Hollywood - Manhattan Beach - via Santa Monica
Things change very suddenly between the scummy areas like the part of Sunset Boulevard where our motel was, and the opulence of Beverly Hills. I think we passed the police station where Eddy Murphy hangs around in Beverly Hills Cop, but I can't be sure.
In Santa Monica, the end of Route 66, we parked up, strolled and paddled along the beach to the pier, walked to the end and watched the fishermen.
We had to find another motel early, because yesterday we picked up free tickets to the shooting of a TV show -- the Geena Davies show. Santa Monica is out of our price range, Debbie wanted to be near the sea, so we drove to the Manhattan Beach area and got a room at the Seahorse Inn - "minutes from the sea", but actually about a mile inland.
The freeway traffic back to Hollywood and the Disney studio complex (on Buena Vista Street!) was a nightmare, and we had to drop food from our schedule to make it there on time. Our tickets only gave us the right to queue: there was no guarantee of getting into the studio at all, but we made it. Other people in the queue clearly made a habit of doing this - they were comparing notes about what shows they'd seen and the facilities in various studios.
Everyone assumed that the Geena Davies Show would be a chat show. It turned out to a a family sitcom in the Cybill mould. Seeing a sitcom being filmed is really quite interesting. All the interior sets are built in a row on one stage. A warm-up comedian gets the audience excited, but also explains our duties: we're there to provide a laugh track, so jokes which we'd normally titter at, we must laugh out loud. On the second or third take, we must try hard to laugh in the same places we did last time.
It wasn't a very good sitcom, but we were impressed by the process. Most scenes were done in one or two takes, and the warm-up man kept us entertained in between scenes as the cameras repositioned and the actors got changed. Everything was shot in sequence, except for the odd location scene which we were shown on video to keep us up to speed with the plot.
In case you see it on TV, my laugh is in the 3rd episode, where Teddy gets upset because her bloke doesn't get jealous about an old flame of hers.
It was late when we got back to Manhattan Beach, and we could only find food at a drive-through McDonalds.