Nathaniel West's novel "The Day of the Locust" describes Hollywood in unambiguous terms as a place where the American dream is betrayed. He describes the people of Hollywood as "savage and bitter made so by boredom and disappointment. All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?" But "they haven't the mental equipment for leisure Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? . Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynching, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars." But "nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies." (Ch. 27) This is an attack not just on Hollywood, but on capitalism in general. Hollywood is merely the place where the bad side of capitalism is seen in all its monstrous glory. .
I would like to concentrate my attention on one aspect of this phenomenon and talk about a specific category of people who were lured to Hollywood and found themselves "betrayed." Los Angeles is crawling with unemployed and barely employed actors. These people lead what from the outside seems like pretty miserable lives: many of them are talented people, but they only get work in the industry occasionally, the rest of the time making subsistence wages doing odd jobs like waitressing. Some of them are doing it because they have acting in their blood and cannot imagine any other kind of life - these people gladly suffer their travails for the sake of their sole passion. But they are a minority. The rest of them have been lured into this life-style not through love of an art form, by a promise of stardom.
