Practically every day, cars stop in front of our house and people get out to take pictures of it, and of us—me and my wife and daughter—if we happen to be outside. Or they'll take one of Tony, who cuts half the neighborhood's grass. Tony loves it. He poses for them, with his rake and lawn bags, grinning, one arm thrown wide as if to say, "All this, my friends." I've told him several times to start charging, but he won't even hear it. He does it, he says, because it makes him feel famous. Usually it's only one or two cars. Other times it's eight or nine in a day. It depends what time of year it is, and what's happening on the Internet. Once there was an event of some kind in town, and we got more than twenty. I go for long stretches when I forget it's even happening. I really don't see them, since I don't leave the house that much, and they're always quiet, they never make trouble. But a month ago my new neighbor, Nicholas, who just moved in next door, came over to introduce himself. He's a tall thin guy in his fifties, glasses and a white beard. Very nice, very sociable. Before he left, he said, "Can I ask you something? Have you noticed that people are always taking pictures of your house?"
"Yeah," I said—pressing play on my spiel—"it's silly, I know, but our house used to be on TV, not anymore, those people are fans.… Isn't that funny?"
"I mean, it is constant," he said.
"I know!" I said. "Hope it doesn't bother you. Tell me if it ever gets annoying."
"No, no, I don't mind," he said. "They're always polite. They almost seem embarrassed."
"Well, tell me if that changes," I said.
"Okay," he said. "I just can't believe how many there are."
Nicholas and I have now had some version of that conversation three times, one for each week he's lived next door. Every time, I've wanted to tell him it's going to end, except I don't know if it will. It may increase.
The story goes some way toward explaining how my wife and I got permission from a bank to buy a giant brick neocolonial house—also how the world economy went into free fall, but that's for another time and a writer with nothing to do but an enormous amount of careful research. My wife was eight months pregnant, and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the converted ground floor of an antebellum house, on a noisy street downtown, with an eccentric upstairs neighbor, Keef, from Leland, who told me that I was a rich man—that's how he put it, "Y'er a rich man, ain't ye?"—who told us that he was going to shoot his daughter's boyfriend with an ultra-accurate sniper rifle he owned, for filling his daughter full of drugs, "shoot him below the knee," he said, "that way they cain't get you with intent to kill." Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tattoos but told us he'd lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he'd saved a drowning black boy's life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience "came to love some blacks." He later fell off a two-story painting ladder and broke all his bones. A fascinating man, but not the sort I wanted my daughter having unlimited exposure to in her formative years. Not my angel. We entered nesting panic. We wanted big and solid. We wanted Greatest Generation, but their parents, even greater. We found it. It had a sleeping porch, and a shiplike attic where I in my dotage would pull objects from a trunk and tell their histories to little ones. We asked for the money, and in some office somebody's boss came forward with the Stamp.
Around the time it became clear that we'd gotten ahead of ourselves financially—and thinking back, that was a seismic twinge in advance of the market meltdown, a message from the bowels that people like the guy with four cell phones and a Jersey accent working out of a storage unit in Charlotte, who'd loaned us the money, probably shouldn't have been loaning hundreds of thousands of dollars to people like me—that was when we remembered something our buyer's agent, Andy, had said. Something about a TV show that might want to use the house. Somebody might be calling us. We had written it down. A guy named Greg.
Often I think of Greg. What an amazing guy. Truly amazing, as in he brought us into a maze. We only ever saw him once. I've never seen him since. And this is a small town—you see people. It was like they flew him in for this meeting. He was a big guy in a loose Hawaiian shirt. Goatee, sunglasses. Did he tell me he played rugby, or did he look exactly like someone I knew who played rugby? He sat across from us at our kitchen table, a thirteen-foot dark wood table that purportedly came in pieces from a Norwegian farmhouse, relic of nesting panic (long table, order). Greg sat across from us. He explained that they'd mostly be using only the front two rooms of the house. This was the place they mainly shot. The rest of our character's house had been re-created on a set, and the transitions would be made seamless in editing.
He laid out the deal they'd struck with the previous owners. We move you into a Hilton. Meals and per diem. We put everything back the way it was. We take Polaroids of your bookshelves to make sure we've put the books in order. That's how thorough we are. We even pay people to come in afterward and clean up. The house looks better than you left it.
We'll pay you $—— for an exterior shoot, $—— for interiors. The combined amount equaled our mortgage.
Yes, I think we can work something out.
"The front two rooms"—that phrase, in particular, we heard repeated: It has a poetic density to it, like "cellar door," so I remember. The front two rooms.
For the last several years, the big ticket in town has been the teen melodrama One Tree Hill, which was on the WB and is now on the CW Network. Don't let the off brands fool you, though; a surprising number of people watch it, maybe even you, for all I know. It's one of the worst TV shows ever made, and I seriously do not mean that as an insult. It's bad in the way that Mexican TV is bad, superstylized bad. Good bad. Indeed, there are times when the particular campiness of its badness, although I can sense its presence, is in fact beyond me, beyond my frequency, like that beep you play on the Internet that only kids can hear. Too many of my camp-receptor cells have died. Possibly One Tree Hill is a work of genius. Certainly it is about to go nine seasons, strongly suggesting that the mother of its creator, Mark Schwahn, did not give birth to any idiots, or if she did those people are Schwahn's siblings.
The One Tree character who supposedly lived in our house was Peyton, played by one of the stars, Hilarie Burton, a striking bone-thin blonde. Think coppery curls. I'd seen her on MTV right at the moment when I was first feeling too old to watch MTV. Superfriendly when we met her, superfriendly always. Hilarie has a golden reputation in Wilmington. She's one of the cast members who've made the place home, and she gets involved in local things. When we met, she gave us hugs, complimented the house, thanked us for letting them use it. She disarmed us—good manners had not been what we'd expected. (...)
Now Peyton lived here, and they needed to bring over her stuff. Greg had given us a choice: Either we can switch our furniture out with yours every time—load up your stuff and haul it away; haul in our stuff, use it, haul it away; reload your stuff—we’re actually willing to do that before and after each shoot. Or we can just leave our stuff here. Treat it as your own. We’ll take it away when the show is over. Let us decorate your new house for you. They may let you keep a few pieces.
Theoretically that made sense. In reality (a word I can hardly use without laughing), it meant that we lived on a TV set. Of course, they consulted us on everything, showing us furniture catalogs, guiding us toward choices that both suited our taste and looked like something Peyton would have in her home. It meant more tasteful floral patterns than I’d expected, but that was okay. Maybe there was a little Peyton in me. (...)
I had a high school Latin teacher named Marcia Markopolos, an enormous person—she often needed a wheelchair to get about, for her girth and what it had done to her knees—also a brilliant teacher. She married young, but her husband was killed in Vietnam. Bottle-blond beehive hairdo. She schlepped between public schools, teaching the few Latin courses they could still fill, using a medical forklift thing that moved her in and out of her van. She was captivating on the ancient world. She told us how the Roman army at its most mercilessly efficient used to stop every afternoon, build a city, live in it that night, eat and fuck and play dice and argue strategy and sharpen weapons and go to the toilet in it, pack it up the next morning, and march.
That description came to mind when the show arrived for the season’s first shoot. With the baby barely two weeks old, we’d felt that she was too small to be moving back and forth from house to Hilton. They did a series of scenes with us in the house, sequestered upstairs.
Boxy light trucks appeared in a row down the street, a line of white buffalo. It was very E.T., the scene where they take him away. Cops were parked on the corners, directing traffic and shooing gawkers. In a nearby field they pitched the food tent, which soon buzzed with crew. The stars ate in a van. I looked out the window—miles of cable, banks of lights, porta-potties, walkie-talkies.
It was a day shoot, but a night scene. They had blacked most of the windows. Upstairs, where we were, it was afternoon. Downstairs it was about ten o’clock at night. From the sound, I guessed there were twenty strangers in the house. Silence. We listened.
Peyton’s voice.
I can’t remember the line. It was something like "That’s not what I wanted." And then another character said something. Footsteps. The director was having Hilarie do the line different ways.
"That not what I wanted."
"That’s NOT WHAT I WANTED."
"That’s not what I WANTED."
You got a sense, even through the floorboards, of former-kid-star work ethic from Hilarie, giving 100 percent. And rolling. And rolling. No brattiness, every take usable.
We heard general chatter and could tell they were breaking off the scene. As the baby nursed, we listened for the next one.
No next one. They were done, moving out. Gone by midnight, traffic barriers picked up. The city vanished. It had existed for about twenty seconds of footage.
The second shoot followed close on the first period an exterior this time. We had family in town: that was fun. It gratified us to see them get a little thrill from it all, the occasional celebrity sighting. Of course, it also meant that some memorable life-changing moments from my first days of being a father—of holding my own child in the kitchen and seeing the generations together—happened while Peyton was on the back patio having equally intense times. One of her fathers, who’d been a merchant marine, had come to port and was trying to get back into her world. I may be slightly off on that; I had to put it together from dialogue fragments.
You could see Hilarie’s sweetness in the way she humored our families. The scene called for her to run through the backyard, up the steps to the back screen door, say, "No, Dad!" and slam the door behind her. Each time she executed a take, my mother and 90-year-old Cuban grandmother-in-law, their faces squeezed together in the window of the porch door, would smile and furiously wave at her through the glass as we begged them to sit. Hilarie waved back, just absorbing it into her process. "No, Dad." (Slam, smile, wave, turn.) "Dad, no!" (Slam, smile, wave, turn.)
Did she want some black beans? Abuela asked. She was so skinny! "No, no, I’m fine. Thank you, though." (To my wife, behind the hand, "They’re so sweet.")
She had a barbecue going out back. A grill, burgers. Picnic tables. All gone by dark. And at some point the next morning, a check flew in at the door without a sound. As the ending voice-over of a One Tree episode might have put it, things were a little crazy, but we were going to be all right.
One thing did happen during the set-decoration phase. It was small, but the symbolism of it was so obvious, so articulate, I really should have paid more attention. They wallpapered the stairwell and put up light sconces. It was the first little toe-wander across the Greg Perimeter, that line around the front two rooms. It was the first shy tentacle-tap, the first tendril-nuzzle.
by John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ | Read more:
Image: One Tree Hill
"Yeah," I said—pressing play on my spiel—"it's silly, I know, but our house used to be on TV, not anymore, those people are fans.… Isn't that funny?"
"I mean, it is constant," he said."I know!" I said. "Hope it doesn't bother you. Tell me if it ever gets annoying."
"No, no, I don't mind," he said. "They're always polite. They almost seem embarrassed."
"Well, tell me if that changes," I said.
"Okay," he said. "I just can't believe how many there are."
Nicholas and I have now had some version of that conversation three times, one for each week he's lived next door. Every time, I've wanted to tell him it's going to end, except I don't know if it will. It may increase.
···
My brother-in-law sells trailers in the Arizona desert—indeed, he professes to "have the trailer game in a choke hold" in that part of the world. Not long ago he told me about the Stamp. He had a boss whose office was across from his in the trailer they worked out of. The boss had a huge specially made rubber stamp on his desk that read APPROVED. Whenever things were getting tense in my brother-in-law's office, when the boss could hear that negotiations were becoming sticky, usually on the matter of the prospective buyer's gaining loan approval, in he would saunter with the Stamp. Saunter doesn't describe his walk, which my brother-in-law imitated. The boss was a little guy, and his legs sort of wheeled out from his body as he walked, like something you'd associate with a degenerative hip condition. He'd come wheeling up to the desk like that and BAM bring down the Stamp on the application, APPROVED. Then he wheeled away, leaving the buyers stunned and, as it dawned on them, delighted. "You understand," my brother-in-law said, "a lot of the people I was selling to were Gypsies. As in literal Gypsies. They didn't have mailing addresses."The story goes some way toward explaining how my wife and I got permission from a bank to buy a giant brick neocolonial house—also how the world economy went into free fall, but that's for another time and a writer with nothing to do but an enormous amount of careful research. My wife was eight months pregnant, and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the converted ground floor of an antebellum house, on a noisy street downtown, with an eccentric upstairs neighbor, Keef, from Leland, who told me that I was a rich man—that's how he put it, "Y'er a rich man, ain't ye?"—who told us that he was going to shoot his daughter's boyfriend with an ultra-accurate sniper rifle he owned, for filling his daughter full of drugs, "shoot him below the knee," he said, "that way they cain't get you with intent to kill." Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tattoos but told us he'd lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he'd saved a drowning black boy's life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience "came to love some blacks." He later fell off a two-story painting ladder and broke all his bones. A fascinating man, but not the sort I wanted my daughter having unlimited exposure to in her formative years. Not my angel. We entered nesting panic. We wanted big and solid. We wanted Greatest Generation, but their parents, even greater. We found it. It had a sleeping porch, and a shiplike attic where I in my dotage would pull objects from a trunk and tell their histories to little ones. We asked for the money, and in some office somebody's boss came forward with the Stamp.
Around the time it became clear that we'd gotten ahead of ourselves financially—and thinking back, that was a seismic twinge in advance of the market meltdown, a message from the bowels that people like the guy with four cell phones and a Jersey accent working out of a storage unit in Charlotte, who'd loaned us the money, probably shouldn't have been loaning hundreds of thousands of dollars to people like me—that was when we remembered something our buyer's agent, Andy, had said. Something about a TV show that might want to use the house. Somebody might be calling us. We had written it down. A guy named Greg.
Often I think of Greg. What an amazing guy. Truly amazing, as in he brought us into a maze. We only ever saw him once. I've never seen him since. And this is a small town—you see people. It was like they flew him in for this meeting. He was a big guy in a loose Hawaiian shirt. Goatee, sunglasses. Did he tell me he played rugby, or did he look exactly like someone I knew who played rugby? He sat across from us at our kitchen table, a thirteen-foot dark wood table that purportedly came in pieces from a Norwegian farmhouse, relic of nesting panic (long table, order). Greg sat across from us. He explained that they'd mostly be using only the front two rooms of the house. This was the place they mainly shot. The rest of our character's house had been re-created on a set, and the transitions would be made seamless in editing.
He laid out the deal they'd struck with the previous owners. We move you into a Hilton. Meals and per diem. We put everything back the way it was. We take Polaroids of your bookshelves to make sure we've put the books in order. That's how thorough we are. We even pay people to come in afterward and clean up. The house looks better than you left it.
We'll pay you $—— for an exterior shoot, $—— for interiors. The combined amount equaled our mortgage.
Yes, I think we can work something out.
"The front two rooms"—that phrase, in particular, we heard repeated: It has a poetic density to it, like "cellar door," so I remember. The front two rooms.
···
A lot of movies and TV shows are shot here, in our adopted coastal hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina—Wilmywood. It started when the late Frank Capra Jr. came here to make Firestarter in the early '80s. He liked the place and stayed, and an industry evolved around him. Dennis Hopper bought property. Now half the kids who wait on you downtown are extras, or want to be actors. You'll be in Target and realize you're in line behind Val Kilmer. We have studios and a film school, and we're known in the business for our exceptionally wide variety of locations. You can be doing beachy beachy and suddenly go leafy established suburb, go country hayride, then nighttime happening street, pretty much whatever.For the last several years, the big ticket in town has been the teen melodrama One Tree Hill, which was on the WB and is now on the CW Network. Don't let the off brands fool you, though; a surprising number of people watch it, maybe even you, for all I know. It's one of the worst TV shows ever made, and I seriously do not mean that as an insult. It's bad in the way that Mexican TV is bad, superstylized bad. Good bad. Indeed, there are times when the particular campiness of its badness, although I can sense its presence, is in fact beyond me, beyond my frequency, like that beep you play on the Internet that only kids can hear. Too many of my camp-receptor cells have died. Possibly One Tree Hill is a work of genius. Certainly it is about to go nine seasons, strongly suggesting that the mother of its creator, Mark Schwahn, did not give birth to any idiots, or if she did those people are Schwahn's siblings.
The One Tree character who supposedly lived in our house was Peyton, played by one of the stars, Hilarie Burton, a striking bone-thin blonde. Think coppery curls. I'd seen her on MTV right at the moment when I was first feeling too old to watch MTV. Superfriendly when we met her, superfriendly always. Hilarie has a golden reputation in Wilmington. She's one of the cast members who've made the place home, and she gets involved in local things. When we met, she gave us hugs, complimented the house, thanked us for letting them use it. She disarmed us—good manners had not been what we'd expected. (...)
Now Peyton lived here, and they needed to bring over her stuff. Greg had given us a choice: Either we can switch our furniture out with yours every time—load up your stuff and haul it away; haul in our stuff, use it, haul it away; reload your stuff—we’re actually willing to do that before and after each shoot. Or we can just leave our stuff here. Treat it as your own. We’ll take it away when the show is over. Let us decorate your new house for you. They may let you keep a few pieces.
Theoretically that made sense. In reality (a word I can hardly use without laughing), it meant that we lived on a TV set. Of course, they consulted us on everything, showing us furniture catalogs, guiding us toward choices that both suited our taste and looked like something Peyton would have in her home. It meant more tasteful floral patterns than I’d expected, but that was okay. Maybe there was a little Peyton in me. (...)
I had a high school Latin teacher named Marcia Markopolos, an enormous person—she often needed a wheelchair to get about, for her girth and what it had done to her knees—also a brilliant teacher. She married young, but her husband was killed in Vietnam. Bottle-blond beehive hairdo. She schlepped between public schools, teaching the few Latin courses they could still fill, using a medical forklift thing that moved her in and out of her van. She was captivating on the ancient world. She told us how the Roman army at its most mercilessly efficient used to stop every afternoon, build a city, live in it that night, eat and fuck and play dice and argue strategy and sharpen weapons and go to the toilet in it, pack it up the next morning, and march.
That description came to mind when the show arrived for the season’s first shoot. With the baby barely two weeks old, we’d felt that she was too small to be moving back and forth from house to Hilton. They did a series of scenes with us in the house, sequestered upstairs.
Boxy light trucks appeared in a row down the street, a line of white buffalo. It was very E.T., the scene where they take him away. Cops were parked on the corners, directing traffic and shooing gawkers. In a nearby field they pitched the food tent, which soon buzzed with crew. The stars ate in a van. I looked out the window—miles of cable, banks of lights, porta-potties, walkie-talkies.
It was a day shoot, but a night scene. They had blacked most of the windows. Upstairs, where we were, it was afternoon. Downstairs it was about ten o’clock at night. From the sound, I guessed there were twenty strangers in the house. Silence. We listened.
Peyton’s voice.
I can’t remember the line. It was something like "That’s not what I wanted." And then another character said something. Footsteps. The director was having Hilarie do the line different ways.
"That not what I wanted."
"That’s NOT WHAT I WANTED."
"That’s not what I WANTED."
You got a sense, even through the floorboards, of former-kid-star work ethic from Hilarie, giving 100 percent. And rolling. And rolling. No brattiness, every take usable.
We heard general chatter and could tell they were breaking off the scene. As the baby nursed, we listened for the next one.
No next one. They were done, moving out. Gone by midnight, traffic barriers picked up. The city vanished. It had existed for about twenty seconds of footage.
The second shoot followed close on the first period an exterior this time. We had family in town: that was fun. It gratified us to see them get a little thrill from it all, the occasional celebrity sighting. Of course, it also meant that some memorable life-changing moments from my first days of being a father—of holding my own child in the kitchen and seeing the generations together—happened while Peyton was on the back patio having equally intense times. One of her fathers, who’d been a merchant marine, had come to port and was trying to get back into her world. I may be slightly off on that; I had to put it together from dialogue fragments.
You could see Hilarie’s sweetness in the way she humored our families. The scene called for her to run through the backyard, up the steps to the back screen door, say, "No, Dad!" and slam the door behind her. Each time she executed a take, my mother and 90-year-old Cuban grandmother-in-law, their faces squeezed together in the window of the porch door, would smile and furiously wave at her through the glass as we begged them to sit. Hilarie waved back, just absorbing it into her process. "No, Dad." (Slam, smile, wave, turn.) "Dad, no!" (Slam, smile, wave, turn.)
Did she want some black beans? Abuela asked. She was so skinny! "No, no, I’m fine. Thank you, though." (To my wife, behind the hand, "They’re so sweet.")
She had a barbecue going out back. A grill, burgers. Picnic tables. All gone by dark. And at some point the next morning, a check flew in at the door without a sound. As the ending voice-over of a One Tree episode might have put it, things were a little crazy, but we were going to be all right.
One thing did happen during the set-decoration phase. It was small, but the symbolism of it was so obvious, so articulate, I really should have paid more attention. They wallpapered the stairwell and put up light sconces. It was the first little toe-wander across the Greg Perimeter, that line around the front two rooms. It was the first shy tentacle-tap, the first tendril-nuzzle.
by John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ | Read more:
Image: One Tree Hill
