told in an evocative style full of allusions to old movies and dead stars, Hollywood Nights is the story of three sad people, and the one who made it out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Poehlmann
• Release date: Aug 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301760862

Tom Poehlmann

Tom Poehlmann graduated from Indiana University with a master's degree in broadcasting, and worked at a public TV station in Southern Illinois for a while. He then did volunteer work with deaf people in San Diego for two years, before winding up at California State University, where he managed campus media production. He spent the next 30 years raising a family, especially a handicapped son who died just short of his nineteenth birthday. Three years ago he cashed in his retirement to buy a house (maybe not the best decision), spent a year teaching software an an Apple store, and then went to Utah to provide health care for his ailing in-laws. During this time he turned to writing in earnest, and Hollywood Nights is his first production.

Book preview

HOLLYWOOD

NIGHTS

By Tom Poehlmann

Copyright 2010 Tom Poehlmann

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

FADE IN: 1 — Hollywood isn’t a place, really, it’s a concept

2 — The stairs were narrow, and dimly lit.

3 — The third floor was like the second and the fourth was like the third

4 — I was almost like a tourist myself

5 — It was quiet at Hollywoodland. 

6 — It was after 2pm when I finally woke up from a heavy, dreamless sleep. 

7 — It was bright on the Boulevard after the aged darkness of the Chinese Theater. 

EXT. BLVD. — NIGHT:

2 — Early on a Wednesday morning a week after this exchange

3 —  I never learned Mad Dog’s real name. 

MONTAGE BLVD. — VARIOUS

2 — I was awakened from a sound sleep late one afternoon

3 — I don’t know how territorial panhandlers are

4 — Once I got started on my mission to save the panhandlers, I didn’t waste any time. 

THREE - SHOT – PRINCIPLES

2 — That night at the Chinese never seemed to end. 

3 — I wandered around darkened streets and even darker alleys. 

4 — When I woke up it was after 6. 

5 — When we got to Highland, we were surrounded by crowds surging north

QUICK CUT: FLASH FORWARD 

EXT. BLVD. — HAND-HELD

2 — I spent the next few hours prowling up and down the Boulevard

3 — The corridor was filled with residents afraid of missing something. 

WRAP PARTY: 1 — A week had passed quickly. 

2 — I knew that my departure would leave no gap in the life of Hollywood.

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FADE IN: 1 — Hollywood isn’t a place, really, it’s a concept, like a studio back lot – empty facades, but no reality.

  It’s a fabrication, like those flickering fantasies the place churns out relentlessly.  Because — what people think of when they think of Hollywood isn’t there. The studios aren’t in Hollywood – they’re out in the Valley or down in Culver City.  The City of Hollywood is one of the few places in Los Angeles that feels like the downtown of a big urban center, a downtown that has been left behind because life has moved out to the suburbs.

I had been in Los Angeles for almost twenty years when I went to live in Hollywood in the summer of 1997.  And yet in all that time I’d never really been to Hollywood.  Oh, I drove through it once in a while on my way to somewhere else, and got jumbled impressions of streets jammed with tourists busily visiting tawdry storefronts in a rather dumpy neighborhood.  But I had never actually been there before a bus deposited me at the corner of Highland and Hollywood Boulevard late on a hot afternoon in early July.

I stood there for a long time, just looking around.  You run into so many strange people on Hollywood Boulevard that I guess nobody paid any attention to a 46-year-old  white guy, tall and rather slim, with graying hair and glasses, dressed in a polo shirt and jeans and tennis shoes, carrying a small nylon bag.  Somehow after the jolting bus ride, all I could do was stand still and stare.  I knew I was going to stay there for a while, but I didn’t know where, or how long, and somehow I didn’t really care.  I just stared blankly at the people crowding up and down the sidewalk, not making eye contact.

After a while I turned and wandered up the boulevard, the setting sun at my back, throwing a lanky shadow ahead of me as I passed t-shirt shops with blaring music, and boutiques selling adult lingerie.  The street was crowded—I think it was a Friday night—and because I wasn’t really watching where I went, I jostled a lot of people without meaning to.  They would swear or laugh at me and then disappear, and my face, which was mostly turned toward the sidewalk, didn’t change.  My mind was numb, and I was only dimly aware of where I was going, enough to avoid wandering through busy intersections but not enough to really pay any attention to all the surface glitz being so stridently promoted around me.

As I plodded up the street with my eyes cast down, I could feel my face tighten into a frown as I turned over in my mind the pain I was going through.  Over and over, the same thing, with no resolution, because there was no way to change it.  Sometimes I’d shake my head and close my eyes because it hurt so much, and my breath would come in deep, painful sighs.  But nobody, of course, noticed what I was going through.  It doesn’t pay to get involved with the people you meet on the street there. 

I finally stopped when I got to the Pantages Theater, a tony venue where a revival of Phantom of the Opera was running.  I had become aware that the character of the crowd had changed, and when I looked up there were men in suits, by God, and women in shiny evening dresses, and I felt out of place and crossed the street to the darker side of the Boulevard.  I realized that night had fallen and for the first time I raised my head and looked back down the street.  The place had totally changed.  In the darkness, you couldn’t see the cheapness of the shops.  All you could see were the lights— neon signs and blinking advertisements.  There were lights from the traffic on the Boulevard, and far down the street there were searchlights cutting through the sky, disappearing into the darkness that hung over Hollywood and which the lights never managed to dispel. 

When I crossed the street it was like I had entered another world.  I looked around me for the first time, really seeing what was there.  I saw trendy, overdressed young people and dark, slow-moving men and women with sunken eyes and threadbare clothes.  There were panhandlers and foreigners who spoke Italian or German or heavily accented English.  And there was noise—traffic and laughter and moving feet and the loud music from the shops.  As I walked back down the street, my face was still blank, but my eyes looked around in wonder at everything.  I didn’t bump into people now.  It was like being in a movie that was happening all around me, and I was watching where I went, interested in something for the first time in a long while.