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In a recent profile interview for The Times, Bridges told me that he was still bothered by his father’s early help. “I’m a product of nepotism,” he said. “The doors were open to me. I’d done several movies before I decided what I wanted to do. There was a certain amount of guilt about whether I really had what it takes.”

As a result, Bridges refused to groom his daughters. “I thought I’d be less proactive,” he said. “One of the hardest things for an actor is getting your first break. Now (my daughters) are in their twenties, they’re leaving college, moving out of the house and looking for careers. I’m thinking ‘Jeez, maybe I should have encouraged them more’.”

None of this is new to Dr Jenn Berman, a Beverly Hills psychotherapist whose clients have included several Sados. “When someone is successful and their parents are also successful, the kind of question that comes up is, ‘Do people think I got this job just because of my dad?’ ” she says. “That can be a very big one to overcome.”

According to Dr Berman, the temperament of the famous parent is key: “If they are absent or difficult, or just don’t know how to be a parent, then in their children you tend to see drug and alcohol abuse, depression, anxiety, eating disorders and, in really terrible cases, suicide.”

But can’t the same be said of ordinary families? Yes, says Dr Berman, but the wealth of A-list households makes a big difference. “Instead of being able to afford a bit of marijuana, they can afford a whole lot of cocaine,” she says. “Instead of not wearing a helmet and falling off their skateboard, they don’t wear a seatbelt and crash their parents’ Ferrari.”

Indeed, there is an entire sub-genre of journalism dedicated to chronicling the misfortunes of such celebrity offspring as Chris Brosnan (adopted son of the former 007 Pierce), who was arrested last year for heroin possession after a police chase through South London. On emerging from an epic stint in rehab, Brosnan Jr found work — directing a film. “Dad’s not involved but I’d love to work with him one day,” he told the News of the World. “I just want to make him proud.”

More tragic was the death of Chris Penn, son of the director Leo Penn and younger brother of Sean. Unlike his father and brother, Penn managed only supporting roles such as Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs; by the time of his death this year he weighed 300lb and had a long history of drug abuse. The post-mortem examination suggested that death was from natural causes.

Of course, many Sados don’t even try to compete with their parents. Says Dr Berman: “Some children of celebrities feel that they’ll never been as successful as their mom or dad, no matter what they do — a ‘why bother trying’ mentality. They struggle to find their own identity.”

Yet such fame-addled products of Hollywood can still benefit from a different kind of nepotism: the bestselling memoir. Take, for example, Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest, or the late Gary Crosby’s Going My Own Way, which offered horrifying accounts of the dysfunctional family lives of Joan Crawford and Bing Crosby respectively. The latter was perhaps the most extraordinary: two of Bing’s children, Lindsay and Dennis, committed suicide, with Lindsay reportedly taking his life the day after watching his father sing White Christmas on television. Both brothers were living on small allowances from their father’s trust fund, and both died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head.

With all this in mind, perhaps it’s surprising that we don’t pity the Sados rather than begrudging them their genetic advantage at Hollywood job interviews. Yet at the same time no one wants to pay good money to watch a movie such as Boxing Helena, the amputation romance written and directed by one Jennifer Chambers Lynch, the wife of . . . well, you can probably guess.

The movie was so unspeakably awful (plot: boy meets girl, boy amputates girl’s limbs one by one) that Kim Basinger backed out of an agreement to play the lead role, resulting in a successful $8.1 million lawsuit. The ruling was later overturned on appeal, with Basinger reaching an out-of-court deal.

Andrew Breitbart says it is the press’s duty to defend cinemagoers from the worst cases of nepotism, though he has little faith in the likes of Variety and Vanity Fair fulfilling it. “The bottom line in Hollywood is that everybody wants a deal,” he says. “Even the journalists who write about Hollywood are trying to work out if this is a person who, one day, might want to read their script.”

But the internet is beginning to pick up the slack: there is already a site entitled The Hollywood Nepotism Page, which lists the likes of Jim Hanks, Daniel Baldwin, Dedee Pfeiffer and Donal Gibson.

Back at the Prada party, I watch the Sados as they walk up in turn to Dustin Hoffman and slap him on the back (a friend of dad’s, no doubt), but I can’t feel much jealousy: these teenagers might drive Porsche convertibles in high school but they’ll spend their lives being ridiculed if they make it and ridiculed if they don’t.

As for their parents, why should we be so shocked when they try to build a dynasty? The Bushes did it, as did the descendants of Henry Ford. Yet in Hollywood, empire-building always provokes more outrage.

Susan Jansen says that we need to move on — nepotism is just part of the survival instinct: “Where’s the surprise? Here is a good job that is overpaid for the amount of labour involved, so you want to hand it over as a favour to someone you know. Why on earth wouldn’t you? The point of nepotism is that you want to get that favour back at some point. You want to be able to call someone and say, ‘Hey, you owe me’.”