Show #1 of my Urinating in Public Summer Tour is now up and running, somewhere in Hollywood. Good luck finding it. Presented by Gallery 5043. Art shows where bums pee. It's free, open to the public, and will still probably manage piss someone off. People get irate about the dumbest things these days. Photos are from my #SEstreetlife series, many of which appear on this blog. Show runs until all photos are stolen. Enjoy! #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
The Hollywood sign seen through the Hollywood & Highland Center, 2020. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
TCL Chinese Theater, formerly Grumman's Chinese Theater. Hollywood Boulevard, 2021. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Hollywood Boulevard with stormtrooper, 2020. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Hollywood Boulevard with old Grumman's Chinese Theater signs. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
The Ripley's Believe It Or Not T-Rex, durnig the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020. #SEstreetlife, #Stevemigphotos
Hollywood... and of dreams or land of nighmares? It depends on your situation. Homeless person passed out on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 2019. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Street performing break dancer on Hollywood Boulevard. That little fenced off area was protecting Donald Trump's star for many months, during the 2020 election cycle. They covered his star with a piece of plywood, with a big sand bag on top of that, surrounded by the little fence. There was nothing to tell tourists why the fence was there, so people just thought it was a construction project or something. 2020. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Street art installation by unknown street artist, 2020. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Bruce Lee's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 2019. #SEstreelife, #steveemigphotos
The Damn Team, a street performing dance team. Ending their show at Hollywood and Highland area, with a flip over five crowd members. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Mel's Drive-in on Highland, just south of Hollywood Boulevard, in Hollywood. 2020. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Graffiti in Hollywood, 2020. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Those Turtles, TMNT, graffiti in Hollywood, 2020. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
Hollywood Boulevard is a weird scene. Full service panhandler trying to make a dollar, 2019. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
YouTube compilation of several days on The Pyramid on American Gladiators, from 1993-1995. The only decent shot of me working as a spotter is at 11:45 in this clip. I didn't see a clear shot of Chris or Neal. If you guys see one, let me know, I'll tag it.
Many, many years ago, in the summers of 1992 to 1995, I worked on the stage crew of the hit TV show, American Gladiators. I stumbled into the "real" TV production world, thanks to a former coworker, in 1991. Before that I worked at Vision Skateboard's video company, from 1987 to 1990. I landed a job as a spotter on the American Gladiators crew for the 5th season, in 1992. I worked the last four seasons that we shot the show, on the CBS Studios lot in Studio City, California.
The job of us spotters started with 6 or 8 days of practicing the different games with the Gladiators and contenders. Since the producers didn't want them sparring with each other until the show taping days, us spotters got to be the Gladiators while practicing against the contenders, and be the contenders practicing against the Gladiators. Right from day one we were taking some hits, and physicallt working hard. After surviving that week, we went on to tape the shows, for abou tsix weeks, in the aircraft hanger-sized Stage 3. Since we shot in the summer, most shows were on hiatus, and we used the Roseanne stage and Tom Arnold Show stages, Stage #1 & 2, as storage for our huge set pieces, along with many of the alleyways between stages.
On several games, like Breakthrough and Conquer, Powerball, and The Pyramid, us spotters would be on the sidelines, holding white karate pads, or at the bottom of the Pyramid, to keep players from going out of bounds and crashing into stuff, like a $70,000 studio camera. On some games, like Swingshot and The Wall, we would fasten the carbiners into Gladiators' and contenders' harnesses, hooking them to their safety lines or bungee cords. But our real job was to help the grips and riggers in between the games, changing sets from one game to another. One old crew guy told me American Gladiators did the biggest set changes in the history of TV, and we did them seven times a day, every taping day, for about six weeks of shooting. Most TV shows would do one, maybe two set changes per day.
The third and fourth seasons I worked as a spotter, was the head spotter, and it was my job to lead the crew. While that may not seem like much, the other stage crews, the grips, riggers, and camera crew had all been working together for years. I had to take 7 guys who had never met each other, and have them working like a tight, cohesive team, in about 8 days. If we did our job well, and worked efficiently, we could take about an hour off of everyone's work day, by helping the other stage crews do faster set changes. That last season, my crew kicked ass, and we hardly ever went into overtime, which saved the production about $100,000 or so over the course of seven weeks. We earned our $90-$125 a day.
Two of the guys on that last year's crew were a couple of writer/director, film school guys, out of Philedelphia, Chris and Neil. They were smart guys, and good workers. But they weren't used to the kind of physical labor we expected of them. Both guys worked their asses their asses off though, in their first TV industry job.
We added the pyramid the season before, I think. While not as big and heavy as the Egyptian or Mayan pyramids. we had to move that huge monstrosity nearly every day, in and out, of the massive Stage 3 building. The top came off with winches, and the three bottom parts were over 20 feet high, and weighed something like 20,000 pounds each. It took about 15 of us grips and spotters to move each piece around the wall, out the giant stage door, and around the corner, where we parked them outside. They were mostly huge steel frames, sitting on one foot diameter dolly wheels, that cost $110 each. Once those things huge pyramid pieces got moving, they wanted to keep moving, and not always in the direction we wanted them to. Every time we moved those pieces it was a battle.
One day there was an accident involving Chris. Chris is now a successful writer, director, podcaster, and comedian. In a podcast recently, he told the story of that fateful day moving the Pyramid. I'll let him tell his story. You can find it at 33:52 in this Troubled Waters podcast. You can find out what Chris Mancini is up to these days with @chrisjmancini on Twitter. You can check out Neal with @FilmNerdNeil on Twitter.
Something reminded me about working on American Gladiators a few months ago, and I looked up Chris and Neal on Twitter, and reconnected. Chris tagged me when he did this podcast, and I knew I needed to do blogpost about it before long. In addition, I lived way down in Orange County when we taped those shows, and rented a cheap motel room in Studio City for the weeks I worked on the show. By "cheap motel" I mean the kind that often had hookers out front when I got back from work each day. Neal happened to be housesitting a huge house in the Hollywood Hills, for his aunt and uncle, that summer. So Chris and Neal graciously let me stay in one of the many spare rooms for most of the time we were working, which was super cool. Huge thanks for that guys!
I don't have lots of money these days, but between my BMX industry days, working on a few TV crews, being a taxi driver, and being homeless for a long time, I have LOTS of stories. I really haven't shared hardly any of my TV crew guy stories with anyone. I may share a few more as this blog rolls along. Let me know people, if you liked this post.
If you are in, or headed to Hollywood, check out my online tourist guide to Hollywood:
You see a lot of weird things when you're living on the streets, but a lot of it is not stuff most people imagine. In the media, when people talk about homelessness, there's a ton of talk about needles and poop everywhere. Yeah, I see where people have taken a dump on a regular basis, since there are not enough public restrooms. And once in a while, I see needles somewhere from an addict, but not very often. But I see a lot more day to day, than those things. Like the dead roach above, that somehow got stuck on a piece of bubble gum, and died. This was on a sidewalk in a nice area of The Valley. I just looked down and said, "What the fuck? How did that happen?" All the things humans do to kill roaches, and no one has tried bubble gum. Crazy.
When the work that brought me back to California didn't work out, I headed down to Orange County, where I spent the summer of 2019. I lived in the Huntington Beach area for most of the 20 years from 1987-2008. But I just kept getting pushed from one area to another that summer. So I headed up to L.A. county, and landed in Hollywood with 85 cents in my pocket, in early September of 2019. I was looking for a place to try and sell my Sharpie art on the street, and figure out what to do next. The guy in gray above, a break dancer, was one of the local street artists at Hollywood and Highland daily, pre-Covid. He would stand there motionless, until someone put a dollar in his jar, then start dancing, and try to draw a crowd.
But he's not why I took this photo, I shot him for an interesting foreground. See that little fenced off area in the background, which has something light colored in it. It looks like there's some construction going on, right? Nope? Inside that fenced area, under a piece of plywood, with a sandbag on top of it, is Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. While not much happened on the Mexico border that he was always drumming on about, Trump got a fence built... around his star. For much of Trump's presidency, this is how his star in Hollywood looked, hidden from all the people who might want to damage it, disguised as a bit of construction. So he did get a fence built, a little bitty one. I always found that funny. Fuckin' douchebag.
While selling little pieces of art in Hollywood to survive, I spent the nights over the hill in The Valley, where things were less crazy at night. There were still a lot of homeless people in the area, but it wasn't as nutty, or as dangerous, as Hollywood a night. This area, a corner of Studio City by Universal Studios, called Universal City, had some good street art appear from time to time. You know that guy who does the Obey stuff? Yeah, this is one of his pieces, that popped up around the time of the 2020 election. "Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere." It's more true now than when this poster showed up.
This was an actual mural, on a boarded over building. There's a small business in the building, but they just put plywood over the old windows, and got a couple murals painted on the wood, by a local artist. This was actually up before Covid showed up on U.S. shores, and became more timely. On Ventura, near the bottom of the hill. It's been tagged over since.
Possibly the most iconic street art image of our times. The late Andre' the Giant, stylized, reminding you to blindly Obey. Or not. Universal City area in 2022. #streetart, #steveemigphotos
Stay up! One of the lesser known pieces from that Obey guy. This one stayed up for many months. Right above the "ey," someone wrote, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me." Rage. #steveemigphotos, #obey, #streetart
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