Living Below the Line: Hollywood Samizdat by Rambo Van Halen

Reviewed by Zachary Cohen

I don’t really remember how to write a book review. Which is OK, because I’m not sure Rambo Van Halen knows how to write a book. Which is not to say that Hollywood Samizdat (Passage Press) is not a good book, in fact, it’s an excellent read; self-effacing, funny, filled to the brim with just the kind of keen insights and degenerate fairy tales one would expect from a Hollywood tell-all.

How did a book like this become so dangerous in the first place that it can even be–ironically or not–labeled as “Samizdat”? Arriving at his thesis in a roundabout way, Rambo lays it at the feet of what he calls “The Machine,” the embedded impulse of today’s globalized managerial elites, the Devouring Mother for the Jungians out there. He always knew it was there festering away, but it was only when The Machine came for his youngest son’s nascent artistic talent that Rambo understood the diabolism of its pervasiveness.

In the same way that Ari Aster’s latest film “Eddington” examines the Covid Era through the sharp lens of a small New Mexico town’s mayoral campaign race, Hollywood Samizdat is ultimately a story concerned with the ramifications of the Me Too movement upon Hollywood. How the previous regime, perched at the top of studios, production houses, casting agencies and the rest of the ecosystem that makes the entertainment business tick, were more deft at getting deals done quicker, permitting creative risk-taking, focusing on competency over identity and the like. Yes, it was mostly men, but also women who had that killer instinct thrived as well.

When, post-Me Too/Harvey Weinstein, groups of women, gays and feminized men and their “teams” took over, decision making was diffused, exactly as the Managerial Class likes it. The results are there for all to see, unmistakably.

Credit to the author for not prattling on too much about Me Too in any sort of polemical way. If you are looking for unhinged rants about the dangers of unfettered female vengeance, this is not the book for you. Rambo is too wise, rendering his story and its moralities with far more subtlety. There’s a touching story about one of his own industry mentors winning a long awaited Golden Globe, one of those tough guy gals that unwittingly mentored him through his own trajectory through the business.

If you happen to be living under a rock, The Machine is not doing so well these days, as the narrative control (lies, fake scandals and gaslighting) essential to its smooth running gets pulled apart like processed string cheese just a bit more everyday; the planks of tradition, culture, and heritage are measured twice and cut once, and finally put back where they belong. Almost without trying to be, Hollywood Samizdat is a small but important chink in the armor of this dying regime. There are cautionary tales within, but also perhaps even a roadmap, letters to a young poet, of how to stand athwart the current paradigm and back towards a system that would once again elevate quality over process.

But what about the book itself?

Well, expect to find yourself unabashedly rooting for a pseudo-renegade Hollywood film and commercial production guy seeking a way out of an industry he describes, in adroitly humanistic terms, as a haven for high-functioning yet mentally ill degenerates, next-level narcissists and wannabe god emperor-directors. Some of them just come across as your standard American ruffian, obsessively driven, the kind of people Twain would have satirized and secretly loved and Whitman would have gawped at.

The kind of people who made America great in the first place. And then there are the Oscar-winning actors–stay away from the Method Ones Rambo warns–who want nothing more than to seduce the extremely good-looking women summoned from across the country (and indeed now the globe) and loudly assfuck them in a trailer on a suburban side street in the middle of an afternoon film shoot. All while losing their precious golden hour light. Just remember, it’s the women asking for it, harder and faster, literally.

For Rambo the way out is through writing, and undoubtedly we are seeing the birth of a second phase of an already very solid creative career. Hollywood Samizdat contains the grit and grime of a life pretty well lived and not yet over. This is not the work of some mid-20’s autist with no life experience outside of MFA workshops filled with shrieking harridans threatened by a sliver of male ingenuity.

We should all be rooting for Rambo and his new métier. He has good stories to tell and is a good teller of them. And he understands that the industry he has worked within is, and forever will be, for all the bullshit and industry revolutions, and revulsions, brought on by Me Too or Covid or the rise of streaming networks, based on telling good stories, in moving picture form. He’s romantic about the talent, dedication and skill required behind the camera to produce such great works.

His own story is sweet and nostalgic, while those of the people he’s met and worked alongside for many years are richly related. When you’ve worked as hard and as long as he has in an industry notorious for its long hours of tedium, paired with exquisite specialization: in film and camera technology, in creativity, in production, in abstract problem solving–like hardwiring a John Deere Gator and driving it straight across San Francisco from Golden Gate Park to the Embarcadero in the middle of the night, in order to get an arbitrary shot by the Bay, only to get fired the next day–in “getting the job done,” in being a team player, in looking out for the people above you and below you in a tightly-coiled totem pole of competency and ego and money and career and status and achievement.

Our world is rife with incompetency, all day long we merely survive it, nothing works and we’re charged subscription fees for the privilege of our own frustration and yet, in an industry that is so easy to despise, Rambo is able to rather deftly make you fall in love with Hollywood all over again. I actually hate him for this. So many of us just want to burn the fucker down and start fresh.

But we have to resist the Vengeful Son energy that is natural to these moments; It is ultimately a Siren Song. In the ashes of what they left us, we will restore the soil. Tale as old as time. America and Hollywood are intrinsically bound together–in that tight chain of human endeavor Rambo has long been a part of, as one goes, so goes the other.

We’re all going to have to find a way to fall in love with America again, and one way to do that is for Hollywood to tell us better stories in better ways and to drop the bad stories, those indelicately stuffed with unnatural political agendas and trendy narrative constructions, told in piss-poor fashion as quickly as a fired PA who didn’t suck up the arbitrary public berating from his coke sweat-drenched 1st AD with just the right amount of aplomb. One comes away with the idea that in Rambo’s no-nonsense world of multiple 18-hour days strung together into a haze of mysterious motor functioning, the tolerance for incompetency is actually rather low.

And so while the “Above the Line” elite of the industry–the writers, directors, producers, actors and executives granted equity in their vaunted creative projects–die on the hill of obsequious social justice masquerades, ensuring there are enough black lesbian body positive (i.e. disgustingly obese and obnoxious) girlbosses in the latest incarnation of an Elizabethan political drama, it is the “below the line” workaday types, from which Rambo emerges, who simply roll their eyes and get on with the work so they can get the damn shot, go home and spend some time with their families. With some pride to boot.

Hollywood Samizdat is easy to read because Rambo is well-versed in the “rigorous honesty” of AA. Which means he knows how to get to the point of things quickly. Throat clearing is at a minimum. The guy actually has something to say. How refreshing. Told plainly, for those who need reminding, means even occasionally politically incorrect. Or what we use to call common fucking sense. Hopefully we’re moving past terms like “Dissident Right” and “Fascist” and “Nazi” and back to something a bit less, oh I don’t know, intentionally divisive. No one has the time for this anymore. We’ve got a country and a culture to save. It’s the top of the 2nd inning, folks.

Hollywood Samizdat is a direct and real book, loaded with film industry anecdotes, maxims and a few delectable grotesqueries. In an act of class unusual for his industry he doesn’t name names, nor does he have to. We’re a culture besieged by content, plenty of which remains excellent, still too much of which is dreck, or “goyslop” in the popular parlance, and therefore the more intelligent of us will be easily able to imagine the actors, directors, producers and such in our minds using Rambo’s prompts to set us off on our own imaginative fantasies. Clever how he does that. I don’t even think he meant to.

And within this frame–aha!–Rambo effectively reclaims something, for himself, his caste within Hollywood and his readers: Integrity. Affability. Reliability. Stability. Craft. The pride in getting the job done, in working hard not only so you can look yourself in the mirror when you brush your teeth in the morning, but because you are part of something bigger, a chain of people, events, places, times, budgets, obligations, responsibilities.

You didn’t let addiction get the best of you. You didn’t cheat on your wife even when your teenage crush grabbed your cock at a West Hollywood Wrap Party. You took your dog for a long walk around the American Apparel factory instead. Sure, you might have been zooted out on opiates at the time, but one lesson at a time. Your drug dealers liked your dog.

That chain, that people young and old, sane or imbalanced, drunk or sober, liberal or conservative, invested or detached, all tirelessly maintain in order to produce the work, mostly on time, mostly on budget. Even if some nerves are scattered along the way and a few who couldn’t cut it have to drop off.

Ok, more than a few, and Rambo is all too familiar with them. This is America, baby. Freedom doesn’t just mean blue jeans, fast cars, and the open road of teenage fantasy as rendered to us in the 20th Century, it’s the freedom to fuck it all up too. Having come close to an ignominious end himself, with a long ago vanquished alcohol and painkiller addiction, he’s able to look honestly at it with the grace and gratitude of middle age, dad-hood and a healthy, though not totally unscathed, marriage. His wife sounds like a hard-working saint in her own right. Thanks, Mrs. Van Halen.

Samizdat is a book about balance: balancing life, work, ambition, the self, reality, responsibility, family, love, marriage, money, relationships. And history.

The author effortlessly weaves in personal stories, of his parent’s rocky relationship and the chaotic childhood he endured because of it, the death of his father, and, in true Hollywood fashion, a war story, or three. Because that’s what Hollywood does best, isn’t it?

Whether Strangelove or Saving Private Ryan or Dunkirk, The Bridge on the River Kwai, or 1917 or The Big Red One, which gets an important mention. We find out late in the story that after 9/11 Rambo tried to enlist in the military, because he had nothing better to do, but given some personal health challenges was literally laughed out of the recruiting office.

It’s real war that is often on Rambo’s mind, the war his grandfather served in, the war his uncles and best friend’s father served in, that create other kinds of chains between peoples, histories, families, countries, generations. That connect us to some things even as they sever us from essential parts of ourselves. It’s called sacrifice. And it hurts. It takes its toll. The ferryman must be paid. Wars that mark families with stains just barely visible underneath where medals were pinned.

There are horror stories out there in the real world, stories where men are shot and scared and die alone. Or cancelled and shamed by schoolmarms. Had careers stolen from them. For less than nothing.

I don’t know about you, and I have no interest in stealing valor from anyone, but just trying to live, thrive and survive in America these past 40 years, I sort of feel like a war survivor too. We just now seem to be getting a sense of what we’ve been up against–55 million foreign visa holders, thoroughly-captured institutions, the collapse of media credibility–so buckle up, kids.

Here, in Samizdat, back in the sunny and safe confines of Santa Monica or Burbank, in the controlled prose and lexicon of Mister Rambo Van Halen and his merry band of highly-competent producers, we can smooth all that out and once again create myth and hero, and give meaning to, and animate beauty.

We can return to a place that makes more sense, without resentment, even for the people who so clearly led us astray, resisting the vengeance that is so clearly our right to take. And we can start making beautiful things again, artifacts of the age, books that are honest confrontations with the self, warts and all, and in moving pictures that slide across a silver screen in a dark room, safe and healthy with our neighbors surrounding us, and show us who we are and what we, as a nation, a people, are capable of.

What’s more American than Rambo Van Halen?

Hollywood.

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Rambo’s a great storyteller. Many are saying he’s the greatest storyteller left in Hollywood. Don’t be a fag, buy his book. Keep it on your coffee table so the Zoomettes think you’re well-read and all that jazz. You can find it here.