After I finally made the decision to move to LA, I had to figure out how to do it in reality. I hate moving, and most of my big moving experiences had been within sixty miles of New York City. I’ve actually moved as far as seven blocks and found it to be a harrowing nightmare, so moving across country seemed to be especially daunting. After looking around and checking prices, I went with a company called Door to Door Moving; the concept is that they supply you with a ‘moving pod’ – ie a big ass wooden crate – that you fill with your stuff, they load it on the back of a truck and it slowly makes its way across country as the truck loads and unloads other pods. The price was right, and other people I knew had used them to happy ends.
Since this move was such a big one and I wanted it to be as personally stress-free as possible, I hired movers to do the actual loading and unloading of the pod. Fuck sweating in the sun for hours. Of course nothing ever happens the way I plan it, so the first leg of the journey got off to a bad start when there was confusion about loading the pod – I was supposed to take my stuff to a warehouse and load the pod there, but the warehouse closed early and no one told me. I had planned my whole move to the day, and all of a sudden I had only one more chance to load the pod, and that was the day before I flew to LA. Thankfully, after much gnashing of teeth and sobbing of tears (I was seriously on the edge at this point), the pod was loaded, with a delivery date right before San Diego Comic Con. The idea was that I would get my stuff (which included my full wardrobe and not just the eight t-shirts I packed to fly out to the west coast) and then go to Con.
Of course that didn’t happen either. The day my stuff was to be delivered (they leave the big crate on the street in front of your house), my street was shut down to film an episode of The Shield. I couldn’t believe it, and began wondering if this was an attack on me by the evil forces of Fox (but I fucking liked BOTH Fantastic Four films!). By this point I had developed a zen-like acceptance of all these setbacks, mostly because I had been living without any of my belongings for two weeks anyway, and looking around my new bedroom I couldn’t quite figure out how to make all my stuff work in the space allotted. I set a new delivery date for a couple of days after Con, and laughed to myself, ‘Oh how Hollywood!’ I stood on the street for a couple of minutes watching Michael Chiklis making his way through a big crowd of Armenians protesting the Turkish genocide of the last century, but since I’m from New York City seeing TV shows being shot isn’t that exciting, and the LA sun is like a brutal Lyndie England to my half-Irish disposition (give me foggy days!).
But I had no idea how ‘Oh how Hollywood!’ this shit would get. When the mover I hired showed up, he asked me a question: ‘Your email address is @chud.com. Do you write for that site?’ I told him I did, and he said, ‘I directed a movie called Vampire Assassin, and you guys reviewed it.’
Uh oh. Had we been kind, I asked? Turns out we tore the movie a new one (check out Wade’s withering review right here), and here was Ron Hall, star and director of Vampire Assassin, with all of my belongings in his care. I had already run into people who had been unhappy with stuff written about them on CHUD (Brett Ratner just got all mad at me on the phone the other day, in fact), but that was usually a social or work situation – I can ignore Joss Whedon in the bathroom at the Slither premiere just as easily as he can ignore me. It’s totally different when boxes upon boxes of my belongings are hanging in the balance.
Now, I don’t know what kind of a director Ron Hall is, but he’s an excellent and professional mover. Ron didn’t hold Wade’s review against me, and was in fact excited to tell me about his next project (a new Dolemite movie, which is pretty cool), about how the money people interfered with him on Vampire Assassin, and to talk about movies in general. Ron and his helper got everything moved in nice and fast, leaving me plenty of time to make it to G4’s studios to tape an appearance on The Loop for Attack of the Show. If I was to be moving in the Los Angeles area again and Ron was still in the business and not getting a three picture Dolemite deal, I’d totally use him again. If you’re moving in the Los Angeles area, you can find Ron at emove.com under the company title of Instant Assistant. I’d run his number, but I don’t know if he’s cool with that. Email me and I’ll hook you up.
Next time: My sink leaks and I call a plumber. Brandon Routh shows up to fix it.