Hollywood Is Murder

The Poetics of Pride

In Jonathan Leaf’s brilliant new novel, City of Angles, an aspiring actress, Vincenza Morgan, pops her car’s trunk only to find the dead body of her occasional lover, Billy Selva. He’s been jammed into the small space on his back, his knees pinioned against his shoulders, the likely murder weapon, a handgun used as a prop in a film, resting on his chest.

Vincenza is about to be late for an important audition: a part in a Reese Witherspoon star vehicle. Her agent has threatened that she “was not to miss an audition again, not if she were receiving chemo and confronted by the amputation of a limb.” What to do?

This dilemma serves as the novel’s precipitating action. It’s of a piece with the all-pervasive conflict at the story’s heart: unbridled ambition versus human decency—or what remains of it among Hollywood’s cast of characters. The torque in this dramatic tension derives from the worst in human nature; mankind’s original sin of pride.

At dark as this sounds, in form the novel is a delightful mix of comic novel and mystery story. Being funny in print is a wildly undervalued gift, as very few have the knack. (We miss you, P.J. O’Rourke!) In Leaf’s case the novel’s humor might best be described as sardonic. Many of its scenes are akin to New Yorker cartoons—after a moment of startling recognition we can’t help but grin.  

The book’s title puts an apt spin on LA and also employs an old Hollywood line. “Everybody’s got an angle.” It sounds like a statement James Cagney might have sneered out in his tough-guy films of the 1930s. It actually comes from Bing Crosby in 1954’s “White Christmas.”

City of Angles builds its series of conflicts culminating in Tom Selva’s murder on the cross-purposes of its characters, their angles. Everyone’s working everyone, which turns personal encounters into high-stakes theater. As one of Leaf’s characters observes:

…the city was one where people unexpectedly fell or rose, often because of unforeseen reinventions. So you had to be alert with everyone, and you had to remember that nothing you said was an aside, nothing incidental, that every statement was a sales pitch, a presentation, a performance.

There’s a basic empathy, though, in Jonathan Leaf’s vision for peoples’ simple humanity. This is never forgotten even when he’s dealing with the vilest of his characters. His capacity to create the interior worlds of a broad array of people—from aspiring actors and industry execs to cops and district attorneys to illegals from Guatemala—manifests not only an understanding of basic human desires but their embrace. He’s no misanthrope.

This distinguishes him from most comic novelists, as humor, especially in print, often depends on scathing caricature and the ruthless administration of justice. (I’ll never forget Pedro Luz’s simultaneous rape and drowning by a bottlenose dolphin in Carl Hiaasen’s Native Tongue.)

Leaf is especially appreciative of what drives people to seek careers in entertainment and their subsequent vulnerabilities. Los Angeles, the author notes, is a city populated by searchers; one of the reasons southern California has always been the breeding ground of religious fervor and cults. People land in LA chasing their dreams.

The not-quite-thirty actress we first meet, Vincenza Morgan, is a case in point. Born Kelli Haines, the Homecoming Queen of Burnsville High in Eagan, Minnesota, she headed to LA right after graduation. She couldn’t wait to escape the stepfather who beat her and live a life inspired by the magic of her appearance in her school play, Our Town.  Billy Rosenberg, a novelist and screenwriter, landed in LA after Dartmouth and early success as a novelist, seeking work as a screenwriter. He’s just as intent on fulfilling his early promise and realizing his own conception of success. The story is much the same for Claire Hesper, a trust-fund beauty and who happens to be Billy’s fellow Dartmouth alum. More gifted as a comedienne rather than as an actress, Sara Kertesz attends the same acting class as Vincenza and harbors ambitions as a producer. While she seems to take everything lightly, she may be the most ambitious of all.

They and the hundreds—the thousands—of other Homecoming Queens, WASP beauties, class clowns, and screenplay laptop jockeys around them are possessed by the notion they have a special destiny awaiting them in the entertainment industry.

Leaf never mocks this. Rather, he examines how the natural impulse to find our destiny and even shape it can become toxic, as we bargain away our humanity for money, sex, fame, and power.

It’s these bad bargains, these trades, these transactions, that makes Leaf’s Hollywood into the fulfillment of what poet Edmund Spenser envisioned in The House of Pride—humanity’s attempt to recreate the divine through sheer illusion.

It’s tempting to say that this contagion is systemic, since we meet it on every hand. Leaf doesn’t let anyone off the hook, though, not even the writer Billy Rosenberg, one of the novel’s few redemptive characters. The contagion of pride rules the town because it rules in everyone’s heart.

The transactional nature of Hollywood is exemplified by its sexual politics. The novel self-consciously takes place after the #MeToo movement, in the year before the Covid pandemic hit. Its studio execs understand they have to be careful. This doesn’t keep one, however, from turning Claire Hesper into his mistress, with the usual constant promises of leaving his wife.

It doesn’t keep the soon-to-be-dead Tom Selva from bedding anyone who attracts his eye, even though the women know he has a pregnant wife at home.

Nor does it keep fabulous looking women from wearing out their tubby and balding studio execs with lubricious attentions before imposing sexual moratoriums once married to these schlubs.

Sex becomes the epitome of every Hollywood transaction, with each side—each sex—calculating return on investment.

A town, a business, an industry where everyone is seeking to be among the few chosen ones is ripe for exploitation. Many times the young and poor have only their beauty to trade and lack the wisdom to hold it dear.

City of Angles is littered with seemingly personal meetings, where somebody wants something—often not the thing for which they are ostensibly asking—and the other person feverishly calculates whether granting the favor will be worth the debt incurred. For example, the head of a Netflix-like streaming service, Todd Gelber, asks a longtime industry friend to introduce him to Vincenza Morgan, implying he needs a mistress to get him through the sexual winter imposed by his formerly attentive Hollywood wife. What he really wants is to incur favor with The Church of Life—transparently, a stand-in for Scientology—in order to manipulate a big-time star disciple.   

The Church of Life—a.k.a. Scientology—has rationalized how to exploit the ambitions and fears of countless unwitting competitors for Hollywood’s prizes into an industrial-scale machine that manufactures money and power. Leaf performs the great service of sketching out how the Church of Life takes the haphazard methods of predators like the infamous Harvey Weinstein and turns them into organized crime posing as religion. The novel is better at this than all the expose´s to date, as valuable as they are. I can’t think anyone would ever darken that portal to hell’s door after reading City of Angles.

The Church of Life gathers together all the various characters’ angles and its own as well. Tom Selva ends up in Morgan Vincenza’s trunk because her friend, Sara Kertesz, and she had the bright idea of advancing their careers through shooting a John Cassavetes-style indie (see 1968’s Faces and 1974s A Woman Under the Influence). The film stars Selva and other stars within the Church of Life’s fold while Vincenza and Sara produce and play plum parts as well. The project appeals to Selva because as the star of car chase flicks (think The Fast & Furious franchise), he longs to be respected as a serious actor. To the industry he’s still the good-looking grease monkey a fourth-rate talent scout found in a Cal State Northridge auto class.

The Netflix-like exec, Todd Gelber, thinks buying and killing the picture will win him favor with the Church of Life and also Selva’s agent, all of whom suppose that Selva really is little more than a handsome mannequin. The Church of Life wants to protect the reputation of its meal ticket, one supposes, and for other reasons as well, as it turns out.

The question remains: who exactly wants to pin the blame on Morgan Vincenza and why?

I’m not going to ruin the novel for you by disclosing the who in the whodunnit. What I will say is that City of Angles exemplifies Aristotle’s ideal in The Poetics. There he argues that the each component of a literary work—he’s talking specifically about tragedy but much the same applies to any narrative—should be subordinate to the dramatic action. The characters represented, the style of their depiction, and the scenes chosen should be generated by, resonate with, and amplify the unfolding of the plot. There should be unity among all the elements represented. Amazingly, City of Angles delivers on Aristotle’s ideal.

Perhaps because Jonathan Leaf has worked so extensively as a playwright (his Pushkin was one of the Wall Street Journal’s 10 best in its debut year) he grasps the unity of a literary work at a deeper imaginative level than almost any mystery writer—much less comic mystery writer—I’ve ever encountered. City of Angles delivers a wallop with its ending, where we find out that envy, lust, greed, and hubris have combined in the murder and its attempted cover-up.

The mystery at the heart of this story turns out to be the mystery of evil, including, in the end, its gratuitous nature—people do great harm for many reasons but ultimately simply because they can and will.

In other words, we enjoy being cruel.

I don’t know of anyone in Hollywood who would have the guts to do this, but City of Angles ought to be made immediately into a movie. Nothing like this has come along to my knowledge since Robert Altman’s The Player.

Let me give the filmmakers a head start. For a theme song, I suggest David & David’s “Welcome To The Boomtown.”

So I say
I say welcome, welcome to the boomtown
Pick a habit
We got plenty to go around
Welcome, welcome to the boomtown
All that money makes such a succulent sound
Welcome to the boomtown

— Harold Fickett