One
"I'm not supposed to tell you this." I spoke in a voice slightly above a whisper, forcing more than a dozen bodies to lean forward so they could hear me. "But this is the exact spot where Christy Caldwell is sitting in the opening shot of her upcoming film, Table for Two. You know, the scene they show in all the commercials, where she's eating alone at a fancy restaurant and she thinks everyone is laughing at her."
I waited as the tourists processed this information, scanning them for those telltale signs of confusion -- a tilted head or a furrowed brow. I found one on the face of a dad from Wichita. His mismatched pale legs and sunburned face was something we often saw in midsummer at Sovereign Studios. It's the sign of someone who never gets out of the office and doesn't wear shorts or know the proper method of applying suntan lotion.
"But, Tracy," he said, double-checking with my name tag to confirm he got my name right. "You said this was a movie theater."
I did my best to suppress a smile as we stood in the lobby of the Sovereign Theater. It was such a help when the tourists unknowingly went along with the script I laid out in my mind. "And that, my friends, is what we call movie magic." Now they all broke into smiles as if that line explained everything. "All the director does is show an establishing shot of the outside of a real restaurant, and then the inside can be anywhere she wants. Throw in some tables and chairs, a waiter or two, and what used to be the lobby of a movie theater becomes an elegant restaurant. Last week this same lobby was used as a church in a music video."
Several people nodded their heads in awe while they tried to picture the theater lobby as a church. I could tell they were having trouble seeing it. The Sovereign Theater lobby doesn't have a concession stand or anything of the tackiness of a public theater, but it certainly doesn't have the stained glass windows and wooden pews of the church I grew up in.
It probably would have been easier for the tourists to imagine if a half dozen people weren't in the process of hanging a huge banner in the middle of the lobby of Christy Caldwell dressed in a slinky black dress. The premiere of her new film, Table for Two, was scheduled in a few hours. Everyone was just at the point of scrambling to get the theater ready for the celebrities, studio bigwigs, and paparazzi who would be showing up later. Fearing that we were about to be kicked out for being in the way, I led my tour out of the theater lobby to continue the Sovereign Studios tour.
It was my second summer as a page at Sovereign Studios, so I was pretty good at knowing when it was time to move the tour along before I got yelled at for interfering with the working studio. Besides, I was also scheduled to work the premiere later, so I didn't want anyone angry with me who could make my life miserable. Pages are at the bottom of just about every food chain on the lot, so it's always good to make sure you don't give anyone a reason to report you to the boss.
By the way, "page" is the formal name for tour guides. Pages also fill in around the lot doing different odds and ends where needed, like working a movie premiere or helping catalog dusty, old archive boxes that have been stored under a soundstage for a few decades. The job isn't exactly all that glamorous.
During the school year, the pages are all college graduates, but the page staff is supplemented by high school and college students for the summer travel season. Even though they only make slightly above minimum wage -- and sometimes have to give walking tours in hundred-degree heat -- being at Sovereign Studios looks pretty good on the resume. Having graduated high school a month earlier, I'd been thinking a lot about my résumé that summer. And I still had four years of college to get through before I even started looking for a real job.
"It looks like they've finished laying the red carpet," I said, once we were back outside the theater. I looked over to one of the workmen. He knew what I was thinking as he waved me along. I gave him a thankful smile and nod as I turned to my tour group. "Anyone want to walk it?"
"You mean we're allowed?" asked a girl who was clearly younger than the twelveyear- old age limit for the tour.
"Go right ahead," I said with a flourish of my arm as I escorted my tour group onto the red carpet.
The tourists beamed as they walked down the carpet. Even though there was no one around but workmen -- and we were walking away from the theater instead of into it -- I can't imagine that any of them had ever walked a real Hollywood red carpet before. Then again, neither had I, so I have to admit I was also a little thrilled by the experience. And I was totally caught off guard when the flashbulbs started going off.
I squelched my momentary panic as I scanned my group for cameras. Tourists are only allowed to take pictures at three studio-approved photo spots. The studio is very strict about that and I clearly briefed my tour group before we started. I could get in a lot of trouble if any pictures of the setup for the premiere of Table for Two showed up on TMZ.com.
My panic was unwarranted, though. Nobody had a camera out. Everyone was simply walking along, enjoying the sights, hardly noticing the flashing lights that seemed to be coming from above.
I looked up to see my friend Dex on a scaffold hanging lights for the premiere. Dex was a part-time lighting apprentice and full-time aspiring actor who, along with his sister, Liz, I'd been friends with since kindergarten. In fact, his parents were the ones who got me the job at Sovereign Studios the summer before senior year.
Dex was flipping some of the lights on and off to imitate the flashes of the paparazzi. Leave it to Dex to come up with a perfect way to make my tour all the more memorable. I let out a relieved sigh and raised my arm in his direction.
"Everyone wave to the paparazzi," I said as the tourists turned toward the flashing lights and struck their best poses. The little girl even did the patented Paris Hilton "turn and glance over the shoulder" move that the celebutante made famous. It was a little disturbing to see a girl who couldn't be more than eight imitating Paris, but I'd seen worse in Hollywood.
In fact, I was seeing worse at that moment.
A mail cart with a distinctive pirate flag hanging on one side was driving in our direction. It was the one mail cart -- or, more specifically, the one mail cart driver -- that I had hoped I could avoid running into during my tour...or ever.
I had a brief moment of panic as we continued down the carpet. Considering the distance, we were going to come to the end at the same time the cart passed by. I thought about stopping the tour to point something -- anything -- out to them, but I didn't want to call any attention to myself, lest the driver see me. Instead, I slid in behind the rather tall, partially sunburned tourist from Wichita and hoped for the best while scrunching down as much as I could, trying to make myself invisible.
Dex shot me an odd look from his light tower, but didn't yell out to ask me what I was doing. I couldn't blame him for being confused. I didn't usually guide my tours hunched over and frog-walking. But if he had realized what was coming down the paseo, he would have understood. He had known me long enough to know about my history with guys and how sometimes it was easier to avoid them than to deal with them.
My group continued down the carpet while I silently prayed that the driver of the mail cart wouldn't see me. I also hoped that the tourists didn't notice I'd suddenly become very quiet and was effectively hiding in the middle of them. When the young Paris Hilton wannabe looked up at me to ask a question, I silently shook my head. Thankfully, she took the message and asked her mom instead.
"Mom, why is Tracy hiding behind Dad?" she called out, loudly, to her mom who was somewhere in front of us.
Thanks, kid, I thought as the group reached the end of the carpet.
I peeked out from behind Little Paris's dad and saw the pirate flag flapping in the breeze as the mail cart passed without slowing. Once I was sure the driver was out of earshot, I continued my tour. "And now when you get home you can tell all your friends you walked the same red carpet as Christy Caldwell," I said. "You don't have to say anything about walking it five hours before her, though."
Every single tourist got that familiar gleam in his or her eye. They all tend to get that same look when I give them interesting exaggerations for when they get back home. I'm sure more than a couple of them were already working on lies to make it sound like they were special guests at the movie premiere.
Now that we were through with what was likely going to be the highlight of the tour, I figured I'd hit them with the historical part while I still had their attention. July tours could be a drag sometimes. All the TV shows were on vacation and the heat kept the few people working on movies indoors most of the day. Most of the two-hour Sovereign Studios walking tour was spent looking at the outsides of buildings while I talked about what went on inside. I had to parcel out the few highlights carefully so nobody got bored along the way.
"Sovereign Studios was formed in 1914 under the leadership of cousins, Harry and Max Burnbaum," I recited from memory as I led my tour group along the beige and red brick paseo at the front of the studio. "They started out in New York, but quickly moved out to Los Angeles, where the year-round nearly perfect weather was ideal for filming...."
I guided my tour group through the studio's various office buildings at the front of the lot, explaining how each building is constructed in a different style of architecture, from Spanish Mission, to Victorian, to Modern. The building exteriors are all designed that way so they can be used in filming. Over the decades, every inch of Sovere...
