Hollywood Does Lunch
By Mary Beth Gentle
You might think that in Hollywood the most important part of the day is when the Director yells ‘Action’ or when the Head of the Studio gives your project the ‘green light’. But actually, the most important part of the day in Hollywood is lunch. It is what gets us through. We watch our clocks for it. We plan for it. And depending how high up the Hollywood Ladder you are, determines just how much time you get for lunch.
The Agents and the Studio Bosses hold their three-hour power lunches in Beverly Hills at either ‘The Ivy’ or the ‘Grill on the Alley’. The hip hangout for the young Hollywood Celebrities and their two hour lunches would be ‘Hyde’ or ‘Les Deux’ which is easily recognized by the Paparazzi hanging around outside. And trust me, Hollywood has it down when it comes to serving up lunch from a Catering Truck. These are not ‘roach coaches’ either, these are Four Star Restaurants on wheels. When the First Assistant Director on the set of a Movie or TV show yells, ‘that’s lunch’ the cast and crew race to the chow line for their thirty minute lunch break.
None of those lunches comes close to lunch inside a Production Office. The Production Office is the hub of any Film or TV endeavor. They spend weeks and weeks prepping crews to go off and shoot in all types of conditions, they wrangle talent, they wrangle budgets and they wrangle trucks full of equipment. But, hands down the most important part of their day is wrangling lunch which is eaten at their desks.
This highly specialized and very important task ultimately rests on the shoulders of the guy or girl at the very bottom of the ladder. The Production Assistant (PA) is the lucky member of the crew to hold the position of ‘lunch wrangler’. The PA starts his day flipping through a pile of menus collected from every restaurant within a ten mile radius of the Production office. You don’t know stress until you have to figure out which one restaurant is going to make thirty or more people happy.
Most PA’s start their days praying that maybe, just maybe it will be a pizza day. Not only is it easier to order; they deliver. Sadly, pizza days are few and far between. Pizza days usually only happen when the PA must stand at the copy machine for nine hours making copies of the script for the entire cast and crew. So, really the whole concept of Pizza Day is not a winning solution.
Once a restaurant is selected, the PA will spend the next two hours taking orders from all the different departments within the Production office. You can always guarantee you will have at least thirty lunch orders to collect. And that is the easy part. You then have to go order all the lunches, pick them up and make sure they are correct and labeled for each individual in the office. This is usually where some ‘old-timer’ pats the poor kid on the back and says, “Welcome to Hollywood.”
That is how the rest of Hollywood does lunch. Of course, in the Hollywood Cubicle it is a completely different story. Those of us working the Studio jobs behind the scenes are left to fend for ourselves, but we do get to leave our desks for a whole hour. This usually means a trip to the Studio Commissary. And you better believe that there are the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to Studio Commissary food.
I have eaten at all the Studio Commissary’s and in my opinion, Twentieth Century Fox Commissary is just good eating. If you are working in a Hollywood Cubicle on the Fox lot, you have won the golden ticket. Not only are you basking in the glorious sunshine of the Westside, but you are eating high off the hog in the Fox Commissary. Now, the poor saps working in a Hollywood Cubicle on the Paramount lot, they truly are the saddest ‘Cube’ Workers in all of Hollywood. The Paramount Commissary makes a killer breakfast burrito, but when it comes to lunch you are better off brown bagging it.
No matter where you end up eating in Hollywood, it’s never about the food, it’s about the deal made at the power lunch, the crew getting a much deserved break after an already long day or the Hollywood Cube worker getting away from their four grey walls for an hour everyday.
So, the next time you head out on your lunch break and pull up a chair at your local Osceola Bistro, remember that it may not be the glamour of ‘The Ivy’ in Beverly Hills, but at least you are not eating Meatloaf Surprise at Paramount, again.
