Urth Caffe on Melrose is a great place for a salad or a cuppa but a horrible place to approach by car. If you don’t live nearby and must look for parking, your best bet is inside an Elvish Bag of Holding. One of the survival skills of any entertainment career is learning where to park for your meetings. I happened to know (since I had just had a meeting here 5 days before), that one of the neighborhood streets allowed for two hours unmetered, and usually had a spot less than 5 minutes’ walk; basically ideal for business.
The first producer I worked for works out of his house now, and is making more movies than ever. I have far more business meetings in cafes than offices these days. This could be a consequence of real estate prices, it could also be that so many of us have been cast loose from any semblance of organization, and are floating free in the bloodstream of the city, gathering sometimes but never stopping. The hustle gets harder every year, and we have fewer assets to do it with, but we keep at it.
As I walked up the sidewalk towards the cafe, I saw one of the producers I was scheduled to meet. He was holding down two outdoor tables, and a spaceman was talking to him. Actually a gray and windblown man in a classic 50’s-style homemade silver pajamas spacesuit, with a cardboard helmet becrusted with shiny fake jewels. He was fearlessly and relentlessly approaching every customer and passerby, offering to sell them, for only $5 a DVD of the film he had made. This town runs on chutzpah, and while he had the slurry aura and patter of a homeless person who had had a little too much of the useful juice squeezed out of the spongy tissues of his brain, he had apparently made a movie. Which, it must be acknowledged, probably put him ahead of half the denizens of the Urth Caffe.
I got in line for my drink, and soon my director friend arrived. I told him about the accomplished filmmaker on the sidewalk and he replied: “Oh, the spaceman? I’ve seen him before. Love that guy.”
We ordered and joined the producer, and soon we were joined by two other producers and the conversation was off and running. It was a good day, a serious day, with great potential for a movie to emerge from the meeting. It can take patience and effort beyond most people to get to a meeting like this.
It went well – at least, as well as perception can tell. I am almost too-addicted to concrete confirmation these days, because I know how many of these possibilities will inevitably be mirages. If there is a check, a greenlight, a film, you will hear about it, never doubt. Until then – it was a fine conversation with good beverages in a town where you can convene on the patio in January.
At one point the conversation turned to famous comedic actors – this movie, if made, would provide space for a cameo or two by this type of celebrity. L.A. has a unique sense for kismet, because at that moment, Jon Lovitz arrived at the cafe, walking his dog. And it says something about L.A.’s sense of blase entitlement that you might look at an occurrence like that and think “well, sure, kismet, but maybe we could do a little better?”
Naturally, when Lovitz emerged from the cafe, he proceeded up the sidewalk and ran into Will Ferrell at the corner. The two stood and chatted (along with, I think, Anchorman director Adam McKay), for a good ten minutes, right behind the shoulder of one of the producers at our table. About two minutes in, a photographer with an enormous lens appeared across the street – sprouting out of the ground, I think. This was not Will Ferrell and Jon Lovitz in high glamour – they were in track suits and ballcaps, just walking the neighborhood for ordinary reasons. Still, the city has decided such things cannot go unphotographed. Within five minutes, three more photographers had appaered, and I imagined them barreling out of a very small car.
And I was momentarily awed by the fact that these people who had reached the very top of the Hollywood mountain were sharing a sidewalk just a few paces away from that ambitious spaceman, in a neighborhood where nobody, rich or poor, can find a good parking spot.