The cosmic collision of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee is so quintessentially Californian, Tom Petty could have written a song about it.
And he did, just without knowing it.
The title track from the late, great American troubadour's 1991 album, Into the Great Wide Open, is a fairy tale about a fledgling rock musician Eddie (a rebel without a clue), the girl he loves, their shared enthusiasm for tattoos and, ultimately, their rise to the top of the West Coast heap.
Unlike the Hollywood supernova of Anderson and Lee's inevitable parting, Petty's song remains optimistic, ending on a happy note, although, distilled through the lens of its star-studded music video (featuring a pre-cancelled Johnny Depp as Eddie), the song becomes a warning about hubris and the pitfalls of success (obviously, Depp wasn't taking much notice during filming).
Petty's song is genius, not only because it rhymes "played from the heart" with "a roadie named Bart" but because it lays bare so effortlessly the very essence of L.A. The audacity of a couple of kids making it big with nothing more than a little high school and a lot of charisma is - along with the rapidly depleting snowpack from the Sierras - what keeps that perennially parched city in bloom.
Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson were just a couple of kids once, too.
She was a good Christian girl from small-town Canada who was noticed in the crowd at a football game. A few short years later, she would help propel the syndicated TV series Baywatch to become the first show with a billion-plus audience.
He was a Greek boy, the son of a US army sergeant and a pageant queen mother, who dropped out of high school to play with a few bands working the L.A. club scene. A few short years later, he would found a seminal US heavy metal outfit which would go on to sell 100 million albums.
After meeting in 1994, Anderson and Lee were married only six weeks later, their courting process a four-day, ecstasy-fuelled bender in Mexico.
Then came the sex tape.
Just how the home video footage of the Motley Crue drummer and the Playboy bunny having sex on their honeymoon houseboat escaped from captivity to become a pillar of celebrity scandal folklore forms the basis of new Hulu series Pam & Tommy, now streaming on Disney+.
And like so many spirals of destruction, this one begins with a home renovation.
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In 2014, a Rolling Stone article by Amanda Chicago Lewis detailed the mostly true story about a disgruntled tradie called Rand Gauthier (his father played the robot, Hymie, in Get Smart) who had been working on the celebrity couple's Malibu mansion reno when Lee (who allegedly had a nasty habit of wielding firearms) supposedly sacked him from the job, leaving Gauthier about twenty-grand out of pocket.
Determined to recoup his costs, Gauthier stole a safe which contained the video tape which, in years to come, so many relevancy-deprived celebrities would emulate when their careers required a much-needed kick-start.
In many ways, Pam & Tommy picks up where Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 film Boogie Nights (another cautionary L.A. story) left off. Pornography has not only moved from the big screen to VHS, home computers will help distribute the material to the point it becomes one of the planet's first billion-dollar DIY industries.
It's the dissemination of the sex tape in Pam & Tommy which is so fascinating and helps make this series just as much a period-based enterprise as new series The Gilded Age, now streaming over on Paramount+.
The players (Sebastian Stan is Tommy, Lily James is Pam, Seth Rogen is Gauthier and Nick Offerman his partner in porno crime) are all great and the script is fun and, at times, takes some wacky chances, such as when we're introduced to Tommy's interlocutory penis. But the real brilliance of Pam & Tommy is how it exposes an age straddling two worlds; the analogue is moving to the digital, the cult of celebrity is moving from mere titillation to full-blown obsession.
The theft and exploitation of the sex tape may be a crime achieved through such 20th century means as pen and paper surveillance and brute physical force, but it leads to a lawsuit interrogating the principles of privacy and the inexorable rise of the internet, issues still being thrashed out more than two decades into the 21st century.
Because we have become so inured to the brand of scandal self-engineered by such internet-savvy conglomerates as the Kardashians, we tend to forget the Anderson/Lee story was one of love at first sight; of star-crossed lovers who wilted under the gaze of a ravening, ugly and uncaring public.
In the end, Pam and Tommy were doomed, but left us with a legend, a Hollywood morality tale.
