Tag: Hollywood

Once again, they are filming something, a few doors down.

The note arrived at our door, on Monday, announcing “Cougar Town” and a scene involving a car ending up in a swimming pool. Sounds hilarious.

That home, where films, commercials and TV are filmed over six times a year, looks like a typical American house, with its black shutters, double hung windows and frame siding.

From what I understand, a young location manager owns it, and has lucratively steered lots of productions into his property.

Times being what they are, we all think it’s important that jobs and production stay in Los Angeles.  The sound of foreclosure is almost as frequent as the police helicopters haunting Van Nuys.

Most of us are deeply fond of our homes, and some even take pride in keeping them ship-shape.

So imagine, when you wake up and find four toilets on trailers parked in front of your home? Your front driveway has been hijacked by an army of producers, PAs, entertainment day laborers, cops on bikes, heavy equipment, and the whiff of diesel smoke from trucks which are parked all day in front, supplying donuts, steel poles, rice crispy treats and sandbags to the hundreds of walkie-talkie talking men and women.

Sol A. Hurvitz, my late father, resided for 29 years in Woodcliff Lake, NJ and would never allow a garage sale, because he didn’t like strangers coming into his hallowed home. Even the blacktop driveway was too intrusive, too sacred a place, to sell off his sons’ unwanted plastic whiffle bats, steel rakes, rusty spades and deflated basketballs.

He lived to see the day, from his wheelchair, parked in a neighbor’s driveway, when the Bergen County fatties and Rockland County bargain hunters drove their pick-ups onto the lawn and loaded up his furniture, paintings, books and belongings. It was perhaps one of the saddest days of his life: watching his home and life dismantled.

And I too, see my home, as some sort of refuge and place of sanctity, and wonder, with some disturbed amusement, about people who have houses where muddy boots, dirty hands and heavy equipment invade half a dozen times a year. I think about how I wash my bathroom weekly,  scrub the bathtub, and vacuum my house, quite fanatically, and then my mind wanders down to the location where entertainment is produced, and strangers urinate and defecate and deface one’s home, but you somehow are compensated in the tens of thousands for this privilege.

Money always wins and only a naïve person would say it doesn’t matter, but there is something base and gross about the frequent whoring of a home, something that only Hollywood could understand and welcome.