Los Angeles [antikvár]

Prologue It is jarring to be planning a trip somewhere, to have, as the French aptly say, already departed, morally speaking, only to find that your friends all seem to believe you are going somewhere else. This is even more troubling when the two destinations in question are, in fact, one and the same. When I began to teli people in New York that I would be staying in Los Angeles for a while, and hoped to write something about the city, they seldom waited another sentence before beginning to discourse on the subject they presumed me to have taken on. Which is only to say that in the month before my departure for the West Coast, I heard more Hollywood stories and more L.A. jokes than I knew what to do with. There were not, it appeared, any other subjects of note that could possibly concern me, anyway. This consensus was not encouraging. L.A. was not just a familiar subject; it verged on being a tapped-out one, or so I was assured. Repeatedly. Here are somé of the things my friends said about the project: "Is there really anything new to be said about Hollywood?" "You're really going out to do a script, right?" "Didn't John Gregory Dunne already write a book about one of the major stúdiós? I've got a copy I could lend you if you need it."