Day One-A Story of Hollywood. Chapter 1

8/9/2019 Day One-A Story of Hollywood. Chapter 1

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2010 Dale Robert Matt All Rights Reserved

CHAPTER ONE

Watcher Bros. movie studio had been in business for 80 grand and glorious years. It hadsurvived the transition from silence to sound, from shades of gray to rainbows of color, a world

war, changing morals, changing standards, an infinite number of trendy genres, hard-headed

actors and even more hard-headed actresses, scripts that werent worth the paper they werescribbled on (but which nonetheless cost seven figures to translate to celluloid). It had beenbought and sold, spun off and partnered up. At the time of this story it was a name partner in a

part of a vast media conglomerate that, at its outset, joined the publisher of Clock magazine (24hours of news in every issue) to form Clock-Watcher Inc., one of the largest corporations in the

world and certainly the largest dedicated to that most ethereal of forms, entertainment.

Yes, Watcher Bros. had survived for 80 years. And it looked forward to 80 more as this storydawns. Of course, no business counts its age in scores of years without thinking big. And

Watcher Bros. thought big. They thought with the bigness of an entity whose products routinelyre-created enormous ocean liners capsizing or monolithic buildings burning to the ground; with

the outlandishness of employees whose faces were known worldwide; they thought on a scalethat having the entire world as a customer might cause you to have were you so fortunate.

Having access to the purse of the mighty Clock-Watcher enterprise only fueled the scope of theirthoughts. And, most importantly, they thought their big thoughts even when it came to the most

humble corner of their operation.

And this corner, as it turns out, was Tours.

Tours, for years, was a small step-child of the whole dream making enterprise. For a few dollarsstar-struck vacationers could take a trip around the glamorous Watcher Bros. movie studio lot,

several hundred acres of sound stages and outdoor sets that was packed with the potential to seea movie star or at least share common ground with those who worked among them. The entire

tour took an hour and a half and threaded itself around the hangar-like sound stages, stoppinghere and there to show off a store room of dusty old costumes from movies long forgotten, or to

see random props that some Hollywood dignitary had once crossed paths with.

It was ninety minutes of reveling in something that really doesnt exist: the glamour of themovies. For the movie business is mostly devoted to capturing incredibly short bursts of acting

around with are situated incredibly phony but usually realistic enough looking plywood andcardboard vignettes. The words are phony, the actors are usually nothing like who they portray,

the sets are made to be put up and, just as importantly, torn down in a matter of hours or days.The only thing real is the money and the contracts that bind one party to feed it to another. The

only real action in Hollywood is handled by attorneys and agents, both acting on behalf of otherparties and both taking their pay or cut from being a proxy for someone else. Which, if you

think of it, is a lot like the movie business where actors portray someone and even whole citiescan be co-oped to be someplace else.

In any event, the Tour department of Watcher Bros. was a sleepy burg that resided in an outlying

corner of the vast Watcher Bros. lot. The tour was not particularly well known by the generalpublic as it was not particularly well advertised. But enough people found their way to it each


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year to keep the Tour department in business and it was felt that most of these people came awayfrom their Hollywood site-seeing adventure happy and most importantly chatty to make for good

publicity for Watcher Bros. as a whole. In other words, a loss on the Tours operation would betolerated as long as people walked out feeling glad they came.

As mentioned previously a company that survives thinks big and a company that thinks bigthinks big even about its smallest cog. Tours, being the smallest cog or at least the least visiblecog, thus did not escape the overall mania for big thinking at Watcher Bros. At first the tour was

a simple walk through the lot conducted by a small staff of two helpful docents. A museum wasbuilt after a while to show off some of the many artifacts collected over eight decades of movie

making and this was duly included in the tour agenda. Eventually a couple of the hundreds ofgolf carts routinely used to traverse the lot were commandeered for the tour. After a couple of

years these were painted a snappy color and a fancy tours logo (created by artists who shouldhave been painting a set at the time) to distinguish them from the other carts on the lot. Soon

enough these carts, which seated five tourists and one driver/tour guide, were replaced by largercarts that seated ten to twelve and included a small speaker system that the drive/tour guide could

use to announce the sites as they were passed. A fleet of these tourmobiles was acquired andthey and the tourists they hauled were a constant presence in every part of the studio.

Each guide created his or her own patter to use on the tour, some of which contained information

that was, at best, not entirely truthful (and worst, revealed company gossip it would best keepfrom the public). To keep the tour to the facts as the company wanted them known, the tour

agenda was standardized and the patter was reined in and loosely scripted. The guidesthemselves were given blue and yellow Watcher Bros. Tours Department oxford shirts in an

effort to encourage professionalism and make the tour look to the tour-buying public a little moreworthy of the price of admission.

Somewhere in this chain the idea that tour patrons might like to purchase a remembrance of their

90 minutes on the Watcher Bros. lot was met with the installation of a small souvenir stand at thegate where tourists exited the lot after the tour was concluded. At first only a few t-shirts and

various cheap knick-knacks were available. However, the tours management soon found out thatthe number of possible souvenir items is matched only by the number of firms possessing the

ability to stamp Watcher Bros. on anything at all. Mugs, sweaters, lighters, pen and pencil sets,commemorative coins, hats, bathing suits, pants and skirts, figurines, scale-model replicas of

sound stages, posters, pennants, sombreros, books, postcards and Watcher Bros. stationary,decorative plates containing images from famous Watcher Bros. movies, watches and jewelry, a

special Watcher Bros. perfume, grooming products and keychains soon joined the t-shirts in thesouvenir stand, at which point the stand itself was in peril of caving in. A small temporary

pavilion was put up on the site where the souvenir stand had stood, and this was ultimatelyreplaced by a small permanent building where souvenirs could be purchased along with tickets

to the tour and even beverages and candy.

As part of the effort to standardize the tour and make sure the company put its best corporate footforward, a twenty minute movie was commissioned by several artists on the lot whose own

projects were stalled for various reasons. When the company became part of Clock-Watcher


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Inc., it was decided to expand this little feature to include highlights of the entire Clock-Watchercorporate family; this increased the length of the movie to thirty minutes.

To show this movie, a wall was knocked out of the new tours building and a 50 seat (later

expanded to over 200 seats) theatre was built. The talents of several sound and lighting

engineers were borrowed from other productions to make the theatre state of the art. When thestate of the art advanced as it was wont to do, the theatre was upgraded. In fact it was upgradedsix times over the years and now was the envy of even the rooms on the lot that screened new

and yet-to-be released movies to executives.

This little theatre was the first stop for people who had purchased tickets to the tour. Theyreceived their 30 minute encounter with official Watcher Bros. and Clock-Watcher propaganda

and were then herded into waiting tourmobiles and driven around on the standard tour. Ninetyminutes of rubbing elbows with the work-a-day Hollywood world later, they were deposited

back at the tours building where time was thoughtfully provided to peruse the vast array ofsouvenir items and perhaps assuage any thirst or hunger their tour had aroused.

One might suppose that this evolution of tours from department to empire was the result of a vast

increase in tour business. One would be wrong. The number of tourists traipsing through themighty Watcher Bros. lot increased only modestly throughout this time, and then mostly as a

spillover from other, more widely publicized tours at a couple of other movie studios. In fact,the Watcher Bros. tour was an afterthought to most of its customers, something that appealed to

the hard-core movie fan or those turned away (by the crowds) from the more popular andmainstream movie studio excursions. Rather than being a draw a concept all Watcher Bros.

movie executives were well familiar with it was instead something that had to be sought out. Itwas the art house tour in a city filled with multiplexes. And like most art houses, it barely

scraped by in a fiscal sense.

No, the ever-expanding tour department had nothing to do with the business it did or even themodest sums it collected. Rather, it was but one manifestation of the many visions of Watcher

Bros. executives, which in turn was the result of the visions that their corporate masters at Clock-Watcher Inc. had for their glamorous Hollywood property. In short, there were a lot of people in

the company having visions. Visions, of course, have a long history (witness such notablevisionaries as Joan of Arc or the children of Lourdes) although not all visionaries have escaped

the straightjacket or worse (again the example of Joan of Arc comes to mind). When JoeAverage has a vision it can result in anything from new wallpaper and carpet to World War II.

While most of us would be fired for having visions at work, the Hollywood executive works tohave visions. And at Watcher Bros., the company that thought big implemented their big

thoughts by envisioning big.

It was at this point that a further advance in the evolution of the Tours department wasundertaken. The entire department was uprooted from it shabby corner near the front gate to a

garish new facility on the ground floor of one of the Watcher Bros. office tours that encircled theoutside of the lot. No expense was spared for this move. The theatre was dramatically upgraded

in comfort, in sound system and in size. The souvenir shop became an expensive-lookingstore; sure, the same knickknacks and clothing items were still sold there, but the interior looked


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more like Sax Fifth Avenue or Neiman Marcus. Topping everything off were two diningfacilities: one a branch of a trendy coffee chain, and one a full service restaurant that provided

meals not only to hungry tour patrons but also to the workers from the neighboring officebuildings and the upper floors of the one Tours was now located in.

The Tours department had graduated from empire and was now on its way to galactic domain. Itwas a heady time indeed for all things Tours.

Topping off the so-called new Tours Department was the idea, generated from the lofty peaksof the Watcher Bros. executive suites, of locating a very exciting (it was hoped) opportunity for

tour patrons to have their pictures taken in front of one of the signature vehicles from a WatcherBros. movie. The tourist, in the normal course of the standard tour, would encounter the

Watcher Bros. transporation department, a normally dull and dingy facility with all the charm ofan automotive repair establishment (in fact, that is precisely what it was). Among the grease

monkees and car jacks would be placed said signature vehicle with a so-called blue screenbehind it. The tourist would be able to select a suitable backdrop and have his or her picture

taken next to the vehicle while the selected background was projected via computer onto the bluescreen.. The picture would be transmitted with computerized backdrop to the Tours Department

where, at the conclusion of the tour, the patron could acquire his or her photo as acomplementary momento of their day on the lot; the required stop back at Tours to procure the

picture would hopefully cause the patron to consider purchasing additional and definitely non-free souvenirs.

Of course, the complexities that this little plan, the description of which takes only a handful of

sentences, were numerous and extensive. For one thing, which vehicle would be used? Shouldmore than one signature vehicle be made available? What backdrops would be offered? How

could the blue screen be set up and who would operate it? How would the picture be transmittedback to the tours office? Would the Tours Department be capable of printing the pictures in the

time between when they were taken and the time the tourists showed up back at the ToursDepartment to claim them?

(All this was to say nothing of the question of how many tourists would even be interested in

having their picture taken and would the offer of a free photo souvenir rein in any need thepatron might otherwise have felt to purchase additional souvenirs?)

Technical and business to say nothing of practical challenges, however, were usually noobstacle to the intrepid movie executive intent on making the Watcher Bros. Tours Department

the envy of Hollywood. After all, there were hoards of programmers, accountants, buyers,consultants and computer magicians present on the lot to handle projects just like this. The

Watcher Bros. visionary saw the vision completed and fully implemented and once it wasmade a Thing To Do, he (for it was mostly hes even at that late date) simply sat back, usually

impatiently, and waited for it to become reality.

So, this is where our story begins, with a Tours Department hoping to begin offering the mightytour souvenir picture a the earliest possible date. It being the spring and the summer being the

tourist season the first week of June was targeted as the date for the first photos to begin


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rolling off the Tours Department presses, so-to-speak, and into the hands of what were assumedto be delighted tour patrons.

Day One-A Story of Hollywood. Chapter 1

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