Joey,
I hope you had a good long weekend.
I spent the majority of mine in California (Southern and Northern). Now being from Texas, I never really understood that state, despite having spent 4 years there. The taxes, laws, culture– it's all too wacky, and not to mention insanely overpriced.
But last Friday, I found myself stuck in LA for a day, due to an administrative blunder on my part. So I decided to fill the time by visiting Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank.
Do you like movies?
I'm not a big fan. But I do appreciate any process that results in a creative product at the end of it, so in that regard the tour was somewhat informative.
I visited the "streets" where famous films like Spiderman (2002), and popular shows like Gilmore Girls, The Big Bang Theory, and biggest of all Friends were filmed. The HBOMax show The Pitt was actively filming in some studio while I was there.
But as I toured the empty sets and saw the facades, the technicians running around, our very Gen Z tour guide who was just happy to be doing something with her theater degree that was connected to showbusiness, I realized how unglamorous the act of making movies can be.
We see famous celebrities in movies and promoting movies. The benefits of being a movie star are obvious. So are the disadvantages. However, what they rarely talk about is the grind of 15 hour days in wardrobe repeating the same lines over and over. The probably occasionally exciting, but often dull work of "imagining" the scene or whole characters as you read lines in a green-screen room where all the CGI has yet to be added. The days, months, or even years, of not seeing the finished product after toiling for so long.
Being on the tour showed me how dull modern movie making can be. So boring in fact that I found the tour underwhelming. The most interesting part was the self-guided portion where we could see the production process from script to screen. Everything else was mostly nostalgia for a medium that mattered more in decades gone by.
Anyway, I did take plenty of pictures on the tour. Here's the actual costumes Michael B. Jordan donned as Smoke and Stack in Sinners.
Speaking of Sinners I recorded a piece about how the movie will be studied in the future. I lay out my thinking here.
If you want to see more let me know.
-Keith
P.S. I'll be out of the country from 21 - 31 Jan. See you next month!