Extracts from Richard E Grant's excellent book
'With Nails'.
The first trip to LA
26 April 1990
Flight to Los Angeles but uh-oh, the ticket reads GATWICK-DALLAS-LOS ANGELES. I now compute that a direct ten-hour flight from Heathrow has been converted into an eighteen-hour (butt) arse-paralyser. Upon arrival al LAX my legs grasp the true impact of JET LAG, this flight having rendered my resources around Gravitation X. Even the eyeballs are weighed down. A medium sized limo hauls my tired-olds to the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard and the driver takes this as his cue to give me a run-down of everyone who has died in the joint, from (John) Belushi backwards.
27 April 1990
Messenger bikes round a fat envelope full of dollar per diem (per day allowances). A very good reason to get out of bed and test the Californian climate and cuisine. The hotel is one of the few really old buildings here and recognizable from those black-and-white stills of Hollywood haunts of the thirties. It feels as though you might just pass Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in the corridor.
28 April 1990
…It’s only when I press the button in the convertible to get the sun roof retracted and take a right onto Sunset Boulevard that my old ticker accelerates faster than my foot. Sun blazing down, music Kiss FMing, and the red car is nosing towards Beverly Hills and I’m a-thinking, Blow me down, gals. This is the Swaz (his nickname for himself as he hails from Swaziland) off to meet the stars. (He has an appointment to meet Steve Martin at his house in Beverly Hills).
A bored Mexican sits smoking beside a blue clapboard stall, which proclaims ‘MOVIE STAR MAPS’. Being a lifelong movie buff, I cannot convey just what a stomach growling thrill it is to have an address in hand of one of them!
23rd May 1990
The Fox studio lot is everything I imagined a movie studio would look like. The offices are hidden behind the façade of New York City circa 1900, which, it turns out, were the sets for Hello Dolly. My parents took us to see this on New Year’s Eve, 1969, in Africa, when I was twelve, and I find myself standing still in the parking lot, twenty-one years older, in the middle of my ‘dream’ that has come true.
P248 – 14 October 1990
Fly back (to LA). New house rental. New start. Sony Columbia Studios down in Culver City. The sound-stages formerly crammed with Never-Never Land sets are now Transylvania, London and the English countryside. Winona (Ryder)’s character Mina’s estate has been built in a vast studio, with painted cycloramas, exterior mansion, terrace and sunken topiary garden and lake. The latter has been created in what was once the pool used by Esther Williams for her forties water-ballet extravaganzas. Grand opera. Victorian furniture, gas lamps, sweeping staircases, horses, carriages, servants, gravel, high Gothic costumery, music-relay through loudspeakers, a multitude of technicians, set dressers and scene painters, lighting, camera tracks, in fact a BIG STUDIO PICTURE as seen in old movie annuals, recreated and come to life. This is where The Wizard of Oz was shot, and for once in Los Angeles, you can glean a sense of the past. Everything is going to be shot on sound-stages, making this an unusual production since most films these days are shot on location. It feels incredibly exciting and I am thrilled to be a part of it.
Extracts from Richard E Grant's excellent book
'With Nails'.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nails-Film-Diaries-Richard-E-Grant/dp/0330349678
