Casing The Joint

It’s 9:30pm. I’m watching TV. My phone rings. A number I don’t recognize. I’m about to let it go to voicemail, but at this hour, I’m curious. I answer. “Hello?” I say.

 “Well, congratulations! You cased the joint!” says the elderly voice on the other end. Angry and sarcastic, it sounds a lot like Estelle Getty catching a cat burglar in her kitchen.

I pause. A long pause. “I’m sorry. What?” I say.

“Oh, I know what you were up to,” she says. “Well, you did it. You’ve got pictures of everything. Congraaaatulations. You cased the joint.”

I sit up, trying to figure out why I’m suddenly involved in a conversation from a 1930s pulp noir.

I think I’ve heard this phrase before, but I want to be sure. I grab my laptop and look it up. “Case the joint.” As per Wikipedia, “to thoroughly observe or examine a place, in order to familiarize oneself with its workings in preparation for criminal activity, often robbery.”

Then I realize the voice sounds familiar. In fact, it sounds a lot like the elderly woman whose house I scouted earlier in the day.

“Maude?” I ask with surprise.

“You know who it is,” she says bitterly.

And then I put the pieces together and I know exactly what’s going on.

Most of the time, when I “cold scout” houses (i.e. go door-to-door hoping to find a house open to the idea of filming), I just leave a flyer with all the pertinent information about both the show and myself, and let the homeowner call me back at their own convenience after they’ve had some time to think it over.

But once in a while, there’s an emergency situation and you have to work a lot faster. This is the situation now. We had a midcentury home drop out of filming at the very last minute, and we are scrambling to find a replacement by the permit deadline.

In these situations, I’ll typically knock on the door and talk to the homeowner directly in the hopes that I can scout on the spot. Some homeowners will ask for time to think about it. Others will welcome you right in.

Maude had done just this. She had ushered me right in to her exquisitely period living room, and even offered me tea. She talked about how long she’d lived in the home, how she’d raised three children here, and how she was excited at the idea of having some excitement again.

I scout a lot of homes in which an older person lives alone, and this is common. What should be a five minute scouting appointment will often extend to fifteen or twenty minutes as I hear stories about family, work, illness, death, grandchildren, past loves, and so on. I’ve come to realize that for many, I’m a rare interruption in a life where each new day tends to be a carbon copy of the previous, and I very much value the stories and histories life these homeowners opt to share with me.

When I left Maude’s home earlier in the day, the scout had gone wonderfully, and she couldn’t have been more excited at the prospect of having filming. But there is a very different woman on the phone. And I think I know what happened.

After I leave, she calls someone. Say, one of her children. She gushes about how a movie location scout just showed up at her door, and how her home might be featured in a big TV show, and that she might even get paid thousands of dollars for it.  

And then, that person reads her the riot act. “How could you be so stupid, Maude!” they yell at her, making her feel like an old fool. “There’s no TV show! He’s a crook! He was taking a pictures of everything so he could come back later and steel it all! He was casing the joint!”

Maybe Maude says no, that the scout showed his credentials. “They were fake! You really think someone out of the blue is going to knock at your door and pay you thousands of dollars to film a TV show? They were casing the joint!”

And Maude hangs up from the conversation, feeling foolish and scared and hurt and angry.

I hate that this has happened, knowing that her fake tough-guy attitude is actually her doing her best to deter me from carrying out the terrible plans she imagines I have cooked up.

“Maude, it’s me! It’s Nick, the location scout. Everything I told you is real! In fact, it was the director’s top choice!” This is true. There’s a very strong likelihood we will film at her home, with a fee approaching $10,000 for just a couple days.

But she refuses to believe me. I beg her to do a Google search for my name, or call my union, or call our production office, but none of it makes a dent. She just keeps saying, “yeah, right,” very sarcastically.

Finally, I realize there’s nothing I can say that will convince her. I tell her not to worry, that she won’t hear from us again, and that I’ll delete the pictures. “You better,” she says, and hangs up the phone.

I learn a very important lesson from this encounter. Now, when I’m cold-scouting and a homeowner invites me in on the spot, I stop them in their tracks. I tell them that first, it’s very important to me that they are sure I am who I say I am. I give a list of ways to verify my identity, and I encourage them to check before letting a total stranger in their homes. Most thank me later, saying I’d opened their eyes to just how easily they could have made a very bad decision if I were actually a criminal.

I’ve never had an interaction like my encounter with Maude since. And I also realized it explained a lingering mystery from my earlier years of scouting.

Back in New York, we were always under the gun to find locations as quickly as possible, and I became an expert at talking my way into homes to scout on the spot. But midway through, as I was taking pictures, I’d consistently notice the conversation suddenly take a noticeably awkward and uncomfortable turn. I could never put my finger on why that was.

Now I realize: it’s the moment the homeowner suddenly realized they had let a total stranger in their home, and that he just might be casing the joint.