Today, a Saturday, I made the drive from my house outside of L.A. through the San Fernando Valley to NBC in Burbank, tracing the route I used every weekday for all those years I worked on "Santa Barbara." I had been invited to come in and do a series of radio interviews with several other actors who are currently appearing on NBC shows. As I passed through the gates and drove by Studio 11, which was built in 1984 for the express purpose of providing a home for SB, I felt a very strange and powerful tug in my chest. After doing the interviews (much camaraderie - Jeff Foxworthy, Jason Bateman among others - Tea Leoni brought her dog George) I started to get in my car to head home, but ended up staring across the parking lot at that big red "11" painted on the side of my old stomping grounds, my hand waiting to turn the key in the ignition, and waiting, and waiting...
Every available entrance was locked, but I kept circling the perimeter, not sure why, since it was obvious there was no way in. Then I saw a door down the far side of the rear of the building which stirred a memory. It had been left propped open daily during the SB days, which was against company policy but convenient for stagehands wanting to enter and exit quietly, and it had developed a seemingly permanent tendency to stick. I tugged, it gave, and I was in.
The workspace itself is a marvel - a giant rectangular room maybe forty feet tall, the floor dimensions of which are sufficient to allow all the sets of a big, sprawling soap opera episode to be erected simultaneously, side by side. There are dozens and dozens of huge lights hanging from suspended steel bars which criss-cross the air some twelve to fifteen feet above the floor. In the earthquake of 1988, those lights jumped and shook and screamed at us but not one of them came down. Today, as my eyes slowly acclimated to the darkness, I could see them there in silhouette, and I remembered how wonderful it used to feel to walk out onto that floor beneath them every afternoon, to continue again my investigations into that great old friend of mine, that guy Cruz.
The technology that supported us in Studio 11 was the very best available in 1984. The Sound Mixing Board was so sensitive that an actor could work in whispers when whispers were right. We could shoot in the light of a candle when only candlelight would do. The building itself, in its sophistication and spaciousness, always felt and functioned like a friend, an active ally in the creative process. I could tell in my travels down the hallways and peaks into rooms that the technology has been upgraded to keep pace with the digital revolution, and I suspect the actors who are working there now will come to love the place as I do.
For a while now the studio has been extremely underused - no steady tenants, no steady demands on its wonders. Though experience has taught me that all machines need to be used in order to remain useful, I realize now that I have taken a little perverse pleasure in knowing that the echoes of all the noise my pals and I used to make there have been reverberating fairly undisturbed in the years since SB's demise - as if that sad circumstance somehow served to keep the show alive in there.
Today the space is packed with the gorgeous sets of NBC's new Aaron Spelling soap, "Sunset Beach," and I know, even from my stroll in the dark, that a good thing is going on. The actress Sarah Buxton will be passing through the doorway of my old dressing room on Monday morning. As I leaned against the wall beside it and absorbed the quiet, I felt a peace about what happened in those days that has not always been so easy to come by.
I regret that I will never get to play that guy again. I regret the way the show was abused by so many of the people who wanted to "save" it or "fix" it. But I'm so thankful that we knew, even while we were caught up in the whirlwind of it, that what we were doing was special. Time, circumstance, and a remarkable, shared sense of yearning to kick ass had come together to lift us to a higher plane, and we were granted the grace to KNOW it, while it was still going on.
I wish the same grace for everyone connected with "Sunset Beach." And somewhere in my bones I believe - the Studio wishes it too.
Till the next time,
A
