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My Silver Screen Memories are Already
Tarnished
by Brock LaBorde
April,
2005
I am celebrating two anniversaries right now.
First, it's been two months and
the birds still
haven't killed us. Second, I have officially been employed in the
film industry for just over one year.
And what better way for me to
celebrate my imagined success and the fact that we must all keep
living another shitty day than by telling you some of my favorite
real-life stories about my first year in "Hollywood South"? FYI:
Did you know that New Orleans is not really "Hollywood South"?
That's just a stupid term that misguided people use because they
actually believe that Hollywood will uproot itself and move across
the continent!
When I tell most people what I do
for a living, which isn't anything to get all excited over, they
usually get all excited and ask the same questions:
- What movie stars have you met?
- Can I be a movie star?
- So what's it like being a movie star?
- Do you know any movie stars that I can have sex with for
free?
- Why are you such a creepy bastard?
Hopefully I can answer at least one
of those questions in this column. Of course, there's lots I can't
tell you, but this will give you a nice taste of what I've seen.
My columns typically flow like
this: an awkward self-deprecating intro, followed by a half-assed
presentation of a theme, then there's a lengthy listing of whatever,
and then it's all wrapped up with a somewhat bitter, somehow
self-promoting ending. Thus, it is now time for the list!
Movie production
experiences that I will never forget as long as I keep talking about
them and looking at this list:
- Losing my virginity to the
Growing Pains family.
My first "real" movie to work on was the
Growing Pains 2: Return of the Seavers
television movie event. I worked as a PA in the Art Department,
helping design and build the movie's sets. As a child, I had a
television as a nanny, so it was a surreal experience when I met the
"Seavers," this TV family that I had grown up with for a good 5
seasons or so. The strangest part was how truly familial they all
were. The set of their house was filled with real vacation pictures
of them as if they used to go on trips together. But they were just
actors! It made me realize that if your own family is screwed up
beyond all hope, there's a slight chance that you can land a newer,
better one in the entertainment industry - one with sweet prime time
ratings, even.
Kirk Cameron is a midget.
- Engineering and building a fake
flood set in diseased, snake-infested waters.
I did a Lifetime flick called
Heart of the Storm
(starring America's Favorite Half Pint, Melissa Gilbert!) and we had
to simulate a flood that is threatening to destroy an entire town.
How did we do this? By stacking a truckload of heavy-ass sandbags in
chest-deep filthy-ass water at a crummy little boat launch, of
course! It was disgusting, heart-breaking, back-twisting work and
the crew I worked with had to risk receiving bacterial infections
and snakebites just for this one 30-second shot in a movie that
about 45 housewives saw. We pulled it off, though, and when we were
done, I saw a snake swim through our set and it had to be at least
8,000 feet long with spikes and tentacles and machine guns mounted
on it, and I feared that I might have to battle it. I swear the
snake does not get bigger every time I tell this story. It really
was 14,000 feet long.
Melissa Gilbert is hotter than
I ever imagined she'd be.
- Getting real drunk at the Glory
Road wrap party...and pretty much every other movie's parties.
All movies have parties for the cast and crew - at the
beginning, in the middle, and at the end. You get drunk at these
parties because you're not paying for the booze. And it's the high
quality stuff, too. Someone like
Sean Penn or
Jerry Bruckheimer (I pooped in
his bathroom once!) or Paramount Pictures is picking up the tab, so
you kind of pound them down like a rock star. And at times, in the
blurry, spinning, fantastic haze of wanton wrap party drunkenness,
you can feel like a rock star, too, even if you're the lowest crew
member on the totem pole. Now I am naturally stupid. I need no
liquids to blunt my cognitive functions. But I drink when it's
there, and it is in such alcohol-fueled stupors that I say things to
people that I wouldn't ordinarily say...and then I forget what I
said or did. For instance, at the
Glory Road wrap party, I
expressed my undying fondness for a gorgeous coworker of mine, only
to find out from her the next day that my secret crush on her was a
secret no longer. At the
Dukes of Hazzard party, I met
Willie Nelson and I have no
clue what I said to him. I think we talked about codfish and breast
implants.
Jerry Bruckheimer wears a
breathing mask like Michael Jackson sometimes.
- Teaching Tom Hanks everything he
knows about acting.
Okay, I made this one up. I've never worked with
Tom Hanks and I doubt he could
ever learn anything from me. Boo hoo. Tom Hanks was funny in that
movie
Turner and Hooch.
- Watching a sick boy's dreams come
true...for about 5 minutes.
I worked on an episode of a TV show called "Monster House" for a
few days and in the episode, a 10-year-old dying boy got the
ultimate clubhouse ever constructed right in his backyard. Among its
many awesome features like slidey poles, slidey slides, and secret
cubbyholes, was a huge control room with TV's, video game consoles,
and a refrigerator. On top of that was a $10,000 NASA-approved
telescope (the kid liked to watch the stars). Since this took place
in a tiny middle-class suburb of Baton Rouge, the clubhouse was
almost bigger than the house itself. The kid loved it, of course,
but I couldn't help but think about how after the show packed up and
went back to Hollywood or wherever, what would the electricity bills
be like for this poor family? And what about when the kid's cancer
took over and he was gone? Wouldn't that monstrous clubhouse taking
up the entire backyard be an awful reminder of their dead son and/or
brother? But that's reality TV for you - all concept, no substance,
and very little entertainment value for those involved in the
production of it.
Reality TV is frighteningly
stupid.
- Studio 8 meeting Broken Lizard.
On many levels, working on the
Dukes of Hazzard was one of the
coolest opportunities I've experienced yet. Yeah, getting to hang
out with
Johnny Knoxville and
Jessica Simpson was fun and
all, but something else happened that was way more substantial - a
few members of
Studio 8 got to meet up with a
few members of
Broken Lizard, a group of
funny-ass, successful filmmaking dudes who people have compared us
to for years. Their latest movie,
Club Dread, was so funny, I
actually laughed out loud a few times, which I never do because I
like to keep all of my laughter and tears inside my heart.
Jay Chandrasekhar, the main
brains behind Broken Lizard, was the director of Dukes, and
one night, fellow Studio 8 member
Crash
and I got to hang out and shoot the shit with Jay on Bourbon Street
until dawn. I know there were some laughs and some strippers, but I
can't remember what was said between us, because we were all wasted,
though I did have a vague feeling in my gut the next day that he had
a good time with us. Or maybe that was just all those Krystal
Burgers.
Broken Lizard is the next
National Lampoon.
- Having my own special tender
moments of encouragement from Carl Winslow, the dad on Family
Matters.
The movie biz is full of random encounters and unbelievable
situations. One such situation occurred while I was working as a
travel coordinator a movie called
Retirement. One of the stars
was
Reginald Vel Johnson, who
played the chubby-faced police officer/dad on the hit ABC sitcom
Family Matters. You know, the
show about the black people that came on after
Full House. Long story short, I
had to give Reginald a ride to the airport. People had warned me
about him, saying that he was cruel and vicious and gay and
uncircumcised and all sorts of terrible things. He was none of those
things (as far as I could tell from the other side of my car). In
fact, he was very supportive, and perhaps even sweet, as he listened
to my ideas and aspirations for half an hour. He told me of his own
projects, some which have succeeded, some which have failed, and in
the end, I learned a valuable lesson about not giving up and being
honest with myself as an artist...and being honest with my loving
family, even the
middle child who was kicked of
the show after the fourth season. It was just like being in the last
5 minutes of a typical Family Matters episode, only there was
no kooky
Steve Urkel crashing through my
roof in a jetpack.
Steve Urkel is going to rule
the world one day as the Anti-Christ with Screech from
Saved By the Bell as his
right-hand man.
- Taking lunch orders and emptying
garbage on Failure to Launch.
Yes, to fully enjoy the peaks of the Hollywood rollercoaster,
you have to endure the valleys first. As of the time I write this
column, I am essentially at the same spot I was last year in the
movie business. Yes, I've moved up a bit on certain films and met
lots of good folks all over the world, but once again I find myself
as a Production Assistant on yet another
big-budget movie, answering
phones and faxing copies of strange memos to people in LA. The only
difference is instead of running errands for
Tia Carrere or
Alan Thicke, I'm going to be
running them for
Matthew McConaughey and
Sarah Jessica Parker. You can
do
big things on small movies or
you can do
small things on big movies. Few
people get to do
big things on big movies. For
now, I'm content learning and meeting people and taking my time
developing my own work.
Brock LaBorde is not worried
and is even somewhat optimistic at this point.
And speaking of my own work, my
book
is in a few local stores now. How neat is that? It's called "The
Semi-Complete Guide to Sort of Being a Gentleman"
and it's available to buy at
IUniverse.com,
Amazon.com, or
BarnesandNoble.com. It's
got over 100 pages in it and there's some neat illustrations from
Studio 8 member
Truston and it is
guaranteed to make you at least think about laughing once or twice.
And by the way, I refuse to offer
any type of rebuttal to
Truston's awful column last
week. As a matter of fact, I will not even mention it or remind you
of it or link to it again
here so you can read all of the
mean, nasty things he said about me! I'm too mature for that.
Your love,
Brock
PS - Stay tuned next year for my next
year of Hollywood memories! It's only a year away!
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