Three Days in the Valley

I called my wife from the streets of New York, speaking to her on my cell phone as I sat on the wide steps of an old brick tenement building. The streets were dead empty, a pleasant change from the norm. No taxi cabs, delivery trucks, bike messengers, honking horns. No people. Just me and and the silent, empty streets, and the silent, empty buildings. And the buildings were truly empty: I peered in the front door of one, just to see, and found it hollow, no floors or rooms, just rows of beams and scaffolding and ladders. Down the block, a subway station led down, not into busy tunnels with roaring trains, but into a dead end. Then, a sign of life, as a guy speaking on a walkie-talkie cruised by. In a golf cart.

Nobody does surreal like Los Angeles.

My flight got in last night at about two in the morning their time, five AM my time, and I drove down Santa Monica Boulevard to West Hollywood in a bleary haze, through deserted streets. Managed to catch about six hours of restless hotel sleep before rising to greet what seems to be the typical perfect LA morning of sunny skies and 75º weather. Chugged down a Jamba Juice and drove to Paramount Studios, where I met a friend for lunch, then wandered the lot for a while, taking in the beautiful theatre, walking past the huge Blue Sky mural, checking out the display of Best Picture Academy Awards and the bench from Forrest Gump, and poking my head in one of the cavernous sound stages (this one complete with a huge backdrop curtain painted with a meticulously-detailed nighttime city skyline). And roaming the aforementioned streets of the movie set that fills in for New York City when the actual city is throwing a fit or demanding a raise or doing something else to render itself unuseable, as actors are wont to do from time to time.

There's a jazz to working on movies that you just don't get anywhere else. Nothing draws the attention of passers-by like the lights and bustle of a movie set, and when you're working on one, that attention just adds to the frenetic energy that sparks through the set as the camera begins to roll, giving you a rush that more than makes up for the crushingly tedious hours you just spent getting everything ready. Walking through the lot, feeling that energy again, made me realize how much I missed it. And walking through those empty streets of that psuedo-New York had me wondering how much I would miss its real-life counterpart.