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LETTERS TO MY HIGH SCHOOL NEWSPAPER Passing Thoughts
So this may or may not be interesting to you, but IÕm going to tell you anyway, and at least give you a chance to make up your mind for yourself.
Something this morning reminded me of a particular morning in the early 1980s when I was working on the Paramount lot off Gower Street in Los Angeles.
I was doing a sitcom called All is Forgiven for NBC, and we had semi-permanent quarters there on the studio lot. Soundstage 11, one of the many huge faded pink structures you may have seen pictures of before.
You drive through the gate, show the guard your pass, go to your parking space with your name on it, and walk across the lot to your soundstage and enter.
A whole different world.
Our set was a family home, an office space, and a stage within a stage, since the show was about a soap opera being filmed. Too complicated to explain, but IÕm including a little clip from it to see if maybe Joe can include it here.
Otherwise, you kind of just have to take my word for it.
But all of this is included inside the studio building. There were about 20 such buildings on the Paramount lot at that time. Each building, each Studio, was about the size of half a football field. Close to that. So, you can imagine how big the studio lot was.
I know youÕve seen aerial photographs before. ItÕs the one with the big water tank with PARAMOUNT painted on its side, and the roofs from overhead of all these different studios in a row and side by side.
Our studio, Soundstage 11 for All is Forgiven, was right next to the Cheers soundstage, on one side, and the Family Ties soundstage, on the other.
In prior seasons, our soundstage had been the soundstage for Happy Days. Outside my little dressing room, alongside the building, was the basketball court Ron Howard had built for their down time while they were taping there.
Woody Harrelson would sometimes come over from the Cheers stage and shoot baskets.
Very young and very new to the business at the time, and a very good basketball player. I was not, and so I just watched my dressing room door. I hope you understand. I would never presume to shoot baskets with Ray Stein (Õ64) either. ItÕs kind of an unwritten code: Talent recognizes Talent. And so, I just watched my doorway the same way I watched Ray those many years, from Jason Lee all the way through Chief Jo and through Richland High School.
Anyway... IÕm not telling you this in order to drop names or show off.
I mean, IÕm not above doing that sort of thing generally; itÕs just that right now, at this particular time in this particular story, thatÕs not what I intend to do.
IÕm telling you the story in order to explain something.
In a canvas folding chair, I would sit outside the door of my dressing room on the Paramount Studio lot and watch the world go by in my spare time between scene tapings. And I saw an eye full.
I recognized actors from TV shows or the big screen. Workmen wheeled whole trees on large wagons past me, where I sat in my folding chair. Furniture on dollies. Groups of tourists in those large open-air vans with a driver on a little loudspeaker telling them what they were looking at. A couple of times some of them waved at me, and I, of course, waved back. And I could see them look at one another afterward, asking who theyÕd just waved at. ThatÕs okay, I told myself. My time would come. And it did. But that isnÕt what the story is about either.
The story is about the eyes through which I was looking at the world. You see, IÕd been in LA by then for about 4 years. IÕve been around enough that IÕd had a little success here and there. IÕd already done St. Elsewhere.
I had my name on a parking space on the Paramount lot.
But I still saw the world through the eyes of Terry Davis from 1608 Turner Street in Richland, Washington. I hope that makes sense. But I never lost that bedazzlement of my first time ever on a studio lot, riding my Vespa scooter to my first on-the-lot interview, when I actually had a pass with my name on it at the guard gate, and I had tears in my eyes when I folded that pass in my pocket and parked my scooter in its assigned space and went inside a building to meet my first casting director and do my first audition.
That newness, that innocence, that Joy, never left me. I never took any of it for granted.
Oh, I get tired sometimes. And I know I was a grumpy jerk sometimes. And I was guilty of the same excesses that a lot of the other people I read about are guilty of. I was no angel. But I never pretended to be, either. I never looked at the world through the eyes of an Angel. I always and forever saw what I was seeing though the same eyes that watched the world go by on Turner Street. And that was my gift. Truly a gift. The gift of loving every minute of it. Even the hard stuff.
But IÕll have to get back to that later. IÕm an old guy now, and these stories take a lot out of me
Terry DAVIS Knox Õ65
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