The Hollywood Years

My first job at Paramount was as a Studio Page. This is truly the epitome of "entry level" work, and yet you had to have a college degree in some kind of communications area (or be close to being done) to even be considered. We worked 20-30 hours a week and I think starting pay was in the $5 an hour range. All of us had to have other jobs to survive. In an average year several hundred people applied for about twenty spots, and it was as good a place as any to start hearing the unceasing Hollywood mantra Do You KNOW how many people would kill for your job??


All this so you could walk around the lot in a grey knee length skirt with a white button down shirt and a navy blue blazer - all brought to you by the Polyester industry. There was also some kind of bow tie involved but I think I've finally managed to block out the specifics of that after all these years. If no one minds I don't think I'm going to try too hard to remember exactly what it looked like. Like most women who lived through 80's and 90's corporate fashion, I'm scarred and recovery has been a long time coming. I still twitch at the sight of shoulder pads, so forgive me.


We had two major job responsibilities as pages. The first was to act as guides on the studio tour and the second was to oversee the audience seating at the live television shows. There were other job duties outside of the scope of these two things, but this was the bulk of it. For today's post, let's talk about the tour angle.




The studio tour was an interesting proposition. Paramount's tour was unusual compared to most of the other studio tours. When I first started the only tour was a VIP tour. This had to be arranged through someone who worked on the lot, so it was basically a private tour. It lasted two hours and was limited to the number of people who could fit on a studio golf cart - which was seven plus the guide. Toward the end of my year as a page we implemented a public tour, which was a whole different kettle of fish. If you had $10 and were over 10 years old, you could make it onto the lot for two hours for a walking tour.



For the most part the tours were the same. We covered a fair amount of the fifty five acres and talked quite a bit about studio history. Most of the sound stages were available for us to go onto, and a lot of the shows were even receptive to (quietly) bringing the tour into the bleachers to watch a rehearsal or, more infrequently, a table reading. (This was entirely dictated by how smoothly that particular set ran. Some notoriously temperamental shows didn't need the general public to witness the rancor that was a dress rehearsal). We almost always had feature films shooting on the lot as well, so it was possible to park your tour group in an out of the way corner and let them check out the action up close.



The thing that never failed to amaze me the entire time I worked there was that Paramount was a little city unto itself. The goal was to make it so you never really had to leave the lot. A lot of the amenities (the gym, the childcare center, the post office) weren't things the public would really care about. But, in true cheapskate fashion, a lot of these things were incorporated into studio productions. Take the hospital, for example. It was a real working infirmary, complete with a nurse on premises and a doctor on call. There was even a golf cart ambulance. If you've seen Top Gun (and lots of other things) you've seen this hospital. The tours loved it. You haven't lived until you've seen a golf cart ambulance.


The tag line for the tour was that nothing was really scripted, so people had the opportunity to really see how a lot operated. And, while this was true, it was double edged. Most tourists are in LA in the summer. Most shows are on hiatus from the beginning of April to the end of July. This is when television stars who want to be in the movies get a chance to jump to the other side - however briefly. Cable has certainly changed this in recent years, but when I was there it was pretty cut and dried. Summer was Pilot Season, a time when everyone and their brother put together a pilot in the hopes that some network would pick up a run of the show, anywhere from five to twenty something episodes (the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - the full season pick-up). Unfortunately for us, a lot of the pilots didn't have "name" actors in them, and names were what out tour groups wanted to see.


We killed a lot of time in the summer. We'd go to the prop department and talk about props. We'd go to the backlot, where things were constructed, and show people how it was done. The big hit here was always "breakaway glass", the glass that you've seen shatter a thousand times on screen. It was made to shatter without sharp edges, so was supposedly completely safe. We'd ask for volunteers and smack them (carefully) with the glass. It would shatter, they would all get a piece to take home with them and everyone was happy. (How our legal department ever thought this was okay is beyond me. There wasn't a page on staff who hadn't at some point cut the hell out of themselves with this "smooth edged" glass, but, at least for me, the tourists were always safe).



A popular stop was always Lucy Park. This was the park that was built for Lucille Ball on the part of the lot that used to be Desilu, and it is featured one way or another in almost every Paramount television show ever done. From the Brady Bunch to Happy Days to Family Ties - there's the park - sometimes barely even disguised. The New York Street backlot was also a big hit. This was the set that was designed so outdoor city shots could be done in the controlled setting of the lot. It went on for a couple of blocks and if you've watched television even once in your life, you've seen it. See if any of this looks familiar...





But without question the number one attraction on all the tours - public or VIP - was the Cheers bar. (If the Star Trek:The Next Generation set had been open to tours it would have been a really close race. The reason they weren't open had nothing to do with temperament and everything to do with shooting schedules. To produce a one hour weekly show is much more complicated logistically than doing a half hour sitcom and they were always pressed for time. Thirty people standing on your set asking questions wasn't really feasible). It never failed with Cheers. We would lead them into a darkened soundstage, and even if we were the only people there, everyone would collectively inhale sharply as soon as they saw the set. In theory they would be seeing the set from the bleachers. In actuality (and completely verboten) some of the guides would let them sit at the bar. Actually sit there, in Cliff or Norm's usual seat, and rest their elbows on the edge. Those were some seriously happy campers until some page (who wasn't me, although it certainly could have been) got busted in the act and that was that. Back to the bleachers we went.


This set has become so iconic, by the way, that the entire thing is now on display in a Hollywood museum. I bet they don't get to sit on the seats now either.


The tour certainly lived up to the unscripted billing. Actors would jump onto the carts spontaneously, much to the delight of their fans. Entire casts would welcome them to their rehearsals. The tours would get to walk onto standing movie sets for current releases on real soundstages - and feel like they had an honest glimpse into a working studio. The tours were fun. They got old, but they were fun. People paid their money and took their chances on seeing the celebrity du jour, but always came out of it with a vision of what it was like on the other side of the gate. For the most part they left happy.


I wish I could say the same for the television audiences.

The Hollywood Years

So, you think it would be exciting to be a personal assistant for a celebrity? Doesn't sound like too hard a job on paper, certainly easier than what most of the world does from nine to five. If you were to read the "trades" - The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, and happen across a want ad for an assistant, it might sound pretty good. It could read like this...



Wanted: Personal Assistant for an A list film star. Duties include coordinating and arranging travel plans, household management, preparing and organizing for meetings, parties, and other social occasions, overseeing personal appearances and schedules, responding to correspondence and traveling with the client as needed. Salary starts at $50,000 a year, includes a private house on employer's estate, all expenses paid. Must be flexible, possess good people skills and have a current passport. Previous Celebrity Assistant experience preferred, but not required. References mandatory. Will train the qualified candidate. Apply to (blah, blah, blah...).


And here is what the job really entails. (These are all- sadly - true stories).


Must be available at 3 am to move the foosball table from the Beverly Hills house to the Malibu house, by way of a drug pickup in Santa Monica. If table will not fit in the back of your small sports car must possess knowledge of how to take apart and put back together and the tools to do same. You have thirty minutes. Go. You may not ask the drug dealer for help. He is not your friend. He is your employer's friend.


Must study daily schedules carefully to ensure that employer's wife and mistress are never in the same zip code. If it is unavoidable that they will be, assistant must stay with wife at all times to ensure that they do not come face to face. Mistress may try to force a confrontation during Power Pilates. You will be fired if she succeeds. The wife may try to shake you off, as she has her own liaison planned (and knows full well what you're doing in the first place), but remember who pays you. It is not the wife.


You must be prepared to support your celebrity in whatever way you are asked to. This means that when she is training for her new film, (which requires her to look even more buff than usual), you will be following her in a car, on Pacific Coast Highway, at four in the morning, while she rides a bike ahead of you accompanied by her personal trainer, bodyguard and a production assistant from the film who is going over her lines with her as she cycles. Your job is to provide water bottles from your backseat that have been cooled to exactly the proper temperature... and to watch out for photographers and autograph seekers.


Speaking of water bottles, it is useful to know which brands of refrigerators hold which brand of bottled water at the celebrity's preferred angle for optimal temperature range. Water will be tested to make sure it is at the proper cool (not cold) degree and refrigerators will be sent back to the store they came from if the fit is not right. The celebrity realizes that the fridge was gratis to start with but is "sure they'll understand" and replace it with another, more acceptable model. Celebrity will not be so understanding if their water is served at an improper temperature (by you) again.


The "private house" in the want ad is actually an annex off of the garage that doesn't even have a bathroom. This doesn't mean that such a house doesn't actually exist on their estate, only that one of their freeloading relatives is already living in it. This is really just a ploy for the assistant to always be available to the celebrity, even if all they need is a replacement for the sex toy that just broke at exactly the wrong moment. What are you complaining about? Don't you know that a million people would kill for your job?


Or how about this. You've traveled halfway across the country with your celebrity to a film set in the middle of the boonies. You're excited, but your employer is not happy, because his costar in this film has an attribute that your guy lacks - he can actually act. And he's the hot young thang of the moment. But he also likes to drink. So, you - young, cute and blonde - are given the job of hanging out with him at the bar to make sure that he drinks enough to make him not at his peak the next day, which happens to be the first day of shooting. Why would Actor #2 hang out with someone he barely even knows, when there's no shortage of cute local ladies all watching breathlessly? Well, he's a notorious loner and your boss has promised him that you'll take care of his every need that night. When Actor #2 brings this up you realize that no matter what you do you're screwed, so you hem and haw and try to change the subject. Meanwhile, a local lad, who wants to look good in front of the gals and show them what pansies these Hollywood types are, hits on you to prove some obscure point that no one ever does figure out. Actor #2 drunkenly takes a swing at him, a full blown brawl ensues and production is delayed an entire day because Actor #2 got his ass kicked and there's only so much makeup in the world. And what does your boss say to you? "If you'd been in his hotel room like you were supposed to be, none of this would have happened."



And then there's my personal favorite. You must be prepared to sit with the actor and his girlfriend, who is in active labor with their first child. The girlfriend, who weighs about ninety pounds soaking wet, followed, per your employer's "request" a macrobiotic diet the entire pregnancy because it was "best for the baby." She is now screaming at the top of her lungs while delivering an eleven pound baby - at home - with not a drug in her system. The celebrity was appalled earlier when she said (yelled) that she might have changed her idea about the meds ("I want them NOW") and asked her, through a hit off the third joint that his assistant had rolled for him, how she expected to be in the moment if she was impaired by drugs.


Now, doesn't everyone want an application?


And you though The Devil Wears Prada was an exaggeration.

The Hollywood Years

**In which the Rotten Correspondent comes down off her moral pedestal and decides to dish on the Hollywood years. This decision was made for several reasons. 1) Virtually all of this stuff has been written about elsewhere, 2) I checked. The confidentiality agreements I signed applied to very specific parameters that became moot years ago and 3) I really do have some good stories. In a sick and twisted kind of way. Stay tuned for more...**


I was standing in line at the grocery store recently and couldn't help but notice how many tabloid magazines there are these days. Clearly, the market for this sort of stuff is booming lately. It's an odd chicken and egg dilemma. Did the tabloids get so hot because of the celebs they cover or did the celebs get so hot because of the tabloids? Does it really matter one way or the other? We seem to live in a celebrity obsessed culture, like it or not. And while I think we're in a state of massive overkill right now in this regard, the fascination has certainly always been there. There have always been people affected by it in ways that you wouldn't necessarily imagine. It always hits me with a thud when I remember that I was one of those people.

Let's just start with the tabloids, since I already have. The first thing to keep in mind is that very often their story is correct. Or kind of correct. As in the basic kernel of the story may be true (Celeb A is pregnant), but then they have to embellish (Celeb A is pregnant by Celeb B's husband) , and exaggerate still more (Celeb A is pregnant by Celeb B's husband who was once abducted by Guatemalan aliens) until they've gone totally over the edge. But it's pretty likely, once the dung is cleared, that Celeb A really is pregnant, no matter how much her "people" deny it. Not always, but usually.

And why is this? Simple. Because a staggering percentage of people working in Hollywood sell information to the tabloids. And why is this? Simple. They pay a fortune. What isn't so simple about this? It can be about more than the money. Have you ever noticed that a lot of the bad press tabloid wise is about people who have burned quite a lot of bridges? They've pissed people off, basically. And their $7 an hour pool boy, who may have put up with unmentionable treatment at their hands, wants a little revenge. And a lot of cash. Call it payback, if you will.

One of the people that started out in my office at Paramount became a Production Assistant on a very hot talk show on the lot - The Arsenio Hall Show. PA's make crap, work very long hours, do degrading scut work and are pretty much a whipping post for anyone who is "above them." Which is everyone. It's all in the guise of "paying your dues." This show became an out of control hit almost immediately and I still have the scars to prove it. As with most "hit" shows, the talent involved stops being quite so grateful for their initial success and starts feeling a little full of themselves once the show really takes off. Egos begin to run amok. This is what is known as prime tabloid territory.

Well, the guy I knew was tired of running his butt off for minimum wage and started selling stories. He sold a big house in the hills with a view amount of stories. He sold a brand new BMW convertible worth of stories. And, because he was basically a lying, cheating sack of crap, he covered all of this up with more lies. He told everyone that the fabulous house he lived in belonged to a relative. He drove an old beater to work to cover his tracks. None of us had a clue what he was doing. All we knew was that someone in the know was singing hard on the Arsenio set, because for a good two years you couldn't sneeze on that stage without the tabloids covering it. And virtually every story they printed was the truth. But the truth was so far out in left field by that point that no one believed it anyway. Repeat after me. Egos. Run. Amok.


The actors, usually just called "talent", ran the gamut. Generally speaking, the smarter the talent the more they were on top of the whole tabloid situation. I had this illustrated for me in a bizarre way. One day about three months into my tenure at Paramount, I was at a Friday night after shoot party on the Family Ties set. I had spent enough time on the set to know people and was only slightly surprised when Michael J. Fox walked up and started talking. What surprised me was what he was talking about. A load of guns, combat ammo even, had arrived at his house in a package, and he had no idea why. Isn't that odd? I took another swig of my Corona and said yep, it sure is. More small talk about earthquakes and hockey and then he was off talking to someone else. He was huge at this point, the cover boy of the moment, and I honestly chalked it up to paranoia. It seemed, at that time, like everyone was gunning for him.

I mentioned this a couple of weeks later to someone who worked on the show. It was just such a weird encounter. The person I was talking to laughed. "Oh, that's Mike," they said "always trying to stay a step ahead of the tabloids." Come to find out he dropped these little bombs on purpose, so he would know who was talking to the tabs. If a gun story had been printed after he talked to me, I would have been in a serious hot seat. Each person got a different story and he was astute enough to keep track. If your particular story showed up in print you were up the creek. Permanently. Once he knew you were okay, he let down his guard some. But never totally. He had too many weirdos gunning for him to ever totally relax. All this meant is that none of the weirdos was actually standing next to him. He was being seriously stalked by two different women at this point and this would involve me later in ways that still make me cringe.

But all I could think, a few weeks later, when I saw some outlandish headline involving him on the front page of the National Enquirer was ...good for you, Mike. YOU NAILED 'EM.