I’ve been busy in 1983 for the last couple of weeks, working on this thing that I thought would be about 3000 words, but is now ten times that, and isn’t as close to being finished as I thought.
Yesterday, I worked really hard to get out not a lot of words (under 400), but that’s okay, because I was working on a scene that’s super important to the rest of the story, and if I got it wrong, it would be like one of those mathematical errors that’s may be only slightly off, but compounds over time until your spaceship ends up crashing into the sun instead of landing gently on Titan.
I was still unsure about yesterday’s work when I started today, and I’m unsure of it right now, but I decided that I have to trust my instincts, not overthink it, and just keep going. I even said to myself, “the only way to keep going is to keep going and the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.”
Once I accepted that it may not be totally right, but was not totally wrong, I was able to get back into the narrative. We’re still at Universal Studios. Here’s a little bit from when the tram drove through the backlot exteriors.
It was totally magical to me. They were all just facades, and none of the sets were dressed with anything more than signs painted on the windows, but I thought it would have been the coolest thing in the world to be on any one of those streets when they were being filmed. To look around and pretend that I was in New York, or Chicago, or the Old West, or wherever Dracula was from – Bulgaria, I thought? – and only have to use my imagination a little bit, because set dressing and lights and costumes would do most of the work … that was incredible to me. At this point in my life, I’d only done a couple of small parts in some little things that have been lost to time (they don’t even exist on YouTube, and I know because I’ve looked), and a handful of commercials. I didn’t want to be an actor as much as my mother wanted me to be an actor, and most of the time if you’d asked me I would have told you that it wasn’t something I wanted to do when I grew up. But riding past all those fake buildings and seeing all that movie magic –“What’s wrong?” Evelyn said.
“Huh?” I said.
“You … you look … sad.”
This still happens to me. I think about things, I get lost in my imagination and in my own thoughts, I retreat from the world and the people who I’m close to, I’m told that when I go to that place in my head, I always look sad, even when I’m not.
“I’m okay,” I said, “I was just thinking.”
This is a work of narrative fiction, mostly stuff that didn’t happen with stuff that did happen mixed in. Some of it, like my memories and thoughts about working on a backlot, are real, and other parts of it are … less real. It’s fun to imagine and remember, remember and imagine, and listen to the characters when they have something to say or do that I wasn’t expecting.
In real life, I was always disappointed that there wasn’t more of a backlot at Paramount when I was working there in the 80s. There is now, and it’s pretty cool, but back then it was just a single facade for the TV show The Bronx Zoo. When I go to work at Warners for Big Bang Theory, I always drive through the backlot, and I’ll even go for walks through streets I know from The Twilight Zone, The Dukes of Hazzard, even Casablanca, when I have long enough breaks during production. I don’t think I’ll ever become immune to the magic of a studio backlot, or a set that’s totally immersive, a little bit of imagination made real on a soundstage.
The version of myself who is in this novella probably doesn’t grow up to be an actor like I did. I’m pretty sure he grows up to be a writer, because … well, that’s all in the story and I should probably just leave it at that.
As I get closer to finishing this thing, I don’t plan to keep doing updates like the ones I’ve done the last week or so, because I want to keep the story behind the curtain more than I have. These parts have been fun to share, though, because I enjoy knowing that they spark some of your memories about the early 80s.
