I’m scouting a craftsman home for a small advertising job when the homeowners give me a warning. “Just so you know, our neighbor hates that we do so many shoots,” they say in hushed tones. “He can be difficult.”
I’ve met many, many “difficult neighbors” in my twenty years of working on film shoots. And without question, I’ve learned that the best approach is to start from one simple tenet: that as a film production, we are a guest in their world, and it is incumbent upon us to be as gracious and accommodating as possible.
After the scout, I head next door to the difficult neighbor’s home, a single-story craftsman that looks like it fell out of a Bruce Springsteen song: rocking chairs on the porch, American flag flapping overhead, an honest-to-God screen door knocking gently with each gust of wind.
I can hear a TV going inside. A game is on. I knock. After a moment, a woman in her 70s answers the door. I explain that we might be doing a small shoot in the coming weeks, and that I want to try and address the issues they’ve had in the past.
“You want to talk to my husband,” she says, her voice tinged with exasperation, and she vanishes inside calling for him, a short name like Hank or Earl. I remind myself as I wait that whatever the concern or complaint, my main goal is not to judge, but to try and see it from their perspective.
After a few moments, a man shuffles to the door. He’s about his wife’s age, but his face is more hardened than elderly. He’s tall but stoops, and wears a Wrangler button-down and jeans. He looks pissed.
“I just don’t fucking understand,” he says. “It’s like living in fucking Hollywood here next to these people. I didn’t think I was going to be living next door to a goddamn movie studio when I bought my damn house forty years ago.”
I tell him I completely understand, and that I’ve met many people all over Los Angeles with the same complaint. I ask if his neighbors have ever offered to require productions to pay him an inconvenience fee, a common occurrence in neighborhoods negatively affected by frequent filming.
“Nah, they’re young. They don’t give a shit about an old fart like me. And I don’t want money. I just want peace.”
I try to stress that we’re a very small production, just fifteen people and a single cube truck, and assure him we’ll keep our distance. “That’s what they all say,” he says. “But then some crew member’s in front of my home smoking a cigarette and jabbering on his cell phone, and then what am I supposed to do?”
I tell him he can call me directly if this ever happens, but I feel like I’ve failed. I’m not a guest; to this man, I’m an invader, and nothing I say or can will change that.
“Look, I get it, you’re just doing your job,” he says. “But I just feel like I don’t deserve this. I was born and raised here. I grew up a few blocks away. I was overseas in the army for a while. Then I came back and worked at the local public schools. I finally retired and now all I want is peace and quiet. Then these young people move in and change everything.”
He motions to a young couple that happens to be passing on the opposite sidewalk. From a distance, they appear to be Indian American, though I can’t be sure. Their little boy runs ahead down the block, laughing and chasing a soccer ball.
“There’s some now,” he says. “And they’re all fucking brown. Where have all the whites gone?”
The world suddenly seems to go deathly silent. All I can hear are his cold, bitter words.
“No more whites,” he grouses. “Just brown people moving in. Little brown kids like that one, running up and down the streets. Brown babies screaming their heads off. It’s sickening.”
Once, a long time ago, I scouted a morgue in New York City, and experienced the smell of a rotting corpse for the first time. The smell was singularly revolting, but more memorable was the reaction it provoked deep within me on a primal level: one of utter, visceral abhorrence. This exact sensation is what I feel now.
Perhaps sensing he’s overshared, he turns and vanishes into his house without a word, and I’m left on his porch in a stunned stupor. That’s the last I ever see of him; the client ultimately opts for a different location.
Walking away, I’m shaken to the core by the encounter. I kick myself for not having had the right words to tell him off for his racist bullshit. I try to reassure myself that he is destined to forever reside in a hell of his own creation, as all that he hates steadily encroaches upon his sanctuary.
But in the end, it’s just a reminder that some homes indeed hold difficult neighbors that are nevertheless worthy of understanding, accommodation and empathy.
And others hold monsters.
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