Generation Wealth

- Do-- Dolce. Dolce. -Dolce.

-Dolce. Dolce and Gabbana. - Yeah.

Dolce.

-Louis Vuitton. - Louis Vuitton.

-Louis Vuitton. - Louis Vuitton.

There wasn't a toy I couldn't buy.

There wasn't a boat I couldn't buy. There wasn't a plane I couldn't buy.

There was nothing I couldn't buy.

I love money.

Come to me.

Eden, what do you wanna do with the beauty pageants?

-What do you wanna win? What's your goal? -Money.

Money. Money. Money.

I would have money as big as this room.

What do you wanna do with that money, Eden?

Spend it all. And kiss it.

I do believe it's un-American to say you can make too much money.

I mean, TheFederalist Papers say, if I wanna work 100 hours a week

and never see my family and die at an early age, that's my prerogative.

This is from the Atlantis in Dubai.

What were you doing in Dubai?

The prince.

You want to throw money.

You want people to look at you. It's power. The money power.

Tonight we're not even worried about tomorrow. Fuck it.

It's kind of like the end of Rome.

I mean, the pyramids were built

at the moment of precipitous Egyptian decline.

And that's what always happens.

Societies accrue their greatest wealth...

at the moment that they face death.

I've been a photographer for 25 years...

with my lens focused on wealth and the excesses of our culture.

The scale of the excess became clear

when I documented the family building the largest house in America.

I noticed that no matter how much people had,

they still wanted more.

I wondered if the hundreds of individual stories I had shot

about money...

fame...

sex...

body image...

even plastic surgery for dogs,

were all connected.

And what they said about us.

To understand what it all added up to, in 2008,

I began working on a book and exhibition about wealth.

It would take me back to my earliest work.

In 1991, I was just starting out as a photojournalist.

I had studied visual anthropology in college

and landed my first assignment with National Geographic,

photographing a Maya Indian village in Chiapas, Mexico.

My mom was a professor of psychology and had been doing research there

20 years before,

so we worked together on the project.

My mother spoke the language and was at home there.

But I struggled to understand the culture

and found it really hard to be accepted into people's lives.

After we had spent months in the field, National Geographic killed the story.

I was devastated.

I almost quit photography.

My boyfriend sent me a tape to encourage me.

Hi, Lauren. Frank here.

I just got your letters today. I really, really miss you.

Go out and do your photography and be aggressive.

The more you put yourself into this kind of work,

you're gonna end up confident about looking for jobs and everything else.

So, please work hard, okay?

Frank helped me see that I shouldn't give up

and that I needed to find a story where I had a deeper connection

to the subject.

I happened to find an old copy of Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero.

The fictional world he depicted

of jaded excess and too much money

resonated with what I remembered growing up in LA.

I started thinking about my own culture in almost anthropological terms

and realized I wanted to go home and explore it.

LA diary, March 4, 1992.

My photography will concentrate on the social rituals of teenage life.

I wanna photograph senior ditch day,

extravagant parties with walkie-talkie equipped bouncers,

girls in designer dresses with hair professionally done,

Mercedes and BMWs.

One day I was photographing at my former high school,

a private school in Santa Monica.

- Here we go. - Testing. One, two, three.

What do you think about growing up in LA?

These three boys said, "Growing up in LA is about money."

And they pulled out dollar bills.

And it wasn't until I processed the film

that I realized they were holding up hundred dollar bills.

And these were 13-year-olds.

Money just ruins kids.

It's ruined a lot of kids I know.

On the first day of school,

Kate Hudson went,

"I'm not gonna tell you who my mom is, she's a big star.

And my dad's a bigger star."

It affects kids who I know, who you know,

how rich you are, what your dad does, what your mom does,

what you have, what I have.

That narcissism that is so full-blown in the culture now

was just beginning to rear its head in that moment in LA.

Photographer Lauren Greenfield has captured the lives

of some of Hollywood's children and displayed them in a new book titled,

Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood.

Let's go to the young man celebrating his bar mitzvah.

Tell us about this. This doesn't look like a religious rite to me.

The family who had this party rented out the Whiskey a Go Go nightclub

on the Sunset Strip and brought in go-go girls

as entertainment for the kids.

Looking at all the pictures, I'm left with a real end-of-the-world quality,

as though there is a kind of ultra-decadence.

These are the images of a society in extraordinary decline.

But I'm wondering what you were looking for.

I had no idea what I was looking for then.

But now I saw a relationship between what I was covering in the '90s

in my first book

and where we found ourselves today.

It made me want to figure out

why our obsession with wealth and status had grown

and why I felt compelled to document it so relentlessly.

So I decided to go back to the teen subjects from Los Angeles.

- Hi! -

Holy shit.

The '90s were crazy.

They're inhaling air freshener at nutrition break.

Nice!

That party that you photographed me in

was probably one of the tamest parties I ever had.

I mean, the shit I used to do...

My father, he is the singer for REO Speedwagon.

When I was born was when he really started having some commercial success,

which is good for him, bad for a kid trying to be parented.

You know, we got raised backstage by a roadie.

I could get away with murder because my dad was on the road

and my mom was preoccupied,

and how I got attention was by acting out and by getting in trouble.

It really does take a village to raise somebody,

and I didn't get that, I was more--

I was raised on an island with a butler.

What do you think it is about LA that makes kids grow up fast?

It just seems like everyone's in a rush to be an adult.

They're losing their innocence so young now.

I hope to stay young forever. I don't wanna grow old.

I think I was maybe 17 when we first met.

You came to my school and you told us you were doing a project.

We became friends and you started following me around.

You know, you can look from the outside and think, "Oh, her life is perfect,"

or "She's pretty," and "She's homecoming queen,"

and this and that, but, you know...

My family struggled a lot with, like, financial problems.

And these rich Beverly Hills kids can have anything their heart desires, you know.

That was one way I didn't fit in.

It was kind of like a thing, like, "You're pretty so you can be our friend."

I was homecoming queen and I had best body.

That was what it was called? Best body?

Well, it was the senior poll where I had the best physique, I guess.

So it was like you dressed with, like, tight clothes

and trying to look sexy in the way that the magazines say

or, like, toward the male gaze.

Oh, my God, look at that girl, Scotty.

- -Hop in!

Chica!

Mija was my girlfriend

in seventh or eighth grade in elementary school,

-and-- - And your hot Latina.

Well...

With probably one of the best racks in high school.

It's not bad. Let's be honest here, Eddie.

Hopefully, this is cut. We don't wanna be disrespectful.

We're not being disrespectful. It's the truth, Eddie.

It is.

Growing up here, we thought the entire world revolved around us.

I feel like I actually got pretty scarred from that time.

And did any of that stay with you?

Whatever things happened in high school is always what you're, like,

trying to heal from later on in life, you know.

It really-- You're so young and impressionable

that I think those experiences really shape you.

When I was in high school, I was really shy and a little insecure

and, like most teenagers, I felt like I didn't fit in.

I picked up photography to try to make sense of my world.

I mean, you went to a-- kind of a fancy high school.

Education was important and it would cost a lot of money to go there.

We found a way to pay for it.

But the values were not my own values.

I think you, like a normal girl growing up in LA, suffered a little bit from it.

You were trying to fit in from the viewpoint of clothes, nice house,

a house you could bring people to.

I think Crossroads made you anxious about keeping up with the Joneses.

The Brentwood parents were afraid to let their daughters

come and visit you in Venice

because they thought it was too dangerous.

You actually one time got out of the car a block away from Crossroads

so your friends...

wouldn't have to see the car that I was driving.

I remember not being able to buy, like, the clothes that everybody else had.

Mm-hmm.

The things you didn't have were the things that I didn't believe in.