Night Shift

I wish my life was exactly like this poster.

Here’s how my day works at Roundhouse Kick Entertainment: I show up to work at 7:00, take an hour for lunch at 12:00, and then head home around 5:00.

Keep in mind that when I say 7:00, I mean 7:00 PM, at which point my parents are already on their second glass of wine and watching Jeopardy! back in Oregon. When I say 12:00 I mean midnight, when my digestive system is still getting used to the idea of me eating a meal that may well be from the nearby In-N-Out. And 5:00 is 5:00 AM, when the real assholes among you are getting up to go to the gym for two hours before going to work.

The night shift is more commonly associated with cops, waiters, and vampires* than with assistant video editors, but that’s part of what makes my employment at Roundhouse Kick so cool – the company is blowing up in the best way possible. We have multiple new shows in development, the ones that we’re airing right now are big hits, and we’re hiring people so fast that we’re expanding through the buildings in our office park like some kind of cancer, buying out office space of less successful production companies and moving the new people in fast enough to raid the old company’s bagel supply before they’ve fully moved out.

*Believe it or not, kids, there was a time when vampires only came out at night, and that was to drink people’s blood, not moon over pouty high school girls and spend their eternal life quietly espousing Christian values.

Part of what this success means, though, is that we have more stuff to do than time to do it, hence why Roundhouse Kick became a 24-hour operation, not unlike Denny’s or an unusually dedicated prostitute. When I show up to work each evening, the day shift people tell us the work they were unable to finish as they head for their cars, and then we go to work on it for the night, leaving them a note about where we left off before heading out ourselves.

Last summer I didn’t have a job (short of trying to keep The Ex Girlfriend happy, which was less a job and more cruel and unusual punishment) and so had little incentive to stick to any civilized type of sleep schedule. Many nights I’d retire from the XBox at around 3:00 AM and get up somewhere in the vicinity of noon. I guess my reasoning was that if I wasn’t able to find work, I ought to fully embrace being a slacker.

After nearly three weeks at Roundhouse, my sleep schedule has begun to normalize. Last night I got home at 5:15 AM and I woke up at about 2:00 PM, which, when compared with the hours I kept last summer, is roughly the same. I still see some daylight before I head off to work, and I don’t feel guilty about my sleep schedule because instead of being a byproduct of laziness it’s a byproduct of the fact that I work a 50 hour week.

Also, anyone who wants to accuse me of missing out on life by sleeping through my mornings can shut the hell up, because I watch the Sun rise and set every day, which, according to a lot of made for TV movies, is probably one of the most life affirming things you can do.

While it’s nice to watch the Sun rise as I drive home, the problem is once I get home the Sun stays up, and the blinds in my apartment weren’t so much designed to keep the Sun out as they were to keep the neighbors from seeing you looking at porn. This didn’t matter for the first week or so, because as I adjusted to my new schedule I’d be so tired coming home every morning that no amount of sunlight streaming through my paper thin blinds could keep me awake.

More recently, though, my after work routine became something out of a cartoon: I’d get home, drag myself inside, crawl into bed, and just begin to close my eyes when sunlight would barge into my room and pull my eyelids open like curtains.

The Internet recommended using an eye pillow to block out the sunlight, assuming that I was a regular shopper at Grandmas ‘R Us and had such a thing tucked away somewhere in my dingy bachelor pad. For most of last week I settled for laying two (clean!) socks across my eyes, which blocked out a fair amount of sunlight in return for a fair amount of dignity. Towards the end of the week, though, I decided that I was done letting the largest celestial body in the Solar System force me to go to bed wearing socks on my face, which led to the creation of Operation Nightfall.

The only reason it's so light is because I had to use the flash so you could see anything.

In one of those coincidences that you wouldn’t believe if you saw it in a movie, Mom and Dad had left several cardboard panels in the backseat of The Mystery Wagon when they handed over the keys. Remembering this one morning as I lay in my Sun dappled bed unable to sleep, I pulled on some pants and marched out to the car with the drive and determination of a madman.

After scouring the apartment for tape I went to work pasting the panels to the window, which miraculously fit perfectly, as though they had been designed for the task. Then, knowing that I truly had gone insane, I cut up a black plastic bag I had with me and taped the shreds over holes in the cardboard in hopes of more fully blocking daylight from my room.

As I write this at 3:00 in the afternoon, darkness reigns in my room, and I could well continue sleeping with no problem. Unfortunately, my neighbors across the alley now only know me as The Guy Who Covered His Windows With Cardboard, so they think I’m either a crackhead or a pedophile, or both.

Truman Capps thinks that his shying away from the sun is yet another step on the road to becoming the crusty old prospector everyone thinks he’ll be.

Working For A Living

Get it? Oh, for fuck's sake, PLEASE get it.

You know what’s ironic?

Driving 950 miles on the pretense that you’ll land one of two internships, both of which turn you down, only to instead through the good graces of a friend get an honest to goodness career style job in the entertainment industry, and be far better and more competent at that job, one which involves navigating complex computer systems in order to literally build television, than you were at your previous Neanderthal-style summer jobs washing cars, busing tables, and making milkshakes.

I guess that’s not ironic. Maybe it’s just sort of amusing. At least, I think it’s amusing.

When uncertainty first began to spring up regarding my internship situation down here (see last week’s update), I contacted my friend Patrick, Giver of Jobs, to see if he could get me an internship of some sort at the production company where he works, just so I could have something on my resume for the summer other than, “Sat around waiting by the phone; considered getting a gym membership.” Patrick’s response was that he wouldn’t allow me to come to his production company unless I had an actual paying job, and so he aggressively pitched me to his boss, who subsequently hired me as an assistant video editor.

So far, Patrick is arguably the only good thing to come from me socializing with Mike, Smoker of Cigarettes, on a regular basis. Patrick and Mike went to school together in the charming old timey Western village of Medford, Oregon, and when Mike went off to pursue a degree in journalism and lame public access television at the University of Oregon, Patrick went to film school at Full Sail University in Florida. He then graduated and, rather than getting a job at Subway like most film school graduates, actually got a job in the entertainment industry at Roundhouse Kick Entertainment,* a reality and documentary TV production outfit, where I now work as well.

*For those of you who weren’t here two summers ago, my places of employment on the blog always get pseudonyms, and that trend continues today. While it may look like I’m trying to protect them from any bad shit I may say, I’m actually trying to protect myself from Roundhouse Kick finding out that I’m blogging about them and firing me for exposing secrets (not that I will, guys).

It’s a good job, and it pays $500 a week. Yes, I guess that’s impressive by Oregon standards, but keep in mind that rent on my apartment in Studio City is about $690 a month when you factor in utilities (which is a pretty good price out here, by the way) and I run through one $50 tank of gas every week driving the 20 miles to and from work every day. It’s still a damn fine wage that I’m happy to be paid, but with the cost of living down here it’s about on par with most entry level jobs.

But why is it a good job, you ask? Three reasons:

1) Snacks!

All my other jobs have been food service, and under those circumstances one is surrounded by delicious food but knows he will be torn a new asshole if he eats any of it, because that food is the product, and skimming the product is a really bad idea that will probably get you killed (according to The Wire, at least).

At Roundhouse Kick, though, there’s a kitchen full of delicious snacks. Granola bars, Chips Ahoy, bagels, cream cheese, bread and peanut butter – keep in mind, folks, that given proper quantities of the aforementioned foods I could probably make it through the apocalypse no sweat.

Also, I definitely picked the wrong summer to swear off of soft drinks, because there’s a dedicated refrigerator completely stocked with all the Sprite, Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, and Dr. Pepper anyone could ever need. To your garden variety elementary schooler who (hopefully) has yet to discover the joys of alcohol and pornography, our company kitchen, lovingly appointed with all the free candy you could ask for, is probably Valhalla. To me, it’s a good excuse to leave my office every so often.

2) The Commute!

Yes, I know – not only do I hate driving under the best of circumstances, but I live in Los Angeles, the bad traffic capital of the world.

The thing is, though, that I work nights,* which means that I’m in the car going to work at 6:00 PM. Traffic is still kind of nasty at that point depending on which freeway you’re on (my commute takes me across three – the 101, the 405, and the 90, which, if you’ve never been to LA, probably doesn’t mean much), but it’s never so bad that it takes me more than 40 minutes to get to work.

*Yes, I work the night shift – this is a pretty big subject and will be covered in depth on Wednesday.

And honestly, I’d much rather deal with LA traffic going five miles an hour than LA traffic going full speed, which as I may have mentioned is like 2 Fast, 2 Furious meets the scene in Serenity when the ship is falling into the planet’s atmosphere and they’re trying to dodge an entire space battle between the Alliance and the Reavers.


Plus, I get off work at 5:00 AM, at which point it takes me a good 15 minutes to breeze on home, listening to Morning Edition and playing Spot the Hobo Village every time I pass a surface street.

3) I Like The Job And I’m Good At It!

What does an assistant video editor do, you ask? Well, he assists the full on video editors in editing video. Duh.

More concretely, it means that I polish up the raw Television that comes in from Roundhouse Kick’s productions and generally make it ready to be cut together into refined, premium Television.

As Roundhouse is a reality TV studio, a lot of the stuff I do involves grooming the excess reality out of the video that’s handed to me. This primarily happens through a time intensive process known as ‘Locating,’ where I watch the raw video footage of client interviews, historical research, and ghost hunts (I work on a ghost hunting show) and place color coded markers, or ‘Locators’, in places in the video which are of interest. There are markers for relevant dialogue, nonverbal reactions, people entering or leaving, and the all important paranormal activity marker (used sparingly).

Thanks to these markers, the editors know which parts of the 90 minute long tape are interesting enough to start working with. It isn’t their job to watch the cast fiddling with their microphones or a crusty old guy at the historical society yammering about his dog for 15 minutes – it’s my job. I also categorize and label B roll (general footage of the haunted house, the town it’s in, the cast dramatically getting out of their cars, etc) and stack audio (synchronize the video footage with what the cast’s independent wireless microphones recorded).

Is it sort of tedious? Yes. But I don’t care – even though I don’t watch reality TV and take the paranormal about as seriously as I take organized religion, I fucking love this job. Sure, it’s tedious work, but it’s tedious work that helps television, one of my favorite things ever, get made.*

*My other favorite things ever are pretty difficult to get jobs with – science fiction isn’t hiring at the moment and I’m underqualified for a job at a distillery.

I guess what I’ve learned is that I’ll throw myself headfirst into a tedious task if I appreciate the end result. So fuck you, Mike’s Drive In! It’s not that I wasn’t good at making milkshakes. It’s that I didn’t appreciate the end result.

Truman Capps thinks you wouldn’t have appreciated the end result at Mike’s either if you’d seen some of the manatees who had come in every day for their bacon burger and extra large shake.

It's coming

Srsly guys, give me like 20 minutes here.

"Cliche As It May Sound, This Is Show Biz"

How many times have I told the internship story now? Want to hear it one more time, for those of you who weren’t paying attention?

In mid February, I became aware of a highly competitive and well regarded internship program sponsored by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the people responsible for the Emmy awards. This program offered internships in some 30 categories, one of which was television scriptwriting. I applied on a whim, thinking ‘It’s not likely, but hey, why not, right?’ This same reasoning is why I’ve had a condom in my jacket pocket for the past year or so.

So I mailed in my entry packet and more or less forgot about it. I interviewed for an unpaid internship in Los Angeles at a reality TV production company full of people friendly and understanding enough to 1) Offer me a job and B) Wait for my response until after I’d heard from the Emmys, who said they’d contact finalists in late April.

So imagine my pants-crapping surprise in late April when I received an email from NATAS telling me that I’d been selected as one of six finalists for the TV scriptwriting internship. This was exciting – getting the internship would mean a $4000 stipend and a seat in a TV writer’s room, which, as summer jobs go, is second in my heart only to a seat on the bridge of Serenity.

We only pay you in tiny leather bags filled with space-coins.

From April 27th until two days ago, my life was less a lived series of events and more a form of purgatory. The people at my safety internship agreed to hold the position for me until I heard the final answer from the Emmys, which they said would come in mid to late June. Every day revolved around getting up and spending 12 or so hours fretting about the strength of my submitted materials, staring at the phone and willing it to ring, and fantasizing about being placed as an intern on Community and having flirtatious, meaningful eye contact with Alison Brie on a daily basis.

Eye contact: Just one of many forms of contact I'd like to have with Alison Brie.

The Emmys blew their first deadline the week before I left England – they informed me that the winner would be notified early the following week. By late the following week with still no word, we were told to wait another week. At long last, word came through that the first of the two winners had been selected and notified, and whoever it was, it wasn’t me. The next winner, they said, would be notified after the Fourth of July weekend.

Shit had gotten real. All of my fantasies about winning the internship had involved me being the first winner selected (they also involved me backflipping onto a motorcycle, but that’s another story), and the idea that some script supervisor could watch my audition video and read my 30 Rock spec script and then pick some girl who wrote poems about horses in high school and wants to be a writer because it looked so fun when Sarah Jessica Parker did it on that show was very unnerving.

Incidentally, I heard this movie really sucked. I can't tell you how happy that makes me.

At this point, the Emmys’ indolence had cost me my safety internship – they had a business to run, after all, and they couldn’t be expected to sit around for three months waiting on an unpaid intern just because he had the good sense to wear a suit to his interview and smile a lot, so they interviewed and subsequently hired another person. Meanwhile, I set up another safety position courtesy of my friend Patrick, Writer of Screenplays, who I know through Mike Whitman, Smoker of Cigarettes, and struck off for LA in The Mystery Wagon, as I had decided that if I was going to spend my whole summer waiting for the phone to ring, I could at least do it in a place where they sell liquor in supermarkets.

As a going away gift, my parents bought me a Bluetooth headset – if you don’t know what that is, go find an asshole and look at the side of his head, and you’ll see one stuck in his ear. It’s for people who receive so many important phone calls while simultaneously doing so many important things with their hands that they have to resort to science to find a balance. I wore that fucking Bluetooth in my ear the whole way down to LA on the off chance that the Emmys called me while I was in the car and still, nothing.

"Yes Mr. President? Sorry, I'm too busy playing the final guitar solo from November Rain to pick up a real phone."

I’d been in LA for three days and the Emmys had once again blown their notification deadline, something I’d become almost used to. Then, I received the call I’d been waiting for and fantasizing about for so long:

“Hello, is this Truman? This is ________, with the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences internship program.”

“Holy shit.” I said. “Hi!”

The woman on the other end laughed. “Holy shit – I don’t have news. I’m just calling to tell you there’s been a shake up at the host company; they’ve ordered a rewrite of the pilot for the show and the writing team says they won’t be able to take on an intern until August.”

That happened.

So I started working full time at Patrick’s company – more details on that in the next blog – a job that I enjoy and appear to be pretty good at, which is a relief, seeing as I was pretty fucking bad at simple, lowpaying, non career oriented jobs such as milkshake making or water glass filling. I’ve been there for a week and a half now, something that I neglected to publicize on Hair Guy or Facebook lest the person vetting me for the scriptwriting internship look and see that I already had a job.

Two days ago, I received the following email from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences:

Dear Finalist,

Due to circumstances completely out of my control, I will NOT be filling the second Scriptwriting slot this summer. Production on _______ has been delayed, and it won't be premiering now until Fall of 2011.

I appreciate your patience, and I'm so sorry to have to give you this news. Cliché as it may sound, this is show biz.

Best,
[Name]

Suffice it to say:

Truman Capps eagerly awaits your comments and emails about what typos he made this week.

Road Warrior

Rush hour.

I’ve been in Los Angeles for over a week now, and while I promised that I’d never let this city change me, sadly it already has. No, I haven’t picked up a cocaine habit or killed a hooker in a drunken rage and dumped her body in the hills (yet!) – I’ve become a different type of driver.

I can’t whether my driving has gotten better or worse, because that really depends on where you’re coming from. By Los Angeles standards, my driving is very bad – I still signal when I change lanes and when I get on the 405 I insist on driving at the prevailing speed in the right hand lane instead of driving as fast and carelessly as possible like everyone else. When I get on Mulholland Drive, the narrow, twisty, two lane road that basically hangs off the side of the Hollywood Hills above a sheer drop, I make a point of driving at a reasonable speed and taking turns slowly instead of flooring it and passing on curves at 55 miles per hour like everyone else. I dunno – as much as I love Jack Nicholson, I don’t want to crash through a guardrail and wind up dunking The Mystery Wagon in his swimming pool. He’s not a man known for measured responses, or sanity in general.

By Portland standards, though, my driving has also gotten worse. I no longer regard other drivers as human beings like myself just trying to get to where they’re going, but rather as a pack of bloodthirsty adversaries who will stop at nothing to kill me. I’ve had some experience driving with this mindset before thanks to several years of nightly Mario Kart 64 matches with my parents.

It’s not like I wanted to become one of the terrible California drivers that we Oregonians bitch about – and yes, Californians who are reading this, you are terrible drivers – it was simply a matter of necessity. Have you seen Mad Max? That’s what it’s like driving from Studio City to Santa Monica. And did Mad Max adhere to the rules of the road that he as a futuristic apocalyptic policeman no doubt understood were created with law and order and personal safety in mind? No. No, he did not – because the mutant savage gangs he was tangling with didn’t adhere to those rules either. He had to become just as insane as they were in order to keep up with them long enough to scream anti-Semitic racial epithets at them, and I feel like I’ve done the same thing, with a few notable exceptions.

Driving from Studio City to Santa Monica is a trip that requires me to travel on three different Interstate highways, all of them jam-packed with porn producers in convertible Sebrings who treat their lane like their own personal territory which under no circumstances should they let anyone else encroach upon, even if it means that person misses their exit. These same people will abruptly abandon the lane they were so defensive of at the drop of a hat, darting into the tiny space between myself and the car ahead of me without so much a flash of the turn signal.

“Well,” I can hear them saying between rails of cocaine snorted off the back of their iPhones. “Seeing me pull into your lane should be signal enough, am I right?”

All of this would be far easier to understand if everyone wasn’t so fucking nice the second they got out of their cars. You think hugging is big where you are? Everybody hugs here. Hand shaking is out, because apparently that didn’t spread enough bacteria, so now complete strangers will throw their arms around you in a warm and welcoming embrace before you can so much as tell them your name.*

*Not that I’m anti hug or anything. All I’m saying is, Eva Longoria didn’t hug me, so I guess the LA hugging phenomenon doesn’t come through where it counts, as far as I’m concerned.

Complete strangers here are charming and friendly in the way that people in Europe seem to think that all Americans are. On my first trip to Ralph’s, the woman behind me in line heard the cashier tell me that they wouldn’t accept my Safeway Club Card and spontaneously whipped out her Ralph’s card and ran it for me. When I was at Galco’s Soda Pop Stop in Pasadena, the cashier casually advised me as to which drinks were not to be served over ice and which ought to be turned upside down before opening. Just a few minutes ago, the cashier at Blockbuster Video and I had a lovely little heart to heart about the movie Hancock and whether it sucked or not – this was thrilling both because the cashier was attractive and female and because it’s always been an ambition of mine to date a video store employee and get free rentals.

Now that I look back on what I just wrote, all my experiences involved retail in one way or another, but the fact of the matter is that seldom in Oregon have I met so many people who’ve been so jovial and friendly while taking my money and not working for tips.

Maybe people in Los Angeles are brought together by the freeways – maybe their reasoning is that they’ve probably cut off, tailgated, and otherwise endangered the lives of so many people on their way to work that as soon as they get there they try to restore karmic balance by being as nice as possible to everyone regardless of race, creed, or what sort of supermarket discount card they have.

Truman Capps also considered Death Race 2000 as a 405 analogy, but he wouldn’t have been able to make that totally awesome ‘Mel Gibson is a racist’ joke.

The Exodus, Day Two

Day Two: Sacramento to Los Angeles, 384 miles

And on the sixth day, the Lord said, "Shit, I still have to put stuff between Sacramento and LA... Ah, whatever. Nobody's going to notice."

Even though the distance I had to drive on Day Two was far shorter than on Day One, I knew that I was still in for some shit because whenever I mentioned that Day 2 of my drive was a straight shot from Sacramento to LA, someone would make a smartass remark.

My Dad: “Oh, Sacramento to LA. Well, have fun with that.”

My Mom: “You thought Portland to Sacramento was bad? Just wait until you drive to LA!”

Molly: “Yeah, Sacramento to LA. That’s a really interesting drive…”

I got into The Mystery Wagon at 9:00 AM expecting a drive that would rival The Hours in terms of unrelenting boredom. I pulled out my iPod, freshly charged from the previous night, plugged it into the stereo, and set my road trip playlist to ‘Shuffle,’ hoping that 4.6 hours of classic rock would be enough to carry me through the daymare ahead.

As soon as I hit ‘Play’, the iPod froze up and refused to so much as turn off.

“This… Does not bode well.” I muttered, pulling out of the parking lot, tuneless, and turning on the radio.

Good little liberals that we are, the dial on The Mystery Wagon’s radio is usually glued to 91.5, the Portland station for National Public Radio. In Sacramento, 91.5 is the frequency for a death metal station. As I cycled through the other presets, I found static, Christian music, country and western, and finally a Spanish language station that only played the sort of mariachi band power ballads you hear in Mexican restaurants. I stuck with that station, as I am technically Mexican and because it still beat the crap out of all the other options, and also Portland’s KINK FM.

It didn’t take long before I was blazing down the two lane highway hemmed in on either side by fields of dirt, The Mystery Wagon buffeted by strong gusts of wind filled with dust and hay. Sacramento shrank away in my rear view mirror, a small island of culture (and late night prostitution) in the center of a vast ocean of boring, boring agriculture.

The right lane was full of 18 wheelers (mercifully the three trailer death caravans that are so terrifying in Oregon are illegal in California) and the left lane was full of SUVs trying to pass the 18 wheelers. The road was arrow straight for miles until, in an exciting change, it gently curved to follow some low hills. As I drove further, the Spanish language mariachi station intermittently gave way to an R&B hip-hop station out of Stockton, the changes between the two punctuated by blasts of static.

The traffic briefly turned to bullshit as I-5 changed to four lanes on the way through Stockton. At one point, coming around a bend in the road, I spotted a California Highway Patrol cruiser parked in the bushes on the shoulder, the patrolman inside pointing a radar gun at traffic. Fortunately, I was wedged in between two semi trucks at the time, locking my speed in at well below the speed limit.

About thirty seconds after passing the cop, though, a black high performance lowrider Honda blasted past me at about 85, narrowly slipped through the space between me and the 18 wheeler in front, and then sped up and passed the truck on the right. 15 seconds after that, the California Highway Patrol cruiser blazed past in the left lane, lights and sirens going.

The duel between Vin Diesel and Eric Estrada marked Real California Experience number two.

Not long after, I started wishing that more gangbangers would start Tokyo Drifting all over the place, because as dangerous as it would be, it’d be something to distract me from how incredibly desolate and boring everything is between Stockton and Los Angeles.

I talked earlier about not seeing any signs of civilization between Ashland and Sacramento. That might have been a little bit of an exaggeration – I recall there was a city called Redding somewhere in the mix, perhaps most notable for its inclusion in the video game Fallout 2. But between Stockton and LA there is literally nothing. The closest thing to a town is the occasional roadside compound consisting of three gas stations, four fast food restaurants, and two hotels, and I feel like those are only there because somebody at CalTrans said “Jesus, guys, we’ve got to put something out there. How little can we pay people to set up a 76, a Dennys, and a Best Western in rural Wasco County?”

When I stopped for lunch and gas at one such outpost I was able to get the iPod working again, which made the next three hours quite a bit more bearable as I hurtled down the road toward a blank horizon. Eventually, the distant form of a mountain began to fade into view, and I realized that what I’d assumed was a blank horizon was actually just a heavy blanket of smog.

I had to be close.

Yes, this was Frazier Mountain, the last line of defense between Los Angeles County and all that nothing. The Mystery Wagon and I had been looking forward to no more steep grades, but alas, it was our only way in. Again, I put the pedal* to the metal and reached speeds of 45, while an unending parade of impatient SUV douchebags, eager to get back to their hot tubs and coke parties in Beverly Hills deemed my driving too slow even for the right lane and angrily blazed past on the left.

*Jesus, I have a lot of grammar conscious readers.

Coming down the other side of the Tejon Pass I was unceremoniously dumped into the nonstop bullshit carnival of the San Fernando Valley. The Interstate widened to five lanes, signs ordered motor coaches and 18 wheelers to take different off ramps, cars were passing on both sides even though I was driving at the prevailing speed in one of the righthand lanes, theme parks sprouted up on either side of the road, motorcycles zipped between cars (which is legal!?), and I navigated it all on a magic carpet of sweaty palms and profanity.

And then, finally, my GPS unit told me to get off the freeway and onto surface streets again. Three blocks later, I had arrived at my apartment in Studio City, at the foot of Laurel Canyon.

It’s a nice neighborhood, albeit one with no sidewalks (shame on me for wanting to walk anywhere in LA, anyway). I’m within spitting distance of a gas station, a video store, and a Ralph’s,* which is about all I really need.

*Home of cheap, tax-free California supermarket liquor. I was going to offer to take orders from my over-21 friends back in Oregon and drive back up at the end of the summer with a Mystery Wagon full of discounted hooch, but according to Molly that’s a felony, so… Sorry.

But the Ralph’s won’t take my Safeway Club Card. Savages.

Truman Capps heard that George Clooney lives in Studio City, and might just take up jogging in hopes of spontaneously bumping into him somewhere around here.

The Exodus, Day One

Day One: Portland to Sacramento, 580 miles

Shit, I did that? Does this mean I get to have a mountain named after me or something?

Oregon is just too damn big.

There’s nothing more depressing than driving all morning, stopping to fill the car with gas, and listening to your entire road trip iPod playlist, only to realize that you’re still in the same fucking state you started in.

However, there’s few things more exciting than driving past the Eugene exit that says ‘University of Oregon’ and suddenly being further south on I-5 than you’ve ever personally driven before. Actually, there’s probably a lot of things more exciting than that, but for me it was a real Lords of the Rings style soundtrack swelling moment to pass through Eugene and then into the land of evangelical billboards and men who wear cowboy hats and bolo ties.

Movies have taught me that a road trip can go one of two ways: You can either grow closer to the people you’re traveling with and learn a valuable lesson about love/friendship, or you can get sidetracked in some small town and be brutally murdered by inbred hill people. As I was driving alone, I prepared for the worst and made a point of keeping my doors locked as I drove through Medford.

Once I’d cleared Medford, though, the Siskiyous loomed ahead, a stretch of Interstate even more peril-fraught than the last. Two years ago, on the way to the Holiday Bowl with the Oregon Marching Band, we traveled through the Siskiyous on motor coaches, at night, in the middle of a late-December snowstorm.

This, in the dark, plus Will Ferrel.

I’m talking about pitch darkness, thick snowdrifts, and sheer drops just on the other side of the frosty guardrails. I was able to avoid an all out panic attack because we were watching Step Brothers on the coach DVD player, but even that was not a huge comfort - Step Brothers is great and all, but if I had to choose the last movie I ever watched before dying in a bus accident, it wouldn’t be that.

The Mystery Wagon looks just like this. I don't have any pictures of it and I'm too damn lazy to go outside and take one now.

I was driving my Dad’s Subaru – The Mystery Wagon, as Alexander and I call it – which has proven to be a more than reliable car for driving around Portland, Los Angeles, and the flatter sections of I-5. But climbing the Siskiyous, which have some of the steepest grades in the entire Interstate Highway System, was about as easy for The Mystery Wagon as it would be for me on a unicycle.

On the way up the pass, I was flooring it, the speedometer hovering at 45, impatient Southern Oregonians in Ford pickups with horsepower equivalent to the Enterprise swinging around into the left lane and blowing past me with ease. I could practically hear my engine talking to me:

“Vroom, y’all… Energy prit-ay, prit-ay low right now… Oh, Truman, hills ain’t exactly my deal, y’all… You ever see a Subaru goin’ up a hill in a commercial? That’s because climbin’ hills ain’t our deal… How much more Siskiyou do we got, here?”

Once I’d made it up and over and then more or less coasted down the other side and across the California border, I had to stop at a border control checkpoint. I was not expecting this – Oregon has no such restriction on people coming into the state – and was unsure what I was getting into when I pulled up to the guard booth.

“You have any fruit with you?” He asked.

“No.” I said.

“Have a nice day.” He said, waving me through.

Now, first of all, what did these four guards do to get them a job sitting in little booths in the middle of nowhere, asking people if they’re driving around with fruit in their cars? Either they really enjoy asking for fruit or they all fucked the wrong guy’s wife.

Furthermore, if I did have any fruit with me that I’d purchased in Oregon, there’s a good chance that it probably wasn’t grown there. A lot of our cheap fruit comes from outside the state, usually from big time agricultural producers. Y’know, like California. As a matter of fact, any fruit I would’ve been carrying probably would’ve made the trip up from Davis along the same damn stretch of I-5, the only difference being that the truck wouldn’t get stopped going into Oregon because we’ve got the good sense not to get butthurt about what fruit is going where.

I had always joked that the space between Ashland and Sacramento was basically a deserted, postapocaylptic wasteland, but when I was saying it I’d always treated the statement as an exaggeration – surely there had to be something there; I was just ignoring it for the purposes of comedy. However, having driven that expanse firsthand, let me tell you: There is seriously nothing.

Above: Something.

Sure, when you first cross the border there’s Mount Shasta, and I suppose the nonstop 24 hour University of Oregon Greek system houseboat party in Lake Shasta that’s been going on since 1973 counts as a settlement of some sort, albeit reeking of Axe and Natty Light. But really, beyond that, there’s just a solid 300-odd miles of emptiness.

After a few hours of rounding corners and cresting hills only to find more nothing, I started going stir crazy. For so long my only human contact had been the grim, distant faces in the other cars and lumbering 18-wheelers I was perpetually passing. I wanted to drive through a city full of people, just to know I wasn’t all alone in the world – I was so desperate, I didn’t even care that the people in question would all be Californians.

Thirty miles outside Sacramento I stopped at a wide place in the road to get my car filled with gas, only to find that in California, they expect the driver to do that himself.

Savages.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I was brought up in a just society of law and order, where when you need to gas up you pull up to the pump and shut off your engine, and presently a glum faced teenager or a hardworking single mother will trot up and ask what sort of gas you want in your car, and when you tell them, they do it. That’s just how things work in Oregon – in restaurants, waiters bring us food, at gas stations, waiters bring us gas, and we don’t pay sales tax on any of it.

Savages.

The whole way to Sacramento I’d been thinking up sick burns about Sacramento to use here, because until then my only experience with Sacramento had been on the aforementioned motor coach trip to the Holiday Bowl, where the band stayed the night in Sacramento on the way down and on the way back. Heading south, Sacramento seemed to us like just a grimy downtown packed to the gunwhales with hobos sleeping on wet pavement. On the way back, we were in Sacramento on New Year’s Eve, and never before have I seen that many whores just out and about in public.

But the fact is, after ten hours on the road spent dodging semis, struggling up and down hills, and longing for evidence of anything resembling human civilization, seeing Sacramento’s skyline on the horizon beyond the fields and trees was one of the most beautiful things in the world, even if it was just Sacramento.

"Sacramento: Existing Since 1839!"

Just Sacramento

When I arrived, I dropped off my stuff at the Days Inn down by the Interstate, which truly was everything an Interstate motel in Sacramento should be. Then I set out to meet Molly, of Writers fame, for dinner, as she is the official Person I Know Who Lives In Sacramento™.

Molly lives in the neighborhood from American Beauty. This isn’t a metaphor or some crappy attempt to convey the pristine suburbanity of her neighborhood; they literally shot the exteriors for the movie American Beauty in Molly’s neighborhood. This is about the coolest thing that could ever happen in anybody’s neighborhood, ever.*

*What’s that? Why, yes, they did film part of a movie in Sellwood, the neighborhood in Portland where I live. What movie? The 2008 hacker thriller Untraceable, with Diane Lane. 14% on the Tomatometer, perhaps most famous for giving birth to the line, “HE HACKED INTO MY CAR!”, which makes about as much sense as “HE HACKED INTO MY DOG!” or “HE HACKED INTO MY GROCERIES!”

In the course of margaritas and Mexican food, I discovered that Sacramento, like most cities except Salem and El Paso, gets significantly nicer the further you are from the Interstate. On the way to dinner we passed no fewer than three palm tree lined parks, not to mention a crap ton of beautifully restored old buildings the likes of which you could easily find in Portland. My impressions were also bolstered by the fact that Molly paid for dinner, because free food (especially free Mexican food) has been scientifically proven to improve my opinion of things. Too bad soccer didn’t buy me dinner…

On the way back, we passed by a couple of carloads of boisterous youth blasting air horns, which Molly explained was some part of local gang initiation rites. As I ducked my head and prayed that I wouldn’t get shot by disenfranchised minorities, I realized that I was having a Real California Experience.

Truman Capps will return with Day Two, which includes an honest to goodness car chase.

Driving To LA, Day 1

My drive today.

You wouldn't want to write a blog after that either. Go read a book or something. Expect a full wrap up on the drive soon.

EDIT: Hey, looks like Google can't be bothered to draw a blue line between Portland and Sacramento. I drove from Portland to Sacramento.

Goin' Hollywood 2: The Squeakuel

That's me on the right.

The summer after my junior year of high school, I attended a weeklong filmmaking camp at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Leading up to the camp, I was really excited about what it meant for my future; at that point, I had already written a (godawful) screenplay, and my thinking was that in the course of this sojourn to the southland I’d be able to pitch it to the various film industry professionals who’d be teaching our classes, or at the very least network with like minded individuals who would probably be the next generation’s Spielbergs and Scorceses (or Bays, in a pinch).

When I got there, I found that most of the people doing workshops were F level Hollywood burnouts or complete outsiders, trying just as hard as I was to break in, and my classmates were mostly rich brats from the Midwest who wanted to get away from their parents long enough to get wasted and hook up. Needless to say, this camp crushed all of our dreams – I didn’t make any headway on my quest to become a famous writer, and we were so heavily chaperoned that none of the other campers could sneak off campus to use their fake IDs or get anywhere within boning distance of one another.*

*Not that I know of, at least. Nobody tried to fuck me, I’ll tell you that much. Except for some weird, slutty girl from Missouri, who has forever sullied my opinion of that state.

The one thing I did learn from that trip was that I was never going to move to Los Angeles. The crusty, jaded old screenwriters they’d pulled together for the workshop, no doubt enticed by the promise of a hot meal and a complimentary bottle of Wild Turkey, had nothing but bad things to say about the Hollywood studio system. They told us spiteful tales of the beautifully crafted screenplays they had turned out, only to see the studios buy them for peanuts and then completely rewrite them into lame teen sex comedies.* To hear them tell it, moving to Hollywood was just a good way to get closer to the industry that would take the delicious fruit of your creative labors out into a back alley and shoot it deader than Batman’s parents.

*Remember SpaceCamp? Apparently SpaceCamp was going to be totally sick until the studio fucked it up.

Plus, everything I’d seen of Hollywood on the various motorcoach tours they gave us between classes didn’t do much more to entice me. The air was hazy and we spent hours in traffic to see old film industry attractions that were at all times grimy and surrounded by crackheads. Believe it or not, there was a time that I didn’t like living in Oregon; a time that I thought it was a lame, boring place. After that trip to LA, I came home and realized that I truly did live in The Greatest Place On Earth™, and I haven’t looked back since.

What turned me off the most, though, was my impression at the time that the whole town was built on shit. Not literally, of course – like most cities on the West Coast, it’s merely built on broken promises made to the Native Americans who once lived there, along with a light dusting of their tears and broken dreams.

Hollywood, as I saw it, was built on shit in a more abstract sense – people went there to break into the film industry and sacrificed everything to get in, and the lucky few who made it in seemed to promptly forget their roots and start shitting on all the unlucky outsiders as they climbed the ladder. And yet all the outsiders we talked to in LA, the struggling actors leading our tours and teaching our classes, the ones who told us that we had to sacrifice all dignity and be as nice as possible to every rude and disrespectful producer and agent who spat on us, couldn’t stop smiling and talking about how Hollywood was where dreams came true.

At the time, it looked like Hollywood was a great place for your dreams to come true if your dream was to spend your entire life being relentlessly derided and mocked. Fortunately, I met Mike two years later, and I’ve been able to live my life of endless derision and mockery without having to leave the Willamette Valley.

So when I tell you that I’m subletting an apartment for two months and leaving for Los Angeles this coming Wednesday, know that I’ve clearly given the matter some good, hard thought.

The fact is, I changed my mind – thanks to the poor nature of the filmmaking camp I’d gone to, I had the wrong idea about the industry. Yes, there’s a lot of assholes in it; some of them are assholes because their job necessitates it, and others are assholes because they’re assholes. But what I realized on my most recent trip to LA, right before I left for England, was that the film industry is also chock full of really, really nice people.

The writers’ assistants who interviewed me at Brothers and Sisters were a laid back, jovial bunch, and all of my cousin’s friends on the set dressing crew were just downright friendly as all hell. When I wound up on the Desperate Housewives lot, the fucking director of the episode pulled up a chair and gave me some headphones so I could watch the shoot, and I cracked jokes with other crew members about how grating Eva Longoria’s laugh can be. The following day, Gene’s friend Amanda, the one who got us onto the Desperate Housewives set, invited us over to have dinner with her family, all of whom work in costuming for film and television. Right away they welcomed me into their home like I was one of the family.

At one point, Gene and I were talking to Amanda’s father, who emigrated from Hungary after World War II and wound up working as a costume designer in Hollywood for a good 50 years – he’s recently retired and now works as a character actor, primarily in commercials. We were just BSing about the industry, and I shared my Eva Longoria encounter from the previous day, and then Amanda’s dad totally knocked my story on its ass by casually recounting how in the 1960s he helped The Beatles choose the clothes they wore on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As he told it, they were so thrilled with the clothes he found for them that he wound up hanging out with them for a few days afterwards.*

*”Did you smoke any weed with them?” Gene asked. “Nah!” Amanda’s father snorted. “None of that. We did a little sniffy-sniffy, though, if you know what I mean…”

The thing is, as big and scary and gangy as LA is, so many of the behind the camera folks in Hollywood seem to be one big, welcoming family. As misguided as it sounds, that looks like an industry where I’d be well taken care of, and to be honest, I just can’t wait to get down there.

Truman Capps would like to clarify that he hasn’t gotten an answer from the people at the Emmys yet – he’s just going down because he knows he’ll have an internship no matter what. And because this stinger wasn’t very funny, GIANT BALLSACK.