President Hollywood
Spencer Pratt wants his LA back.
Maps to the Stars is one of my favorite movies about Los Angeles. I re-watch it every time I visit the city, which tends to be every other year. Every time I re-watch it, I wonder why I keep getting drawn back to it because it’s deeply unpleasant to watch. It involves incest, suicide, death of children, murder of adults, and a level of vapidity that I have only seen in the beautiful Los Angeles.
Maps to the Stars follows Havana Segrand, an aging actress who is struggling to get the roles she once easily could in her youth. When initially passed up for a role playing her own mother, a deceased old-time Hollywood actress, Havana goes into a spiral and starts hallucinating visions of her. At the same time, a 13-year-old actor and recovering addict named Benji is dealing with finding roles after a public fallout over drug use. Benji’s parents manage to close some deals for him, but he then relapses, shoots a dog, and strangles a younger child actor on a film set.
Havana gets the role of her mother after the originally cast actress’ young son dies. She celebrates the death and her victory, with her new assistant, Agatha. Unbeknownst to Havana, Agatha is Benji’s estranged sister and only moved to Los Angeles to look for him. Agatha had set their family home on fire when they were children, and was cut off from the family and sent to a psych ward by the parents. After finding her parents in LA and being again turned away by them, Agatha stops taking her medication and stops showing up to work. Havana sleeps with Agatha’s boyfriend before firing her and mocking her burn wounds. Agatha beats her to death, and then commits suicide with Benji at the site of their childhood home.
I found Maps to the Stars to be visually analogous to my memories of Los Angeles. Most of the movie takes place indoors and in cars. Conversations and tense moments happen inside mansions, malls, and limos. Outside moments are usually in backyards, or briefly outside a Rodeo Drive storefront. The film also displays the value put on fame that’s unique to LA, and the use of humanity as a tool to get it. Lying is commonplace. You sleep with a director if you want a role or a contact. You throw your competitors under the bus.
The last time I visited Los Angeles, I stayed in a guesthouse Airbnb in the now-ashen Pacific Palisades. While I was there, I had dinner with an old friend at her sugar daddy’s house. She met this boyfriend on SeekingArrangement, while working full-time at a merchandising company that she quit when moving into his Beverly Hills home. This boyfriend was a fat Israeli guy who worked in real estate, and was 30 years older than her. Despite having three teenage kids from a previous marriage that he had partial custody of, his house resembled a bachelor pad. He had large, colorful, street art-style paintings of Pablo Escobar and Biggie Smalls. He had ceramic pots painted - COCAINE, OPIUM, MARIJUANA - holding flour, sugar, and tea. He had a whiskey room that took up 1/4 of his first floor. He made us a really good dinner and shared where to buy authentic Israeli hummus in LA. When I left, my friend was changing into her bikini to join him in his hot tub.
LA has had a rough go at it in recent years. Sixteen thousand homes and structures were destroyed in the 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires. Homelessness has increased and become more visible, with streets being occupied by tents and residents being struck by increased crime and disorder. Production companies are moving operations to the east coast, where costs are lower and filming permits aren’t as strict. Many LA residents want a safer city and more prosperous entertainment industry, and Spencer Pratt promised these wishes in his failed mayoral election bid.
Spencer Pratt is a professional name-dropper and previous reality tv star on The Hills. The Hills was about the lives of beautiful people in the beautiful Southern California. On the show he had an on-and-off relationship with Heidi Montag, sometimes cheating on her and sometimes declaring his love while downplaying his late-night text exchanges with other women. He stood by Heidi when she had 14 plastic surgery procedures done in one day, and married her in season four.
The Hills represented Los Angeles at its best and most hated. The show featured two protagonists, Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag, who moved to the Hollywood Hills after high school to pursue careers in fashion. Lauren sticks it out through fashion school and Heidi drops out within the first week, then maneuvers through odd jobs and boyfriends as the show goes on. The show launched other stars off the ground like Brody Jenner and Audrina Patridge, who was robbed by the Bling Ring during season five. The Hills pre-dated Keeping up with the Kardashians, warming up audiences to reality tv and putting the Jenner name on the map.
Before The Hills, Spencer Pratt met Brody Jenner as a producer on the set of The Princes of Malibu. The Princes of Malibu was a reality TV show about Brandon and Brody Jenner, sons of Bruce Jenner and Linda Thompson, living on “permanent vacation” in the Malibu estate of Linda’s husband David Foster. The show was cancelled after six episodes, but Spencer had made it on as part of the cast by the end, joining the Jenners in on-screen parties and laying about in the mansion.
Spencer Pratt got into politics after his Pacific Palisades home was destroyed in the 2025 fires. In his campaign, he argued that California government’s decisions to cut the LA fire department’s budgets and to drain the Santa Ynez reservoir directly caused the destruction that took place in the Palisades. This past week, I took a drive through the Pacific Palisades to see the damage to the neighborhood I stayed in years ago. When I was last there, it was an established area with a posh, busy shopping center. It now looks like a rapidly developing desert town. Historical buildings are now burnt up facades, with the city trying to maintain what’s left of it. Entire rows of houses were completely leveled. Throughout the neighborhood, I saw dozens of American flags alongside property developments, and signs saying “THEY LET US BURN”. Palisades residents experienced an unprecedented devastation in LA and want someone to blame, but I ultimately think that these fires were an act of god and that the outcome wouldn’t have been changed by better policy.
Despite losing the mayoral nomination, Spencer Pratt has found himself with pretty significant political support. In the June primary, he received 25% of the city-wide vote. LA runs mayoral elections following a non-partisan primary, where only the top two nominees run against each other in the November election. Spencer lost to Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, who beat him by about 30,000 votes. This process is much unlike NYC’s ranked-choice voting, where voters can rank up to five candidates from different parties. Spencer Pratt may have had a chance at winning with ranked-choice. After losing the Democratic mayoral primary in NYC, Andrew Cuomo switched parties and still managed to get 42% of the popular vote.
I think Spencer Pratt makes for an interesting figure in our current era of celebrity politics. He shares the social climbing, status-scanning tendencies held by Gavin Newsom. He actively distanced himself from Trump during his campaign, but then called the primary rigged and met with Trump at the Oval Office in July. He speaks for a lot of LA residents when voicing his concerns about crime, homelessness, and related quality-of-life issues. The remaining candidates don’t seem to prioritize these issues in a way that provides relief to LA residents.
Spencer Pratt might have a future in LA politics, but he needs to let go of the celebrity culture that he thrived in. As a politician, Spencer Pratt is now engaging in a kind of subverted name-dropping practice where he names LA politicians as his adversaries, rather than people that are his “good friends” after meeting them at a party once. Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and the LAFD apparently screwed him and his wife personally by letting their house burn down in the most destructive fire in LA history. They owe him, and he has to run for LA mayor and meet with the president to get what’s his.
I’m not sure how much LA actually wants the old LA back. Plastic surgery that’s ravaged women’s figures and faces was borne out of the reality TV genre that Spencer Pratt helped start up. It accelerated social media’s evolution and strengthened the hold it has on media and culture. Film and TV production gave up on new talent and awarded recycled scripts to already established actors and directors. People who moved to LA to become actors, singers, and dancers, ended up waiting tables as auditions became dead-ends and their dreams passed them by. Maybe residents want the city to offer more than entertainment.
Is “Maps to the Stars” based on the Bruce Wagner novel? Never read it but I’m a fan of his work. I think he’s underrated.