August 23, 2006

This LA is not that LA

by Terry Taylor, Creative Guide

They have no course like this at the Ad Center or Portfolio Center. They don't teach copywriters or art directors such things. Basic training at Fort Polk is probably the best place to learn this side of the biz. No luxuries or lattes out here where people may curse and pray all in the same sentence. 

This is advertising like a Robert Johnson song where the Devil and God both show up and give you a little seminar inside of an hour.  A week between the Atchafalaya and Red River in Louisiana in August and you'll know why the Blues settled in here. 

The temperature is stuck at 100 and stays there for a week. The heat index pushes above 120 in places, depending on clouds and dirt and metal and concrete and asphalt. No white Mondrian sheets or SoHo bistros here. I've been on stressful shoots for 25 years but this is where truckers

and linemen earn a hard living up against a hot aluminum wall and a creosote pole between a weekly paycheck and a cold beer and church on Sunday. You can call it a lot of things but fun is not one of them.

By noon, the meat on your neck is cooking and your ears are turning to jerky. You can lose 10 pounds between breakfast and dinner. Spend 15 hours a day 1,000 miles away from trendy, and advertising starts looking like an episode of "Dirty Jobs."

Saturday, 11 pm:  Delta looses my luggage for the umpteenth-hundred time and with the new flight rules, I am left without even toothpaste or clean underwear. That was the easy part. We check into the seldom-working-elevatored Holiday Inn with a box of hours-old Popeyes chicken at midnight. This is known as a good day.

Sunday:  Still no luggage or toothpaste. Record radio all day on a portable DAT, no actors, all real people, and a hope that we can make four minutes of good radio from 5 hours on DAT. Delta finally finds my suitcase Sunday night. I have a toothbrush and underwear. I'm happy like Christmas.

Monday:  94 degrees at 9 a.m. By 3 p.m., the weather imitates hell. By 4 p.m., the heat index is so far above 100 we don't ask about it anymore. We scout TV locations in temps that bring back August memories of smothering humidity from my youth on South Alabama football fields. My youth, however, is noticeably absent as the flat land and the oven of sky pinch us hard in a dirt field ringed by power lines next to a substation and a water treatment site, behind a wall of earth built to keep the river out of living rooms. It's the best this patch of land will look all week.

Tuesday:  Hot again. More scouting, and then shooting starts at 4 p.m. in a soybean field south of Alexandria, La. The massive sky peels off a stunning copper-stained sunset and we feel like we are being crushed under steaming towels as fire ants introduce themselves to several people on the crew who've never experienced why the word "fire" comes before "ant." Itching is followed by red welts. Darkness drops, but the humidity wraps us in wet blankets of steamed air. We are simmering beside the highway as night comes like the train that drags coal past us going south beside the road to Baton Rouge.

Wednesday:  11 a.m. Hottest day yet. After assembling the crew at the hotel, a 16-hour, 102-degree (heat index of 126) shoot day starts in the dusty rut behind the Red River levee, and soon boils into a purple sunset of thunderheads and 40 mph winds that sandpaper our eyes and lather our sweat in layers of mud on skin and clothes. Lightning pounds the ground in garish, vertical bolts and rain blows sideways, cooling the air down to the low 90s. Compared to two hours ago, it feels like winter.

We shoot through it all. Equipment and shelter is damaged. We shoot shot after shot, set-up after set-up. Gallons of water and Gatorade are consumed along with miles of film. The people toward whom we aim the 35mm Arriflex work through it all like it's an everyday event for them. They are linemen in a tough place on a good day. We're the ones suffering. To them, it's business as usual. To us, it's like having our heads shoved 6 feet down a Peterbuilt's smokestack.

Wednesday: 11 p.m.  We notice that no one has peed all day. Apparently, we are being liquidated through our pores. In a few minutes, heat exhaustion, dehydration and low blood sugar all descend on me in a sickening whirl as my vision blurs, my thoughts jumble and my jaws and shoulders ache like the result of a good beating by somebody who knows how to administer one. We keep shooting. Never felt this sensation before, like things are ripping up inside me. More shooting. It

literally hurts to think. Blinking hurts, my teeth hurt. I finally sit on a truck tailgate and drink a Coke, then Gatorade, and it goes away. Or I am dead. Hard to tell at this point.

We are soiled and filthy and the "set" is a tepid bog, causing us to finally abandon the deteriorating quagmire at midnight under a swarm of aggressive mosquitos, and move to finish the shots we still need at another location because the fire truck can't traverse the unbearable, ankle-deep slop we're standing in. The filming of "Apocalypse Now" comes to mind as we load up and drive away, spinning big, knobby tires in rooster tails of brown ooze. I hope to never see this particular patch of earth again. We finish off the next three hours of shooting under a manufactured deluge in the streets from the fire truck, under a sky fractured by forking tendrils of heat lightning. The fire truck hoses wash off our equipment. 

Thursday:  3 a.m.  I walk in the icy hotel room, and extract the contents of my drenched pockets. The story boards I'd folded are soaked with sweat and rain and mud and look like a smeared Rorschach test. I stand in the shower, fully clothed, shoes and all, as the mud dislodges from

my entire being and encircles the drain like blood from the "Psycho" shower scene. Five hours' sleep and we go again.

This is how it goes. The rest of the week is more of the same, with endless bottles of water bleeding out of us in rivulets, staining our clothes in salty rings.  We shoot in heat and storm and whatever happens. Day and night, moving over there, sweating, setting up over here, sweating, shooting that, sweating, moving, sweating, setting up, sweating, shooting, sweating, moving, sweating, sweating, sweating. This is where they train people to go to Iraq. Now I know why.

The people we work with and the ones we capture on film are used to extreme weather and endure it like a necessary evil. Many lost everything last year in two hurricanes and yet, while their possessions were gone, drowned or blown away and their families uprooted, they somehow managed to work months of 15-hour days in heat and storm and pain and things I can never imagine. They tolerate our film crew like they do the weather, with graciousness and a weary eye. My week in the heat pales compared to what they have gone through. Sweat and lost luggage is nothing. In the superficial world of advertising, this LA is a long way from the other LA. A very long way.

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