As the city that made all my dreams come true continues to burn, a few thoughts on what has always made it so great (and the ghouls with pig shit in their veins currently celebrating its pain)
That was one awesome story/letter about what is happening in LA! Thank you so much, Cole, for writing such a poignant and celebratory story of what LA is really about. As you said, all those resentful human beings are just being petty and selfish for a dream they couldn't accomplish, as you did as a successful screenwriter. You're the bomb 💥 ❤️
I simply cannot understand how anyone can revel in the misfortune of others, whomever they are. The world needs compassion now more than ever. Thank you for expressing this so eloquently. I’m sorry you’re having to watch the destruction of so much that you hold so dear.
It’s a happy town. You can ask anyone - busboy, real estate agent, barista - and more than not they came from somewhere else to pursue a dream.
Those who come to LA aren’t here for the money, even though they’d like some… they’re here - we’re here - because we have a burning desire in our heart that won’t go away.
I moved to LA in 1985 to pursue my dream of being on the big screen. I knew no one. Had no connections. Lived in a studio apartment in Westwood waitressing at El Torito’s. (I left a good job in Minneapolis, a marketing manager for a hotel chain)
A mere 7 years later in 1992, I realized I was tired of playing other people and wanted to be myself.
That became my new dream: could I live an authentic life as me? (I had no idea who I was.)
LA gave me the courage to leave one dream for a truer dream, a more “who am I” dream.
That quest led me to live in Chicago, Washington DC, London, Boulder and other cities here and there.
Which led me to ironically be the first Life Coach in the world to change lives on TV. Hysterical, right? I’ve done over 600 episodes in 3 television series.
And regardless of where I travel, I always end up back in LA.
I may have come here to play a part in movie magic but the reason I return is it’s one place I can be fully, whole heartedly me… because I’m surrounded by people who are committed to doing the same.
The world thinks LA is filled with fakes but I know it’s filled with the realest people I’ve ever met.
If you haven't yet found Terry Pratchett, you'll like his take on Hollywood, "Moving Pictures". And, yes fuck all those ghouls celebrating this pain. Well put.
It's been called many things - that cloying, misdiagnosed condition that masquerades as jealously, fear or spite from those around others trying to live larger than life. I know it's hard to forgive, and to be worn down by those seeking to twist a very sad situation with a nasty socio-political inflection, but I hear you. And there are plenty of others too I'm certain who feel the same. Viva LA, and long live the city of dreams. Stay strong Cole.
Wonderfully written! These mysteries of the human condition are the kind of topics no AI can come close to dealing with as an aspiring generator of entertainment filler.
Thank you, I will! I call them "AI Critters." IRL, I was a contractor for a law firm and busted a new would-be freelancer who was sending in AI-generated pieces much faster and cheaper than our usual stable of writers (very arcane niche of law requiring deep background and discernment). The pieces (on spec) were really garbage. Here! I wrote about it. What a hoot!
What a beautiful tribute to L.A.! I have a friend who is finally starting her dream of a singing career there after marriage, 3 children and divorce. She has been safe from the fires so far, and I hope the fires are under control soon.
Thank you for this. I did not follow my dreams, but am happy with the life I have, and love that others follow their dreams. They (you) have given us great art and made life meaningful. Anyone who finds any joy in this unimaginable suffering of others, is a monster. 💔
The thing is, we end up finding our dreams sometimes. Life is a Stones song. You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might just get what you need. I think life is complicated and I don't judge why anyone ends up anywhere. I just hope they're happy wherever they are.
ex Chicagoan since 1996. I dreamed of living in Los Angeles since I was at most 10. I knew this was my place and ached to be here. and while I can certainly imagine the benefits of not living here (not the least of which is having a much bigger, nicer house), I don't think I'll ever leave. my people are here. the weirdos and dreamers. I'm old enough that most of my friends back in Chicago are locked into pretty good, mostly lucrative lives that are leading towards a comfortable retirement, and almost nothing I do feels comfortable as I continue to dream. if I was like this back there, I'd be a pariah. out here in LA, I'm probably more normal than most.
"if I was like this back there, I'd be a pariah. out here in LA, I'm probably more normal than most."
I love this observation very much. Exactly. Dreamers are typically pariahs within their families and communities. LA is the shelter that takes them in. (Shit, I wish I'd written that into the piece now. Heh.)
I had a rare experience of a family that not only encouraged me to be an artist but seemed to have outsized expectations. on the one hand, it was great. my parents were both very enthusiastic about me becoming a filmmaker, supportive to the point that my mom found me a job locally as a PA one summer (I hated it hahaha never worked so hard in my life and it was "just" a crappy corporate sales video - I learned to love production later), sent me to NYU Film, paid for my student productions that ran over budget, etc.
socially, it wasn't so good. friends expressed skepticism, one told me I'd die if I went to NY from the Chicago burbs (I did not die), school bullies called me all kinds of names for being artistic and not sporty, and so on.
what I think nobody expected, myself included, was how much this path would change me from their perception and outsized expectations of me. that I'd follow some kind of traditional route into and up through the system to wild success, and that I would share their worldview even as I lived a radically different life from any of them.
nor did any of us expect it to be a lifelong process... I mean, I'm nowhere near where I'm meant to be, and yet I seem to be right where I need to be, and I'm pretty damn lucky, and yet endlessly frustrated and heartsick at all the things that I dream of that haven't become reality yet.
which is precisely what this life has in store for any of us. and thank God it's here in LA where I'm surrounded by my fellow creative miscreants.
Thanks for sharing a bit about your life. I feel odd knowing so much now without a name...do feel free to share that, if you want. Otherwise, no worries and best of luck on your continuing creative adventures!
Love your eloquent response. Thank you for taking the time. And I do believe there is an intersection between human reality and spiritual truth and that intersection, for me, is my middle way.
No one knows who they are… perhaps I better get to writing posts already! Maybe I can help! ❤️
"I was tired of playing other people and wanted to be myself... (I had no idea who I was.)"
Thanks for sharing this powerful insight. I often think that conservative suspicions of LA's dream factory are rooted in a similar concern -- that Hollywood storytellers construct narrative universes where people get lost and never confront the identity challenge you express so eloquently. The problem with this critique is that many conservatives believe there's only one meaning-making Story that's true -- the Christian one. But the flip side is an endless tsunami of stories that overwhelm and disorient you... or you walk away to figure out who you really are.
Put another way: The Church once controlled a singular narrative inside which many people had to live. Now we have a post-Enlightenment culture where everyone is encouraged to tell their own story or to make up stories, which leads to a world with billions of narrative without a center. No wonder there's an epidemic of loneliness.
Seems like there should be something in the middle.
Thanks for your response, Cole. If you have specific links to earlier posts re: fracturing of culture, I'd love to read them. ... Related Q: What role do you think our golden age of Narrative plays in that fracture?
Hi Cole, I had just NOW been thinking of you and wondering how you were. Great big virtual hugs to you and your family. Wow. What a stunningly beautiful and sad and perceptive piece you have written here. Thank you.
Still remember that Dreaming City based on the 80's experience of heading there on a Greyhound bus from San Francisco with my best friend Pat. I did not dare fall asleep given the freaks coming on and off the bus and stayed awake reading a copy of the noir LA novel "The Big Nowhere" and filling on cheese crackers and Slim Jims.
This line I quoted from this is my life at the moment. First a brief setup;
I, a kid from the projects not only had the audacity to go to college but while there challenge the fuck out of it-I am a high school drop out-got his GED at 18 due to a whole of dumb shit didn’t start college till 19.
Then once I saw SUNY would rather rubber stamp my education, I transferred out (more audacity) then in CUNY -guess what did the same thing.
Oh take a bullshit math and science courses plus a foreign language..at 24….to get my degree in film production from City College? Hold my blunt
Instead I went and took NYU’s placement test for their adult school in the two weeks it took for CUNY to do likewise while assessing my credits.
I got into NYU I have no idea if I ever passed CUNY’s test. There if I didn’t care to take a course I didn’t like they offered one I did. In other words I was able to pay to fail. By this time, 2001-3 I was being told in so many ways to quit. Quit to do what? I’d ask, shockingly these same working class folk had nothing to say but what I had already heard.
The beauty of early adulthood is now we get to see what’s real and immediately the first thing you learn about work is, my job no matter how much I save ain’t shit. Or if I save some here and there I could do xyz…but how long is that gonna take?
My dad was the guy with the good job but it required discipline to make it work long term.
Of course when I did graduate the problems waiting for me made up for the lost time. (some tried to blame my downfall for taking a film education or since I’m a dropout in jucos why take something more practical?)
Two evictions and a lot of moving seemed to prove them right, ok but I was 36 not 96.
I never gave up. I stayed in the fight. Unlike lots of family and friends. They gave up sometime after the rush of their 20’s meant a lot of spilt milk to mop up in their 30’s. Add denial and having to unwind their mistakes and the money it cost them. They never overcame their mistakes. They didn’t want to.
Now 40+ they all seem baffled I’m still going strong. Not sure what I was supposed to do?
Anyway that’s why this line below hits hard like a Wu Tang Clan verse:
“No, it had everything to do with the fact that I was determined to become what I wanted in my life and he never would. Not because he couldn’t, but because he couldn’t bring himself to try.
That’s what broke up our friendship, in the end. It broke up other friendships, too. It tested and even crippled relationships with members of my family. You see, I had done something unforgivable in their minds — I’d gone off to chase a dream, while they had never dared to even act on theirs.”
Working class people play too many games. My dad a truck driver for USPS suffered none of the problems the carriers did.
He drove a truck full of mail from JFK to the Farley post office building in midtown Manhattan. A building in any other city is probably the biggest post office if not government building in the state.
In NYC it’s just one of a few big ass post office buildings the other being the Morgan Facility. What did he do with his money? Party and bullshit. Never bought a house till his kids in his second marriage were all grown.
Still a bullshitter he cheats on his second wife, and because he threw his money around he didn’t even have enough money to get the divorce. This was in an inexpensive city, Providence, Rhode Island.
What kills me about people like my father is people come from all over the world to get their New York experience. He a native, had an inside track.
All he wanted to do was buy caddy’s (you’re from Detroit so you already know) and motorcycles while we live in the projects.
Somewhere around his forced retirement due to a bad arthritic back that paralyzed him he saw how small of a life he CHOSE to live.
All that running around he did in the 70’s-90’s now his kids are estranged.
His “1 & a 1/2” half ex wives -technically the second wife is still married to him wanted nothing to do with him.
I wonder for people like my dad who is the politician they blame for that?
My dad probably went along with anyone who mentioned New York’s situation at the time he left. Being the late 80’s when the city was on its way to 2000 homicides as his reason to leave.
But that is not why he left. Add that he left a New York ghetto with a government job that wasn’t affected by the changes in the economy like other government jobs were, to live in a cheaper city’s ghetto for 20 years.
His second wife also became a postal worker. And yet it still took 20 years to buy a house in a city half the size of Brooklyn.
That’s not policy dude that’s your own asinine actions.
Ironically his parents had property in the south and in New York. Houses and land everywhere.
He didn’t learn not one lesson. Instead he chased what I wouldn’t even call a dream and if it is -it’s definitely someone else’s dream.
Rather he chased a marketing campaign right to the end.
Thanks for this, James. I'm still reeling this week -- I also just received some other rather huge news that's going to disrupt my life for the next several months -- so I can't reply more right now. I'll try to later, sorry.
That was one awesome story/letter about what is happening in LA! Thank you so much, Cole, for writing such a poignant and celebratory story of what LA is really about. As you said, all those resentful human beings are just being petty and selfish for a dream they couldn't accomplish, as you did as a successful screenwriter. You're the bomb 💥 ❤️
I simply cannot understand how anyone can revel in the misfortune of others, whomever they are. The world needs compassion now more than ever. Thank you for expressing this so eloquently. I’m sorry you’re having to watch the destruction of so much that you hold so dear.
LA is to dreamers as New York is to powerbrokers.
It’s a happy town. You can ask anyone - busboy, real estate agent, barista - and more than not they came from somewhere else to pursue a dream.
Those who come to LA aren’t here for the money, even though they’d like some… they’re here - we’re here - because we have a burning desire in our heart that won’t go away.
I moved to LA in 1985 to pursue my dream of being on the big screen. I knew no one. Had no connections. Lived in a studio apartment in Westwood waitressing at El Torito’s. (I left a good job in Minneapolis, a marketing manager for a hotel chain)
A mere 7 years later in 1992, I realized I was tired of playing other people and wanted to be myself.
That became my new dream: could I live an authentic life as me? (I had no idea who I was.)
LA gave me the courage to leave one dream for a truer dream, a more “who am I” dream.
That quest led me to live in Chicago, Washington DC, London, Boulder and other cities here and there.
Which led me to ironically be the first Life Coach in the world to change lives on TV. Hysterical, right? I’ve done over 600 episodes in 3 television series.
And regardless of where I travel, I always end up back in LA.
I may have come here to play a part in movie magic but the reason I return is it’s one place I can be fully, whole heartedly me… because I’m surrounded by people who are committed to doing the same.
The world thinks LA is filled with fakes but I know it’s filled with the realest people I’ve ever met.
This is beautiful and thank you for sharing it here, Rhonda!
🥹
Rhonda... not sure if my comment threaded properly so I'm sharing it again with this link: https://colehaddon.substack.com/p/los-angeles-is-the-american-dream/comment/87249249?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2qmdf
Thank you… your response is enlightening. ❤️
If you haven't yet found Terry Pratchett, you'll like his take on Hollywood, "Moving Pictures". And, yes fuck all those ghouls celebrating this pain. Well put.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Pictures_(novel)
It's been called many things - that cloying, misdiagnosed condition that masquerades as jealously, fear or spite from those around others trying to live larger than life. I know it's hard to forgive, and to be worn down by those seeking to twist a very sad situation with a nasty socio-political inflection, but I hear you. And there are plenty of others too I'm certain who feel the same. Viva LA, and long live the city of dreams. Stay strong Cole.
"...that cloying, misdiagnosed condition...."
Wonderfully written! These mysteries of the human condition are the kind of topics no AI can come close to dealing with as an aspiring generator of entertainment filler.
Cheers Moe, and aye to the AI comment (and I like the idea of AI being aspirant, which it seems to be :)
Thank you, I will! I call them "AI Critters." IRL, I was a contractor for a law firm and busted a new would-be freelancer who was sending in AI-generated pieces much faster and cheaper than our usual stable of writers (very arcane niche of law requiring deep background and discernment). The pieces (on spec) were really garbage. Here! I wrote about it. What a hoot!
https://medium.com/@ma_murphy_58/ai-writing-competing-on-speed-and-low-price-specialists-beware-ceb47296f1a3
Cole, I posted this article as well on LinkedIn. Such a great article! ❤️
Thank you so much, Yolanda. I’m glad to hear it’s resonating with anyone. Are you still in L.A.? Are you safe?
I'm still here, but I'm in Marina del Rey. They said to have a bag packed. Three new fires started last night.
By the way, Cole and Maria Shriver mentioned me three times on LinkedIn. They (LinkedIn) are all excited. 💫👏
Maybe you can be my new mentor. I'll post everything for you. There's no pressure whatsoever!
What a beautiful tribute to L.A.! I have a friend who is finally starting her dream of a singing career there after marriage, 3 children and divorce. She has been safe from the fires so far, and I hope the fires are under control soon.
I wish her nothing but the best. The town can be brutal, and luck is a factor too, but it can make so many things possible that aren't anywhere else.
Thank you for this. I did not follow my dreams, but am happy with the life I have, and love that others follow their dreams. They (you) have given us great art and made life meaningful. Anyone who finds any joy in this unimaginable suffering of others, is a monster. 💔
The thing is, we end up finding our dreams sometimes. Life is a Stones song. You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might just get what you need. I think life is complicated and I don't judge why anyone ends up anywhere. I just hope they're happy wherever they are.
ex Chicagoan since 1996. I dreamed of living in Los Angeles since I was at most 10. I knew this was my place and ached to be here. and while I can certainly imagine the benefits of not living here (not the least of which is having a much bigger, nicer house), I don't think I'll ever leave. my people are here. the weirdos and dreamers. I'm old enough that most of my friends back in Chicago are locked into pretty good, mostly lucrative lives that are leading towards a comfortable retirement, and almost nothing I do feels comfortable as I continue to dream. if I was like this back there, I'd be a pariah. out here in LA, I'm probably more normal than most.
"if I was like this back there, I'd be a pariah. out here in LA, I'm probably more normal than most."
I love this observation very much. Exactly. Dreamers are typically pariahs within their families and communities. LA is the shelter that takes them in. (Shit, I wish I'd written that into the piece now. Heh.)
I had a rare experience of a family that not only encouraged me to be an artist but seemed to have outsized expectations. on the one hand, it was great. my parents were both very enthusiastic about me becoming a filmmaker, supportive to the point that my mom found me a job locally as a PA one summer (I hated it hahaha never worked so hard in my life and it was "just" a crappy corporate sales video - I learned to love production later), sent me to NYU Film, paid for my student productions that ran over budget, etc.
socially, it wasn't so good. friends expressed skepticism, one told me I'd die if I went to NY from the Chicago burbs (I did not die), school bullies called me all kinds of names for being artistic and not sporty, and so on.
what I think nobody expected, myself included, was how much this path would change me from their perception and outsized expectations of me. that I'd follow some kind of traditional route into and up through the system to wild success, and that I would share their worldview even as I lived a radically different life from any of them.
nor did any of us expect it to be a lifelong process... I mean, I'm nowhere near where I'm meant to be, and yet I seem to be right where I need to be, and I'm pretty damn lucky, and yet endlessly frustrated and heartsick at all the things that I dream of that haven't become reality yet.
which is precisely what this life has in store for any of us. and thank God it's here in LA where I'm surrounded by my fellow creative miscreants.
Thanks for sharing a bit about your life. I feel odd knowing so much now without a name...do feel free to share that, if you want. Otherwise, no worries and best of luck on your continuing creative adventures!
hahaha I have a bit of a branding issue on here that I'm working to solve. not trying to be secretive at all - my name is Glenn Sanders - nice to meet you. I'm also on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/itsfullofstars.bsky.social and my creative writing space is here https://nightvisionlabs.substack.com/
Nice to e-meet you, Glenn!
Love your eloquent response. Thank you for taking the time. And I do believe there is an intersection between human reality and spiritual truth and that intersection, for me, is my middle way.
No one knows who they are… perhaps I better get to writing posts already! Maybe I can help! ❤️
"I was tired of playing other people and wanted to be myself... (I had no idea who I was.)"
Thanks for sharing this powerful insight. I often think that conservative suspicions of LA's dream factory are rooted in a similar concern -- that Hollywood storytellers construct narrative universes where people get lost and never confront the identity challenge you express so eloquently. The problem with this critique is that many conservatives believe there's only one meaning-making Story that's true -- the Christian one. But the flip side is an endless tsunami of stories that overwhelm and disorient you... or you walk away to figure out who you really are.
Put another way: The Church once controlled a singular narrative inside which many people had to live. Now we have a post-Enlightenment culture where everyone is encouraged to tell their own story or to make up stories, which leads to a world with billions of narrative without a center. No wonder there's an epidemic of loneliness.
Seems like there should be something in the middle.
There's a lot to think about here, Alan. I've written quite a bit here about the existential loneliness that stems from a fracturing of our culture.
Thanks for your response, Cole. If you have specific links to earlier posts re: fracturing of culture, I'd love to read them. ... Related Q: What role do you think our golden age of Narrative plays in that fracture?
Hi, Alan, this is one of my more popular essays. As for your question, I’ll give it some thought.
Link?
Mysterious. I commented with it where this showed up in my Notes feed, but that must not translate to here. Sorry! https://colehaddon.substack.com/p/guys-i-think-peak-tv-helped-break
Great post, Cole. Thanks for writing it... and sharing it.
Hi Cole, I had just NOW been thinking of you and wondering how you were. Great big virtual hugs to you and your family. Wow. What a stunningly beautiful and sad and perceptive piece you have written here. Thank you.
Still remember that Dreaming City based on the 80's experience of heading there on a Greyhound bus from San Francisco with my best friend Pat. I did not dare fall asleep given the freaks coming on and off the bus and stayed awake reading a copy of the noir LA novel "The Big Nowhere" and filling on cheese crackers and Slim Jims.
Cheers and very best,
Maureen
This line I quoted from this is my life at the moment. First a brief setup;
I, a kid from the projects not only had the audacity to go to college but while there challenge the fuck out of it-I am a high school drop out-got his GED at 18 due to a whole of dumb shit didn’t start college till 19.
Then once I saw SUNY would rather rubber stamp my education, I transferred out (more audacity) then in CUNY -guess what did the same thing.
Oh take a bullshit math and science courses plus a foreign language..at 24….to get my degree in film production from City College? Hold my blunt
Instead I went and took NYU’s placement test for their adult school in the two weeks it took for CUNY to do likewise while assessing my credits.
I got into NYU I have no idea if I ever passed CUNY’s test. There if I didn’t care to take a course I didn’t like they offered one I did. In other words I was able to pay to fail. By this time, 2001-3 I was being told in so many ways to quit. Quit to do what? I’d ask, shockingly these same working class folk had nothing to say but what I had already heard.
The beauty of early adulthood is now we get to see what’s real and immediately the first thing you learn about work is, my job no matter how much I save ain’t shit. Or if I save some here and there I could do xyz…but how long is that gonna take?
My dad was the guy with the good job but it required discipline to make it work long term.
Of course when I did graduate the problems waiting for me made up for the lost time. (some tried to blame my downfall for taking a film education or since I’m a dropout in jucos why take something more practical?)
Two evictions and a lot of moving seemed to prove them right, ok but I was 36 not 96.
I never gave up. I stayed in the fight. Unlike lots of family and friends. They gave up sometime after the rush of their 20’s meant a lot of spilt milk to mop up in their 30’s. Add denial and having to unwind their mistakes and the money it cost them. They never overcame their mistakes. They didn’t want to.
Now 40+ they all seem baffled I’m still going strong. Not sure what I was supposed to do?
Anyway that’s why this line below hits hard like a Wu Tang Clan verse:
“No, it had everything to do with the fact that I was determined to become what I wanted in my life and he never would. Not because he couldn’t, but because he couldn’t bring himself to try.
That’s what broke up our friendship, in the end. It broke up other friendships, too. It tested and even crippled relationships with members of my family. You see, I had done something unforgivable in their minds — I’d gone off to chase a dream, while they had never dared to even act on theirs.”
Working class people play too many games. My dad a truck driver for USPS suffered none of the problems the carriers did.
He drove a truck full of mail from JFK to the Farley post office building in midtown Manhattan. A building in any other city is probably the biggest post office if not government building in the state.
In NYC it’s just one of a few big ass post office buildings the other being the Morgan Facility. What did he do with his money? Party and bullshit. Never bought a house till his kids in his second marriage were all grown.
Still a bullshitter he cheats on his second wife, and because he threw his money around he didn’t even have enough money to get the divorce. This was in an inexpensive city, Providence, Rhode Island.
What kills me about people like my father is people come from all over the world to get their New York experience. He a native, had an inside track.
All he wanted to do was buy caddy’s (you’re from Detroit so you already know) and motorcycles while we live in the projects.
Somewhere around his forced retirement due to a bad arthritic back that paralyzed him he saw how small of a life he CHOSE to live.
All that running around he did in the 70’s-90’s now his kids are estranged.
His “1 & a 1/2” half ex wives -technically the second wife is still married to him wanted nothing to do with him.
I wonder for people like my dad who is the politician they blame for that?
My dad probably went along with anyone who mentioned New York’s situation at the time he left. Being the late 80’s when the city was on its way to 2000 homicides as his reason to leave.
But that is not why he left. Add that he left a New York ghetto with a government job that wasn’t affected by the changes in the economy like other government jobs were, to live in a cheaper city’s ghetto for 20 years.
His second wife also became a postal worker. And yet it still took 20 years to buy a house in a city half the size of Brooklyn.
That’s not policy dude that’s your own asinine actions.
Ironically his parents had property in the south and in New York. Houses and land everywhere.
He didn’t learn not one lesson. Instead he chased what I wouldn’t even call a dream and if it is -it’s definitely someone else’s dream.
Rather he chased a marketing campaign right to the end.
Thanks for this, James. I'm still reeling this week -- I also just received some other rather huge news that's going to disrupt my life for the next several months -- so I can't reply more right now. I'll try to later, sorry.
I hope the huge news is of the good kind, Cole.
It does not. Australia’s rental system is grotesque.
Shit. It certainly is. Holler if I can help.
Thanks, Tess!