Tales From the Valley : Stealing Signs

Last night, I was having dinner with my friend Andrea and her friend Angela at the Thai BBQ Palace on Ventura in Studio City (I had the crispy duck). As we were leaving, we passed by one of those big yellow signs that they use around Los Angeles to help movie and television crews to the locations of their shoots. These signs are usually around 30"x20" will have some name and an arrow pointing in the direction that you are supposed to go. Sometimes, if it is a really famous show, they try to throw you off using some abbreviation. Other times, they just use the name of the show.

In this case, the sign said "AMP" and since those were the initials for my friend, I reached up to get the sign off of the pole. Normally I wouldn't just take someone's sign, but we had seen what looked like a casting call as we were walking to the restaurant and we figured that it was over by now. We were all kind of wondering what this casting call was, because it looked like a bunch of random skanks standing in front of a Bank of America in Studio City. And if you know The Valley, seeing a bunch of random skanks milling about for no apparent reason is not out of the ordinary, casting call or not.

We were almost to our car when somebody shouts "What are you doing with my sign! Hey, I need that!". It turns out that the casting call was for the new Anna Nicole movie starring Willa Ford. All of those girls that were dressed like hookers in front of the BofA were recruited as extras. They were going to be filming a recreation of the Playboy Mansion, and they were still thirty girls short of having a full house. Andrea and Angela were seriously thinking about becoming extras in what is sure to be one of the greatest movies of the century, but ultimately decided to pass.

As for me, I was intrigued, but as there would be no nudity, I decided to go home and finish the rest of the first season of Weeds on DVD.