Worked as a door stop at Raleigh Studios in Manhattan Beach yesterday. Yes, a door stop. They were shooting a scene for an upcoming telecast of "Orange County" and they needed me to prop the fourth floor fire door open. Seven years of college to become a door stop. Wouldn't my St. Mary's University professors be proud?
Security work is like being punished every day for showing up. When they gave me this assignment, I thought, 'Oh, cool, I'll be hobknobing with the starlets, hanging out in front of the makeup trailors and scarfing down some of that famous buffet they always have for their breaks between takes.'
No such luck. I pulled door stop duty.
Raleigh Studios rents out office space in some of its buildings. An aerospace engineering firm, PanAmSat, rents the fourth floor of building 7. The directors of "Orange County" decided to shoot a scene in the PanAmSat lobby, so I had to door stop the fire exit to keep lookee loos from crashing the set.
The PAs and whatever else you call them came in lugging furniture props and setting up their Joker K5600 spot lamps and laying out miles of electrical cables and there was a cocophony of conversation about what goes where and how it's gonna go and it was like a racecar pit crew buzzing around the lobby.
There were lots of men in shorts with walkie talkies stuck in the small of their back and before I knew it there was 40 or 50 crew-- men and women-- doing this high speed construction act and I thought: 'no wonder TV shows are so expensive, it takes dozens and dozens of men and women, a ton of equipment and 4 or 5 hours of frenetic labor to make 10 seconds of TV.'
Women were running around saying "unacceptible", men were plugging things in, pulling things out (metal things), associate assistants were touting their boyfriends' screenplays to anyone who would listen and the sound of 40 or 50 people all talking at the same time got louder and louder until I heard, "Matty! good to see you!" The star had arrived, I guess.
"Okay, guys, settle in for rehearsal, please!"
Some of the actors were hearded over to chairs near my fire door while the main actors were on the set rehearsing. I thought the actors near me might busy themselves with rehearsing their own lines, but they did everything BUT that. They talked about reservations at The Dresden and called their girlfriends to beg for a weekend away and bought flowers in Colorado and talked to their agents.
I only caught bits and pieces of their conversations, like " . . .THAT culture has a THING about Windex. No, REALLY. It's the strangest thing. WINDEX! They even . . ."
or "What's David Hasslehoffer doing now?"
They formed cliques, the men with the men and the women with the women. The men generally talked about cell phones and relationships while the women were talking about Jesus and that old way of life (sounded drug recovery-ish to me).
I stood there 6 hours, propping up that door. No breaks. No food. No smoking. When the shoot was over and the PAs and whatevers were tearing down the set, one of them said to me, "Exciting, eh!"
"Why is that?"
"Being around movie stars! I'll bet you love this job."
"Why is that?"
"Because you get to look at movie stars all day," he said.
"But they don't look back so what's the point?" I asked.
Here is an actor's tear sheet from the set that I stole:
"the o.c. - "The escape" - BLUE REVISION 07-30-03
RACHEL (CON'D)
Calling in a high-powered Securities Attorney. In the span of a weekend?
SANDY
God, I'm impressive.
RACHEL
And conceited.
SANDY
So you keep saying.
RACHEL
Truth be told--no one was gonna touch that guy. The fact that you DID made the partners think--made me think--is Sandy Cohen ready to come off his high horse? Is he finally tired of being a martyr?"
ZZZZZZZzzzzz. Oh yeah, from reading this script I can see this is gonna be Must See TV. My questions are these: how can a person be on a high horse and a martyr at the same time? And, can a man working as a doorstop find happiness on a Manhattan Beach TV sound stage?
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