Access: Malibu

How the other half lives.

A 6:00 a.m. call in Malibu means a blaring alarm clock at 4:30, then crawling into my work clothes, staggering to the car, and making the thirty minute drive to Santa Monica, where Interstate 10 makes a sharp right turn as it morphs into California State Route One. I head on up the coast for another half hour to arrive at crew parking with minutes to spare, then slurp a cup of very bad coffee before climbing into the passenger vans with the rest of the crew to be driven all the way back to … Santa Monica.

Sometimes this business makes no sense at all.

We’re in the midst of three weeks shooting pickups for Showtime’s sapphic soap opera The L Word, which films in Vancouver — doubling for LA — but makes the pilgrimage to Southern California every summer to crank out scenes needed for several episodes in recognizable LA locations. I have no idea what the show schedule is like up in Canada, but these pick-up shoots wring every last drop of blood from the cinematic turnip, each day a bruising march from well before sunrise to long after dark. This is the third summer I’ve worked this gig, where the days often involve four locations and three company moves over the course of 16 to 17 hours — and many of these are heavy locations, with tons of cable and a truckload of lamps.

The saving grace is that we’re getting full union scale, so these long days mean fat paychecks at a time when too many shows in Hollywood pay the cheap-ass cable rate of 20% under scale, with double-time only after we’ve worked 14 hours.

Cable rate sucks — I hate it.

Back in Santa Monica, we prepare to shoot a series of “walk and talks” — long walking dialogue scenes — in Palisades Park, a thin strip of grass graced with tall slender palm trees at the edge of the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway. We don’t need much lighting here — it’s just me, the senior juicer, wearing a battery belt to power a Sun Gun held high behind the camera to brighten the actors faces — so the rest of our crew is driven back to Malibu to rig the next location.

The long, busy morning stretches well past noon before we pack up and hop in the van to Malibu, where a catered lunch is being served an hour-and-a-half late. The effects of our early wake up were now being felt — everybody is dragging. Shoots like this are a serious grind during which you’re always tired, but you just keep going, putting one foot in front of the other. That’s the job.

Exhausted and famished, I inhale lunch, then am headed for a quick nap when one of the rigging crew stops me.

“Sleep later,” she says. “You’ve gotta see this.”

I follow her reluctantly, tracing the cable she’d helped run from the generator through a well-manicured garden, then around a sprawling two-story house into the back yard where I behold this … the sheer beauty of which damned near drops me to my knees.

For a moment I feel like one of the mortals of Greek mythology who’s been transported to the playground of the gods in Olympus.

“So this is how the other half lives,” I mutter.

“Yep,” she nods. “Must be nice.”

I can’t help wondering what it would be like to live here, to swim in that pool each afternoon, and enjoy the serenity of this view every day. Would I become bored after a while, missing the good old days of life amid the car alarms, traffic, and the relentless din of police helicopters carving angry circles in the sky — the cacophony of the city — in my Hollywood apartment?

I’ll never know. We’re here to look, not touch, so none of us will be diving into this lovely infinity pool today or any day. Instead, we work another ten hours into the night before making the long drive home, then catch a few hours sleep before getting up in the pre-dawn dark to do it all over again in a different location.

It’s just another day in Hollywood.

P.S. Yes, it’s Oscar Sunday, so … whoop-de-do. I’ve had my say on the old blog— several times, actually — about Hollywood’s annual exercise in self-congratulation, and won’t repeat myself here. If you’re interested, here’s my first take on the Oscars from the Wayback Machine.