Power, Money, Deals, Drugs & Bimbos

Actors and actresses and comedians and comediennes have exerted enormous influence over this society via TV and cinema. What kind of people are they who are exerting that influence? A little reading in the popular press suggests that they are the unstable denizens of an unhappy town, a Hollywood where drug use, trading sexual favors, and mental illness are common.

Various entertainment writers have drawn attention to the widespread use of illegal drugs in Hollywood. For example:

(1) Roger Ebert: “Half the people in Hollywood seem to have gone through recovery from drugs and alcohol by now [1990].”1

(2) Jorge Casuso: “During the freewheeling ’70s, Hollywood seemed to be riding a coke-induced high. On screen, recreational drugs were the props of the glamorous…[or] they were psychedelic aids in the search for Truth…. Off-screen, drugs were part of the Hollywood mystique, seemingly taken as casually as a cocktail. Business deals were cut over vials of cocaine.”2

(3) Michael Kilian: “Hollywood was notorious [this said in 1984] for its nonchalantly open use of the drug [cocaine] by celebrities.”3

(4) Clarence Petersen wrote in 1992: Hollywood is “a mean town, run by weird men (mostly) addicted to power, money, deals, drugs, and bimbos.”4

(5) Walter Scott: “A knowledgeable studio executive tells Parade [magazine in 1996] that drug use is as big — or bigger — than ever in the movie capital [Hollywood].”5

(6) Hilary de Vries, in 1998, noted “Hollywood’s renewed use of drugs.”6

(7) And film critic Michael Wilmington, in 1998, similarly observed that “a sort of heroin/cocaine chic exists in today’s Hollywood.”7