Today's Blind Items - One Crazy Summer - Part One
With all apologies to the movie of the same name, I felt like it was the only title that fit the blind. A question I frequently get asked by people I work with and from readers is what made me want to be in this business. How did I get started? I think no matter what I would have ended up doing something in the music business. It was just inevitable because of some of the people I grew up with and the parts of the industry I was exposed to in my formative years. The rest of it, that first introduction to the world of Hollywood and its good and bad and very ugly side probably would not have happened except for that summer. A few of the people that I met that summer are still in my life. To say they have had a good career is an understatement. At the time I don't think anyone predicted it. With what I saw that summer, I'm not sure how any of them are even alive after all these years. Maybe it was just crazy to me because I had never seen anything like it. The just over the topness of it all. Like so many of my personal stories, this one came about because of an introduction.
I was not going to do much that summer. No real plans. My parents had plans for me. They wanted me to get a job. I didn't have a problem with working during the summer, but the job they wanted me to do was going to be a lot of work out in the hot sun for very little pay. They didn't want to finance me all summer. I saw their point then, and I see it now and I would do it, but I was hoping for something that would be at least a little more fun. Hello fun. Actually those were not the words that came out of the phone, but it was my old friend, sometime double dater and what she says is a too frequent visitor to this spot who called and said someone was looking for a production assistant on a movie and she thought of me and the next thing you know I was working on a movie. My first one. Away from home. This was going to be fun. It was fun. I had no problem being the go get guy and filling orders and running around town in a non-air conditioned van they gave me simply because it didn't have air conditioning. It was one of those jobs where even though I literally worked 15 hours a day and never stopped running around that it never felt like work. It was something entirely new and I couldn't get enough. The first week or ten days I was there it was only crew. There were no actors there, or at least none that I saw. This was all pre-production. Just a bunch of people trying to make everything smoother when the shooting started. All of the planning and preparation that went into those days was crazy. What was more crazy was that even though they worked that hard to make sure everything ran smoothly, nothing really did. It was not the fault of the crew or the director or anyone really. The problem was that with very few exceptions, the movie starred nothing but teens or those just out of their teens. I remember the first day when the lead portions of the cast arrived. I knew who the two males leads were and one of them I had watched a million times in a few of his movies. Even though he was still young, I think still just barely in his teens, his career was in a nosedive. Some bad decisions on his part and horrible decisions by his people had brought him to this set at this time. Lets call him FT. He looked like a mess. He looked old. Teenagers are not supposed to look old. They are not supposed to look like someone who is a decade older. OK sure, throw Lindsay Lohan's name out there or some person you knew in high school who smoked meth every day, but this was neither of those. Despite looking old he had an attitude. I guess a couple of failures were being bolstered by the bottle he had with him nearly all of the time. The only time he set the bottle down was to do lines of coke. I'm pretty sure that whatever the budget of this movie was, a good portion of it went to coke. To this day I have never seen a group of people do that much coke in my life. I have seen individuals do more, but as a collective whole, it is not even close.
I don't know if it was good or bad that my double dating friend showed up the day I met this person for the first time. Since that day she has been in and out of my life and is that constant in the background that ties parts of my life together. My friend was there because she took a day off from that thing she does. Back then she was still struggling, but doing so with a guy who shows up in an epic blind item that is still one of my favorites. My adventure with him was still a few years down the road.
When I saw this person for the first time, it took my breath away. Whenever I see her now or talk to her, if I think about that first day, it still happens. I remember two things. The way she spoke because she was trying out a southern accent and these massive gold hoop earrings she was wearing and would wear for most of the movie. We were about the same age. Total polar opposites. From the time we first said hello though we have always been friends. Lets call her MW.
The third member of this little acting troupe we will meet tomorrow.
