Love, Hollywood Style

One "I'm not supposed to tell you this." I spoke in a voice slightly above a whisper, forcing more than a dozen bodies to lean forward so they could hear me. "But this is the exact spot where Christy Caldwell is sitting in the opening shot of her upcoming film,Table for Two.You know, the scene they show in all the commercials, where she's eating alone at a fancy restaurant and she thinks everyone is laughing at her."I waited as the tourists processed this information, scanning them for those telltale signs of confusion -- a tilted head or a furrowed brow. I found one on the face of a dad from Wichita. His mismatched pale legs and sunburned face was something we often saw in midsummer at Sovereign Studios. It's the sign of someone who never gets out of the office and doesn't wear shorts or know the proper method of applying suntan lotion."But, Tracy," he said, double-checking with my name tag to confirm he got my name right. "You said this was a movie theater."I did my best to suppress a smile as we stood in the lobby of the Sovereign Theater. It was such a help when the tourists unknowingly went along with the script I laid out in my mind. "And that, my friends, is what we call movie magic." Now they all broke into smiles as if that line explained everything. "All the director does is show an establishing shot of the outside of a real restaurant, and then the inside can be anywhere she wants. Throw in some tables and chairs, a waiter or two, and what used to be the lobby of a movie theater becomes an elegant restaurant. Last week this same lobby was used as a church in a music video."Several people nodded their heads in awe while they tried to picture the theater lobby as a church. I could tell they were having trouble seeing it. The Sovereign Theater lobby doesn't have a concession stand or anything of the tackiness of a public theater, but it certainly doesn't have the stained glass windows and wooden pews of the church I grew up in.It probably would have been easier for the tourists to imagine if a half dozen people weren't in the process of hanging a huge banner in the middle of the lobby of Christy Caldwell dressed in a slinky black dress. The premiere of her new film,Table for Two,was scheduled in a few hours. Everyone was just at the point of scrambling to get the theater ready for the celebrities, studio bigwigs, and paparazzi who would be showing up later. Fearing that we were about to be kicked out for being in the way, I led my tour out of the theater lobby to continue the Sovereign Studios tour.It was my second summer as a page at Sovereign Studios, so I was pretty good at knowing when it was time to move the tour along before I got yelled at for interfering with the working studio. Besides, I was also scheduled to work the premiere later, so I didn't want anyone angry with me who could make my life miserable. Pages are at the bottom of just about every food chain on the lot, so it's always good to make sure you don't give anyone a reason to report you to the boss.By the way, "page" is the formal name for tour guides. Pages also fill in around the lot doing different odds and ends where needed, like working a movie premiere or helping catalog dusty, old archive boxes that have been stored under a soundstage for a few decades. The job isn't exactly all that glamorous.During the school year, the pages are all college graduates, but the page staff is supplemented by high school and college students for the summer travel season. Even though they only make slightly above minimum wage -- and sometimes have to give walking tours in hundred-degree heat -- being at Sovereign Studios looks pretty good on the resume. Having graduated high school a month earlier, I'd been thinking a lot about my resume that summer. And I still had four years of college to get through before I even started looking for a real job."It looks likeRuditis, P. J. is the author of 'Love, Hollywood Style', published 2008 under ISBN 9781416951384 and ISBN 1416951385.