Want to pull a heist with me?

I wonder if Los Angeles has more unqualified people attempt heists than the average city.

I just came in from my balcony. It is too dark tonight to see the Hollywood sign clearly. Or maybe it is too bright and the sign is overwhelmed by the nearly full moon and the holiday decorations visible on top of the Capitol Records building.

I just finished watching the Halloween episode of Boomtown. Boomtown is a long-canceled crime drama, which starred Donnie Wahlberg as a hard-driving detective with a good heart and a depressed wife. Each episode is shot from the point of view of multiple characters, who come together to show the whole story. I imagine show creator Graham Yost probably referenced Pulp Fiction during the pitch meeting. It is a sympathetic way to tell a story, such that the viewer understands where even characters at odds with one another are coming from.

Boomtown’s “All Hallows Eve”, written by show creator Graham Yost, features, in addition to a pumpkin hunt gone laugh-out-loud horribly wrong, an ambulance hijacked by a heist crew of desperadoes, dressed as cowboys, one of whom has been shot. The ambulance paramedic is one of the show’s more lovable characters, yet your heart just goes out to the lead hijacker.

The heist mastermind, Holden McKay, and his wounded brother Sam, came out to Hollywood to be stuntmen. After working as a janitor in a movie studio, Holden decides that a heist would be easy to pull on Halloween, when masks would not seem suspicious. Even though his master crime obviously failed badly enough that his brother got shot, listening to Holden explain how he could have been a janitor in Tulsa, but he came to Los Angeles for something more, I find myself thinking that pulling a heist would be totally reasonable.

The actor seems so convincing and compelling that I’m sure I must have seen him in a major role in something else. According to the internet, I probably saw the actor, named Tyler Christopher, also dressed as a cowboy on CSI, but his main claims to fame are that he used to be married to Eva Longoria of Desperate Housewives (which I have never seen) fame and, oh yeah, he is apparently a huge soap star, having appeared on approximately nine gajillion episodes of General Hospital. I looked up how many episodes of General Hospital George Clooney was on, so I could make a statement about how every huge success in Los Angeles is somehow dwarfed by someone else’s. Only it turns out George Clooney was on E.R. I’m assuming they both take place in hospitals populated by hunky men, so anybody (who had never watched either) could make the same mistake.

A funny thing about Los Angeles is that there is always the sense that there is something bigger, something really huge, something incredibly larger than the average life. And that something is just barely beyond your grasp. It doesn’t matter how ridiculously successful you are either. You don’t have to be a janitor to feel like this here. There is the sense that if you were just a bit bolder, just a bit more extroverted, just a bit more elusive, or just a bit more in the right place at the right time, then you would finally break through to the big time. I don’t think anyone in Hollywood is ever so rich or so famous that they don’t feel like this, like they could hold the moon in the palm of their hand, if they could just figure out how to possess a slightly better balcony.

In “All Hallow’s Eve”, the ambitious lawyer, played by Neal McDonough, who is planning to run for District Attorney goes to a party at a Hollywood home with lavish Halloween decorations. They are there because the attorney hopes to eventually hit the party-thrower up to film a campaign commercial. He and his wife joke somewhat disparagingly about how their host wrote “that one with the bus” and “that other one”. Graham Yost, in addition to creating Boomtown, wrote Speed, which was okay, was indirectly responsible for Speed 2: Cruise Control, which I had the sense not to see, and wrote Broken Arrow, which was bad enough to stall the careers of both Christian Slater and John Woo in one movie.

Boomtown seems solid so far and I was interested in the show because Graham Yost also created the more recent Raines cop drama, which is pure genius. Raines is brilliant enough that I can forgive Broken Arrow. Jeff Goldblum plays depressed Detective Michael Raines who solves crimes by being a crazy person who hallucinates speaking with dead people, but who has the misfortune to know he is out of his gourd, although very good at his job. Detective Bobby “Fearless” Smith from Boomtown has a cameo on Raines, so they both take place in the same world. It is a world where both horrible and wonderful things happen.

So I wonder if Los Angeles, as compared to most cities, has statistically way way way more giant crimes attempted by amateurs. I’ve also got a pal at the District Attorney’s office I could drop an email, but I can’t decide how a statistician would quantify such a thing. Maybe a statistician wouldn’t quantify such a thing. Maybe the aggregate average of longing for greatness, expressed as the cosine of plucking the Hollywood moon out of the sky, can only really be quantified by midnight philosophers and dudes who create unjustly canceled cop shows for NBC.

So, who wants to pull a heist with me?

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Posted by Amelia G on December 10, 2008. Filed under Blue Blood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry