The Spirit of Los Angeles

Every year is an election year in Hollywood. What is the weekly box-office tally if not a referendum on the stars who compete for our allegiance?

Notwithstanding Madison Avenue and Washington D.C., Hollywood is where most of the ideas that shape America are hatched, groomed and tossed into the ring like fighting roosters. From the giant donut by the L.A. airport to the preening bodybuilders of Venice Beach to the brand-defining sign atop the Hollywood hills, the people and places of the metro area radiate a vibe that shouts: "Choose me."

The electoral underpinnings of greater Los Angeles are laid bare at Oscar time, when various entities with an agenda jostle for airtime and I return to my old haunts for a weekend visitation.

This year’s Oscar ceremony had been moved up on the calendar, to curtail the mudslinging that had taken some of the luster off the awards in recent years. This compressed campaign season, along with restrictions on screener tapes, meant that slow-closing darkhorse candidates would be at a disadvantage. Polls suggested that the winners in the major categories were virtually preordained: "The Return of the King," Charlize Theron, Sean Penn, Renee Zellweger and Tim Robbins. The biggest question was whether peaceniks Penn and Robbins would say something more provocative about the war in Iraq than the obvious "We told you so."

Two nights before the ceremony, the red carpet area in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard was the eerily calm center of a palpably tense and cop-filled neighborhood. While camera crews in perches calibrated their equipment like rooftop snipers, I shared a quiet moment with the golden idol himself.

The Hollywood and Highland mall that hosts the Oscar ceremony has an unmistakably pagan aura. It’s modeled after the Babylonian temple that is leveled in the silent classic "Intolerance." (Babylon is now Iraq, but the elephants on pedestals hint that maybe it’s our own corrupt republic that is headed for a fall.)

For me, there has always been a weirdly religious quality to cinema and to the make-believe town with which the industry is associated. On the week when "The Passion of the Christ" was breaking box-office records, that consciousness was elevated. Across from my fleabag hotel on Sunset Boulevard was the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church. (For you non-Catholics, the "blessed sacrament" is communion, the ritual eating of the crucified Jesus). In Hollywood’s golden age, the church was a tour stop, and some of the pews are sponsored by bygone celebrities. (On a particularly bad day in 1992, after spending the night on the steps of the church, I said my prayers in a pew that was sponsored by actress Irene Dunne.)

But scores of other faiths and philosophies battle for attention in Hollywood. Next to the church is the aptly named Crossroads of the World, a little office park with an ocean-liner motif that was the setting for Danny Devito’s scandal magazine in the movie "L.A. Confidential." That’s where you’ll find the local offices of Eckankar, a quasi-Tibetan religion that believes in "soul travel." I’d always wanted to peek inside, to see if it might give me a karmic flashback, so finally I stopped in for a chat. I told the friendly couple who sat me in the library that I recalled a local-ago St. Louis newscast in which a little Eck adherent had been asked to explain what she learned from her religion. The girl said one of its principles was to never say anything that wasn’t two out of the following three things: Necessary, kind and true.

Across the street was the headquarters of the Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights, an organization which preaches that psychiatrists are brainwashers. The building also advertises a museum of psychiatric torture. What it doesn’t readily advertise it that the organization is a spin-off of Scientology. But elsewhere in Hollywood, Scientology stands proud. On the sidewalk in front of another Scientology office I saw a faith-enforcing apparatus called an E-meter, a pseudo lie-detector that looks like one of those car-battery contraptions that frat boys test at Tijuana cantinas when they want to prove their manhood.

Next to the machine was a friendly lad who offered me a free IQ test and personality inventory. I told him I was too busy, which was not kind, but it was necessary and true.

Taped to a vending machine that dispensed free weeklies (which compared Neil Young’s "Greendale" and Mel Gibson’s "The Passion of the Christ" as competing visions of faith and redemption), I found an interesting flyer. It warned about the rampant manifestations of domestic terrorism: "partial birth abortion, a homosexual revolution, cloning experimentation, and bizarre religious cults like Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the ugly Roman Catholic fallacy." The leafleteer, who signed himself the Chuckawalla Valley Christian Soldier, urged his readers to pledge their loyalty to our "divinely appointed president."

My own hotline to the father in heaven was severed when I lost the cell phone I inherited from my dad last year. I raced back to the press office to see if I could find it; but beneath a liquor-store wall that was formerly the site of a pro-Bush billboard, I was stopped for jaywalking. My inquisitors were the archetypal good-cop/bad-cop tandem. (The bad cop even gnawed on a toothpick.) Although my talismanic press badge earned me a reprieve, Mr. Toothpick threatened to yank my Oscar credentials if I transgressed again.

By the time the cops let me go, the phone was no longer where I left it.

I had to score a new cell phone, quick. Although I knew some back alleys where mine would eventually be resold, I opted for a new one, with a built-in camera that made me feel like a journalistic James Bond. Armed with my new gadget, I convened the annual meeting of exiled St. Louisans at a pub called The Cat & Fiddle on Sunset.

While I waited for the attendees, I had my first star sighting, albeit a minor one. Seated at a table in the pub courtyard was Michael Constantine, whose career was revived as the father in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" but who will always be dear to me as the dour principal on "Room 222." This was my opportunity to ask him whatever happened to Karen Valentine, who should have graduated from that TV series to movie stardom. But Constantine was busy chatting to a guy with a shaved head and a goatee who looked like a version of me with a gym membership and a rent problem.

Some things hadn’t changed since our last meeting. Doug Cox of Edwardsville, an Emmy-nominated writer for "Pee Wee’s Playhouse," was still making the rounds of film festivals with his feature-length comedy "Shrink Rap." Actress Susie Duff of Affton was still refining "Locked Up in Malibu," a program that teaches improv to young inmates. (A week earlier, Duff had been in Juarez, Mexico, with Sally Field, Jane Fonda and "The Vagina Monologues" author Eve Ensler to raise awareness about the unsolved murders of hundreds of young women in the border-town factory zone.) Although my friend Paul Boydston of Odessa, Mo., had become a father that month, he was able to join us and reported he was still scouting film locations and still trying to launch a reality TV series. (Boydston claims he was the first producer to pitch a television show about blind-dates, an idea that was promptly stolen.)

Newcomers at this year’s gathering included Shaun Peterson of Wentzville, the director of a terrific indie feature called "Living in Missouri" and a hit video for the band Train; and Bill Rust, a tech wizard from Webster Groves who freaked when he figured out that his mom and Duff’s mom were best friends.

Director George Hickenlooper e-mailed his regrets, because he had to attend an Independent Spirit Awards function for his documentary "Mayor of the Sunset Strip" (which is opening in St. Louis on April 16). But we did attract an attendee who is hotter than St. Louis in summertime. Screenwriter James Gunn, who wrote "Dawn of the Dead" (which opened last week) and "Scooby Doo 2" (which opens today), brought his actress-wife, Jenna Fischer, and his screenwriting brother Brian.

James recalled that when the original "Scooby Doo" movie was announced, expectations were low. James was the target of a hate-mail campaign that originated at an influential movie-gossip Web site. Then the movie was re-edited by studio executives because test audiences objected to some sexual innuendo and references to the occult. Yet the neutured film became a surprise hit with kids and spawned a sequel. He asserted that the second "Scooby" was a better film, because the success of the first one gave the creative team the clout to retain their vision.

James has extra clout now that "Dawn of the Dead" has displaced "The Passion of the Christ" as the number-one movie in America. As James said,"’The Passion’ only has one guy rising from the dead. We've got thousands."

James’s brother Brian said he was working on a script for Disney called "Supersize." It’s based on the true story of two grade-school siblings who were so enormous that they masqueraded as teenagers to play varsity football.

Like the Gunns, Jenna Fischer is from Manchester. She recently starred opposite James in a mockumentary she directed called "Lollilove," about a Yuppie couple who give inspirational candy to homeless people. But she’s got a better chance of becoming a household name through "The Office," an adaptation of the award-winning British TV series. Jenna plays the receptionist in the NBC pilot, which stars Steve Carell and was directed by Ken Kwapis--who is from St. Louis.

My penultimate St. Louis moment was on the afternoon of the Oscars. It’s a thrilling if surreal time to be in Los Angeles, as cops line the streets, helicopters whir overhead and every media outlet in the Western world turns it attention to this rather bleak piece of real estate.

Although the California primary was looming, the occupation in Iraq was unraveling and the president of Haiti had just been "voluntarily escorted" to another country by American forces, the only politicking on the parade route was a pair of friendly souls toting a Dennis Kucinich banner. But the familiar Oscar-day characters were out in force: The guy with the paper whale hat who waves his demo tape and begs for a recording contract, the Superman lookalike who poses for photos, the anti-gay crusader who cruises on Hollywood boulevard in a hillbilly truck emblazoned with hellfire slogans.

The crowd of spectators was sparse, yet there was an unusual number of religious zealots, including a not-so-friendly guy with in "Repent or Perish" t-shirt who hectored the passing limousines with a bullhorn.

One of the black limousines eased to a stop so a police officer could poke a bomb-check mirror under the chassis. The celebrity occupant waved to the civilians on the sidewalk. "It’s Pierce Brosnan!" someone shrieked.

I raced to the window and called out to the movie star, "Hey, Pierce, I’m a friend of Judy Mancuso." Judy Mancuso is a woman from Cape Girardeau who moved out to L.A. when I did in the late ‘80s and struck a lasting friendship with the future Mrs. Pierce Brosnan, Keely Shaye Smith. Judy once brought Keely to a party at my house, where the fellas deemed her too beautiful to approach. (We had the same reaction to an aspiring musician from Missouri named Sheryl Crow.)

"Tell Judy I said hello," Pierce replied with apparent sincerity. Keely, in the seat beside him, waved merrily and called out "Me, too!" Then I took their picture with my James Bond camera phone.

The Oscar ceremony itself was entertaining but free of surprises. In the midst of global upheaval, with billions of voices clamoring to express their version of truth, Hollywood had cast its vote for a fantasy about the ultimate war between good and evil.

After I filed my story, I heard about a party at a Hollywood VFW hall where 1,500 Lord of the Rings fans would be dancing jigs and drinking ale until the wee hours. But I was through with playing the out-of-town reporter. I traded my Cardinals hat for a cap from my college alma mater, the University of Southern California, and headed to the diviest bar I could find. In a working-class corner of East Hollywood, in a joint called the Grasshopper, a young man spotted my hat and threw me the USC-alum hand signal. I went over to say hello and to talk about the Trojans football team.

He handed me a business card that said his name was Jon Oliver King, and he was a classical guitarist.

I tried to make like a local, and I asked him which high school he had attended.

"I’m not from around here," he said. "I’m from St. Louis."