Going Hollywood - Day 1 Setup

Henry and I flew into Los Angeles late on Monday night. We could see the fires from the plane coming in, but other than that it was an uneventful travel day. Tuesday was setup day when the fake convention (dubbed "Alt Con 9 - Los Angeles") was going to come to life.

The next morning, we hopped in a cab and made our way to the Los Angeles Studio Center lot. One problem though, is that if you ask an LA cabbie to take you anywhere but the airport or the hotel, they don't have a frickin' clue where they are going. This moron couldn't get us anywhere near where we had to go and we were almost late.

When we finally arrived, we were greeted by Katherine, the Production Director (?) who was in charge of getting the set constructed. Our product had arrived and after warding off her staff who was drooling over the case of Pirates, we went downstairs to see "Alt Con". The actual set was the lobby of the building that they use as the lobby to FBI headquarters. Obviously, they have to disguise it as much as possible so the room was filled with banners, booths, and hand constructed sci-fi and comic elements. There was almost no licensed properties, as the majors didn't want to play ball. However, Wizard of the Coast, Dark Horse and a couple of artists as well as us had sent elements down. We were the only company to send staff and we were, quite frankly, treated like stars because of it.

Before we began, we got to tour the sets for NUMB3RS. This included the FBI cubicles, interrogation rooms, and the school and home sets. Hollywood is clever folks, they can fool you in ways you couldn't imagine. What's really cool, is that with the cameras becoming smaller the sets were more or less full sets with either no open "4th wall" or the ability to pull one back. When we were in the offices and the house, it was like we were in these places no matter which way you looked (except for up).

We returned to the con and were given the choice of where to put our booth. Having cleverly read the script the previous night, I knew where a lot of the action was going to take place so I picked what should be a good spot. We won't know until the air date in November for sure.

We got set up after a couple of hours, and left with seemingly very little else done. We both wondered how they were going to pull this off. I went back to my hotel, did email for a couple of hours ventured out into downtown LA for dinner (by the way, downtown LA closes at 6pm. Thank God for Qdoba!) I didn't get much sleep and that was definitely something that I would regret the next day.