Boyle Heights
Omens colored the first moments of our working day.
So did the junkies, of course, the discarded furniture, the tipped-over garbage cans, the feces deposited around our front and back steps during the night. We moved with care to reach the door of our warehouse, one of five in a row on South Boyle Avenue in East Los Angeles. A big space, breezeblock walls, thick concrete floors, featureless; a perpetual thrum of sewing machines came from next door, where Guatemalan women made knock-offs of First Lady Nancy Reagan’s latest frocks. The smell of tobacco and strong coffee floated from the windows of our place, where John, the boss, would be on his tenth pipe and second pot by the time the rest of us arrived.
John was superstitious, wanted us to report on any unusual sights we’d seen on the drive in to work. These were the omens.
‘A crow riding on a dog’s back,’ said Jim, breezing into the front office one Monday morning.
‘Rowing machine, middle of 46th and Lincoln,’ said Justin a day or two later.
The witnessing of omens was only half the story, because one couldn’t know whether an omen was good or bad. Its true character could be revealed only by viewing the previous day’s work, known as the ‘dailies’.
We were a small company of filmmakers, stop-motion animators. We weren’t the ‘Hollywood’ end of the industry; no glittering Westwood debuts for us, no celebrities, no Oscars. Our territory was daytime TV, afterschool specials, title sequences. Animation hadn’t gained traction in porn, or we’d have been doing that too.
Elaborate miniature sets, animal characters made to walk, talk, run and fly by moving them in small increments, one frame at a time. A tiny leg swung forward half an inch, the corresponding arm pulled back, torso eased right, head tilted left, eyelids lowered towards the blink.
Click. Repeat.
If the shot turned out well, that morning’s omen had been a good one. If the shot failed, the omen had been bad. The dog-riding cowboy crow was a good omen, and yielded a flawless, long take of Catso the Cat running after Ralph the Mouse. The rowing machine was a bad omen: a complicated scene with Ralph flying a styrofoam airplane – twelve hours of work for a four-second clip – ruined by a lighting malfunction. Reshoot.
Our studio was in Boyle Heights, a district just east of downtown. Low rents. Start-ups and sweatshops. Medical tech and manufacturing. Graphic design, gangs, graffiti, a venerable synagogue, a tired-out Sears, Mexican tiendas. Each afternoon, an old man pushed a little cart down our street, bells tinkling, coconut and mango popsicles sold ice cold from the hot sidewalk, fifty cents. The air outside our door carried the smell of meat-rendering plants, and the diesel exhaust of long-haul trucks heading east. On a smoggy day the entire San Gabriel mountain range could vanish, as if by black magic.
The neighborhood had its own superstitions and omens. Businesses with the Virgin of Guadalupe painted around their doorways were broken into less frequently. Bungalows’ front gardens were specially planted with herbs, ruda, romero, albahaca, to keep evil spirits away. Some of the locals were on the lookout constantly for unusual sights, anything that might signal the arrival of immigration police, la migra.
Our studio fit comfortably here. Boyle Heights had a history of welcoming people in transition. Joel, recently arrived from the Midwest, was meticulous and ambitious, keen to get on. Jim, laconic, perpetually lovesick, already had one foot in feature films. Justin was about to become a father. His soulful face and shoulder-length hair made him look like Jesus, so much so that the black-dress abuelas in the streets followed him with their eyes. John, our director, a hot-tempered polymath, building his studio up from nothing. And me: the only one among us who wasn’t sure she wanted a career in film.
No one but John believed in the omens, but we’d all been trained to look for them. Mine appeared on a hot and cloudless morning. My Volkswagen’s windows rolled down, Los Lobos blaring on AM radio – la la la Bamba! – I was keeping the beat on the steering wheel, singing along, when I caught a glimpse of something white in the air. It hit the windshield and bounced off. Horrified, I was sure I’d hit a dove – then I noticed the pick-up truck ahead, loaded with white parcels. Its suspension was shot. Each new pothole launched a dozen rolls of toilet paper into the air.
This certainly qualified as an omen. I watched, amused, until the driver ahead of me got twitchy, swerving to avoid the rolls. At Soto Avenue I pulled off the freeway – and it was here that I saw a second omen.
A sight that would stay with me for years.
John had already been to the overnight lab on Hollywood Boulevard by the time I arrived. The dailies sat in a canister on our lunch table. They included a long, involved scene that had taken me two days to complete: multiple puppets, dialogue, characters running, the set so large that getting to the puppets meant sliding underneath the stage on a mechanic’s trolley and popping up through a trapdoor. Seven hundred frames. My back hurt and my knees were scuffed. I didn’t want a reshoot.
‘Well?’ John chewed his pipe from the left side of his mouth to the right, and back again.
Joel spoke first. ‘A pair of feet sticking out from under a bush.’
‘What’s unusual about that?’ snapped John.
‘In Bel Air? On Chaucer Terrace?’ One of Joel’s current girlfriends was up-market. ‘The shoes were really good quality,’ he added.
John wasn’t satisfied. He looked at Jim, then Justin, who shrugged. He turned to me.
‘Toilet rolls flying from the back of a truck,’ I said.
This brought a spark to his eye. ‘Where?’ he demanded. Like the location might be significant.
‘On the Pasadena Freeway,’ I said. ‘And—’
The second omen was harder to describe. It seemed personal, all at once. I decided to keep it to myself.
‘And?’ John prompted.
‘And, it almost caused an accident,’ I said.
‘Right.’ He scooped up the canister. ‘Let’s see what it means.’
Two hundred years ago this place, Boyle Heights, was a wide sweep of arid lowland, covered in chaparral. The Pueblo of Los Angeles, the Paradon Blanco, white bluffs. I could have animated the growth of this district, the scene starting with a single dot, a settler’s house, and building outwards from there like a cyclone. Chaparral cleared, the plain freckled with vineyards, a handful of fine Victorian villas sprouting around a man-made lake, a boathouse, a plume of fountain. Handsome boulevards spooling north and south, a horse-drawn tram, church steeples rising, parks unfurling. Comes the railway: factories and lumber yards spawning workers’ bungalows, gridded streets thundering overland west and east. Bridges leaping the LA River towards downtown, freeways, arteries pumping traffic in and through and out – and always a scraping away, erecting, razing. Getting rid of the old, making room for the new.
The rich neighbourhoods to the west were protected by building regulations, but Boyle Heights was open for industry and the people flowed in from all points of the compass. African Americans from the south, Russians on the run from Tsarist conscription, Japanese rolling in on the aftershocks of the San Francisco earthquake, Mexicans dodging revolution, European Jews uprooted by two world wars. A racially integrated housing project, one of the nation’s first, was built here. With a constant cycle of migration, displacement and new beginnings, Boyle Heights was the American story in miniature.
If the world outside our studio door was elastic, the world inside was equally so. Three sets, the action changing daily, a new film each season. Singing dinosaurs in winter, a talking toad in spring. The studio, like the neighborhood, was shabby, but served as a valuable way-station. People came to get experience, to move on to features, better credits, better pay.
Occasionally, we were invited to glittering studio parties over on the west side, where we mingled with the money-end of the industry, saw possible roads ahead. At one timbered, mock-Tudor mansion, big-name actors performed from a mezzanine. John’s friend Ron was there, a director who got his start making training films for the US Postal Service. Ron’s was the flight path everyone pictured when they entered the business. Very few made it this far.
A week before my two-omen morning, I got what seemed like my big break: I was loaned out to larger company to work on an international film. It was only a single scene, but it was my first feature. The studio was in Burbank – home to Disney, Warner Brothers, the real deal. The address I was given led to an immaculate industrial building with a shining red door.
Inside, a small crew was working on the final sequences of a low-budget, straight-to-video horror, set in San Francisco but produced mostly in Italy – ‘international’ having everything to do with evading Hollywood’s powerful unions. The star was Sonny Bono. The plot was nonexistent. At the peak of the action, with the aid of a stunt double and some prosthetic makeup that looked exactly like melted candle wax, Sonny bloated and transformed from a third-string celebrity into a giant seed pod. He then sprouted vines, which climbed up the walls of his apartment and out the windows, to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world.
As one of two ‘vine wranglers’ I was positioned above the set, where I had to bend at the waist to reach down into a miniature room. The episode took all night to shoot – ten hours bent double. During that time I dreamed of other jobs. Air-conditioned jobs. Jobs where people sat upright in chairs, wore nice clothes. Museum curator. Graphic designer. I dreamed of travelling, of going to university. My mother had always wanted me to go to university. I saw myself in a collonaded academia with high-ceilinged libraries. Lecturer. Historian. By the end of the shot, I would have traded jobs with the UPS man who bounced in carrying a parcel, first thing in the morning.
Most people who worked in stop-motion knew from their earliest days that they wanted to be animators. They were reared on the classics: Willis O’Brien’s King Kong, Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts, Rankin and Bass’s Pinocchio, Art Clokey’s Davey and Goliath.
I was different: the accidental animator. Literature, history, music: these had always been my passions, but my school years had been overturned, aged fifteen, when my sweet mother fell prey to a degenerative disease, deteriorated over two terrible years, then died. Stunned and directionless, I’d tripped into animation from a beginning cinematography course, taken on a whim. When John showed up at our year-end screening looking for an apprentice, I was the only person in the room who’d even experimented with stop-motion. The work had seemed fun, at first, and I was living the dream: the girl who had nearly flunked out of high school, landing in Hollywood. But the years had passed, the novelty faded. Now I was stuck. I wasn’t qualified to do anything else, and animation paid too well to leave without a plan.
In our tiny screening room we animators fidgeted, wondering what the omen of the flying toilet rolls would bring. Did a prop get bumped? Had a light burned out without our seeing it? Collectively, we had more than forty hours of work in the few yards of film on that little reel. John threaded the dailies through the projector’s gate.
There’s a sequence in the 1933 King Kong where the animator noticed, halfway through a long and difficult shot, that he’d left a pair of pliers on the set. Reluctant to start the sequence afresh, he decided to animate the pliers. In the finished film, they pop into frame and then swim off, long handles frog-kicking through jungle undergrowth, a camera-shy amphibian. Most of the time, though, problems couldn’t be rectified so creatively.
John nodded, Jim hit the lights. The projector whirred. Four short clips took all of fifty seconds to watch before it was over, tail leader flapping on the take-up reel. The flying toilet rolls had been a good omen: the animation was flawless.
John clapped me on the shoulder as I headed to my set.
‘Nice work,’ he said. ‘You’re going places.’
He was right, but not in the way he thought.
My second, private omen had seemed like nothing at first. A tall, semi-trailer truck, an eighteen wheeler on Soto Avenue. I caught sight of it as I pulled off the freeway and slotted in behind, my car nose-to-ass with its high rear bumper. Then I glanced up and saw.
The semi was painted, front to back, in primer. It looked like a big gray whale, apart from its back doors. Across these, spray-painted in red and pink, was a gigantic heart, eight feet tall, like an enormous valentine, vibrant against a backdrop of concrete and early-morning smog. Scrawled across the heart in white wobbly letters were three words: I Love You.
This wasn’t the work of a graffiti artist. The lines were uncertain, the heart’s lobes mismatched. Who had created it? Why?
I pictured the scene: a window overlooking some scrapper’s yard. The semi-trailer parked long-term, doors clearly visible. Someone recognising its potential as a canvas. I imagined a hardware store, rattle-cans sold over the counter, pink, red and white; heard the spray-hiss, paint powdering onto cold metal by night. I saw curtains flung open the next morning. Revelation, a big smile. Message sent. Message received.
All around me, drivers were grinning, commuter indifference flown. We laughed, pointed, honked. The semi driver responded, blasted his air horn, his meaty arm out the window waving regally, the mayor in a parade. The heart’s message was shouted out in heavily-accented English. A spontaneous love convoy, rumbling into Boyle Heights. The truck led me straight to our warehouse. I pulled to the curb, cut the ignition and sat.
I didn't believe in omens. I didn’t. But the painted heart touched me.
I’d wasted a night of my life turning Sonny Bono into vines; the heart painter had made far better use of the midnight hours. The heart spoke of spontaneity and spirit. Of leaps of faith, new directions – themes echoed by this district, Boyle Heights, in all its plucky ebb and flow. I thought again of the university education I’d missed, of the careers I hadn’t followed, and of my mother, dead before her time. The heart – my heart – spoke to me of happiness, and it spoke in my mother’s voice.
The semi and its little unscripted procession carried on, turned right on Olympic. The pink and red ensign drifted over the bridge – and away. My omen, and its suggestion, understood, that the universe was trying to show us something, if only we had eyes to see.
‘Boyle Heights’ was first published in The Southampton Review, Winter/Spring 2019
The image associated with this piece on this website, "Virgin of Guadalupe" by Sarah B Brooks, is licensed under CC BY 2.0