The City of Angels

It's funny how we learn the things we know about ourselves. Right now, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Los Angeles, writing this on a notepad made from old Grey's Anatomy shooting scripts. It's just one of the little things I picked up on a visit to the set of the show the other day. The other was a major personal insight.

I didn't know that my friend Julie was close friends with someone who worked on Grey's when I came to LA. And Julie didn't know that I was a fan of the show when she offered to get me a visit to the set. As we drove to the tiny lot in Silver Lake, just outside of LA proper, where the show is shot, Julie was apologizing profusely. It seemed we were going to get there just as everyone was breaking for lunch, so I probably wouldn't get to see any of the stars. But I didn't really care about that.

As our guide showed us around the dim labyrinth of the sound stage, bodies were everywhere. Crew members were catching a much-needed nap while the actors were all at lunch. On every gurney and operating table, there was a dusty overworked body, completely conked out. We walked through the nearly pitch-black sound stage and our guide joked that the place was more like the Winchester Mystery House than anything - which made perfect sense, considering the door marked "Exam Room #1" opened into the doctors' break room. The actors did eventually come back from lunch and I did get to see a take or two, but seeing the celebrities was really the least exciting part for me.

There's something magical about walking through an empty sound stage. It's the reality of the unreal that excites me – the strips of perfectly color-matched masking tape they use to hide the seams at the corners of the break-away walls, the various recipes for fake blood, the shelves lined with books on guns, medical maladies and a Seattle phone directory. The actors? The talent? I can really take or leave them. And that was the insight.

I'm a production person to the core. Yes, I am creative and I deal easily with creative people, but when it comes to what makes me happy, that's not where I want to be making my money. I want to take the idea and make it real, whose ever idea is it. I want to be painting masking tape to cover wall seams, I want to be figuring out what makes the perfect fake blood.

Of course, there's still a part of me that longs to write the Great American Novel or to see my name up in lights, but there's pivotal moment in every artist's life where he somehow finds that what he longs for isn't what will make him happiest in the end.

In either case, it's the magic that calls.