| If the House is a Rockin' |
[04 Oct 2007|05:15pm] |
If you ever drove through Searchlight, Nevada on your way to someplace else, you’d notice first that from east to west and north to south, that town was nothing but a trailer park sitting in the dust. RVs, single-wides, double-wides… Searchlight had ‘em all by the dozen and not much else. Before 2008, anybody looking to move into the great, desert outdoors would’ve found that a detractor and kept on trucking to the next zip code.
That was before Birthright: The Series.
It was a great, unsolved mystery to the locals. Why had OZTv picked their miniature town, of all places, to shoot their sinners’ show about the supernatural? It didn’t make a lick of sense to anybody. There wasn’t a thing around, other than the Nugget’s hash browns, that had any kind of charm. Those locals had spent their whole lives in Searchlight and they could admit it. They were just too stubborn to pack up and leave.
Despite the town’s lack of anything resembling livability, the locals defended their territory and fought off the ‘Hollywood Menace’. Oh, those citizens rallied and picketed and wrote letters to the Senator, who was even from Searchlight. The truth was they could’ve protested ‘til they were blue in the face and it wouldn’t have stopped the network’s momentum. For every angry citizen that protested, there was some broke schmuck happy to hand over his trailer and his land to an Executive willing to pay top price.
A lot of those trailers had been converted into another kind.
The TV star kind.
One of them was bright blue…
‘Well, the house is a rockin’
Don't bother knockin’
Well, the house is a rockin’
Don't bother knockin’
If the house is a rockin’
Don't bother, come on in!
Kick off your shoes, gotta loosen the blues
This old house ain't got nothing to lose
Seen a lotta years, start spreading the news
We got real old floor, come on baby, shake ‘em loose’
Anna Finn sat in a bathrobe at her vanity table. There were so many light bulbs around the thing, she practically had sunburn. With half an hour to go before her hair-and-makeup call, she had some time to kill. Stevie Ray Vaughan kept good company.
She thumbed through the latest issue of Cosmopolitan and found a dog-eared page on facial workouts. Supposedly doing these exercises twice a day would keep her from getting wrinkles. Anna propped the magazine against her mirror and studied the photographs. “Well, if it works for Julia…”
Off she launched into a series of facial contortions. Pucker-mouth, relax. Pucker-mouth, relax. Left eyebrow. Right eyebrow. O-face. Relax.
Carefully tucking his script into the back pocket of his jeans, Orrin Jeffords picked up the two coffees he'd fixed in his trailer and pretended to wander outside in an aimless fashion. The coffee on-set was so bad that he'd finally bought a coffeemaker of his own. If they were going to insist on such long hours while filming, he could at least drink something that didn't make his stomach turn inside out with distaste.
No shirt today, it was too hot, even for the beginning of October. He'd been trying to pick up something of a tan out here, but the higher-ups kept bitching at him about it, saying it was all wrong for his character. Like they knew shit about characterization, or acting, or any of it. He'd done Shakespeare, for Christ's sake, and gotten good reviews at it. For all they knew, Chekhov was just the guy who helped fly the Enterprise.
Then again, if he'd stuck to plays, he wouldn't be enjoying his current level of success, so he'd tried to tone down the snobbery in interviews lately. The first rule in television acting was, Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Orrin sipped at the first cup of coffee as he continued his falsely casual trek across the open spaces between trailers, exchanging polite nods with several extras and other behind-the-scenes people.
There were three steps between the sandy earth and Anna's trailer door. Orrin put one cup on the narrow railing, then rapped lightly on the doorjamb. The script in his pocket would be a good cover if anyone else turned up. Rehearsing, that was what they were doing. She was helping him with his next scenes, which likely would prove to be difficult. All part of the business.
Knock, knock, knock.
( Don't Bother, Come On In )
( A Little Clandestine (Adult Content: OMG Sexuality?!) )
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