What Happened to Our Great Parties?

Hollywood still throws plenty. It just forgot how to have one

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

It’s awards season, maybe you noticed. And if you didn’t, I wouldn’t worry about it. They’re not quite what they used to be. Maybe you noticed that, too.

What they used to be — aside from a hilarious cage match of ambition and desperation — was a chance to go to parties and get gift bags and be one big happy entertainment business. It really was an amazing eight weeks where it seemed like everyone in show business had been visited by three ghosts the night before. I remember going to some event once, at whatever restaurant was happening at the time, and being warmly embraced, and I do mean warmly, and I do mean embraced, by a person I didn’t really know that well, with whom I had had one meeting, years before, and he hugged me closer and sort of sidled me along to the gift bag table. He said, “I love this community.” It was him talking. It was awards season. And he had a hand in the movie that the party was designed to promote — I think. It might have been that he was the publicist for one of the actors who was on the cover of a magazine and this party was for that, but that’s sort of the point of awards season. It didn’t matter. There was joy in the community and also gift bags.

I don’t know if they still give out the really swanky gift bags anymore. I do know that the parties don’t have the same zip. But that’s maybe because at some point between the collapse of the broadcast networks and the razor thin margins of the streamers, people in show business stopped knowing how to throw a party. Everyone got very serious.

Do you want to hear something sad? I’ve been a working writer and producer in show business for 30 years, but the only really great Hollywood party I’ve ever been to was my first one, way back in 1991, after the Golden Globe Awards.