Closed Gates-My First Days in LA

When I first arrived in LA, seventeen years ago this month, I noticed everywhere I went that there were gates, locked gates. Gates on parking lots, gates on driveways, gates on everywhere. There wasn't one of them I had access to. I had moved to a city I was locked out of. Because of the height of the moving van I arrived in, I couldn't even get into the parking garage of the hotel we checked into.

We had descended from the Cajon pass from high desert in the late afternoon after days of driving a truck from Rochester, NY. In the back of the truck was a Tetris of mattresses, guitars, dressers, cardboard boxes and couches. Packed into the cab, was my wife at the time, Susan, myself and two cats.  We were greeted by a sprawling valley of un-ending urban development that never stopped for the last seventy miles of our journey. The traffic was also un-ending, We inched towards the goal we been driving days for and planning for over a year, Hollywood.

What we didn't have were jobs, a place to live, or any contacts except for the phone number of a friend of a friend. I had just turned up in Hollywood with a dream. Classic or cliche, you decide.

It was eight O'clock when when pulled up to a Motel 6 just off Hollywood Boulevard.
the desk clerk chatted about how hot it was. After the plains of the Midwest and the deserts of the West in summer, I hadn't really noticed. I was happy to hear a local regard the heat as unusual.

Because the van was too tall for the parking garage. I would have to find a place on the streets of Hollywood to leave everything I owned, all night long!

After a lot of a driving back and forth and some unfriendly horn honks, I found a spot to park on Las Palmas just south of Hollywood Boulevard. I locked the doors, double checked the padlock on the back, said a quick prayer and walked away.

When I got back to the hotel I was beginning to feel the weight of what we had just done. I was beginning to panic. I said to my wife Susan, "Maybe we could still go back. We have just enough money to make it back home."

Susan had always been less adventurous of the two of us. It was not her idea to uproot and move the way we did, but she went along and worked hard to help make it happen this far. I though she might jump at the chance to chuck it all and return home. Instead she said what may have been the most important thing she'd ever say to me.

I got the 'buddy boy' speech. Even though she didn't say those words she might as well have. As I recall it went like this:

"Listen, I came out here with you and we sold our house, quit our jobs and left our families. We're not going back now until we've given it a chance, okay?"

That's what I needed to hear, a loving but firm slap on the face. My panic subsided and I haven't looked back since.

The next morning I got up early to move the truck before I got a ticket. I was more worried whether I would see the truck at all, or maybe just an empty shell with all our stuff in the hands of unknown strangers and gone forever. Dramatic I know, but a country boy hears stories about LA. Even if I didn't believe them, I could help but think about it.

To my great relief it was all right where I'd left it. Later that day we put everything in storage, turned in the truck and rented a car. It hadn't occurred to me when our friends and family helped us load the truck in Rochester that it would just be the two of us in LA. Actually, Susan was feeling sick, so it was pretty much just me.

I made a phone call to the friend of a friend. He said he'd ask around. I wasn't expecting much.
A couple days later I got a call from a guy at Gameshow Network. At first I thought maybe he was looking for audience members or contestants. I was still living in a hotel room, maybe places like that cold-called tourists. I had no idea. Instead he wanted to offer me a job, a gig really. two weekends a month for a few months. It wasn't much, but it was something. It paid twenty dollars and hour, more than I'd even made by almost double. But I was in LA now, I'd need every penny.

I followed the directions to Gameshow Network. Down Fairfax Avenue,  right on Venice, left on Clarington. I pulled up to the gate of Gameshow Network, a modest modern building across from Sony Pictures Studios.

A voice on the intercom said "Can I help you?"

"I'm Joel Johnson, here to work on the show... 'Inquizition'," I said after looking at the little piece of paper I had jotted the information down on.

The intercom was silent, but after a moment then the gate shuttered and began to move aside on its tracks. I drove inside.

Well, that's one gate unlocked, I thought.

Many would follow. The garage to the apartment we rented a few weeks later, the gates of the University of Southern California, and the American Film Institute where I learned film production in the trenches of crewing large student films. Later the gates to movie studio lots, Universal, Sony, CBS Radford in Studio City, CBS Studio City in Hollywood, as well as hundreds of little back-alley studios and locations.

As a rough estimate I would say I have worked on 50 films, mostly shorts, but a few notable features like "The Bucket List" and "The Lords of Dogtown". I've worked on easily five hundred TV shows and thousands of live broadcasts. I have supported probably the same number of YouTube videos.

I'm not sure if I'll stay here forever. There's a gate I've been wanting to get through for many years, the gate of the Atlantic, the gate to Virgin Atlantic flight the formidable gate of United Kingdom immigration so I can live and work in that "green and pleasant land".

I'm not sure when or how, but it will happen, one little gate at a time.