“Hollywood” as an industry goes through cycles.  Of course, you have the big studios which each have the facilities to complete an entire television show or film “in house.”  But economic conditions sometimes dictate outsourcing to specialty studios that can often provide work at a more cost-effective price point.  It was during one of these outsourcing cycles that I got my first job in the industry, at an independent sound postproduction studio called Larson.

But eight years later, the work was drying up for the independents as studios again favored in-house solutions.  So someone (a UK based company called The Television Corporation) got the clever idea of buying up lots of independents and selling itself to the studios as an alternative to in-house solutions, but at a scale larger than a single independent with a huge overhead it had to cover with higher prices.  The resulting company was called Pacifica Media Affiliates. They acquired Larson, and when they acquired Larson they acquired me.

I was immediately repurposed into more of a network and systems architect and now had staff to handle the day-in-day-out minutiae of an IT department, such as troubleshooting equipment or answering user support calls.  Though I had an office at our Isabel Street facility in Burbank (called “The Castle” because the building had a façade with faux stone and turrets that vaguely resembled a medieval castle), most of my time was spent traveling between PMA’s facilities and integrating them.

This was tricky work that demanded a great deal of diplomacy, because each acquisition “resented” being acquired (even though the economic reality demanded it), and I “represented” their new corporate overlord and the loss of independence.  Nobody wanted to hear, “you’re not going to use that accounting software you’ve used for ten years and know really well, I’ll be installing and training you on MAS-90, which is what all PMA facilities use and integrates with our General Ledger.”  I symbolized change, and rarely did an acquisition think it was for the better.

One acquisition, that despised me, was Weddington Productions in North Hollywood.  They had a storied history, being founded by two Oscar winners, and a credits list that read like a history of feature films and box office smashes in the last quarter of the 20th century, films like the Indiana Jones franchise and The Matrix.  Their largely Apple Macintosh-based IT infrastructure was incompatible with the rest of PMA, so it fell to me to “move” them onto a Microsoft Windows computing platform.  They hated me, and I felt that hate expressed passive-aggressively in my direction every time I was there.

They were a cocky bunch and it was tense whenever I was around.  I get it.  I come along and tell them their administrative infrastructure is all wrong and they have to change. They’re fresh off an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture for Traffic, and though they lost to Gladiator, they could still boast that their client, Steven Soderbergh, had won Best Director.

Now I was a heavy smoker in those days – which feels weird to say now that I’ve just completed radiation treatment in September 2025 for lung cancer my doctor says was almost certainly caused by smoking 2 packs a day for 30 years.  But it is what it is.  It was a bright, spring, Los Angeles morning around 11 am, and I had popped out to the parking lot behind Weddington for a quick ciggie.  As I stood there puffing away, I noticed a car with blacked-out windows struggling, because it had been hemmed in by two other cars – one in front of it and one behind it.

I walked over and began directing the unseen driver behind his tinted windows with hand motions:  backward-backward-STOP!-crank the wheel all the way to the right-forward-forward-STOP!  The driver realized I was a good samaritan trying to help him out of a jam and followed my direction to a T.  More than I could say for the people inside the building!

Eventually, the car was free of encumbrance, but rather than speed away it stopped.  The driver’s side window rolled down.  I got a look at the driver.  As I peered inside the car, I realized it was Steven Soderbergh, that year’s Academy Award winner for Best Director.  He motioned for me to come over, and when I did he said,

“I directed the Academy Award nominated film Traffic, but someday you’ll tell all your friends you directed an Academy Award-winning director in traffic.”