“Shhhhh!” said my friend Joseph. “Keep it down. You never know who might be listening.”

Joseph was new in LA. After realising that a career in mergers and acquisitions wasn't for him, he had moved west from Washington DC to write scripts. Lunch with him was never easy: he was always terrified that his fellow diners would steal his ideas. This struck me as a little paranoid; a little conceited, even. After all, Joseph hadn't yet made a cent from writing. If someone was going to commit intellectual theft by eavesdropping, wouldn't they get a job as a tea boy at a studio commissary?

Anyway, with his hand cupped over his mouth, Joseph spilled the beans on his latest concept: a thriller, in which evangelical Christians would wage a campaign of terror against the US. This made me think of a news story I had once written about a team of Hollywood scriptwriters who had allegedly been hired by the Pentagon to come up the most outlandish terror-attack scenarios they could think of, in an attempt to pre-empt the next September 11. Joseph suggested that I work with him on his script. I told him that I would love to, but that I was too busy writing a book and being a foreign correspondent. The lunch ended, and I didn't think any more of it.

I mention all this because the subject of paranoia has been much on everyone's minds in LA recently, thanks to the trial of Anthony Pellicano, the private investigator known as “the Big Sleazy”, which begins tomorrow. According to government prosecutors, Pellicano - whose clients have included Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Michael Jackson - specialised in running illegal background checks on his targets and bugging their phones. Prosecutors say that the dirt uncovered by Pellicano was used to discredit those involved in lawsuits against Hollywood's A-list. For example: when “Bo” Zenga, a producer of Scary Movie, sued the Hollywood power-broker Brad Grey over his claimed $3.5 million share of the film's profits, his phone was allegedly tapped by Pellicano for three months (there is no suggestion that Grey, now the head of Paramount Pictures, had any idea of what Pellicano was up to). Incidentally, Pellicano has pleaded not guilty, and will represent himself in court. As for Zenga, it “emerged” during litigation that he had embellished his CV, and a judge ultimately ruled against him.

So perhaps my friend Joseph was right: perhaps no one in Hollywood can be trusted. After all, when the FBI raided Pellicano's offices, they found thousands of hours of encrypted wiretap tapes, most of which have never been decoded. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the secrets they hold are still influencing deals made today. Meanwhile, when I last spoke to Joseph, he told me that he was working a new project: a movie about a screenwriter hired by the Pentagon to come up with outlandish terror-attack scenarios, to pre-empt the next September 11. It sounded a bit familiar, to be honest.

Or maybe I was just being paranoid.

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