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# The Hollywood That Once Was
- URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/memoirs-of-a-nobody/
- Published: 2026-07-04T12:57:50.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-01T14:35:49.000Z
- Description: Measured against the golden age of the studios, the political class are, to Van Halen, mere amateurs at mythmaking. Perhaps the strongest argument in his favor is the failure of both Hollywood figures and political elites to artfully conceal their melodramatic tantrums in public.
- Author: John Campbell
- Tags: #Issue 1, #pos-10, #featured

Faisal Marzipan

*Hollywood Samizdat: Notes from Below the Line* by Rambo Van Halen, 2025, Passage Press, 240 pp.

While reading *Hollywood Samizdat: Notes from Below the Line*, an autobiography from an author writing under the nom de plume Rambo Van Halen, I was haunted by a vision of a video depicting the legendary film director David Lynch in a studio directing an episode of *Twin Peaks: The Return.* Every member associated with the production, including its financial sponsors, was present to witness Lynch bringing his craft to bear. Later, during a discussion, one of the team members pointedly addressed Lynch to emphasize time was limited to exactly two days before they had to complete the production of a particular scene. Lynch, visibly irate, launched into a passionate monologue championing the artist’s inviolable right to creative autonomy and lamenting how little time the studio allowed him to “go dreamy” and “experiment.” According to protocol, such a vehement outcry had to be reported to the studio and crew members dispatched to assuage Lynch’s sense of aggrievement.

What drives one to write an autobiography? Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography was composed during his retirement when, impoverished and lacking a pension, he turned to Mark Twain to support his writing venture. Soon after its publication in 1885, salesmen, dressed as Union army soldiers, ventured across the country to promote the book and, as a result, Grant’s finances were set aright again. In our time, however, the paradigm of an accomplished older man reflecting back on his life has been replaced by something else; now, a successful autobiography precedes worldly success. This paradigmatic shift was best exemplified by Barack Obama in his autobiography, *Dreams from My Father*, published in 1995 when he was thirty-four and preparing to run for a state senate seat. In his early thirties, J.D. Vance also wrote an autobiography which, like Obama’s memoir, delved into the challenges of his upbringing. In both instances, the autobiography served as their “thesis statement” of the character of ambitious men who were intending to run for president at an early age.

What, then, drives Rambo Van Halen, who covets neither fame nor prestige—or at any rate will not surrender his day job to obtain them—to set down his life anonymously, forgoing the celebrity and the wealth that an autobiography might confer? For Van Halen, the answer may be that as a “below the line” man—that is, a member of the nonperforming crew—in what was once among the most glamorous and lucrative of American exports, he can offer an illuminating perspective on current-year America. Leaving questions concerning Van Halen’s motives aside, what kind of an autobiography is this? Its character is difficult to categorize into any established literary subgenre. To fairly characterize what type of book this is, it’s worth contemplating two wildly popular but contrasting genres that emerged out of the internet in the late aughts, when YouTube democratized the production and dissemination of the moving image.

The first genre was dubbed the “shoot interview,” in which a professional wrestler divulged the behind-the-scenes stories of the wrestling business. From world-famous wrestlers like Scott Hall or Jim Cornette one could gain insight into how a captivating persona was created, the expertly choreographed “kayfabe” antics or outright violence that went on backstage. In contrast to the smooth, sober tidiness of the analytic video essay, the shoot interview is chaotic, frequently bloody but, in its own way, very compelling. For instance, there was an incident where Arn Anderson and Sid Vicious fell into a heated bar argument in Blackburn, England, that, after a brief cool-off, escalated further when Sid opted to arm himself with a broken leg torn from a hotel chair and proceeded to confront Arn in his hotel room. Unfortunately for Sid, he had little time to react before Arn opened the door and immediately proceeded to stab him with a pair of scissors. The wrestler Big Van Vader recalled Sid descending into the hotel lobby in visible distress before collapsing onto the floor. Vader rushed to press on Sid’s severed artery until the paramedics arrived, thereby saving Sid’s life (and Arn’s career).

The second was the long-form video essay, most memorably represented by the frame-by-frame exegeses of Stanley Kubrick by Rob Ager, among the form’s most prominent practitioners, and the sardonic but entertaining critiques of *Star Wars* mounted by Red Letter Media. YouTube executives disliked the long form, for the simple reason that an advertisement sells best in the instant before a video begins; an hour-long disquisition on the set design of *The Shining* affords far too few of those instants. The film studios, for their part, professed that close analysis of this kind infringed on their copyright. This solicitude for their copyrighted productions intersected with YouTube’s financial incentive to check the popularity of long videos on its platform, ultimately leading to the demonetization of such content.

One can make a comfortable living acquainting people with facts they are pleased to hear or, if they lack any compunctions of conscience, amass vast fortunes soothing them with lies they wish to hear, but those who set about revealing too many truths that no one wants to see run the risk of bankruptcy, homelessness, or worse. The film critique genre, which reached its apotheosis in the 2012 documentary *Room 237*, takes a final, polished object like, say, *The Shining* and proceeds to scrutinize it frame by frame and imbue it with themes and concepts the director may have meant to convey but left somewhat implicit or veiled. It is easy, and lucrative, to read too much into the films. Such in-depth film evaluations can certainly captivate the public, but the deeper the analysis goes, the more it shades into sensationalism, obscurantism, and conspiracy-mongering. An example that illustrates this genre’s excesses was one video essayist’s claim that Kubrick must have been involved with a NASA plot to stage the moon landing. He drew this conclusion from the fact that Danny, one of the film’s main characters, wore a knitted sweater bearing the mission emblem of Apollo 11.

*Hollywood Samizdat*, Rambo Van Halen’s polished and remarkably thoughtful debut, resolutely falls into the first genre. This is a confessional account; it airs the dirty laundry of an industry that is, by his account, in terminal decline and increasingly supplanted by TikTok. There is another quality in this account that’s found in the “shoot interviews” and in another equally eccentric source—Penn and Teller, the magician duo featured on a popular TV show where they explain the mechanics of a magic trick while simultaneously performing it. Like the two entertainers, Van Halen enchants his audience with his craft even as he exposes its inner workings. The successful application of the filmmaker’s craft, like the magician’s, demands a degree of charisma and technical prowess immense enough to entertain an audience into suspension of disbelief. After seeing “how the sausage is made,” one begins to share in Van Halen’s profound adoration for this art form. Filmmaking was the one vocation that could hold a middling student possessed of large ambition and a willingness to work long hours. Like many of his Gen X cohort, he worshipped the films of John Hughes, *Ferris Bueller’s Day Off* above all, and in one essay he weaves the memory of his father with his love for the movie business:

> Of course, great cinema has that effect. It has that power. You get hypnotized by the moving image. It’s not real, it’s just light reflected off a screen. But you think it’s real. I’ve said this before. I repeat it because it’s true.

You don’t look at a film, you look into it.

And it hypnotizes you. And it implants ideas into you. Plants them deep. Most people don’t even know they’re there. And those ideas change you. If you think this sounds like the plot of Christopher Nolan’s *Inception*, you are correct. Because this is the plot of *Inception*, which is a movie about how movies work. Movies play with time and space and hypnotize and implant ideas. Movies can be insidious tools of propaganda. Some people intuit this, and they don’t trust the film or the filmmakers. And then they come up with wild conspiracy theories . . .

Van Halen’s enchantment with the movies, contracted at a young age and abetted by a few family connections, eventually led him to secure a foothold in the last frontier town of the American Wild West: Hollywood. Having long resided within that world, he describes it with the white-knuckled tension and vivid clarity of a man newly sober. The eighteen-hour days, the obtuse egos of the talent, and the irascible directors serve to impart to the reader a richly textured sense of how movies are produced, even if the picture isn’t so pleasing at first. A latently chaotic environment regularly inflamed into abject turmoil by the most unexpected vagaries or by the clash between egos on set leaves one struggling to believe how a single screenplay was ever produced into a film in Hollywood, much less how its studios could possibly manage to concoct and carry out a conspiracy.

A veteran of this mythmaking industry such as Van Halen is perhaps the ideal man to wipe off the mystical and obscurantist mist surrounding society’s views of Hollywood and, most significantly, political elites more broadly. This approach, which as social critique is refreshingly original, is exemplified in “Patronize Me,” an essay first published on X in 2024, in which he recounts the case of a celebrated director of animated films who, granted his own studio and asked to deliver a script, simply declined to do so! From the floor, Van Halen explains, the crew’s labor is “everything”: they exist to make the director appear competent and to forestall his disastrous missteps, while the director’s reciprocal duty is to keep the lights on and the next job booked:

> This was many years ago and Luminary Director hasn’t worked since. He’ll probably never make another movie. And this is sad because you like his movies, remember? Again, I wasn’t there. But if I had been there (and if they would have approved my very reasonable salary request) I would have done the following: 1\. Stayed up all night and typed up a script 2\. Sent the script to the suits, followed by daily production reports 3\. Done all of this without Luminary Director knowing. Why? The obvious reason is to save everyone’s job. But the bigger, related reason is that my role (and everyone’s role) in the Hollywood Patronage System is this: Take care of the people above you, and look out for the people below you.

From here Van Halen draws an illuminating analogy with the Biden debacle of summer 2024, in which—he insists—there was neither a grand design to dispossess Biden of his presidential nomination nor a plan to install Kamala Harris as dictator for life, only the haphazard scramble by subordinates to manage a political campaign in crisis. This was, in Van Halen’s diagnosis, a salvageable campaign that simply required the saving grace of a show-business visionary because—and this is a recurring theme—political mythmaking differs very little from the cinematic kind. Measured against the golden age of the studios, the political class are, to Van Halen, mere amateurs at mythmaking. Perhaps the strongest argument in his favor is the failure of both Hollywood figures and political elites to artfully conceal their melodramatic tantrums in public.

In sharp contrast to the just-so stories of methodically orchestrated conspiracies, the actual daily life in the filmmaking world is a maelstrom fraught with unpredictable conflagrations of hostilities between egos at the most crucial points, the seemingly futile cat-herding of crew and performers, and a habitual tendency to fall behind schedule, often redeemed only by the inexorable imperative of “getting the shot right while the sun is going down or we waste another fucking day.” This anarchic condition is not incidental but necessary to the workings of the film industry and sits oddly against the ubiquitous consensus-guided, bureaucratic ethos of the modern economy.

Hollywood, in Van Halen’s telling, was the last untamed frontier of American commerce, surviving the formidable onslaught of advancing columns of private equity, bloodless consultants, and, most disastrously, the prioritization of “appropriate” levels of racial and gender workforce diversity above all other personnel selection criteria—longer than any other sense-making American institution. Private equity and consulting firms promise large gains in efficiency and superior returns on investment, while in truth they have presided over the managed decline of whichever studio they’ve touched. Efficiency, we are told, is also why films are now shot digitally—to economize. Physical raw film stock once routinely consumed between a fourth and a third of a production’s budget; yet when the studios switched to digital platforms, the quality declined, the budgets did not shrink, and, most significantly, piracy was made trivially easy. Save for a handful of notable intransigent holdouts like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, the analog cinematic film is all but dead today.

Despite drastic overhauls of the studios’ corporate governance structure and a significantly more “diverse” workforce, box-office revenues have fallen precipitously since Covid and remain down nearly 40 percent compared to 2019; only about two-thirds as many films were made in 2025 as in 2018\. The decay of the American film, Van Halen contends, mirrors the decay of America itself. One is hard pressed to say he is wrong. To produce films, to prosper in filmmaking at all, is ultimately a matter of “making things happen,” which necessarily requires a command of institutional knowledge no customer-relations database can reliably capture, let alone impart.

Editor’s note: *This review was written and accepted for publication before the book under discussion went out of print. Readers wishing to consult the text itself may find it through secondhand booksellers or library holdings.*