Leaping Lizards

The cast of Invaders from Mars included Karen Black, Timothy Bottoms, Hunter Carson, and Lorraine Newman, and they all sat outside in the front garden in their canvas chairs talking and laughing and generally being famous, which impressed me to no end. Summer was just beginning and entire place was sunlight and green plants and blue sky.

 It was absolute thrillville when Tim and Karen started talking to me a few days in. I felt like one of the guys, a member of the crew rather than a worker drone. We all had hours of time where we had nothing to do.  On this show we waited for lighting for probably 80 % of the downtime.  So we just learned to listen for the first AD to call us, but in the meantime, anything was a go, even loud laughter.  Twelve hours and more we were going to be out there in the wilds of Malibu, every day.

But that was great!  It was one long outdoor picnic. I had never even heard of something as fantastically decadent and luxurious as Craft Service, and couldn’t believe that all this wonderful food was free and was always there, always being replenished.  I had never been exposed to Hansen’s sodas, or Evian, or even unlimited Starburst candies and Nacho Cheese Doritos.

So, in the boredom of doing nothing we all got to be friends, from the entire cast to the make up and wardrobe people, even to the lowliest of us, which would be the standby painter and carpenter.  We told each other our dreams, played practical jokes on each other, amused each other and at the end of the show, we even went sailing together out of Marina del Rey.

But during many of the waiting hours I was stuck by myself at a small old building, a shack, really, across the side lawn, and buried behind some mesquite and flowering bushes.  I was unable to leave it during long periods of takes and retakes.  I would sit on the steps, after dealing with various odd paint and maintenance tasks inside of the shack, where all my touch up paint was stored.  I would clean brushes, age wooden fence posts and the like, then run out of things to do.  I couldn’t risk crossing through the scene being filmed just in front of my shack, so I would quiet myself and remain frozen, more or less.

As the hours passed, and I was forced to stay absolutely still and quiet, I began to look at all the tiny things around me.  I noticed the never ending stream of ants first, and studied them, finding where they entered their holes, and how they passed information to each other by touching one another on their way past, one by one, antennae touching.  Little aliens, they could just as well have been Martians themselves; they were such strange, busy, mysterious tiny tots. I grew to know the movements of the ants, to pick up on their rhythms of their day.

Then one morning I saw a small dark head peek out from around the corner of the bottom steps. A bright eye touched mine and I warmed up in pleased surprise. It was a lizard.  I love lizards, and from childhood have always sought them out, sometimes catching them gently and turning them upside down to stroke their bellies and hypnotize them so they would lay in a trance, or cling to me for up to twenty minutes (although I wouldn’t presume to do it now or at the time of Invaders).

This lizard at first would just look at me, watching for my attention to turn toward something else. I would pretend to do so, but would sneak a peek to see what the lizard was doing.  Eventually I saw the lizard make her move—a little tongue flicked out and one ant went missing from the column.  She was hunting the ants.  She reminded me of a miniature tiger, shadowing a herd of teensy prey animals.

She grew bolder over the days to follow, and soon she was creeping closer to my shoes, sometimes flicking up an ant, but really I could see she was curious—about my big feet, about me.

Now, before this, I am not sure I would have recognized that a lizard was being curious.  I would have suspected it, perhaps, but I wouldn’t have really believed it.  However, on the first day of work at Mr. Blandings’ ex-dream house, our gang boss showed us something amazing during one coffee break.  He told us that he had realized two lizards lived in the front yard on a little hill.  They were very protective of their hill, and could be seen looking around from the top, proudly surveying their domain throughout the day.

So at break, our boss put a small wood board on their hill.  When he approached, both lizards whisked out of sight instantly.  “Now just watch this,” he said. “Give ‘em a minute or two to work up the courage to check out the strange new thing in their home.”

Sure enough, a few minutes later, both lizards’ heads peeked over the top of the hill. They bellied down from the summit, then sidled over to the wood.  They looked up and down at it; they cocked their little reptilian heads from side to side.  You could see the wheels turning. Then one by one, they shimmied up to the board, and leapt up onto the top surface.  Soon they were crawling all over the piece of lumber, checking every square inch, looking over the edges, pacing out the length. Curious lizards, right before our eyes.

Next time, more on our lizards, our actors and poetry from our fire marshal.

 

 

Wild in Malibu

After two weeks of traveling and writing (stuff other than this blog) we’re back and ready to return to those days of yesteryear, remembering the first job we ever had on the set of a film as a standby painter. Enjoy these stories of a time when everything was new and fresh, and full of promise, like the first morning of the rest of your life.

I was still technically working for Cinnebangs when Invaders from Mars started pre-production, and a small contingent of us were sent out to restore, paint and wallpaper a mysterious old house located inside Malibu Creek State Park, a 7,000 acre piece of wilderness once owned by Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, and Twentieth Century Fox.

As I crawled west in the sparkling early morning traffic on the Ventura freeway, I realized that for at least the next month I would be driving to a lovely wild place up into the Santa Monica Mountains, far from the grime, crime and beautiful transvestite streetwalkers of downtown Hollywood. Although I would miss those daily glimpses of the outrageous fashion parade on Sunset, I was definitely glad to be exiled from Hollywood Central for a while.

The drive off the freeway was idyllic; every curve in the road revealed more green and growing things. Huge oak trees, manzanita and fragrant sage covered the mountain sides and the sun shone on picturesque valleys. Further in, I passed multi-million dollar ranches with acres of white fences patrolled by thoroughbred horses worth more than my combined income from the past ten years. There wasn’t single human being in sight.

It was hard to believe that the teeming crowds of the Topanga shopping mall and its exponentially expanding population of tweens infesting the ice skating rink were less than twenty minutes away. The park was off to my right, and as I drove through it, I could see it was a nature reserve area more than a baseball field type of area.  Nobody had changed it from its natural state. I liked the wildness, very much.

I found the house far back in the park, and it was a bit derelict, but charming, a storybook house.  I stared at it for a minute. It looked eerily familiar. The carpenters had been there for a week before us painters, so piles of lumber cluttered the overgrown front yard, and I knew that the whine of power tools would be heard whenever work went on, drowning out the wonderful sounds that I heard all around me now as I got out of my truck: birds singing everywhere, noisy and happy and alive.

As we painters were shown around and given the rundown on what needed to be done to bring the building back to life, our gang boss explained why the house inspired a sense of déjà vu.  It was the house that Cary Grant struggled to complete in the 1948 movie Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.  I wondered if the ghost of Cary Grant ever visited.

The house, perhaps because it hadn’t been used for a long time, or maybe because of its isolation, seemed otherworldly. It would be months before I left that house, working on it or in it six days a week, ten to fifteen hours a day. When we started painting and wallpapering, it was late spring.  When we completed filming, it was late November.

In all that time, I never got over the faint, haunted feeling of the house.  But it became comforting in its strangeness, and there were things that happened there which probably could never have occurred in another place.

I would meet my best friend for the next fifteen years there, learn about filmmaking there, go jogging every day through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world there, and because of the long hours spent sitting still during the months of filming, I would make friends with a lizard while I was there. Seriously. That lizard let me pet her, towards the end of our time there. So I believe there was something strange about that house, but also wonderful.

Next time, a story about lizards, a fire marshal philosopher-poet, and why you should never bring a cup of coffee onto a hot set.

 

From Set Shop Hell to Malibu Creek

That first job on the set of a real feature film was an adventure, the likes of which I will never know again. That’s because I will never again be so full of wonderment and fear, and pure desperation to get out of where I had been working, which was at a set shop I’ll call Cinnabangs.  Every day at Cinnebangs was a hardworking, kick-ass experiment in boredom and/or terror, with a healthy dose of toxic materials handling and a puzzling lack of employee morale.  Maybe it wasn’t so puzzling.  We never knew when exactly we would be off work each day.  We always started at 6:30 am, but we were allowed to leave at 5:00 pm or maybe 7:00 pm, or possible 12:00 am. You just never knew, because it apparently was an ongoing secret, one kept from you for obscure reasons.

As everybody kept working, drilling holes in plywood, mixing resin for some mold filling, spraying glue onto felt squares, apparently oblivious to the need for dinner as the clock crept past 5:00 pm, then left 6:30 pm behind and headed towards 8:00 pm, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Why don’t they just tell us what time they want us to work to?” I’d come up with possible reasons: maybe they didn’t know what time we should work to; or maybe it was just the competitiveness of the workers there (not me—I had a boyfriend and wanted to get home); maybe nobody working there wanted to be the first to cave in, exposing themselves as a detestable weakling and a coward by asking if they could go home.  Anyway, whatever the reason, it was an eternal mystery as to what time you would be leaving work that day, and I learned not to make any plans with my boyfriend on weeknights.  Whether someone in authority would remember to break you for dinner was a crap shoot, as well.

For some other unknown reason, even though there were at least ten to fifteen of us working in the set shop every day, and they only gave us a half hour for lunch, making it impossible to go out for anything, Cinnebangs had no break room, no lunch table, not even any chairs for their employees.  Each day at lunch time we’d glumly file out to the sidewalk in downtown Hollywood and sit there like beggars, pulling in our feet when people with better jobs walked through our sad, mopey little cluster.

Conversation was hard and mean, and usually consisted of a statement from person A followed by a comment from person B that would be something along the lines of: “I did that, too, but I did it better.” Or perhaps a disdainful, “So what?” I remember I once mentioned that I had just had dinner with Timothy Leary, something I was rather proud of—it was a wonderful and very interesting evening.  Person B replied (I’m not making this up), “Oh come on, everybody here has had dinner with Timothy Leary!”

So I was desperate to get out of the set shop, but didn’t know how to do it.  Then when some of us were sent out on a mysterious mission to paint and wallpaper a place out in Malibu Creek State Park, I was thrilled.  We didn’t learn until later that this was to be one of the sets for a movie that Cinnabangs had been hired to work on.  And that movie was Invaders from Mars.  For once we wouldn’t have to eat lunch on the sidewalk of the grimiest back streets of Hollywood.  We would be out in the beauty of nature, and maybe, since it was in a park, we might even be able to find a lunch table.

As it turned out, Malibu Creek State Park had many, many things, amazing, lovely, and unforgettable things.  It was also the place where I discovered the way out of the misery of the set shop and onto the set of a real movie.