I write about show business.

Most people have an appetite for entertainment. We set aside x-number of hours each week to sit down and soak it in, even though we complain that “nothing’s on” or “it’s all just a bunch of garbage now.” We watch it anyway. Because we have a need to observe human beings duking it out with each other. It doesn’t matter of it’s love or jealousy or vengeance. We just want to know how it’s going to end, and we’ve been doing this since at least the Greek plays of over 2000 years ago.

I became enamored with cinema when someone sneaked me into Jaws 3-D. By age ten I was collecting soundtracks by the dozen, and by thirteen I was committed to working in motion picture professionally. I devoured not just the regular news rack fare (Premiere, Entertainment Weekly) but more offbeat magazines like American Cinematographer, Film Score Monthly, and Cinefantastique.

Why do I mention this?

Because like Kit Cooper, my feelings about the business now are a mix of positive and negative, and it’s hard to tell which one won out: the enthusiasm of my childhood or the adult cynicism. The latter tends to be more dominant, at least in most people I know. That grousing monkey moved in and rearranged the furniture of my mind, but the former innocence still in love with the art tries to put it all back into place.

You see this a lot in Hollywood. An awful lot of people there look exhausted all the time, at least the ones who haven’t just arrived from Kansas and Idaho with stars in their eyes. But no matter how much rot one finds in Hollywood, cinema is baked into Los Angeles culture the way art is a part of Paris and everyone who lives there. Even if it’s not your trade, you know someone who’s in it, and you respect the hell out of it. That sums up my own feelings about the town. And I think Kit Cooper would agree.