KEY POINTS:
"Ellis, I can't accept this," I said for the third time.
He pushed the expensive gift back on to my desk. Ellis was always pushing. He was a Hollywood producer. It's what he did best. That Louis Vuitton wallet might have been worth a week of my salary back then.
The longer I demurred, the more uncomfortably obvious it became to us both that this was his down payment for greater access to my boss, a senior film and television agent in Los Angeles.
After two more tries, he won. It was his job to win, even the smallest battles. He would have called it opening doors. I would have called it grease.
We had another client who nabbed the golden ticket with a "greenlighted" television pilot and a network order for a handful of episodes.
She walked in one morning, stopping casually at different desks to show us her Harvard degree. The senior partner, himself an alumnus, had said he didn't believe she ever could have been Harvard material. The rumour had set in.
"And there I am in my cap and gown," she grinned, brandishing the diploma and a photo, proof that her degree wasn't bought by mail order.
Welcome behind the scenes in "the Industry", as Hollywood production is known in Los Angeles.
The place where buying a latte at the Sherman Oaks Starbucks means giving 6 per cent of gross to the valet parking guy.
Today I will be one of maybe six twisted souls nationwide who will actually sit down to watch the Academy Awards on a friend's cable connection in the middle of my working day. (Programmers take note, put it back on free evening television next year.) Yes, I'll be looking at Cate Blanchett's dress and Benicio Del Toro's eyebrows like any self-respecting celebrity-slobberer.
But it's those boring winners that look like your Uncle Murray, or the "development sluts" stuffed into ill-fitting frocks (yes, that's what they called them), that still stir up some latent film industry appreciation gene, one that I thought was long dead.
This isn't a celebration of some pit bull producer's alpha moment.
When 17 people bound up on stage for the best picture award, you are seeing a history of burgeoning heart attacks and bad marriages wrought from their film being pushed through a succession of studios, writers and directors for years.
Getting a film made is no labour of love; it's a psychotic obsession. It's an exercise in delusional fantasy that may have eaten a decade out of somebody's very real life.
Author Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy took 23 years to become a film, once said, "Getting a movie made in Hollywood is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it."
He died two years before the film was released.
Kiwis watched Lord of the Rings like it was our own personal "Precious" come true. But someone had been trying to get LOTR made into a film since 1957.
There were rumours the Beatles even wanted to buy the rights as a vehicle for them to star.
Producer Saul Zaentz had it in the 1970s, but the project continued its slog through "development hell" for another two decades before Peter Jackson got the rights, finally releasing his films 44 years later.
Don't buy your tickets just yet for The Hobbit either.
There are still legal fisticuffs over the billion-dollar spoils from the trilogy. Jackson fought New Line for his profits and now the Tolkien estate is suing for its 7.5 per cent.
These are stories from the biggest fish, the ones with all the power and glory. Even from my flea-sized perspective then, I saw producers of all sizes throw themselves into a tsunami just to give their project, their dream, some "legs". It took years - for most a lifetime - of tunnel-visioned passion to make it on to that Oscar stage.
So I say let them blub. Bring on the Celine Dion dance numbers and dead swan neck dresses. What I see when I watch that God-awful glitz is more daunting than all the money in Peter Jackson's house budget; I see a momentary glimpse into the singular achievement of their lifetime.
Aside from watching an Olympic athlete collapse in tears at a gold medal performance, there aren't many moments in our culture when you get to see someone reach the pinnacle of their life's work, condensed into a 45-second speech.
In truth, I couldn't stomach a lot of them. But when the credits roll, I have to admit, I can't help but respect those who battle that fiercely for their dreams.
www.traceybarnett.co.nz
