There are sure signs of spring and the promise of eventual summer in Minnesota, although snow has fallen as late as the end of May. Nonetheless, we're sustained by the sure knowledge that our summers usually are a delight, and this is a beautiful day.

The movie, "Fargo," is right: Minnesotans do talk about the weather a lot; but, while the dialect in the film elicits a smile of recognition from native Minnesotans, it is a Hollywood caricature, after all. Most of us do not really talk like that.

I'm a native Southern Californian, although I have not lived there since I was 2 1/2. My wife Roberta and I visited about a month ago. I was reminded how much I really do enjoy that area. Like so many experiences during recent months, it brought back memories of times past.

I managed to meet with Jerry Willenbring along with his son and colleague, Nick, in San Diego, where Careers Online, Inc. is headquartered. I also met with my former movie maker colleague, Brossy Reina, in Orange County. We expect that Brossy will be part of some of our projects later on. He's surely one of the more interesting persons I've worked with in recent years. He spent a number of early years as a professional singer, served as an officer in Vietnam, and was head of public relations for a major west coast university for a time. He also spent about fourteen years in Hollywood working post-production on various feature films and major television projects.

Oddly, Minnesota and Hollywood have developed a relatively close connection during recent years. The Coen brothers, who produced "Fargo," grew up here. This has also become a favored location for Hollywood productions. Several films per year are shot here. Oscar winner Jessica Lange lives only a few miles down the road in lovely little Stillwater on the St. Croix river that we share with Wisconsin. She grew up in Cloquet near Duluth, which is also known for having the only gas station designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (honest!).

University of Wisconsin business graduate, Arnold Swartzenegger, is in town now filming his next Christmas comedy, "Jingle all the way," and it isn't the only film happening here right now. Megastars not only sell movie tickets; they can also help sell newspapers. Arnold's been on the front page here several times during the past week or two. Roberta and I saw him at Warner Brothers in March finishing off his latest action flick. We were told that he wanted to re-shoot a scene because "it wasn't bloody enough," and whatever Arnold wants to do, Arnold gets to do. Apparently, he's just purchased John Kennedy's golf clubs for more than 3/4 of a million dollars. Wake me when all this is over.

I'm ambivalent about Hollywood, but no more than about the academic culture and others. On the one hand, there is only one Hollywood, so far as the intricate craft of film-making is concerned (and the equally intricate craft of deal-making). It certainly has attracted one of the highest concentrations of brilliantly talented people on the planet.

On the other hand, Margot Kidder has been in the news a lot during recent days, and her apparently sad situation helps remind us that Hollywood can be a real meat grinder too. According to press reports, she has experienced a sequence of unfortunate events, including an injury and other health problems, which led to her bankruptcy. She's been sick, she's broke, and she can't get work. Only a few years ago, she was a major star, and major stars, while they're major stars, are treated like royalty in Hollywood. But, among other things, she committed the unforgivable sin of growing older than about thirty, and I wonder how long it's been since anyone in Hollywood has returned her calls.

Of course, Hollywood is not the only place in which one can find persons suffering from psychiatric illnesses, which, after all, are simply illnesses like any other. Sometimes debilitating, sometimes life-threatening, but mostly treatable when resources are made available. Despite the stereotypes, I'm not sure that Hollywood is any colder, more mercenary, or more predatory than the rest of American society. Maybe it simply reflects our society as a whole, not only in what it puts on the screen, but also in the way people live and relate to one another in the community. Maybe things are just a bit more concentrated in that community, which, after all, is a relatively small community in which one can find nearly anything, however remarkable, however peculiar, however depraved.

Take Melrose Avenue, for instance. Drive up the Hollywood Freeway from Los Angeles. Take the Melrose exit and continue west. You'll pass Paramount Pictures with its famous front gate that goes back at least sixty years. A local television station sits next door. Continue on, and you'll eventually pass through quite a number of blocks that are, well, tacky. Remarkably tacky. Some might see these few blocks as somehow symbolizing Hollywood's impact on the American culture.

It's not a slum. It's just, well, Hollywood tacky. A very strange mixture of the weird and unsettling, combined with a variety of ordinary businesses, some with very modest storefronts, behind which you may very well find people who also work under contract in the major film industry. Electricians, designers, lots of folks. But, in Hollywood, given the native insecurity of the industry, nearly everybody tries to have something else going on the side, just in case. Brossy tells me that at any particular time, less than 2 percent of the members of the Screen Actors Guild are able to make a living as screen actors. This includes many former household names.

Continue west on Melrose. Eventually, you will move out of the tacky area into a somewhat more ritzy part of west Hollywood. Here there are a lot of interior designers, art galleries, and so on, but still mixed in are a few mostly abandoned buildings, a few vacant lots with junk scattered around.

In one of the small galleries that probably started out as somebody's wood frame house years ago, I had a brief chat with Mark Kostabi who was exhibiting his recent work for the Hollywood community one night last month. Mark is 36 now, but for years, he was the enfant terrible of the international art scene, which he vaulted to the top of at about age 20. His work hangs in major galleries throughout the world. He'd probably also be deserving of the Nobel Prize in self-promotion, if there were such a thing, and running into him in this particular part of west Hollywood seemed appropriate somehow. Brilliant, enormously talented, unconventional, strange, but not nearly so strange as he likes to appear, outrageous. Yes, this is the right place.

Work in Hollywood, of course, is mostly just work like work anyplace. There is nothing particularly glamorous about a back lot that is not dressed for a shoot, and certainly nothing fancy about an interior shell with dirty old Styrofoam coffee cups sitting around. Nobody who works in that business confuses the images on the screen, which can take months to put together, with the daily work routine.

Nonetheless, we can learn something from this particular work setting. For one thing, the temp and contract work, with all their insecurities, lack of benefits, etc., that are becoming increasingly common throughout the economy, have been the norm in Hollywood from its beginning. Again, California has been showing us our future.

Also, while the American economy has been in need of a greater relationship between actual performance and its reward system for sometime, we might be careful about romanticizing meritocracy too much. If you set aside, for the moment, Hollywood's politics and what it often takes to get into positions of opportunity in the first place, there is a brutish justice to the way rewards are distributed there. Arnold is guaranteed $20 million per picture, not because he's a nice person or even particularly interesting, but because he can still fill theaters throughout the world. When he stops doing that, they won't return his calls either.

Big time commercial athletics, another branch of the entertainment business, is probably even more brutally just, in a sense, but, of course, only in a sense. Never mind the question of whether a human being should be entitled to several million dollars per year under any circumstances simply because he can throw a ball better than the rest of us. It's called the market system, and, in parts of the pop culture, it sometimes operates in a purer form than elsewhere.

A few years ago, Jack Morris was one of the top pitchers in American baseball's major leagues. Roberta and I watched him pitch the 7th game of the 1991 "World Series" in the Minneapolis Metrodome. Sorry, friends in other parts of the globe, but that's what we insist on calling a North American sports tournament. Anyway, multi-millionaire Jack walked out like a gladiator, and he seemed fifteen feet tall, invincible. He could hardly have gotten more attention. He performed brilliantly. It could not have been better if Hollywood had scripted it.

This summer, insisting that he can still throw a ball, Jack Morris will play baseball in the Twin Cities again. Not for the Minnesota Twins this time, but, instead, for the minor league team across town, the St. Paul Saints. He'll be playing along side youngsters who are full of hope, most of whom will never make the majors. But, at this point, it's the best Morris can get, and he has left his comfortable Montana ranch because he wants to play again. He hopes to prove himself sufficiently to get back in the major leagues somehow.

Nothing for old time sake in the majors. It is about as pure a performance-based reward system as one can find. You either hit the ball or you don't. You either strike them out, or you don't. No subjective supervisor's ratings to worry about. No water cooler politics to contend with. It's all real clear and real brutal.

Gary G. Johnson
April 28, 1996

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