"A New Hollywood, A New Marylin" by Craig DeLancey

The setting of our story: New Hollywood.

As if Hollywood could ever be other than new. They should have named it, "Another Hollywood." Or, better yet, "More Hollywood." Hollywood never grows, it never moves or evolves; it’s everywhere, all the time. Once you are in, there is no outside.

You may be thinking: Marilyn grew old, Bogart died of cancer, Schwarzenegger finally got weak. I too suffered from this confusion once. But think it through: someone named "Marilyn" died young, the necessity of a biological script -- but this death was incidental, as was her body, her individual mind. It’s the films that we know, that we refer to, that we care about. The thing that died -- it was just a fleshy shadow, obscured always by the more concrete cosmos of images, by the virtual and eternal (and so, most real) world of light and pictures.

I should know. I’m a Marilyn.