The art of snooping

Thu, 31 May 2007 10:38:00 +0000

Years ago, I got an entry-level position at a San Francisco private investigative firm. I entered the job hanging onto some long-standing beliefs about the gumshoe, based purely on film, television and pulp fiction, of course. During the two-year stretch of my employment at the firm (which chooses to remain nameless) many of my P.I. fantasies came true: I got to hop into a cab and say, "Follow that cab." I got to follow a subject into a bar and order a beer while I was on the clock. I got to work undercover on a case that I'm still not allowed to talk about. I got to rummage through the trash of a complete stranger and attempt to piece together a phone bill.

For the most part, however, my job bore little resemblance to that of the fictional gumshoe. I was never held at gunpoint, nor did I ever pistol-whip anyone. No one ever asked me to find an invaluable figurine of a mysterious blackbird. Of course, I didn't expect those things to happen. But in the back of my head, I had always hoped I'd get to snoop. It seems to me that rifling through a person's belongings is the direct route to that person's character. To properly investigate a subject, we must investigate a subject's stuff.

Confessions of a Hollywood sellout

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 20:22:00 +0000

I stand in the center of my apartment. The room glows with the lowest-grade white copy paper. I have covered every surface available. First the coffee table, then the floor, my bed, finally my desk. For a brief moment, I conjure the image of myself as Lawrence of Arabia, staring out into the great, clean expanse of the desert. The image is fleeting because I am nowhere near as cool as Peter O'Toole and because these pages aren't simply grains of sand. They're too significant to form such a comparison. Each page on that floor marks a moment in my life. Each page, even in the smallest way, explains who I am today. As a whole, these pages symbolize a decade of work, at least 25 drafts of the very same script. They define most of my adult life. They are more me than anything else I can think of. And while I'm fishing through these pages trying to remember whether Sal is or is not wearing his toupee in the third act, I stop and look around and I think about what all of this means. I say, out loud, What have I done? Then I sit down on the floor, on top of the pages, and start to sob.

Salon.com > Lisa Lutz

The art of snooping

Confessions of a Hollywood sellout