- OTHER MEDIA
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- FACING FAILURE
- 'Pure Shock Value': Play is about making it in Hollywood and still
being just a starving artist
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- Matt Pelfrey's seen the face of desperation - and it isn't pretty.
- The Los Angeles playwright says he has friends who've technically "made
it" in Hollywood who are still riding couches and struggling to survive
economically. If it's so difficult for them to make it big, to reach the
"Entourage" level, what about someone with little to no talent?
How far would he go to succeed?
- Pelfrey examines those issues in his new play, "Pure Shock Value,"
about three people at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain who are thinking
of abandoning their showbiz dreams - until a stranger, an "alternate-world
version of Quentin Tarantino" - appears in their backyard, and the
trio decides to give it one last go.
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- "I'd always been interested in the strata of people I meet in
Hollywood, and it's the real bottom-feeders, the people who may or may
not have talent but are gambling everything on scoring in Hollywood,"
Pelfrey says by phone from Los Angeles. "And the interesting thing
that happens to them as they start to enter their 30s and the clock is
ticking, and they start to realize they haven't really laid the foundation
to do anything else."
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- Pelfrey's play will be performed by the sketch comedy troupe Killing
My Lobster, the group's first full-length play since 2006's "Hunter
Gatherers." It's based, in part, on an incident in 1996, when Margot
Kidder was found in someone's backyard having a nervous breakdown, as well
as when a couple found Robert Downey Jr. passed out in their child's bed.
The difference is that Pelfrey's characters are going to try to take advantage
of their "fortune."
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- "I never really wanted to write a play just about people in Hollywood
struggling to make it. That's not a huge interest to me," he says,
"but when it came with the plot twist of this person having a nervous
breakdown and the moral choices the characters would have to make, then
I thought that's something I can play with."
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- Pelfrey's world premiere play is his first production in San Francisco;
he studied at San Francisco State. And, though he's had some success, with
his plays produced in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, desperation is
an emotion Pelfrey knows, not only about Hollywood but also about the economy.
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- "It's like everything is conspiring to crush you and you don't
have a basic standard of living and yet something in myself and in these
characters still wants to gamble, still wants to pursue this."
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- "It is scary," he says. "But you can also check the
news and the weird, desperate stuff people do all the time, you can't even
make up. In some ways, it's realism."
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