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Joshua loved Hollywood and its confident hustlers. On a previous visit he had delighted in spinning through the canyons in somebody else's Mercedes, gearing down to consider the more outlandish mansions, each garden perfect. He liked to wander through the unbelievably opulent men's shops on Rodeo, startling the prissy clerks.by bargaining. He enjoyed the tanned, trim, middle-aged producers on health diets, toting scripts to market in Gucci attaché cases, even as their East Side grandfathers had once carried sewing machines on their shoulders. They strutted into the Polo Lounge or La Scala or Dominic's, bound in safari suits, blissfully playing the room, death just another sour-grapes rumor out of the East, bad word of mouth, something that used to figure in grainy European-made films, which everybody knew were bum grossers."