What makes Sammy run wild

Obsessed with success, they find themselves in frenzies when the industry's harsh reality clashes with their desires. Now, their condition has a name: Hollywood NOS.

By Rachel Abramowitz
WSJ
February 14, 2010

"Heroin is a preservative," said Doug Rosen, explaining, tongue in cheek, why he looks almost exactly as he did seven years ago when he was a rising Hollywood producer with a healthy six-figure salary, a spanking new Audi A4, a $3,000-a-month, one bedroom apartment and, oh yes, an $80,000-a-year drug habit.

Wiry in a black T-shirt, cargo pants and a green cap, the 32-year-old Rosen, now a family therapist trainee at Beit T'Shuvah, a no-frills residential drug rehab clinic on Venice Boulevard, confessed that he never was particularly interested in making movies or television. He just wanted to be somebody -- the guy with the girls, the cars, the expense account and the trappings that accrue to a entertainment industry power broker.

"If you're an incomplete, vacant person, this is an industry that can seduce you," said Rosen. "I got seduced. Nobody wronged me."

For therapists, psychiatrists and spiritual counselors with Hollywood clientele, Rosen is a familiar type, a walking casualty of the entertainment business, where the narcissistic fantasy of stardom as an actor, director, producer or writer -- often seen as more important than the actual work of acting, directing, producing or writing -- collides with the rejection, failure or limited success that is the reality for the vast majority in the industry. Patients suffer from the mistaken assumption that that showbiz glory will somehow insulate them from emptiness or the mundane hardships of day-to-day life.

(More here.)