It’s the public image of Bruce Wayne.  It’s the Napoleonic Complex of Ari Gold.  She calls it my ‘smartassness’, but one of my close buddies gave it the best nickname of all: ‘Hollywood’.

The ‘Hollywood’ persona gets its roots in the pro wrestlers I looked at as a kid.  Guys like Ric Flair, Shawn Michaels, and the Rock (more on him in a second).  Like in the movies, there’s a few guys who are just over the top, comically ‘bad guys’ (like the drug dealer on Roc who bragged about selling drugs to kids), but the really interesting bad guys are the ones who don’t believe what they’re doing is bad as much as they just believe they’re approaching the world from a different point of view as everybody else.  They may be ‘unpopular’ but they don’t believe they’re ‘bad guys’. 

(Before I get too far off topic, I promised to give a shoutout to my boy John C. who writes about all things wrestling at www.thejohnreport.net.  As my interest in the wrestling business goes in and out, I can always stop by John’s site just to see what’s going on week to week and to reminisce about the ‘glory days’ of my youth.  Speaking of which, he has a nice piece up now on the newly retired Shawn Michaels.)

‘Hollywood’ as my friends know it (especially the Joker) is the kid who wears sunglasses inside the club, the kid who has season tickets to the USC games, the guy who delights in riling up the ‘red staters’ with his liberal attitude, and asks for a double mocha latte when I go to a friend’s house and he asks if I want a glass of water.  ‘Hollywood’ is me being a jackass because sometimes it’s just more fun to be a jackass. 

The best ever ‘real world’ example of this goes back into the wrestling world.  A little backstory first:  the Rock was the most over good guy in wrestling for most of the 90s.  So over he started getting parts in Hollywood movies.  You all know this, but along the way the wrestling crowd started to ‘turn’ on him.  He was still playing to the fans, but the fans started giving him ‘You Sold Out’ chants, and booing all the signature moves of ‘The People’s Champion’.  The booing became so loud and abrasive, The Rock, in mid-match, would start acting like a ‘bad guy’ since that’s evidently what the people wanted him to be.

So the next PPV comes around.  The lights go out.  Everyone looks to the Titantron to see a video they haven’t seen before: a helicopter flies over the City of Angels at night.  30 seconds of build up…60 seconds of build up…IS COOKIN!   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8EmLeciR8

Half the crowd is booing their lungs out, half the crowd (like me) is cheering out of respect.  If the People want to boo him?  Fine.  The man who was once ‘The People’s Champion’ ain’t doing it for the People anymore, he’s doing it for himself.  He’s ‘Hollywood’ now, deal with it.

Yeah.  ‘Hollywood’.