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.