Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…and New Orleans

Over the weekend I started a massive project to organize my old photos. A couple decades of slides and negative film before I started shooting digitally in 2006. The first shot was taken at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. It’s a quintessential backlot location as you can see the Hollywood sign in the background. I was 25 years old and worked for a production company in Burbank.

Last year I wrote a post about seeing Once Upon a Time in …Hollywood nine times while it was in theaters. One of the reasons I gave for seeing it so many times was that I didn’t know if I’d ever have that experience again. To see a well-done, big budget, non-superhero movie, that had an extended run in theaters. Little did I know that a global pandemic was heading our way and that in 2020 I wouldn’t even go to the movie theaters nine times total.

The second shot was a few years earlier during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I stopped to look at a guy doing face painting and this guy leaned over to me and said one of the most original lines I’d ever heard. He said (in a voice like Mae West), “If you had that done you’d look like a Corvette Stingray.” A few minutes later I had a fleur-de-lis on the side of my face—but I’m not sure the sales pitch was 100% accurate. But as Jimmy Buffett sings, “We do it for the stories we can tell….”

That was part of a classic college weekend road trip. Left Miami on Friday and drove straight through to Slidell, Louisiana where we crashed in a KOA campground in a pup tent held up by a broken broom handle. Spent Saturday and Sunday day in New Orleans, and Sunday evening headed back in to Miami in time for a film editing class with Ralph Clemente Monday night. Ralph said he was going to give me an A just for showing up. (Read the post The Perfect Ending after Ralph passed in 2015 and his most accomplished student who won an Emmy for directing an episode of Games of Thrones.)

My biggest pure old Hollywood moment was in Burbank—just over the hill from the Hollywood sign—when I saw John Huston. I was just leaving a post-production house where I had some color timing done on a project and he was being pushed in on a wheelchair. (It was just months before he died in 1987.) I just stared in awe in the parking lot knowing that I was looking at the great director of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, and The Maltese Falcon. He looked like a Rolls-Royce.

P.S. Here’s my dream car as a kid. Oddly, I’ve never driven, or even ridden, in a Corvette.

Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles