THINKING OF MOVING ACROSS THE COUNTRY TO FOLLOW YOUR DREAM OF WORKING IN THE MOVIE BUSINESS?

Read me first.

by Jeff Fisher

Thinking about moving across the country to chase your dream?

Here’s the part nobody mentions: when you get past the rush of excitement, the blind hope, the “where exactly am I going to live?” of it all…it can be a bit f*ckin’ scary. Not in a vague, poetic way — in a very specific way, like the moment your Mazda is packed to the gills and the AAA map collection riding shotgun looks like the full map rack at Barnes & Noble (Yes, when I moved, there were still paper maps. So retro!) That’s when it starts feeling real.

I was 22 years old and determined to move to Los Angeles. My Step Mom said I always had a wanderlust for California and she was right. I had 2nd cousins who lived in Calabasas and I thought they were the coolest kids in America. So, I said goodbye to my hometown friends and family, and hit the road on I-95, heading from South Florida to Southern California to pursue my filmmaking dreams.

By then I’d already put some miles into chasing that dream: a few production credits, a stretch sleeping on my aunt’s couch in Brooklyn while P.A.-ing on shows around New York. I had a gut feeling that LA was going to be a better fit for me than NY. I had two phone numbers in my pocket of people that lived there — an Associate Producer from a PBS show I’d worked on, and a friend of one of my best college buddies (now my longtime friend Toni) who would send me photocopies of the Hollywood Creative Directory so I’d have addresses to mail my resume. My car was packed so full, I could barely see out the rearview mirror.

Since I was a little kid, I dreamed of being a movie director. All that was standing in my way was about 3,000 miles of highway. It’s the 990 miles of I-10 across Texas I’ll never forget, but more on that soon.

A NARCOLEPTIC ASPIRING STAND-UP COMIC AND “NOT BEVERLY HILLS”

Before my car ride West, I had flown out two weeks beforehand to find a place to live and try and line up some production work. Toni had steered me towards papers like the LA Reader and other roommate finder services. My college friends flew out with me for the first few days, but the rest of the week I was on my own looking for a place to live.

LA had some wiggy roommate options. There was the aspiring actor with more attitude than furniture, a narcoleptic (also aspiring) stand-up comic living in a “Beverly Hills adjacent” apartment. A local waitress set me straight on that phrase real fast: “You know what Beverly Hills adjacent means? It means NOT Beverly Hills.”

There was the aging actress with an impressive cat collection. And by impressive, I mean she had six of them.

Each place had exactly one thing going for it — a location, my own bathroom, a place to park. Rarely more than one. My dreams of a Three’s Company type situation near the beach weren’t really pulling into focus. Turns out, Jack Tripper must have had a budget bigger than $450 a month.

Then I saw an ad in the LA Reader: a room in Malibu, under $500 a month. It was the last place on my list. I thought, why not?

MA-LI-BOOOOOOOOOOOO

I drove my rental car down PCH and came to this two-story, 1960’s style apartment complex that was literally on the beach. I couldn’t believe it. I knocked on the door and two arguably very handsome guys answered, one wearing a wet suit. Let’s call these guys Bill and Ted. They told me they wanted to stay close to the beach because they were surfers, and they were willing to share one bedroom so I could have my own — which meant I’d only be paying a third of the rent.

It felt too good to be true. I mean the building was, LITERALLY, on the beach in Malibu.

I immediately said “I’ll take it.”

I did not factor in the traffic on PCH. Or how far I’d be from anything resembling “town” where production work might be. All I saw was beach. And Malibu. I mean — come on.

Now all I had to do was take the place and be extremely vague with my extremely frugal father about the location of my new home.

THE SPEAKERPHONE AND “JEFFREY MA-LI-BOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

A little more context on my Dad’s brand of frugal — the kind of frugal where he’d drive across town to save three cents a gallon on gas, a decision that probably didn’t make mathematical sense once you factored in the gas it took to drive those 20 minutes. It was a principle thing. Malibu was not going to land well, even if it was a sick deal in my 22-year old mind.

Dad also, frugal or not, was the guy who took my last production paycheck and matched it dollar for dollar so I’d have a nest egg to move to Los Angeles. He believed in the dream even when it made him real uncomfortable.

I had kept the exact location of my apartment pretty vague. But that all changed when I got a call from my Hungarian aunt, let’s call her Aunt Zsa Zsa, who had lived in the States for 25 years but still sounded like all three of the Gabor Sisters rolled into one — with a dollop of Miss Piggy.

If you don’t know your Gabors: Zsa Zsa once slapped a Beverly Hills cop for the indignity of being pulled over for speeding, and Eva played the glamorous city wife exiled to a farm on the tv show GREEN ACRES (a precursor to Paris Hilton on The Simple Life). My aunt also shared their habit of avoiding possessives — so instead of saying “Lisa’s friend,” she’d say “the friend of Lisa,” punching the word “friend.”

OK, so my Dad was a big fan of the speakerphone button on the new kitchen wall phone. He’d crank it up real loud and everyone would get the thrill of talking to the room when they called. Talk about real uncomfortable.

So, Aunt Zsa Zsa calls and it turns out she and my uncle were coming out for a medical convention. My uncle was an eye-doctor (and my Grandmother’s favorite son) who needed to get some hours for his license, and they were coming to California for said convention. Next month. She wanted my address so they could visit.

“Uh, how about I just get you my phone number when it’s hooked up.”

Nope. She wanted the address so they could surprise me if they had time. The surprise sounded very unnecessary. Turns out, she was not hanging up without it.

Finally, to end the standoff, I mumbled my new address (on Pacific Coast Highway!) and slurred “Malibu” and the zip code. Turns out I didn’t mumble enough. A stony silence hit the kitchen.

Then, at full Gabor volume: “Ooooooooohhhhhh, Jeffrey..... MA-LI-BOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Followed by a stage whisper: “So fancy.”

The look on my Dad and Step Mom’s faces could best be described as “not amused.” I did my best to sell the, uh, value. I told them about my other cat-filled, narcoleptic roommate options, but I had definitely lost the audience. The general vibe was that I was living in a fantasy world and would soon be back in South Florida, reconsidering their advice to become an accountant.

By the way, my aunt and uncle did not come to visit. I assume they didn’t want to leave the Regent Beverly Wilshire, exhausted from lectures on ophthalmological advances.

500 MILES OF MORGAN FAIRCHILD

After a tense 24 hours of that speakerphone drama bomb, it was finally time to drive cross-country. I had burned CDs (everyone from Madonna to Michael Jackson to The Romantics was along for that long-ass drive), had a stack of maps from my new Triple A membership and a Mazda hatchback packed to the gills.

Each night of the drive, I’d set a goal city to keep on schedule — Tallahassee! New Orleans! — then find a payphone and call a hotel I could afford out of the Triple A travel guide for that state. Night one, my goal was New Orleans. It felt like a win, but I still had the Lone Star state to make it through.

After two days of driving, I stopped at a gas station somewhere in the middle of Texas — a state that takes roughly 990 miles to cross on I-10. I had already played the hell out of those mix CDs. I needed some new material.

And there at that gas station, I saw it. In the sale bin, I found an audiobook on cassette: Pat Booth’s wildly soapy novel MALIBU, read by Morgan Fairchild. The story of multiple generations of wealthy Californians — and the Japanese House Boy who helped raise them. Morgan Fairchild read all of the roles. It was Entertainment with a capital E!

Turns out, Morgan Fairchild says the word “Malibu” something like five hundred times over the course of that book. And she would punch the word Malibu each time for dramatic effect. Example: “It was Dominique’s first time back in Malibu, since seeing Jacques, and she desperately needed a facial.”

I was so bored of that stretch of highway that, to entertain myself, every time she named the town, I turned the volume down and, at the top of my lungs, did my best impression of my aunt’s voice: “Ohhhhhh, Jeffrey.... MA-LI-BOOOOOOOOOOOO! So fancy.” People passing my over-packed hatchback in their F-150s must have thought I was insane.

BILL AND TED’S NOT-SO-EXCELLENT ADVENTURE

I made it through Texas (and New Mexico and Arizona) and to the promised land: Malibu.

Bill and Ted were there to greet me, and I was feeling pretty optimistic.

After the first week, it became pretty obvious to me that Bill and Ted were in fact a couple. A couple with, let’s call them…a few complications.

They sometimes had what I’d call major disagreements. As in, “WHY DIDN’T YOU COME HOME LAST NIGHT?” being yelled at a volume that made you think they were on a bus and truck tour of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

One of those disagreements ended with Ted holding a knife on Bill.

Full disclosure: it was a butter knife. The emotional intensity, however, was operating at a full machete level. That’s when I knew my time in “the Bu” (as Bill called it) had a shelf life.

Around this same stretch, I had a huge meeting lined up — a chance to visit the set of a movie by my favorite director at the time, Charles Shyer. I had been wildly connecting the dots to make this happen. I had written him letters care of his agent and somehow had landed this invite, coordinated by his assistant.

I got dressed. I walked outside. Turns out, Bill had gone surfing with a friend and blocked my car in with his truck.

What was I going to do? The cab fare to get from Malibu to that set was…A LOT OF MONEY. And that’s when it really landed: Malibu was a place you get to live after you’ve made it. It’s a goal. It is not supposed to be the starting line. I was also fairly certain I did not want to die in the middle of someone else’s domestic dispute, in the event the butter knife ever started feeling too dull.

I did what any reasonable, financially unstable twenty-something would do: took a cash advance on my credit card and called a cab to get to the meeting. Getting home was the hard part — that took several buses, and if you know anything about LA public transit at the time, those rides back to Malibu made The Odyssey feel like a trip to CVS.

But I made it to the meeting. I shook Charles Shyer’s hand. I told him how much I loved his movies. I watched them shoot. It was worth it. I felt like I’d crossed over — from movie watcher to someone actually in the industry, one step closer to my dream.

WHAT MALIBU TAUGHT ME ABOUT TAKING THE LEAP

Here’s what I didn’t understand yet: Malibu was a preview.

It looked exactly as sexy and glamorous as advertised. It also came with a butter knife wielded like a machete. That’s a pretty accurate summary of what this industry offers early on — the view is real, but so is the chaos, and you don’t get to skip to the part where it’s all beachfront property and no drama. You have to survive the first roommates, the blocked-in cars, the crazy assistant jobs, the short films funded by credit cards, the one thousand no’s on your way to the one yes that helps to change things.

Change can be terrifying. Leaving Florida, moving three thousand miles to share a room’s rent with two strangers who turned out to be a couple with, uh, communication challenges — none of that is comfortable. But comfortable doesn’t get you anywhere. The leap is the only way anything changes at all.

And that Charles Shyer meeting might be the most valuable lesson in this entire story. When something actually matters and you’re stuck, find a way. Even if the way is several buses, a credit card cash advance, and a bus and truck tour of Virginia Woolf through the drywall.

For what it’s worth: Bill and Ted eventually called it quits, and Ted and I stayed friends for years while he kept chasing his own acting dream. Sometimes the drama passes and what’s left is just a person you liked all along. You just liked them better single.

THE TAKEAWAYS (FOR ANYONE ABOUT TO MAKE THE LEAP)

→ The beachfront view is a goal, not a starting point. If it feels too good to be true this early, it probably is — enjoy it, but don’t be shocked when it comes with complications.

→ When it matters, find a way. A blocked-in car is not a reason to miss the meeting. It’s a reason to take the bus. Even a few buses.

→ Comfortable doesn’t create change. The leap does. Every scary decision in this story — the move, the room, the meeting — is the only reason any of the rest of it happened.

Making your own leap right now — a big move, a career pivot, a decision everyone around you thinks is a little bit crazy? I offer one-on-one coaching and consulting sessions. Reach out at reeltalkwithjeff.com and let’s get you ready.

Jeff Fisher is a director and writer whose credits include Paramount Pictures’ “The Stranger in My Home” and “The Image of You,” Hallmark’s highest-rated film of the year “My Christmas Love,” and reality hits spanning from “The Simple Life” to “Keeping Up With The Kardashians.” Visit www.jefffisherdirector.com to see his work and www.reeltalkwithjeff.com for more industry insights. @jefffisher_insta

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