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" Are there philosophers anymore? Because I was about to say that philosophers spend their whole lives looking, mostly without success, for what I was looking for: joy. Something funny. Something that makes you happy. A little beauty. Talent.  I am not a philosopher. I live in Los Angeles. I needed help. So west on Sunset, left on La Brea, south till Wilshire, turn right, and follow that west all the way to Beverly Hills to meet an entertainment agent, a Mr. Schiff, in high hopes that he might be able to help me out a little bit with my search here in the holy mecca of American culture, where talent from all over the world flocks to make it big. A place that from living here I would go so far as to say is the last place you&amp;#039;d want to look for talent. But that&amp;#039;s just me. Once I passed the ICM building on Wilshire, I knew I had entered the 90210,  because I started to notice I was now sharing the road with Ferraris, a couple Bentleys, a Lotus, and a shitload of late-model Mercedes.  Lately I&amp;#039;ve noticed a lot of Mercedes in my neighborhood, too, but the older diesel ones -- this place down the street from where I live does a kick-ass business converting diesel Mercedes to run on vegetable oil -- you even get a cool little bumper sticker that reads, POWERED BY 100% VEGETABLE OIL when you make the switch.  While I was shifting, ashing, and sipping 7-Eleven coffee in stop-and-go traffic, I noticed I still had on the bright fluorescent bracelet from the goth club I&amp;#039;d gone to the night before. I don&amp;#039;t go to goth clubs, that&amp;#039;s not my thing, never has been and never will be, but last night I went out drinking -- trying to get myself into various clubs on the Sunset Strip just to get a feel for what goes on there -- and I felt like Paris Hilton trying to get into the Esquire charity house in Bev Hills. Denied. Long story short, I somehow ended up at an industrial goth club on Hollywood Boulevard. It was one of the only clubs I could find that would let me in -- one that was kind enough to have a come-as-you-are policy.  Most of the doormen in this town eye me up and down -- Vans, white tube socks, shorts, blue work shirt, mesh hat -- and tell me, &amp;quot;Sorry.&amp;quot; The last club I tried to get into, I asked the doorman why I couldn&amp;#039;t get in and all he said was, &amp;quot;Look at you.&amp;quot; In desperation I asked how much I&amp;#039;d need to slip him under the cuff to let me in. He advised me to try the club around the corner, so I did.  I do my best thinking where alcohol is served and am generally very happy in a dark bar. But once inside that club I noticed that I was the only one there not dressed all in black with an unhealthy fascination with mortuary affairs and death culture.  In an attempt to fit in, I ordered the darkest beer they had, then stepped outside to the smoking lounge. I spoke with a guy who worked there, a security-guard-bouncer type, and asked him what these people did for work, since none of them to me really looked all that employable. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;d be surprised,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;These people here, a lot of them are loaded. They have tons of money, and during the day you would never guess that they are like this. Some work corporate jobs, a lot as graphic designers, and at night they, like, change their whole look and come here.&amp;quot; Maybe that&amp;#039;s what I need to do, transform myself to fit in, I thought as I looked at a guy wearing a dog collar.  MR. SCHIFF I pulled into the underground parking garage below the building and followed the visitor-parking signs down to the valets on the lower level, where I saw a red carpet leading to a velvet rope. Behind that, parked at an angle, taking up three whole parking spots, was a mint Rolls-Royce, worth more than a four-bedroom house in most states. The valet asked me if I was there for a delivery. I told him no.  My first impression of Mr. Schiff was that he was nothing like the stereotypical Hollywood agents depicted in movies -- although he did have one of those hands-free headsets on, which he politely removed once we sat down and began talking. He seemed well put together and, from the framed black-and-white Mickey Mantle eight-by-ten next to his desk, was probably a New Yorker.  &amp;quot;So what exactly do you do?&amp;quot; I asked.  &amp;quot;Well, I was an agent for many, many years, and I started this company about sixteen months ago. It&amp;#039;s a talent-management company, and we represent primarily for movies and television, film, and other media the nonmusic-related work of Eminem, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, Pharrell, Liv Tyler, Ryan Phillippe, Jeff Bridges, Wesley Snipes, a whole bunch of writers and directors. We represent an Internet start-up, which is like a virtual MySpace. MTV, NBC, Universal, Interscope, Warner Music, and a whole bunch of other people heavily invested in it and believe in it. We are consultants for an online market-commerce business, which, if you&amp;#039;re watching Desperate Housewives and you want to buy a skirt that Nicollette Sheridan&amp;#039;s wearing, you can go to the Website, click it, and buy it. We&amp;#039;re going to produce a movie with a young outfit in New York called Plum Pictures. So we&amp;#039;re doing a little bit of a lot of things. But primarily, the core of our business is as a talent representative. We manage the careers of our clients.&amp;quot;  Not that anybody ever does, but when people ask me, &amp;quot;What do you do?&amp;quot; (a question I ask myself daily), I usually answer with a simple &amp;quot;Hang out&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re looking at it.&amp;quot; Both of which are true, and it never seems to shock anyone, which is probably the main reason I moved to L.A.  I grew up in northern California, and seven or eight years ago, a friend and I went on a road trip to Los Angeles. It was the first time for both of us, and we visited for about a week, and the entire time I sensed something very odd about the place. I couldn&amp;#039;t quite put my finger on it until about the third or fourth day. We were driving around some neighborhood near Hollywood, and we passed by this coffee shop with outdoor seating packed with people all wearing sunglasses. None of them looked like they were on a lunch break. I asked my friend what day of the week it was, and he thought about it for a second. &amp;quot;Wednesday,&amp;quot; he said, and I was like, &amp;quot;Shouldn&amp;#039;t these people be at work, at a job or something?&amp;quot; It was like everybody here just seemed to be hanging out every day like it was Saturday.  So shortly after the road trip, I packed my bags and migrated to L.A. I wanted to be one of them. Anyway, two guys who work for Mr. Schiff entered the room and took seats beside us. Both looked to be about my age -- Scott Vener had a subtle hip-hop thing to him, and Jack Heller rocked a pink polo shirt. Mr. Schiff got up from his seat and introduced them to me, told them I was from Esquire and doing a story about Los Angeles for the 2006 Best &amp;amp;amp; Brightest issue. I had a piece of scrap paper with me that I had written down my assignment on, and I read it out loud to them: &amp;quot;In search of things that make it good to be alive. In search of talent. Drink, joke, woman. Cultural essay of L.A.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s it, and I asked them for help in finding talent here in L.A., since that was what their profession entailed.  Jack answered first, &amp;quot;To be honest with you, most of our talent that we&amp;#039;ve signed in the last year has come from New York, Detroit, Australia, and Hong Kong.... I don&amp;#039;t think we&amp;#039;ve signed anybody who was a Los Angeles native or who is actually living or working out here. Unless they are a writer.&amp;quot; We sat around and talked for a while about talent and where to find it here, and it seemed like a lot of the ones to look out for were all from anywhere but here.  &amp;quot;Everybody is an actor in L.A., and half of them are just off the boat from Kansas,&amp;quot; said Jack. &amp;quot;And for every movie role that gets cast, there&amp;#039;s five hundred people who audition for it. We sort of go beyond L.A., because we don&amp;#039;t have to compete with everybody. Here, everyone is the same biscuit. If you go to New York or you go to London, you&amp;#039;re finding talent that nobody even knew was there.&amp;quot; We all agreed that when you go out looking for talent or Best &amp;amp;amp; Brightest or whatever here in L.A., and you start asking around for it, most often whoever you&amp;#039;re talking to will tell you they&amp;#039;re the best.  I asked them where they were from, and they all said New York.  Mr. Schiff brought up how Asia was going to blow up for talent, and Jack told me about a client of his, Edison Chen, &amp;quot;who is actually going to be here in a half hour. He literally has become the style guru for all of China, and I can go on for an hour on how many things this guy has going in the pop-culture world, from the number-one album, number-one movies. He has a TV show over there, which is their version of Punk&amp;#039;d and Jackass -- which is their number-one English-language show on MTV. So he&amp;#039;s in town this week because he&amp;#039;s the male lead in The Grudge 2. Like, last night we go and see The Departed, they had a little screening, and he actually played the Matt Damon role in the original Chinese version of the movie, and -- this is how I know he&amp;#039;s going to cross over -- so we go there, and within thirty seconds all these people who were waiting for autographs turn to Edison, and the paparazzi knew who he was, and he signed like thirty autographs, and this one guy who kept coming over -- some white guy -- and he was like, &amp;#039;I loved you in Initial D, and Infernal Affairs 2 is the best....&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  Scott, who does all the music for Entourage, recommended a band from Whittier (southeast of L.A.) called Cold War Kids, as well as a club down on Fairfax Avenue called Largo. Jack added that as far as the L.A. nightlife goes, it was basically run by one person, Brent Bolthouse. That name sounded familiar, and I asked if he was the guy who runs the club called Hyde -- a club that for whatever reason has made it into every celebrity-worship mag and induces paparazzi hard-ons -- and Jack told me it was the same guy. I got turned away from Hyde.  For maverick fashion, Jack suggested I check out a shoe store called Undefeated. He asked me if I was familiar with stores like Union, Supreme, and St\u00FCssy, and I pretended not to be offended as he explained to me that Undefeated is, like, this &amp;quot;movement&amp;quot; started by the same entrepreneurs, who were about to expand and become the next big thing here as far as men&amp;#039;s wear goes. He also brought up a frozen-yogurt store called Pinkberry, which was &amp;quot;about to explode&amp;quot; and become the next Krispy Kreme. I thanked them for their time.  On the way out, I bumped into Edison Chen in the lobby. We shook hands and small-talked, and he seemed humble for being the style guru for all of China, which made me kinda like the guy.  When I exited the parking garage, I called my wife, not to tell her I met Edison Chen but because I vaguely remember her telling me a little bit about some frozen-yogurt place called Pinkberry, and I needed to get directions. Around the corner from Pinkberry is the world-famous Pink&amp;#039;s Hot Dogs, which always, always, has a long line of people waiting to order its hot dogs. I&amp;#039;ve eaten there only once, just to see what the hubbub was about -- waited for nearly forty-five minutes, and the hot dogs tasted like hot dogs to me. I prefer the hot dogs from the Mexican street vendors that sell for three bones downtown and are wrapped in bacon with loads of peppers, onions, and mayo. The thing is, Pink&amp;#039;s is located at a very busy intersection, La Brea and Melrose, and I have this theory that places like that are popular in L.A. because when people see a long line here, they think, Wow, that place must be good, and that&amp;#039;s what everybody else is getting, and I have to get what everybody else is getting. Lines are important, they tell you what everybody else is doing. Anyway, as I sat there and plowed away at my frozen yogurt with my plastic spoon and looked across Melrose, I saw that on the other side of the street there was a Baskin-Robbins. It looked half dead and deserted, on its way out.  And I thought, What&amp;#039;s wrong with Baskin-Robbins?  COMEDY DEATH RAY At the Improv, I heard Ahmed Ahmed, the Arab comedian, tell his jokes about how hard it is for him to get on a plane. And at the Comedy Store, I heard Aron Kader, a Palestinian comedian, talk about visiting the Middle East with a cousin who&amp;#039;s driving him around and saying, &amp;quot;America is very bad, very weak, and Americans think they own everything,&amp;quot; and then asks if he&amp;#039;s hungry. &amp;quot;We have McDonald&amp;#039;s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Applebee&amp;#039;s, and TAIF&amp;#039;s (Thank Allah It&amp;#039;s Friday).&amp;quot; This is new, I thought, and pretty funny.  When I had called the Comedy Store in Hollywood a few days before and asked them who was the funniest person in L.A., the guy on the phone angrily told me, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s definitely not Dane Cook! If you write that Dane Cook is the funniest guy in L.A., I&amp;#039;ll fuckin&amp;#039; stab you with a beer bottle!&amp;quot;  Fine, so who is? He didn&amp;#039;t really have an answer for me, but he did give me a good handful of names of people who he thought were pretty funny and worth checking out. He suggested that my best bet would be just to come on down and check it out myself and see who&amp;#039;s funny and who&amp;#039;s not. Said that there were a variety of good comedians who perform there every night.  He mentioned something about getting me in no problem, just as long as I talked to the doorman and showed a business card.  Business card?  I thanked him, and before we hung up, he suggested that I also check out Comedy Death Ray at the Upright Citizens Brigade, a once-a-week sketch-comedy show that featured a lot of good talent that he described as being an &amp;quot;alternative, bookwormy&amp;quot; kind of comedy, geared more toward the NPR-listening set.  I started asking around at places like the Improv, the Laugh Factory, et cetera, and I sat through dozens and dozens of comedians on various nights of the week, and I asked dozens of different people as well as several comedians who they thought was the funniest guy or gal in town, and they all gave me dozens upon dozens of different names, and I never got the same name twice.  When I posed that question to this one comedian out in front of the Laugh Factory after a show, he became fierce and pointed at himself and said, &amp;quot;I am! I&amp;#039;m the funniest guy in L.A! Just ask everybody here!&amp;quot;  He turned around and asked out loud who the funniest guy in L.A. was, and of course they all said he was. He looked disappointed when I asked him who he was and told him I&amp;#039;d never heard of him before.  He gave me his name, Skyler Stone, which I wrote down in my journal along with the dozens of other names.  The next day, I went down to Kinko&amp;#039;s and tried to get some business cards done cut-and-paste style with an Esquire logo so I could get into the Comedy Store, but they looked like ass and nothing like the ones in American Psycho. So with no business cards, I decided to check out Comedy Death Ray first. I brought my digital recorder with me, recorded the announcement kindly requesting that nobody record the show, as well as some of the evening. But anyway, Andy Ritchie told this joke: &amp;quot;Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan. It just seems like the entire region has always had a presence of these crazy, pissed-off people that run around and blow stuff up, and it&amp;#039;s not going to stop until we get these guys some air-conditioning. Maybe if they didn&amp;#039;t have to hang out in 120 degree temperatures all day, then maybe God wouldn&amp;#039;t talk to them as much. You get hot for that long, you&amp;#039;re going to go crazy. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter where you live or what nationality you are. Look at Texas! Yee-haw! Jee-hawd! There is very little difference.&amp;quot;  I had a good time and even laughed out loud a couple times, and maybe it&amp;#039;s just that truth definitely has the bonus effect of making a line funnier, but on that night, in that cramped little joint, this was one of the funniest jokes I&amp;#039;d ever heard. After that I just sat there and wished that they had ashtrays and served alcohol, which they don&amp;#039;t. As a rule, the comedy clubs that serve alcohol are the funniest.  So then I went out and explored those to focus my search. While liquored I&amp;#039;d see somebody who I thought was really funny, but then the next day when I studied their acts again on video, they weren&amp;#039;t funny. But drink is not required to laugh, and so I kept being drawn back to Comedy Death Ray.  The show started at 8:30 p.m. and it was completely sold out, partly due to Sarah Silverman headlining. I parked my ride across the street, next to the Scientology Celebrity Centre. The atmosphere inside is very intimate -- Comedy Death Ray holds barely a hundred people, and there&amp;#039;s a certain anticipation and excitement in the air before and during and even after the show, which I had noticed the last time I was there, as if Sonic Youth were playing an unannounced secret show at a small club.  The host for the evening did his shtick between comedians as a gay Puerto Rican craft-services supervisor, which was entertaining to observe, as was the guy who was sitting in the front row who had on an Everything Is Illuminated T-shirt.  Now, I understand wearing a T-shirt of a band you like, a movie, a sports team, a corporate logo, or even your favorite bar, but a T-shirt of a book? I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;ve ever seen that before, and one of the comedians that evening made a crack about his shirt, &amp;quot;Nice shirt, too bad nobody went and saw the movie.&amp;quot; Wait a minute, they turned that thing into a movie? For a second it got really tense between the two. Mr. Everything Is Illuminated was also wearing a loud wool scully cap, the kind that paperboys back in the forties wore, and he got cracked on for that as well -- and the two went back and forth until the guy had to yell out, &amp;quot;Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!&amp;quot; Comedy at its finest. The only negative point about the place is that it&amp;#039;s so small that if you have to take a piss, you either hold it (like I did) or get up and go, which is difficult, since everybody is all crammed in there. Since the show is very fast-paced, as soon as a comedian is done, the host immediately comes out, does his or her thing, introduces the next comedian, bam, bam, bam, and if you get up from your seat to go relieve yourself, you become a target to get clowned on since the spotlight&amp;#039;s on you, which also happened to Mr. Everything Is Illuminated. When he got up to take a piss while Greg Proops was on, Proops flicked a nickel at him, asking for a paper.  Proops, as it turned out, is the funniest man in L.A., with kinda retro hair and glasses and an interesting voice and mannerisms that kept it interesting the entire time he was onstage -- superenergetic with a witty, intelligent kind of observational humor. On another night, he&amp;#039;d bring down the house hard when he called Paul McCartney&amp;#039;s estranged wife, Heather, &amp;quot;Pogo Ono. She shills for a land-mine charity, but frankly she&amp;#039;s 50 percent less likely to be injured by a land mine.&amp;quot; Sarah Silverman was the headliner, and most of the people were there to see her, but she just kind of stood up there onstage like a celebrity, and it felt like all that energy that was in the room when Proops was onstage completely disappeared, and I started thinking about ashtrays and alcohol and was glad that I paid only five dollars to get in.  LIGHTFIELD LEWIS  Los Angeles is filled with people who live their lives as a movie, but here is a guy who has actually gone ahead and made the movie. The trailer for Lightfield Lewis&amp;#039;s movie, Lightfield&amp;#039;s Home Videos, starts off with an impressive FROM EXECUTIVE PRODUCER GUS VAN SANT and then quickly dissolves into a video montage of very early VHS film clips of Giovanni Ribisi, Leah Remini, Cuba Gooding Jr., Beck, and Lightfield&amp;#039;s sister Juliette Lewis, all of whom he filmed way before they were famous, just kids screwing around, shooting scenes, and making short films. The tag line for the movie is, &amp;quot;Imagine your life was a movie and you had final cut.&amp;quot;  Twenty years ago, Lightfield started shooting movies on VHS and never stopped. He was obsessed -- at times bordering on total madness -- and now it&amp;#039;s safe to say he&amp;#039;s the premier VHS filmmaker in the world. And he&amp;#039;s so retro that the rest of the world is just now hip to what Lightfield&amp;#039;s been doing his whole life. Witness YouTube. Now he&amp;#039;s put together his masterpiece from all the stuff he shot, and it&amp;#039;ll be coming out next year. We met up at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, and he said that only within the past two years, which is about how long he&amp;#039;d spent editing his movie, had he finally confronted the twenty-first century and gotten himself a cell phone and e-mail account. We walked through a security gate to where my car was parked, and he asked me if I knew who his father, Geoffrey Lewis, was. I nodded yes, but in all honesty, I didn&amp;#039;t so much. He went on to explain that he was an actor who made several movies with Clint Eastwood, and that since his father was in the business, Lightfield grew up wanting to become an actor, too, which made sense -- my father was in the military, and I had grown up wanting to enlist. &amp;quot;With some people, it has the opposite effect,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;When they grow up around it, they&amp;#039;re like, Ugh, stars, yeah, I know Clint Eastwood, blah, blah, blah.&amp;quot; Lightfield explained that because of his father, he viewed working in the industry as a job and &amp;quot;not this somewhere-over-the-rainbow thing. It was something you simply do. Dad comes home with his vampire makeup still on when he was doing Salem&amp;#039;s Lot, and it just got to be normal. I wasn&amp;#039;t good in school, and he tried to get me into some kind of hobby, develop some vocation, whatever.&amp;quot; I drive a stick shift, so I handed Lightfield my recorder while I drove, as directed, to CineSpace, a unique restaurant/nightclub on Hollywood Boulevard where they do a dinner-and-a-movie thing. While stuck in traffic, Lightfield continued. &amp;quot;One day my dad brings home a video camera, and, dude, it&amp;#039;s the one thing I never put down, it&amp;#039;s the one hobby I never gave up, and back then a video camera was -- this was the end of 1982, the home-video camera was not what it is today. The home-video camera today is about as common as a toothbrush, you know, who gives a shit, like now, you have a video camera in your cell phone, it&amp;#039;s no big deal, but back then, when my dad bought me a video camera, it was like he gave me the ingredients to the Everlasting Gobstopper. That&amp;#039;s a Willy Wonka reference. I don&amp;#039;t know if you know that one.&amp;quot; Me: I got it.  &amp;quot;It was like, something, so I just started videoing things, and it was the one hobby I never gave up. I would do it every day. I was never good with manuals, but I kind of figured everything out, and I learned how to kind of edit in camera, as it&amp;#039;s called, because I didn&amp;#039;t have an editing machine. David Bowie talks about how when the synthesizer was new, it came with an instruction manual, and the way they developed all the sounds in all of what we know today in music came from doing things with it that you weren&amp;#039;t supposed to do.&amp;quot; Since Lightfield was always filming and taking pictures of everybody, I figured it&amp;#039;d be okay if I took his picture. I asked him if it was cool to take a picture. I pointed the camera and he kind of freaked out and told me not to take his picture from that angle. Okay, I then changed my position a little bit and when I took the picture, he asked to see it, so I handed him the camera. &amp;quot;No, no, no! That&amp;#039;s awful! Delete that!&amp;quot; I scooted over to an entirely different position, and while making the letter L with both my left and right hands, kind of like how a director does when he&amp;#039;s framing a shot, I told him that I was going to take a picture at this angle right here and asked for his approval. He didn&amp;#039;t hear me right and said that he wasn&amp;#039;t going to do that with his hands.  &amp;quot;No, I don&amp;#039;t want you to do that with your hands,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;This is how I&amp;#039;m going to take the picture -- is it cool if I shoot it?&amp;quot; He said sure, and I took the photograph, and then he demanded that I delete that photo, too. He then went to go look for a photo to give to me. I just bought this digital camera for this assignment, so I didn&amp;#039;t have time to properly read over the manual to find out how to delete photographs, though I imagine it&amp;#039;s pretty brainless, I just never took the time to learn how, and I thanked him and told him if I needed a photo, my people would talk to his people, and shortly after that, I needed a drink, so I drove a couple blocks to a bar on Hollywood Boulevard I like to go to whenever I&amp;#039;m in the neighborhood.  THE BAR  I don&amp;#039;t really rememberthe first time I drank at the Frolic Room, but I definitely remember what happened afterward. When I stepped outside for a smoke, instead of going back inside to drink more, I decided to explore Hollywood Boulevard, and I came across a used bookstore, and with alcohol on my breath, I asked one of the guys working there if they had any Bukowski, since I didn&amp;#039;t see any on the shelves.  He was a heavyset guy, and he paused from putting prices on the inside of the books with a pencil, and he frowned, like somebody had just mentioned his ex-wife&amp;#039;s name to him, and shook his head no and went back to pricing books.  When I asked what the deal was with that, he, irritated now, said, &amp;quot;That asshole used to get drunk at that bar down the street, and whenever he ran out of money, he&amp;#039;d come inside here and harass the customers, have them give him money if he signed his own book.&amp;quot; At the time, I thought that was the coolest thing in world, and I still do, and although that bookstore down the street is no longer there, I still go to that bar every now and then. I have many favorites in town, but it&amp;#039;s a bar that always has a good mix of characters. The jukebox is one of the better ones in town, and behind the bar, next to two American flags, is a framed portrait of one of the greatest Americans to live in Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski.  ASHLEY JOHNSON While I waited at a table outside of Fred 62 (a twenty-four-hour diner in Los Feliz that I like to go to for a meal sometimes after last call, because after 2:00 a.m., it&amp;#039;s like a holding tank that serves food for the drunks populating the area and where the employees wear ironic shirts that say things like HOMOS ARE GAY or GIVE GOOD FRED), Ashley Johnson ran inside to get quarters for the parking meter. An artsy-looking girl about my age cruised by on a Razor scooter while a couple holding hands, both head to toe in American Apparel, walked past in the opposite direction.  Ashley, an actress and photographer, was going to be the last stop in my search for talent here in L.A., and of the thousands of actresses in Hollywood, I couldn&amp;#039;t have been more relieved that it was her. She&amp;#039;s just the right mix of beauty and talent that makes you smile. And she didn&amp;#039;t look anorexic, dress like a skank, or have fake tits or a fake personality. After Ashley returned from avoiding a parking ticket, she sat down, and a waitress wearing fishnet stockings and thrashed low-top Cons came over and took our orders. I ordered first since I had had the most time to stare at the menu, Miss Johnson being more than an hour late, which she apologized for. I had been literally on the verge of saying fuck this and asking an actress I recognized from the movie Next Friday sitting at a table inside if she&amp;#039;d like to answer my questions when Ashley got there.  She began by telling me how she was originally from Michigan and came out here on a family trip when she was six or something, and one of her friends was into acting, so she went along on an audition, and the casting director was like, &amp;quot;Hey, why don&amp;#039;t you come in, you&amp;#039;re the same age, come read the part,&amp;quot; and she did, nailed it, and ended up getting a part in the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Lionheart. She claims her parents were a bit apprehensive at first, not really into it, and &amp;quot;were kinda...umm...&amp;#039;That&amp;#039;s kind of weird, we don&amp;#039;t know if we want to put you in acting.&amp;#039; But I just liked it. It was kinda fun.&amp;quot; After that she went on to play Chrissy Seaver on Growing Pains. In What Women Want, Ashley played Mel Gibson&amp;#039;s fifteen-year-old daughter.  So she&amp;#039;s been working a long time, and she&amp;#039;s only twenty-three. For growing up a child actor, she appeared so unscathed. I wondered if she&amp;#039;d ever slammed H or dined and dashed or had been in a whole lot of trouble before. I asked her why she hadn&amp;#039;t ended up as an E! True Hollywood Story, like the majority of child actors here in Hollywood. I mean, everybody goes through a rebellious phase, and when asked if she&amp;#039;d done any drugs or anything like that, she just smiled and laughed, telling me not really. &amp;quot;I did go through a phase like that, but not like I think most of the other kids do. When you are, like, a teenager and acting, there are drugs all around you, so it&amp;#039;s easy to just sort of get into that lifestyle, but, I think, I didn&amp;#039;t. I don&amp;#039;t why I didn&amp;#039;t, though.&amp;quot;  I wanted to talk at length about the drug scene in Hollywood, but that wasn&amp;#039;t really what this article was about, so I brought up the independent movie she recently starred in, Nearing Grace, which The Hollywood Reporter says is a &amp;quot;superb turn&amp;quot; for Ashley. I watched the movie the night before. She plays a high school girl, the goofy, creative type. I enjoyed her character, even though I found the movie to be a Sofia Coppola knockoff. The other movie that I watched of hers, Fast Food Nation, I think is more of a breakout performance for her. She again plays a high school student, but this time a pretty average, small-town girl with a hot single mom (Patricia Arquette) and a job at a fast-food joint, who eventually finds herself falling in with a bunch of animal-rights-activist college kids. Fast Food Nation will probably get a lot of people talking and, because it deals with both immigration issues and the meatpacking industry, will probably raise as much hell as Super Size Me, if not more (like, I&amp;#039;m still pissed off at that movie, as well as fat people, for essentially being the reason why I can&amp;#039;t supersize my shit anymore), so I wondered if Ashley had to go through any special media training for what to say and what not to say to the media. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s soo funny, I did!&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;And I never had to do any of that before, and I don&amp;#039;t really do a lot of interviews. They did the media training on things like, I pretty much can say anything except about where they shot the later scenes in the movie.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah, I wondered about that, where did they shoot that?&amp;quot;  I asked that question without even realizing that I asked that question, and I think she answered the question without even realizing that she answered the question. &amp;quot;A lot of it was shot at -- none of it was shot in the States, just I think some of the places were in Mexico. I wasn&amp;#039;t there when they did all that stuff, but I think a majority of the stuff was in Mexico.&amp;quot; The later shots in the movie show cows being stunned and butchered, skinned, ground up, and shaped into burgers -- basically moving through moo-cow Auschwitz -- and are, I think, the best parts of the flick.  We both sat there and thought about that for a second, and then, since she worked with Mel Gibson, I asked her about the DUI incident in Malibu. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s such a nice guy. People do really stupid things. I wish he hadn&amp;#039;t done it, but people make mistakes.&amp;quot; So is it true the Jews run Hollywood?  Long pause. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know. If they do, that&amp;#039;d be cool.&amp;quot; The number-one thing that&amp;#039;s always bothered me in interviews with actors and actresses is when the interviewer asks the talent, So, what was it like working with blah blah? I hate that, because nobody goes through life loving every single coworker they&amp;#039;ve ever had, and I have yet to see, read, or hear about an interview where the actor was like, &amp;quot;Fuck that guy, he was a dick, couldn&amp;#039;t remember his lines for shit, and just an embarrassment to share the screen with.&amp;quot;  They always get all excited, like it&amp;#039;s the first time they&amp;#039;ve ever been asked that, and they say premeditated cookie-cutter crap like, &amp;quot;Oh, my God, it was so amazing working with Dustin Hoffman&amp;quot; and shit like that, telling some meaningless tidbit about how funny or down-to-earth the actor is off camera. &amp;quot;So, what was it like working with Ethan Hawke?&amp;quot; I asked. She laughed. There&amp;#039;s a pretty big scene in Fast Food Nation where Ethan and Ashley go to a bar, and Ethan starts asking Ashley what she wants to do with herself. She says the scene was improvised. &amp;quot;We just started improvising it, and we just took what lines worked, what didn&amp;#039;t, and sort of made a scene out of it. A lot of it was just our own dreams or whatever I guess.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know,&amp;quot; her character tells him, &amp;quot;I want to write, I like photography, but I think I want to study science, aeronautical engineering,&amp;quot; which is what Ashley really wants to do.  &amp;quot;I read this study the other day,&amp;quot; Ethan Hawke tells her, &amp;quot;about people who are the happiest with their lives, and the ones who&amp;#039;ve followed their passion -- right? -- even if they weren&amp;#039;t, you know, technically successful -- right? -- when they were looking back at their life, they had fewer regrets.&amp;quot; Ashley&amp;#039;s boyfriend is a musician and currently in a band that sounds a lot like Jeff Buckley. &amp;quot;He just got signed, and we&amp;#039;ve been best friends since thirteen, and just seeing the journey that he&amp;#039;s been on -- it&amp;#039;s hard, I think, it&amp;#039;s harder to break into music than acting. He just went through such a hard road with it. I think if you have a talent, somebody is going to hear you--eventually.&amp;quot; Our waitress was now back at our table, and while she was pouring some fresh coffee into our mugs, Ashley completely stopped talking, waiting for our waitress to leave, and once she was gone Ashley resumed talking. &amp;quot;Why&amp;#039;d you do that?&amp;quot; I asked. She laughed out loud. &amp;quot;I think that&amp;#039;s kind of an issue that I&amp;#039;m dealing with right now. I feel so embarrassed to say I&amp;#039;m an actress for some reason -- because I feel like it&amp;#039;s something that everybody in California wants to be doing, and I love what I&amp;#039;m doing, but it&amp;#039;s not like the most important thing in my life, and I think -- I don&amp;#039;t know, sometimes I feel just stupid to be like, Yeah! I&amp;#039;m an actress!&amp;quot;  Before we left, I asked if I could take her picture. She said it was no problem at all and smiled when I snapped a couple pics of her, but for some reason the damn flash didn&amp;#039;t go off, and I wasn&amp;#039;t sure if the pictures would come out okay, so since she is the photographer, I handed her the camera and asked if she could take a look. She twiddled with it a bit and with a smile handed it back, and I took another quick snapshot. When I got home and checked my camera, I smiled when I saw that she had deleted all the other photos of herself except the last one -- and that&amp;#039;s the image that I have of her. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a49/esq1206drinkjoke-216/>