Lowell, Mass: Hollywood East

I live right in downtown Lowell, MA. During the spring of 2008 Ricky Gervais shot much of his movie, The Invention of Lying (working title, This Side of the Truth), in Massachusetts. Many scenes were shot on location here in Lowell. One weekday Liz and I decided to head down to that day’s location to see if we could spot a movie star. We knew we were getting close when we saw Middle Street lined with trailers. We didn’t see familiar faces around the trailers, but the name on each trailer door was worth the trip.


Out onto Central Street and we found the crew, shooting a scene on the sidewalk. We were directed to cross the street to stay out of the shot, then funneled across to Merrimack Street, where we stood looking back down Central to watch the show. Us and about fifty locals.

We caught sight of Ricky early on. He was both director and lead actor, so he never stopped moving. It was difficult to tell when they were shooting, rehearsing, or changing camera angles. The scene they were shooting involved a lot of movement, so they used a steadicam instead of a stationary camera or a camera atop a tripod or dolly.


We spent a half hour or so watching the bustle of the movie crew.


Aside from Ricky, none of the other actors were around, including Jennifer Garner, Louis C.K., and Rob Lowe.

Why am I mentioning this now, over a year later? Because the trailer for the movie, scheduled for a fall release, just came out. And Lowell is all over this thing. There’s restaurants like the Dubliner and Cobblestones, not to mention the very scene they shot on the sidewalk the day we were there.

Check it out, 18 seconds in:



Okay, that’s not all. Come this Monday, July 6, Hollywood arrives again, this time to film The Fighter, a film directed by David O. Russell, starring Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. According to themovieblog.com, “Wahlberg will play (Micky) Ward, a fighter (from Lowell) who was losing bouts and was ready to hang up the gloves when his brother came back into his life. Bale will play Eklund, whose drugs and robbery spree drew him a 10- to 15-year sentence in state prison. There, he kicked drugs, became a model prisoner and emerged as a changed man who helped his brother reach the glory that eluded him.” I have no idea how much of the movie they’re shooting in town, but it’s always cool to see a movie crew hanging about. Keep track of the shoot here.

Also, check out Liz’s blog post from last year. She talks more about seeing the Ricky Gervais shoot, with additional pics. Plus, she gives you a little history of another film shot in Lowell.

First Draft Theater 2

First draft theater presents the second in a series of posts featuring a few pages of a first draft or a work in progress. (Check out the first here.) The following is the beginning of a story I've come back to a few times in the past year. Give it a read. Let me know what you think. Am I going to Hollywood? Or someplace even hotter? You decide.

Waiting for Hugo


Hugo aimed his manual camera out the drivers' side window of his 1986 Mustang. Though he had California plates, people always asked him where he was from. “Your car’s rusted,” they'd say. Cars don't rust in L.A. The Mustang was fine for just getting around but it was a lemon, in the shop every other month.

Hugo worked the lens and zoomed in for a close-up of the ranch house’s front windows. He tried to shoot fast but was dazzled by the bright orange curtains. He zoomed out and snapped a wide angle. The front of the house was overgrown with bushes and ivy. He had imagined a more streamlined environment, but he could work with it. He wondered if this was the Charles Manson house. He knew it was here in Laurel Canyon someplace, along a pleasant tree-lined street like this.

A woman came out of the house and walked down the driveway, watching him. She carried a tray.

Hugo hadn't planned on spying on this mid-century modern in the neighborhood where Manson did the deed. Lack of supplies had driven him out of his apartment; when he went to make coffee that morning he found his roommates had brewed the last of it. When he wasn't at his part-time temp job, he was home working on his screenplay. To write with any passion he needed coffee. With sugar if he could afford it. That meant a drive to Ralph's.

He had been ambitious when he left Kansas City and his tight-knit family and moved to Los Angeles. During his first year in L.A. he wrote a screenplay, a 150 page opus about a zoo of anthropomorphic animals that helps a lowly zoo employee outsmart the state lottery system. He was convinced it would get snapped up during an outrageously lucrative bidding war. Months were spent sending it to agencies and producers. He revised the script to make it a family-friendly PG-rated movie. When that didn’t work, it became an action movie, and finally he spun it as a hard-R suspense thriller. Nobody read it. When Hugo's passion for his sapient creatures dulled, he knew it was time to get busy on another screenplay.

At Ralph’s, Hugo walked the busy aisles, dropping essentials into his basket: a pound of Eight O’Clock coffee (cheap, but not the cheapest), a pound of sugar, wheat bread, baloney, macaroni loaf, Pepsi. At the checkout his card wasn’t accepted. Flushed, he had the girl put aside the sugar and the baloney then paid cash for the rest. Outside a man in a Nova with tinted windows tried to flag him over. "Hey buddy. You want a sandwich?" the man shouted to him. His face was beyond wrinkly, it was corrugated.

"I'm all set," Hugo said.

"Yeah? You look all set."

What did he need a sandwich for? Did he look like the kind of guy that would buy a sandwich out of a non-air conditioned car? Hugo drove onto Victory Blvd., realizing the sandwiches the guy was selling must have been drugs. He rolled down his windows. The dry air triggered his asthma and he started to cough but the wind cooled his hot skin. He hung a right, trying to remember all the drug dealer details so he could use him as a character in his script. His second screenplay. He got excited thinking about writing it and headed up into the hills of Laurel Canyon to carry out another errand.

His second screenplay concerned a tight-knit family living in a perfect Mid-Western suburb in the 1970's. The daughter gets pregnant and turns her middle-class family upside down. Hugo wanted pictures of a house to use as a model for the house his movie home. When he found the perfect house he would populate it with his characters like a life-sized dollhouse. Actual photos helped him visualize his family.

The woman walked into the road, ten feet from Hugo's Mustang. He slid his camera into his backpack. “It’s a public way,” Hugo said. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

The woman smiled and held her tray in front of her. She was tall and gangly; at one time she had probably been thin. Her hands looked swollen. He couldn't stop looking at her clown-sized digits. He could use that detail. The boyfriend, a drug dealer, dropped the Baggie of dope because of his huge meaty hands. On the tray were white bread sandwiches.

“Monty’s home. If you’d like to talk to him,” the woman said, taking another step toward the car. “I’m sure he’d be interested in what you have to say. I'm Eve. Eve Garland?”

Hugo started the Mustang and was about to put it in gear when he realized the woman had not told him to leave.

"What?" he said out the window. Eve Garland. That struck something familiar in his memory. She was an old actress. She had been in some B-movies. Maybe some minor TV roles. He recognized her. Just.

She looked toward the house then back to Hugo. Her smile changed from greeting to imploring. It would have been creepy or pathetic but Hugo found it more ingratiating than anything.

"Monty’s been waiting."

"I think you have the wrong—"

“Sandwiches?”

She was like a mother, her voice a little loud but caring; the sandwiches were cut into quarters and stacked in a circle like a Wonder Bread pyramid or a wedding cake for six year olds. Hugo wanted to cover them with plastic wrap in case a bird crapped on them or the wind tussled with tree-stuff and something landed from above. Or pollen. Was there pollen in L.A.?

"Follow me?" The woman walked back up the driveway then turned, waiting.

Hugo was the pathetic one in this strange, sudden scenario. In the three years since he lived in the Valley nobody had ever waited for him. He couldn’t get his phone calls returned; he couldn’t get the lowest-tiered producer to even open the envelope in which he mailed his screenplay, afraid of unsolicited hit movie ideas for fear of getting sued. When Hugo did solicit, sending query letters as feelers, he got no action. He tried personalizing the queries depending on which production company he approached. (I’m a big fan of your client Bruce Spunkmeyer. I believe my script, a cross between Die Hard and Madagascar, would be a perfect fit for MadCap Productions.) If he got any response at all it was always no.

But Eve Garland was telling him that Monty wanted to see him. Was Monty her husband? Maybe he was a producer or worked at a studio. He pulled his car into the driveway, locked it up, then decided to grab his backpack. Maybe he could take more pictures of the house. He followed Eve onto a stone walkway.

It was midday. The neighborhood was still. The woman pulled a ring of keys from a lime-colored apron and opened the front door. She had a light touch with those thick fingers. “How rude of me.” She turned and blocked the door. “You must be peckish after your drive. Sandwich?”

Hugo grabbed four triangle sandwiches. Peanut butter and jelly. The quarter sandwiches created a whole one and he stood and ate. The sweet food was thrillingly familiar and set his stomach into a crescendo of gurgles.

“Thanks,” he managed.

"I'm so sorry I wasn't better prepared.”

Hugo followed her into a foyer that opened onto a wide sunken living room. The carpet was orange shag. The orange drapes, darker than the carpet, adorned all the windows. Sliding glass doors opened out onto a terrace and swimming pool. There was the hum of central air conditioning. It smelled musty but also like the scent of a flower Hugo couldn't place. But not an actual flower, but a powder derived from a flower. The furnishings looked ordered out of House Beautiful circa 1962. Nothing looked contemporary but was still pristine, as if the house had been kept in a hermetic time capsule.

That’s what he felt like he had walked into, a moment frozen in a different era; no questions asked, no reasons given. It was how he had originally hoped to be embraced by Hollywood’s decision makers and money providers. Hugo didn’t know what they expected of him. Would the real visitor drive up any minute? This could be an advantageous mistake. He needed contacts in the business; he had to make the most of it.

Book Review: Memorial, by Bruce Wagner

If I were a character in a Bruce Wagner novel, I would have been born and raised in Los Angeles. My mother, Marjorie, would have married twice—divorced once and widowed once—passing her old age year in relative comfort in tony Beverlywood. My sister, Joan, an also-ran architect, jealous of other architects of her generation, would be flipping out because she’s almost 40 and hasn’t achieved all she wants from her career or from men. My father, Ray, would have left this cuddly family unit when I was only a couple years old. And then there’s me, Chester, a forty-something location scout and relative loser, always seeking, never finding. If the above were so, then you could call my life Memorial.


We are introduced to this Los Angeles family as things begin to fall apart or come together, depending on your point of view. Chester gets taken in as the butt end of a reality show gotcha moment, caught on tape, getting physically banged up in the process. For the remainder of the book he pops pills to fight the pain and hires a pit bull lawyer who promises Chester he’ll wring the production company for all they’re worth. Joan sleeps with most of the men in her life, including the man her company is wooing to land a contract to design and build a memorial for his brother lost in the Asian Tsunami of 2004.

Meanwhile Marjorie gets scammed by a troop of ingenious grifters as they wring her for all she’s worth with a bogus state lottery shadow program called the Blind Sisters. Gullible and lonely (her kids only call when they’re looking for a handout) she willingly gives these very nice people who want to lavish her with secret lottery winnings all the information about her bank accounts and money up front in order to secure her place among the other secret winners. That’s just the beginning of poor Marj’s problems. Her devastating fall from grace is a cruel wonder to read.

While Marjorie is raked over the coals, her ex husband, whom she hasn’t seen since he left decades before, has gone through the trauma of having his City of Industry apartment mistaken for that of a drug dealer and invaded by police. In the process, his dog is shot. After the ordeal there are lots of apologies by all involved, his dog gets the best care, makes it through, and Ray ends up with a tasty settlement from the city.

So, lots of opportunity for a rather depressing story. But Wagner takes us into the cranium of these characters so absolutely that we don’t just witness their innocence (for the mother and father) and humor and pathos (for the kids) but we feel it absolutely. Wagner is masterful at spinning pages of internal strife and dialogue into gold blocks of black humor and endless pop culture references. Actually, he goes beyond references to show how actual behavior and thought patterns are predicated on the cultural environment.

Bruce Wagner has been writing about Hollywood and Los Angelinos denizens since the early nineties (and earlier?) when he published his first novel, Force Majeure, about an aspiring screenwriter who drives a limo for a living, a character who will do anything to get his stuff on screen and be a player in Hollywood. Wagner writes about the inner workings of his L.A. characters like no writer since possibly Nathaniel West—splayed and flayed in real-time, they swagger, discourse, screw, ingest drugs, screw over, and ultimately expect their due. And it should be said, the karma they put out comes back to them in grand ways. Generally, lots of humiliating situations ensue. I couldn’t get through Force Majeure. It was unrelentingly depressing and misanthropic. It also lacked what his later novels (including his cellular trilogy, I’ll Let You Go, I’m Still Holding, and I’m Losing You) abundantly enjoyed: a wicked, fun, spot-on sense of humor. The blacker the better.


Chester and Joan fight off their respective demons by fucking, doping, and spewing some of the foulest, racist, darkest humor I’ve probably ever read in a mainstream book. There are some images I wish I hadn’t come across. Yet everything mixed together—the bathos of Marjorie as a total victim; the tender, dopey father making gestures to reconnect to his original family; Joan discovering a strength and positive ferocity while becoming her mother’s only benefactor and protector; vapid, flailing Chester digging deep to finally overcome his fears and head off to India to search for an inner peace he’s canny enough to know he’ll never get in Los Angeles—all this crazy shit reduces like a surprisingly succulent stew from the disparate parts of a dozen stale Hollywood pitch meetings.

Death comes a calling, and India as country and symbol spins its web, as a real or fantasy destination for many of the characters. It’s this symbol of peace and healing that swirls out of the memorials for everyone lost in recent tragedies, both American and world-wide. It’s like Wagner has created this sour and sweet salve to rub on America’s collective, exhausted wounds.

Wagner’s prose is thick, and I’m always surprised at his savvy turns of phrase. While his characters, mostly Joan and Chester, spew long pages of venom and uncanny (sometimes unrealistic) insight into almost every corner of their psyche, there’s nothing boring about Memorial, and everything about it will stick with you. This novel was published in 2006, and it’s so timely that if you read it in another couple years, the pop references would seem stale, although they magically still hold up in February 2009. And his themes of human loss, family struggle and tragedy, of the haves and wish-I-hads, of endings and beginnings, never really go out of style.