When Hollywood Invades the Hood
It starts quietly — with the ominous fluttering of paper. A smattering of notices taped to doors and lightposts proclaiming, “Hollywood is coming to town, and we have chosen, your — yes your — ‘hood to be the scene of the scene.”
Rapidly, the momentum builds — traffic cones appear on sidewalks, lighting rigs clutter the areas in front of stoops, crew men amble down the street as if they owned the very concrete under their boots, and, finally, that monstrosity of monstrosities — the craft services trailer — rolls into town. Yes. The invasion is complete, and with it comes one of the most unlikely of alliances: hipsters and old people.
You see, at any other point in the year, the hipsters and the neighborhood old folks (read: the people the hipsters are rapidly replacing) are at constant war. Old folks hate hipsters for their Bacchanalian ways, and hipsters hate old folks because, well, old folks yell at them. However, when Hollywood enters the equation the two factions call a cease fire and join together in harmonious union against their Tinsel Town tormenters.
Hipsters loudly curse and shoot nasty glances at dastardly location scouts when they choose to shut down the h-kids’ coffee shop for the day to shoot The Good Wife (“Where the fuck am I supposed to design this website for that sketchy bed bug removal service? I’m a freelancer, man. This is my fucking office! Do I go into your Hollywood coke den and set up my laptop among the white lines? Actually… can you give me the addy for said den?”). Old people, for their part, call the cops when late-night (read: 7 p.m.) shoots of Bored to Death rouse them from their near-death slumber.
The two factions saunter down the sidewalk, side-by-side, telling frantic crew members to “Fuck off!” when asked to cross to the other side of the street because “they’re in the shot.” “Well, you’re in my hood!” they cry in unison, and then turn toward each other, offer up sheepish, triumphant smiles and say, “Fucking Hollywood. They think they can come in here and run roughshod over our town!” And in that one, glorious moment — they believe it. This is their town. United under God (or some other higher being — give it up for my agnostics!).
You know, until shooting wraps and the craft services truck trundles out and hipsters go back to being the most annoying folks on the block. But for now, they’re like P, B, and J, man. P, B and a carefully rolled J.
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