I'm living and working in Hollywood. Have done for nearly ten years now. It's wild - I realized recently that I have been an entertainment industry professional for longer than I was an AV consultant. I have done this for longer than high school, college and the gap year betwixt.

Yet the last movie I saw in theaters was Star Trek Into Darkness. Television is chockablock with shows I've worked on but not watched. I read something like 24 books a year but maybe one of them is fiction.

My friends are entertainment professionals. They work on shit you've seen, shit you've heard of. BM vs. SM. ID4MkII. Fury Road. TMNT. But we don't care. Discussion at dinner last night was about whether Spike Jonze jumped the shark before or after Being John Malkovich. My DP buddy's favorite film of all time is Tarkovsky's Stalker. And when I started this adventure we all worked on the movies we worked on so that we could afford to work on the movies we wanted to see.

But those movies don't exist anymore. Nobody is making them. The most successful producer I know has gotten shit to Cannes several times but you haven't heard of his films, despite them gaining major theatrical releases. I don't talk to him anymore because Hollywood starfuckers annoy the shit out of me. The most successful producer I'm friendly with doesn't want to make movies anymore because it's a fucking grind. Subverting your life for 18-24 months so that you can have something that someone somewhere can flip through at Walmart and decide not to buy. And those are the profitable ones.

I haven't watched Stranger Things. I probably should. At the same time, the people I know who love it are the ones whose relationship to the entertainment industry is nostalgic at best. Down below there's a discussion of the "genre" of superhero movies. Seriously? That whole pedantic manichean clusterfuck blew up out of cynical marketing in the past ten years. Dear ComicCon, fuck you. We thought we had our sci fi back when Star Wars finally ran its course. But no, we had to suck down another ten years of Pepper Fucking Potts while JJ Abrams retooled his lens flare for Tatooine. If you google image search "Malibu Cliff House" you know what you get a faceful of?

Eat a dick, Tony Stark.

So it's pretty fucked up that I'm looking up "Malibu Cliff House" on google image search because I was looking for one I set a screenplay in back in 2009, but never wrote. 'cuz I'm writing it again. Yeah. My attention span is so short I can't edit the book that I know I can sell but I can write the screenplay I know I can't. 'cuz me and my cynical buddies can shoot that shit and at least have something to strike back at the fucking dark(knight) with.

I had the 8 year chip, tacocat, but I fell off the wagon. Fortunately, self-loathing is a useful prime motivator for creativity.

(the house I was looking for was built in 2003 and didn't sell for 8 years at $1.8m. It sold in 2011 for $1.5m and has since been sold twice, each owner pocketing more than $350k simply by living in a bitchin' ass Malibu cliff house for 18 months. If you ever wondered why you feel like the economy is hammering you while Bloomberg keeps talking about how great things are, that's why)