Churning out dreams

Wilfred Jayasuriya takes a walk through the Sony Columbia Movie Studios in Los Angeles

“Send Me Post Cards from LA” is a popular song about a waitress in a village restaurant in USA, who leaves her job to make it to Hollywood, as an actress. The song is sung by her waiter lover, whom she has left behind. This song was popularised among school children in Sri Lanka, by being included in the excellent “General English for the A Level” text, authored by Manique Gunesekera et al. When the waitress reached the dreamland what kind of place would she find?

Sony, a Japanese firm bought up Columbia Pictures in the early 1990s and “Sony Colombia” remains a flagship in the American entertainment industry. Its buildings at the centre of Culver City “downtown,” in the heart of Los Angeles cover 44 acres of built up property, mostly consisting of studios and “lots” or outdoor sites where movies are produced.

Metro Goldwyn Mayer {MGM) studios were located there at first. With “back lots” to produce cowboy films and extravaganzas in the “golden age of Cinema from 1890 to 1960,” the total area of land owned by the studio was 145 acres. MGM has now moved elsewhere. When MGM was at this site they had a resident lion to growl! Now the logo is not the lion but the woman in a classical toga touted by Columbia.

Cynthia, Menik and I were part of a group of 12 who did the evening 6. 30 p.m. tour. The tour guide, dressed in tee shirt and jeans, a young man with a slight sprout round his chin, turned out to be the most entertaining part of the evening. He walked backwards through most of two hours, walking fast enough to make us stretch our legs. He talked facts, figures and sidelights, such as about Jeopardy, the quiz show which is filmed in Sony Columbia (let’s call it Sony), on an indoor set separately maintained; about one Merv Grifffin, who was the originator of the show idea, and how Merv Griffin earned US 80 million dollars in royalties for the Jeopardy theme tune and song! But this apparently was peanuts to the wealth that Griffin accumulated.

The audience is what makes talk shows (including quizzes) lively. They clap and laugh and provide a choric element. The audience for sitcoms or talk shows are not paid nor do they pay cash. However, once you enter the audience and sit you are captive in a real sense. You cannot leave till the show is over. The filming is done live on sets in front of the audience. Take a scene in a café for instance. The set is laid out like on a stage, with three walls for the café and one side open where the audience sits.

There are a huge number of cameras and lights overhead. Different cameras take pictures from different angles and these are combined or edited to provide a continuity or point of view. The actors perform not once, like on the stage, but many times to get the required quality scene. Signals appear before the audience from time to time: Applause or Laugh. Or Clap at twice the speed! When recorded and synchronized, the faster clapping can be made to sound as if a much larger crowd was clapping. And you better do that. Otherwise you may have to wait longer. So you come out of the show annoyed and tired but perhaps happy with the experience. But you cannot leave when you want to! And that may be for six to seven hours.

Apart from the scenes or locations where the movies are filmed the main activity areas are the sound productions units. In one section songs and music are recorded. We were shown what the guide said was the most popular – because it was acoustically the best – recording studio. It had walls covered with cardboard or similar material and it was littered with musical instruments, seats for musicians and podiums for conductors. This recording studio had been used by artists from Judy Garland onwards.

This is the Barbara Streisand room. (All rooms and other locales are named after film celebrities e.g. Gene Autry Square or Bob Hope room. When I think of an old musical like the Pirates of Penzanze, with the wonderful music and dancing of Judy Garland, in her twirling skirts and think that the wild energy and glamour of the music and song on board ship was really produced in this old cardboard walled room I am amazed at the actuality of the words “dream factory.”

Of course cardboard is not the only feature of sound production. The electronics and computers are visually “beyond belief,” the number of light points on the synthesiser seemed to be around five thousand – in all the colours of the rainbow. Often what is recorded when acting is not clear and dim, and the recording is done again and again without action and dubbed into the tape. Actors hate this gruelling event because the fun is already over. They are paid by the hour extra. In one case – a Tarzan film – the actress’ voice was completely replaced by another woman’s voice – Glenn Close’s voice – because the original actresses, voice did not suit the scenes.

The small flower and tree garden in front of the administrative building, (which also contains on show, the 13 Oscars won by the best 13 films by Sony Columbia) had been used to represent the huge Central Park in New York.

A short avenue through the studios has a neon sign saying “Main Street.” This is the only place where visitors are allowed to take pictures. Here there are shop fronts or office fronts, ready made for filming after adaptation. There is a police station, a ladies’ garments shop with models, a café front, a pub front, and so on and at night the lights are on as if it is a real street.

If you wish to show people walking on the side walk (pavement) you film them at below knee level so that you get the impression, when you take them in the background of the bogus shop fronts, that they are walking at a higher level than the road. Cars don’t roll along the Main Street on their own wheels. Their wheels are removed and they are placed on a trolley and pulled along and filmed appropriately to show they are travelling! And to supplement the camera tricks there are computers to manage further distortions of reality.

How much a part of the experience of a film is the introductory sequence of a person travelling in a car down a street? The introductory sequence says that life is a journey and when we enter the world of art we are entering on the quintessential journey symbolized by a travelling vehicle in which the camera is placed and through whose camera eyes we remark the passing scene. And yet the speeding car is in reality without wheels! And the street down which it speeds is only shop fronts placed beside each other with nothing behind or inside.

This is the world of work. When we were walking through the streets of the dream factory, work was going on, as it does day and night. Thirteen hour work days are normal during production. Menik’s neighbour in Culver City, Joan, who works in a “post production” sector of the studio, alighted from her car and greeted us as we were passing by. She was coming for work at 8 p.m. Everything is quiet on the lanes in the lot though the interior may be humming with activity. The largest studio is as tall and long as the Cinnamon Grand’s main building or the front building of the Colombo General Hospital on Regent Street. Through a door, which happened to be open, we saw a huge wooden set apparently containing a football stadium kind of set. Carpenters are at a premium in making dreams real.

Art according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet and literary theorist, depends on “the willing suspension of disbelief.” The dream factory enables the final product we enjoy by working hard at making artifacts, by taking craftsman like steps. Making a film is as much craft as art.