Episode two of the podcast, Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, is titled Bret Ellis, Valley Boy, and it focuses on the city of Los Angeles in the 1980s, and how it provided the setting for Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero.
Narrator Lili Anolik draws on interviews with Bret and his high school classmates to set the LA scene –
There was this sense that we were at the red-hot center of youth culture. And I felt growing up here, really now in retrospect, was kind of glorious.
Anolik describes the LA known to Bret and his peers –
…it’s not the LA that appears in the pages of Nathanael West or Raymond Chandler or Robert Towne, or the LA that appears in the screens of Billy Wilder or Nicholas Ray or Roman Polanski. No, it’s the LA of Beach Blanket Bingo or any of the other beach party teen movies from the 60s, only updated. Instead of the beach, the mall, though the beach too, and backed by a soundtrack of West Coast New Wave girl bands, as ingenuous as blue skies, as beaming as sunshine.
But there was a flip-side to the sunshine, swimming pools and palm trees. Author Michael Tolkin wrote that LA in the eighties was a ‘…noir utopia, a tropical Berlin. In other words, early 80s LA is a place that looks like a dream, but feels like a nightmare.’
Anolik zooms in on Bret’s upper middle class suburban childhood in Sherman Oaks. His mother, Dale, was a homemaker. His father, Bob, worked in commercial real estate and was described as ambitious and focused.
“I had a mother who was nurturing. I had a father who had completely checked out, completely checked out, and angrily too.”
Bob was disappointed in his only son, ‘…a physically imposing boy, but one psychologically disinclined to organize sports, with a temperament both sensitive and imaginative, a sissy in brief.’
Bret found his escape from his father via books, and said that he became a voracious reader. He especially loved horror.
He also loved movies, and Bret and his friends would spend whole days seeing multiple movies, discussing them afterwards and writing their own critiques. Anolik summarises the duality that Bret was navigating –
…discovering that he gravitates to the pop musical Grease and to the art film Days of Heaven. To the demotic as much as to the elite. And that taste good and good taste might be for him one and the same.
Bret’s high school, Buckley, offered an ‘…East Coast-style education on the West Coast’. There were some very conservative standards and rules, but combined with a student body that included its fair share of Hollywood elite. At high school, Bret was described as –
…unauthentic and unengaged, uninterested in girls or conventional achievement, and above all calmly, numbly, near maddeningly passive. Appears, though, is the key word here because Bret is his father’s son, even if he is a mama’s boy.
Bret did possess his father’s drive and ferocity (and libido) but had not yet found his focus. Then two things happened – he read Joan Didion’s work and saw the movie, American Gigolo.
Of Didion, Bret said –
Her clarity and directness was speaking to me in a way, kind of like punk was speaking to me. The kind of minimal directness was speaking to me in that moment. I was so enthralled at Joan Didion that I was trying to write like her and I would sit with a book split open and I would type it out on my typewriter and try to figure out why this is so powerful. Was it a comma? Is it the italics?
And of American Gigolo, he says that the impact the movie had on him was ‘…impossible to tally‘, introducing him to a new way of looking at LA, and ‘sexual uncertainty’. As Anolik describes, the text of Gigolo is heterosexual (the main character, Julian Kaye, services women), and yet its subtext is not. Bret says of Gigolo –
The light bulb went off. That was really the beginning of the genesis for Less Than Zero… And really did move me to, I think, write a short story. … it was also a confirmation of a lot of things I’ve been feeling about the city and about gayness.
In 1980, between Bret’s sophomore and junior years, he ‘…goes from ugly duckling to beautiful swan. Or, in 80s parlance, from totally geek to totally chic.’ And with that came the attention of Buckley’s most popular girl, Julie Foreman. As Anolik describes, suddenly Bret is,
…not just socially acceptable, he’s socially desirable. Which means the observer of the drama is all at once a player in it. The voyeur, a participant.
She goes on to say that the foundation for Less Than Zero was in place – ‘…Bret has his language, courtesy of Joan Didion. He has his vision, courtesy of American Gigolo’, and he had his characters, courtesy of Buckley and girlfriend, Julie.
Anolik leaves us with the teaser for episode three, introducing Bret’s friend, Dominic Gross, who was the inspiration for the character of Julian in Less Than Zero –
…just as Julie got Bret and us past one velvet rope beyond the velvet rope, so Dominic will get Bret and us past another velvet rope beyond the velvet rope. Julie’s Hollywood is A-list, establishment, respectable. Dominic’s Hollywood is the sleazy reverse of all that.
People referred to in episode two:
Lili Anolik (author)
Bret Easton Ellis (author)
Nathanael West (author)
Raymond Chandler (author)
Robert Towne (screenwriter)
Billy Wilder (film-maker)
Nicholas Ray (film-maker)
Roman Polanski (film-maker)
Michael Tolkin (screenwriter)
Bruce Taylor (high school friend of Bret’s)
Ian Gittler (Bennington classmate)
Dale Ellis (Bret’s mother)
Bob Ellis (Bret’s father)
Ajay Sehgal (high school friend of Bret’s)
Joe Eisenstadt (Bennington classmate)
Paula Powers (class of 86)
Chip Rosenblum (high school friend of Bret’s)
Dominic Gross (high school friend of Bret’s and inspiration for character of Julian in Less Than Zero)
Bret Witke (nightclub owner, Boys & Girls)
John Seidel (nightclub owner, Power Tools)
Michael Landon (actor)
Steve Robbins (Bret’s high school English teacher)
Richard Gere (actor)
Julie Foreman (actress and Bret’s first girlfriend, and basis for character of Blair in Less Than Zero)
John Gregory Dunne (author)
John Foreman (producer)
Books and films referred to:
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
Beach Blanket Bingo (film)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (film)
Valley Girl (film)
The Shining by Stephen King
Grease (film)
Days of Heaven (film)
Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion
A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion
The White Album by Joan Didion
Play it As It Lays by Joan Didion
Boogie Nights (film)
Monster by John Gregory Dunne (based on John Foreman’s legendary annual Christmas party)
American Gigolo (film)
Soundtrack:
The Go-Gos
Fear of Music by Talking Heads
West Coast New Wave girl bands (The Bangles, Josie Cotton, The Motels)
Psychedelic Furs
