Growing up, I always dreamed of moving to Hollywood and writing screenplays. I also dreamed of being a mermaid just like Daryl Hannah in Splash. I thought that Mermaiding was a possible career trajectory. O, and I wanted to be a doctor and a novelist. I still want to be all of those things, but my doctor tells me I must sleep, eat, rest, and exercise. These requirements apply to me as a “human woman.”
The more I think about Hollywood, the more perplexed I become. As a child I thought Hollywood seemed like the Land of Oz or Narnia. It was the place that transformed my beloved books into movies, a magical place. Oz and Narnia came from Hollywood as far as I was concerned as a 5-year-old director, actress, dictator. I assumed everyone must be super nice in Hollywood. You know, as nice as the munchkins in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy arrives in Munchkinland. As I grew older, I started to get some intel that this was not the case. I became aware of child actors having problems with drugs and alcohol. My mother somehow appropriately conveyed that Dorothy in real life did not come to a good end. As a 7-year-old, I could not understand this. This place was magical. It was in the same state as Disneyland. This place made the Parent Trap with Hayley Mills and ALL the Shirley Temple movies.
In 4th grade, when I had finished all my homework. I went up to my teacher Mrs. Light and said, “I’m bored! I need an activity!” She rolled her eyes and politely directed me to the library. “Kristin, you can pick out any play you would like and cast and direct it yourself.” This was the best assignment ever for 10-year-old Kristin. I chose Heidi and cast myself in the leading role. I then proceeded to hold tryouts on the playground and cast my closest friends in the leading roles. What I didn’t realize at the time is this is how Hollywood works. This was nepotism, although, sadly 10-year-old Kristin didn’t know that word. I was a slavedriver as a director, and we had rehearsal after school every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for 3 months. The Martha Stewart parents of the cast were enlisted to make costumes. I took over my mom’s home office and made programs. We did 3 performances. In my mind’s eye, these went pretty well. I wish I had proof, but sadly my brother or father taped over the footage of the play on VHS with some teenage mutant ninja turtle movie.
But, I digress. I thought living in Hollywood would perhaps be as easy as directing my 4th grade play. What I didn’t realize and nobody told me about is life gets sad. Other children can be cruel, and though I hope I wasn’t cruel in 4th grade, I think I was just bossy and pushy, I didn’t experience real cruelty until middle school and high school. 13-year-old Kristin was probably the worst version of herself.When I got into middle and high school it seemed as though everyone else had been handed a rule book or magical map of how to be cool or how to live, and I must have just been absent that day or playing my viola in a corner. As I went through high school and started college, I started to hear more about my beloved Hollywood and Disneyland. I watched “Pretty Woman” at age thirteen and thought, hmm, hold the phone, where Julia Roberts is living initially doesn’t look like the Hollywood I imagined, but the movie is saying this is part of Los Angeles. The movie also glamorizes the life of prostitution and turns it into a Cinderella story so it probably didn’t really help with my understanding of how the world works. I began to find out that the people who work at theme parks aren’t all that happy. I heard stories of the actors playing Pluto and Donald Duck hiding handles of Jack Daniels in the ceiling for relief between shifts. Yeah, happy people don’t do that.
I went to visit a friend at Yale my sophomore year of college. She told me about a fellow student who published Yale’s Hottest Women Catalogue every fall. He spent every summer in Hollywood and was going to be a director. When I ran into him at a party, he told me all about the “Mattresses” he had encountered over the summer. At this point, I thought a mattress was a comfy, down feather bed covered entity. But, no, this guy told me “Mattresses” were models, actresses, and waitresses, and, as a director, he could just sleep with any of them whenever he wanted. It was then I realized there was something very wrong with Hollywood. As college and life progressed, the intel just kept coming.
My childhood friend wrote and sold a screenplay and moved to Hollywood. I would see him when I visited Santa Monica and when he came back to Connecticut for the summers. I would tell my friend about my plans to turn my book of short stories into a screenplay and maybe wanting to move to LA. He was encouraging of my writing, but told me “LA would eat your soul for breakfast, Kristin.” Firstly, I don’t think my soul would be very tasty, but that is besides the point. That sounded pretty ominous. So, I continue to sit here, in my room of my own in Virginia and write and make judgements. But, still a part of me dreams of Hollywood, that peculiar, terrifying place.
~by Kristin Rose Jutras
Published by Kristin Rose Jutras, M.F.A
Kristin Rose Jutras attended Stanford University and received a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing with a minor in Biological Sciences; she has a love of contemporary fiction and nineteenth century poetry. At Stanford, Kristin was a reporter and photographer at The Stanford Daily. She has worked in science publishing at Pearson Education and The New York Times Digital. Kristin graduated with her MFA in Creative Writing and Communications at Fairfield University and was the Poetry Editor of Mason’s Road Literary Magazine for two semesters. Kristin taught Composition, Communications, and Poetry at Fairfield University and was previously the Communications and Creative Services Director at the Fralin Life Sciences Institute at Virginia Tech. She is now an Account Supervisor at TellMed Strategies, a woman-owned healthcare, life sciences, and biotech public relations agency.
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Kristin Rose Jutras 