A Visit to L.A. Law

1989

In the 1980s my mum was a little old lady who competed for turf on Venice Beach with roller bladers and skate boarders. I travelled there more than once every year to visit her.

I had lived in LA during the 1960s as a teenager and college student so it was great to get back.

Different family members joined me on each trip. Sometimes it was all four of us; Margie, my wife, me, our daughter Amy and our son Stephen. Sometimes just me and one or both of the kids. In 1989 it was me and Amy.

At that time I was working in advertising with Shoppers Drug Mart as my main client. Our advertising campaign had morphed in the previous year from Bea Arthur, Maude, as spokesperson to a real life couple who played a pretend couple of lawyers on the hit TV show LA Law. Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry. 

Before this trip I had arranged through the Tuckerberry's agent that Amy and I would visit the set to see some of the TV show being filmed. It would be a chance to meet some actors in their cage. That is, while they were filming.  

So one afternoon during our 1989 trip we descended on a hidden, nondescript TV production studio off Olympic Boulevard in West LA. 

We had to talk our way in as we weren't on the list at security. They made some calls while they kept us waiting. Finally the seas parted and in we went. 

Once inside we said hello to Michael Tucker briefly as he was busy doing scenes. Jill wasn't on set that day.

We stayed for a couple of uneventful hours. We felt welcome but mostly no one talked to us. Why didn't they want to know who we were and why were we hanging out on their set? 

We had the run of the place as long as we stayed out of the shots. We had both attended Shoppers Drug Mart commercial shoots so we were able to act cool. 

We knew the actors working that day from watching the show. In addition to Michael Tucker, Susan Dey, Jimmy Smits, Harry Hamlin, John Spencer and Larry Drake were on set.

John Spencer was the only one who engaged us. You'll know him more famously as President Bartlett's chief of staff on The West Wing. He was brief but friendly and helped us feel a bit more comfortable. 

I finally realized everyone knew who we were. In reality I was the Tuckerberry's client as we were paying them something like $50,000 a day to be in our commercials. Maybe that was meaningful. Maybe not. LA is a strange place.

Short tangent on film production. It's edifying to watch a TV show being filmed. The thing is you start to understand the complexity of the work the director and editor does. 

Movies and TV shows are filmed or video taped in pieces that are sewn together by the editor to achieve a coherent story line. The impressive thing is that the director has to visualize all this in advance in order to film all of the right scenes and the building blocks of those scenes. 

You also get an extra appreciation for actors who are often solitary when filming a scene. For example, if you see a conversation between two characters the camera seems to be moving back and forth between the two. Well in reality they aren't conversing with each other but rather alone talking to the camera. And then the sewing happens in the edit. 

So now sometimes when I'm watching a TV show I step back and see it being assembled from behind the camera. More fun. 

Our trips to LA always ended with breakfast at the same new age natural foods restaurant on the Venice Beach boardwalk. Excellent pancakes. Terrific coffee. Just the right kharma to take back to Toronto.