HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—I have this dream that one day I will be in a position to make a parody of Hollywood that illuminates the profound nature of its rotten soul. I know, it's been done before, but bear with me. My idea has a really perverted twist in that it involves a thief responsible for stealing untold millions of dollars from people no one cares about—in this case, internet pornographers around the world—and then turning around a using his ill-gotten gains to start a career in mainstream Hollywood.
This lowlife, a white-toothed snake charmer whose willingness to mercilessly scam untold numbers of people is matched only by his personal arrogance, takes the illicit millions and starts a Hollywood production company, dumping a huge chunk of the filthy lucre into a feature that highlights his own exploits in the porn industry, with himself as, of course, the hero. The movie bombs, making back only a fraction of the production and marketing costs, but it features a couple of bona fide Hollywood B-listers and does just well enough at a few festivals to give the production company enough street cred to stay in business.
Mainstream Hollywood, of course, could care less where the new company's money came from. In Tinsel Town, those sorts of questions can easily boomerang, exposing the entire rotten core of an industry that is in many ways the perfect business through which to launder money made from other questionable ventures. In many ways, the snake oil charmer has made a lateral move from porn into Hollywood, and picks up right where he left off, swindling people fictitiously rather than literally.
In a brazen move that is seen as a further insult to the industry that paid a big price for trusting him, the producer also makes a so-called documentary about porn in which he tells the story of people who have left the industry. Ironically, the producer fails to include himself. In this way, he can "comment" on the business from his perch in Hollywood without having to admit his own destructive role in it. The documentary bombs upon its first release, so the producer simply renames it and re-releases it a few years later, but no one is fooled.
The producers' many victims are also not amused. These are people still smarting over the fact that theft in plain sight could take place and no one would care, and even worse, that Hollywood, which looks down its nose at porn, would so greedily take the stolen money for its own.
Determined not to let the producer get away with it, these people—like the abused circus workers in Tod Browning's 1932 classic, Freaks—decide to turn the tables on him by, in this case, making their own movie—part reality show, part feature film, part episodic TV, part documentary, part porn flick, and ultimately, part video game—which just happens to feature our hero in a role he did not even realize he had agreed to play—as himself.
In Hollywood, all that glitters is good, and the bad guy in real life often gets to become the good guy in real life if he comes equipped with the money to buy that good will. But the cinematic blade cuts both ways, and in my parody of Hollywood the bad guy, a fictional character shaped from the clay of real life, actually gets his comeuppance once the movie is released to glowing reviews and huge box office, and so do his new Hollywood friends, whose careers all wind up in the shitter as a result of their association with the pearly-teethed snake oil salesman whose own unwitting cinematic debut reveals him as the sort of degenerate even Hollywood eschews—if the money is right.
