The Sunday Memory Drawer - The First Full Day in California

Following up on the tale I started last Sunday.  Recounting my very first day living in California fourteen years ago this month.

Even though, during our first night of sleep which really didn't happen due to the clankety clank of the parking lot gate outside our apartment, we had to hit the ground running the very next morning.

We were due at the studio.

Such a Hollywood thing to say.  Let me write it again.

We were due at the studio.

Ah!!!

Still feels good.

Oh, we weren't working or anything.  But, thanks to a good friend of ours who was a line producer at "Murphy Brown," we would "be there" for the final six weeks of their production cycle.

So, as we drove to Warner Brothers in Burbank, we marveled at our good fortune.  We were incredibly lucky being able to view first-hand sitcom production close-up.  An internship that required no college credits.  We had read for years how a television situation comedy was done.  If it is shot before a live studio audience, there is a very set and intricate five-day work schedule culminating in "show night," when it is actually filmed like a stage play.  It's a now time-honored process that had been started by Desi Arnaz during the very first days of "I Love Lucy" and it exists to this day.

We would get to experience it all.

At the gate to all Hollywood studios, there are those little guard booths.  You are nothing if your name does not appear on that "walk-on" clipboard the gatekeepers hold so dearly.  And there's a little rush that happens when you give your name and the guard says...

"Okay, drive over to Stage Four.  You know where that is?"

Ummm.  We didn't want to look too stupid.  But we had no clue.  Somehow, we fumbled through an un-intelligible response.   No worries.  He pointed us in the correct direction.

Celluloid history seeps out of every cement pore at Warner Brothers in Burbank.  You can actually sense the ethereal presence of movie stars gone by.  While I am sure the lot has been updated over the years, it still looks amazingly as it did in the newsreels of the 30s and 40s.  Is that James Cagney over there?  Was that the make-up department that painted up Bette Davis' puss?  Oh, look, in the gutter.  Errol Flynn is drunk again.

Well, we didn't see any of that.  But we could feel it all around us.  And we weren't on the lot for more than two minutes before we had our very first sighting. 

Dean Cain.

Okay, it was the 90s, not the 40s.  Dean would have to do.

There's another layer of security at whatever soundstage you're involved in.  You walk through a metal detector, because, after all, it is Candice Bergen's workday home and you never know when a deranged Dan Quayle might show up with a gun.  Once cleared with your name on yet another list, you're given a little paste-on circle that you place someplace on your person.  It's the color of the day.  If you're not wearing the correct color of the day, I suppose you are carted off to Jack Warner Jail by Yosemite Sam. 

We always had the right circle on.  There was no way these daily dreams would be curtailed for a single nano-second.

The cool thing about these little golden circular passes is that you can pretty much walk all over the lot unaccosted.  In the course of our time there, we'd watch George Clooney and Anthony Edwards of "ER" play basketball in an alleyway.  My writing partner would get shooed away by Clint Eastwood when he tried to peer through the windows of Malpaso Productions.  And, for one noontime hour, my cohort would disappear to God's knows where.  When he returned, he reported back.

"I was watching them rehearse Friends for a while."

Oh.  Meanwhile, I had spent the lunch break watching a cameraman pick chicken salad out of his teeth.

At this point in time, "Murphy Brown" was in its ninth season and the production was on automatic pilot.  The entire crew was so well-rounded and experienced that an episode was produced like Swiss clock-work.  We heard stories of 'Friends" filmings that lasted for eight or nine hours and required to change out the live studio audience mid-episode because the first group would get tired.  Not so at "Murphy Brown."  Friday night filmings were usually done in just a little over two hours.  They really knew their shit at Stage Four.

Since our very first day at Warner Brothers was a Friday, it was "show night."  The day's activities would be for the camera guys to finish up scene blocking and the producers to tighten up any script points.  Whereas "Friends" would rewrite complete scenes on the floor during the tapings, there was very few changes at "Murphy."  Over our weeks there, we witnessed very few line changes over the course of an episode's production.

After we watched all this last-minute activity, we got shuttled into "dinner."  A nearby soundstage is set up as a mess hall/restaurant and most of the cast and crew eats before the filming.  We never saw Candice there, but pretty much everybody else showed.  The buffet was damn good and we did our best to eat plenty without looking like two tourists at an unlimited food court in the middle of Iowa.  Our dinner companions usually wound up being our producer friend, the actor playing the bartender at Phil's, and the comedienne who did the audience warm-up every week. 

When dinner was over, I remember how we ambled back to the soundstage for the show.  We passed by all these slobs on line outside.  This was the studio audience.  I wondered if they were looking at us like we were somebodys.  Little did they know.  We easily could have staying in a mindless queue just like them.

Our seats in the audience bleachers were duct-taped off so we were VIPs.  Another reason to sneer at the common folk around us.  Do you folks have any idea who we are? 

Okay, we were dreaming again.

I don't remember much of the show that night, except that Walter Cronkite had been there the day before to pre-shoot a scene which was shown on the monitors so our laughter could be recorded.  We had missed more broadcast royalty by about twenty-four hours. 

While we had been to show filmings before, we were amazed all over again by the process.  Few folks know that sitcom scenes are filmed at least three different times so that the producers can have a variety of takes to use for the final edit.  That may sound trivial, but it is really tough for the actors to get the same flow from take to take.  Also, the studio audience might laugh heartily at the joke during the first take and less so after that.  It becomes an energy endurance test for all concerned.  Good actors nail it every take.  And we were watching some real pros at work.

"Murphy Brown" was a class operation all around.  From the incredibly non-annoying warm-up comic to the jazz band that played between scenes, it was a very special evening for us.

And, lucky studs that we were, there would be five more of them coming.  When I got home that night, I decided to commit my early California experiences to paper in a journal.  Indeed, it was the very earliest edition of this blog.  If I was to have this wonderful time watching a television situation comedy be produced, I wanted to save it all for my own personal history. 

Next week, you'll enjoy the fruits of the journal that I kept.

Dinner last night:  BLT sandwich at Blue Plate.