Hollywood Vision (Not!)

Pet Peeve:

Hollywood producers have long had the habit of shooting location footage in their back yard and calling it Rome. Or Alaska. Or Seattle. Or New Jersey, where I happened to grow up. What these people seem obliviously, vaingloriously, utterly incapable of grasping, or even imagining, is that the rest of the world, or for that matter the rest of the country, does not in the slightest resemble those brown, burned out hills and valleys that surround Los Angeles, and resemble nothing so much as, well, Los Angeles.

This past week I was watching two of my favorite shows, and they are favorites no more, because I have become so weary of having burnt brown stains smeared across my screen and being asked to believe it is Seattle, or Princeton, or Niagara Falls. Do these people in Hollywood actually imagine that nobody outside of Los Angeles County (or for that matter, inside of Los Angeles County) ever goes outside, opens their eyes, and looks around? That we won't notice the Hollywood sign hanging over, say, Brooklyn?

The first offender this past week was the series that specializes in graphic gruesome detail, apparently more titillating by a long shot then, say, sex, to these people, these days. It's called 'Bones,' appropriately enough I suppose, although it's rarely about anything that basic or natural. This week's episode of Bones featured, or we were being asked to believe it featured, a bone yard on an upstate New York campus, on the Canadian border. Now, I happen to have spent several years getting my bachelors degree on a university campus in upstate New York (Syracuse) and while it often had more than I cared for in the way of snow, or ice, or leaves blowin' in the wind, or arboreal forests, not to mention numerous frigid lakes and rivers, what it did not ever look like, even once, was a flowerless, grassless, treeless brown dirt yard out back behind, say, Burbank, where this dismal footage was so obviously filmed.

The other offending episode was from my favorite 'Jersey' show, 'HOUSE' about a person of that name, not a building, for those of you who might be unaware. 'House' is supposed to take place in the very elegant and stylish (and historic) town of Princeton, New Jersey, at a medical center adjacient to the university by that name. Blessedly, these producers sent out a B unit to take some stock footage of the area, which they use in the main titles. ('Bones' is supposedly based in Washington, D.C., and stock footage of that area is also used in the main title, and nowhere else). Now, if you haven't been to Princeton, you should go, it's a beautiful town. Unlike, say, the brown hills above Woodlawn Cemetery, where they apparently film 'House' as well as 'Bones.' This week's 'House' episode also involved a road trip. And this gets into yet another of my least favorite Hollywood conventions: long boring car scenes in which two actors pretend to be riding in a car while spewing hours of verbal exposition (in Bones, they will ride in a car without stopping for so much as a traffic light for ten minutes at a time in the middle of D.C.--try that some time!). The oldest convention in Hollywood is to run stock footage in the background of scenery rolling past. Unfortunately, said scenery is always of the highways and byways of Los Angeles, looking exactly like Los Angeles, and nowhere else, with brown treeless hills and boring neighborhoods and mini-malls everywhere.

Even my current favorite show, 'Grey's Anatomy,' supposedly set in Seattle, where I now live, features brown treeless hills for a background, whenever they show the grand foyer of the supposed Seattle Grace Hospital, and the 'landscape' beyond. Here's a clue, Hollywood location managers and producers: Mt. Rainier does not in the least bit resemble the Hollywood Sign. And Puget Sound does not consist of a brown blotch of Van Nuys Airport runway. And Princeton, N.J. does not look in the least like a burnt out soccer field in Canoga Park, where this road trip apparently took place. And the day it does, is the day I finally return to L.A., where my own career was once long-sidelined.