Havoc (1)

The following is an excerpt from an email I’d sent the day after this shoot. Southern California was on fire and I was working on a movie…

I’d driven in to downtown LA in my primered Mustang [most of which I’d had to reassemble just to be able to drive it] when, while changing lanes, I hear this nasty crackling/thumping noise. I knew it was my tire…and it was bad. Real bad as far as definitely gonna make me late for call time. And I’ve never ever in my theatre or film/TV career been late.

I get the car off the freeway and into an empty parking lot. Downtown LA as night is falling is not a good place to be alone, but I had no choice. I couldn’t drive the darn car anywhere with the tire that screwed up. The belts had separated and the sidewall disintegrated.

I call my hubby who grabs a wheel off my other car and high-tails it to my corner. I wasn’t really too afraid of being there because I still had my cell phone and the spot was well lit and I could see if anyone was going to come up and try to grab me or whatever, but when my husband arrived, I was definitely relieved [even though he was more freaked out than I was about the location! Tough guy, yeah right! 🙂 ]
Anyhow, my rocket scientist of a husband brought the jack, the tire, but forgot the tire iron.

Yeah. Nice, huh?

What would have been a really simple detour had just turned into an all new source of frustration. At that point, I was only about fifteen minutes late for call. I’d let production know I was gonna be late and they’d said it was okay. So, after an annoying odyssey involving calling a tow truck while another showed up, hanging up on the call only to have the second tow truck not help us, I flagged down a fellow in a pick-up truck who appeared to have tools. We got the tire changed and I was on my way to the set of Havoc. And I was only about a half hour late. No big deal. They hadn’t even started filming anything yet.

I only “worked” for 10 hours [most was spent sitting, being bored and trying to stay awake]. But the one thing I actually got to do was kind of hilarious. And before I get into that, first let me say that I’d experienced a sort of strange irony–last night’s location was the exact same location I was on for tonight’s episode of Cold Case. Very small world.

But this time, instead of being a hooker, I got to buy some crack from a couple of hoods on a street corner. Yeah, the AD told me and this other girl to walk across the street, buy some drugs and keep walking. She and I looked at each other questioningly–neither of us knew how to buy drugs! So, we walked across the street, I pulled the fake money out of my bra and sort of slid it to one of the guys and the other guy sort of slid me the little baggie. Then we walked away wondering if we’d done it right. The director didn’t complain, so I guess we did okay.

Oh, the things I’ve learned while on set!

UPDATE: Rather than trying to figure out how to add the update to this entry, click here for screen captures and more about my time on Havoc!

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