Look out, world...this diva is about to break out!

You’re my mascot, Paper Moon.”I was too tired to object. We both knew I was more than a mascot. I’d worked for my brother since I was eleven, for six long years.“You should stop calling me that,” I said.“I love that name.”“P.M. and her dad were crooks. It gives it away.

After the introduction, Elki pointed at the palm trees. “Ever seen something so stunning?”“Please,” I said, “I hate those trees. They grow on and on. Keep going, with nothing sucking their strength like normal trees and their branches. Selfish bastards.”“Wow. Don’t trip. There.

I was being photographed by a gay male who was imagining me as what he thinks a straight man wants to fuck, and he was doing so on behalf of a director, a straight male who was interpreting me with his little boy brain on behalf of the studio, also male, who were interpreting me based on who they want to sell tickets to, which is this invisible horde of boys and men. The male gaze is real, ladies and gentlemen, and it is deep.

It was a brutal schedule. I would be on the airplane going back Monday morning at six after shooting all Sunday night, every time barely making my flight. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I had to rush straight to the Paramount studios and be a whole other person, this wildly different character, Paige. My brain was starting to scramble on top of its already fragile state.

The bizarre thing about the industry is: you were discovered because you were unique. What was special about you when you were discovered, they do their damnedest to remove, not unlike what traditional society does to children.

Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. But things weren’t entirely black—not yet. When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Tuesday you’re laughing again.

Hollywood’s motives in marketing sex may have been cynical—Hollywood’s motives always are. But in providing audiences with sophisticated fare, it was also responding to real cultural changes that had happened within American society. Hollywood was a few years behind the trend, of course, but that’s nothing new. Don’t forget, this is the same industry that for seventy years has made wonderful, passionate, stirring anti-war movies six or seven years after every war, never during one.

It's easy not to abuse your power when you don't actually have any power.

The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.