hollywood watch
Yesterday I got some bad news about a project I’ve been working on. I knew it was coming – when the network executives suddenly stop calling with ideas for casting and thoughts on the next draft of the script, you know you’re in trouble.
Still, when the news came, it stung. This project was almost two years in the making. The script was new territory for me – more dramatic, darker and more suspenseful than my usual comic style – and I was proud of it. The first episode – shot over a thrilling week in New York – was fast-paced and hilarious in an evil way. In other words, it came out exactly as I had envisioned it.
But when the call came that the project wasn’t moving forward all I could think about was: “Where am I going to eat?”
Bad news makes me hungry, but it also makes me sentimental. The meal I eat after getting bad news has to be special. A bad-news meal needs to be rich and fatty and satisfying, but it also needs to have some kind of historical show business heft. When your show gets the axe, you want to sit where decades of writers and directors and actors have sat nursing similar wounds.
So before I would really sift through my feelings about the news, I needed to decide on lunch.
Years ago, a paramedic told me that for weeks after the death of movie legend Elizabeth Taylor, he’d pick people up in his ambulance and as they sped to the nearest hospital, lots of them would pull off their oxygen mask to make a request.
“I want to go where Liz Taylor died,” they’d say.
Meaning, “Take me to Cedars Sinai hospital.” That’s where Elizabeth Taylor died and that’s where they wanted to go, too. This is Los Angeles, and people want a little celebrity pixie dust wherever they can find it.
The perfect place for a bad-news lunch was the old Nicodell Restaurant on Melrose Avenue, tucked into a space between the old RKO Studio and Paramount. That’s where, sometime in the 1950s, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz told old-time actor William Frawley that if he didn’t get control of his alcoholism, he’d be fired from the smash-hit sitcom I Love Lucy.
“Let’s sit in that booth,” we young comedy writers would say, when we stopped in at the Nicodell for a (pretty awful) meal. It’s not that much different from “I want to go where Elizabeth Taylor died”.
Eventually Paramount bought the restaurant, closed it, tore down the shabby, threadbare building and put in a car park – which wasn’t a tragedy, really, because the food was awful and I had a production deal at Paramount at the time and appreciated the convenient parking spot.
It still made me sad. I felt like what older Los Angelenos must have felt when they shut the pony ride park on the corner of La Cienega and Beverly Boulevard. Anyone who grew up in this city in the 1950s and 60s remembers that park with great affection.
It’s now the Beverly Center, a huge brown mountain of a shopping mall, which is either sad or not depending on how sentimental you are about kids riding around a dusty track on ponies.
The Beverly Center has about six restaurants – all of them fairly decent, but none truly suitable for a bad-news lunch. You can’t wallow in self-pity in a shopping mall.
I was stuck. My stomach was growling and I was starting to panic: I needed to settle on a place quickly or I’d start moping about the news without a fork in my hand.
And then I remembered: I once ate lunch at a deli in the San Fernando Valley and two booths over a very powerful network television executive was having lunch with his former Number Two employee, someone he had publicly fired a few years before. The firing had been ugly and sudden and for all any of us knew, they hadn’t spoken since then.
It seemed like an awkward lunch. Both of them sat stiffly. Neither spoke loud enough for me to overhear anything – and believe me, I tried. But when they both got up to go, the handshake they shared seemed genuine. Peace, it seemed, had been brokered.
At the time I thought, “This is nice. Nice that they’re still having lunch together, nice that people get over things.”
When I remembered that, I knew where I needed to eat – that deli in the San Fernando Valley. I even knew where I needed to sit – in the booth in the place where I once saw people get over something.
I had a gigantic roast beef sandwich and a monstrously large piece of chocolate cake. And it worked.
Rob Long is a os Angeles-based writer and producer
On Twitter: @rcbl