The Endeavor Flyover: Getting a Premium Rush in L.A.

Los Angeles perhaps seems most lovable when you’re in motion, tooling down the highway in a late-model sports car. Anyway, that’s the message of Randy Newman’s great L.A. anthem:

Roll down the window, put down the top
Crank up the Beach Boys, baby
Don't let the music stop
We're gonna ride it till we just can't ride it no more . . .

(I love it!)

As every resident knows, L.A.’s such a sprawling megalopolis that it just has to be negotiated by automobile. The freeways, of course, are the way you whisk yourself from here to there . . . except on those odd occasions when they’re closed to all comers. The much-traveled San Diego Freeway (also known as the 405) normally takes thousands of L.A. drivers from the suburban San Fernando Valley over the Sepulveda Pass to the trendy Westside. But starting tomorrow night we’ll have to contend with Carmageddon 2, a sequel to last year’s weekend-long shutdown. Which means a lot of us won’t be going much of anywhere.

It was less than a week ago when we Southern Californians got a real lesson in speed, as well as the perks of celebrity. Friday, September 21 was the day the space shuttle Endeavor, riding piggyback on a 747 jumbo jet, entered L.A. airspace, en route to its retirement home at the Los Angeles Science Center. Our city was granted one of the four surviving shuttles because of the importance of the Southern California aerospace industry throughout the shuttle era. We all knew the shuttle would be flying south from the Bay Area, but I don’t think most of us realized in advance the scope of its victory lap. For over an hour, Southern Californians of all stripes were bound together by a remarkable sky-show, as Endeavor cruised down from Malibu (crank up the Beach Boys, baby!), passed over the Santa Monica pier, flew by the posh mansions of Brentwood and the skyscrapers of Downtown, circled the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, then dipped its wing to the Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor before alighting at LAX.

I myself saw Endeavor under the best of circumstances. I’d breakfasted at a rooftop restaurant in the Miracle Mile, then joined a throng of excited Angelenos watching as Endeavor glided over the Hollywood Sign and the nearby L.A. Observatory (which I’ll forever associate with Rebel Without a Cause). The sky was a pastel blue, the air was clear, and the moment was magical.

This being L.A., the news media included in their coverage of Endeavor the reactions of show biz names from Justine Bateman to Tom Hanks (whose role as astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13 has pumped up his enthusiasm for all things space-related). His tweet: “Just flew over my head!!! Don't see this everyday. Never will again. The Spaceman in me just went berserk. Hanx."

If Endeavor on its farewell flight was poetry in motion, it was also a reminder of how rarely we in L.A. really feel the pleasure of speed. There are just so many of us -- so many cars, trucks, motorcycles, and (heaven help us!) SUVs -- that the on-the-road feeling we love is increasingly impossible. Pondering that fact, my mind makes a cross-country leap to a movie I recently enjoyed, a chills-and-spills action flick set among the bicycle messengers of New York City. Premium Rush is worthy seeing for its kinetic energy. Quite a contrast: the heavenly gliding of Endeavor and the “ride like hell” pedaling of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, ricocheting off of car hoods on the mean streets of New York.

Requiem for John Ingle (and the High School Drama Festival)

When I read about the passing of John Ingle, who’d starred for two decades as Edward Quartermaine on General Hospital, I wondered if this was the same man who’d ruled high school drama competitions back when I was a fledgling thespian. Yup, same guy. I never met him, but in my era his impact on the semiannual festivals put on by the Drama Teachers Association of Southern California couldn’t possibly be overestimated.

I was a student at Alexander Hamilton High School, home of many serious-minded drama kids. Each year we worked hard on our dramatic scenes, comedy scenes, and monologues, hoping to bring back booty. We had some successes (I nabbed a trophy myself, for playing the English-challenged Katharine in Shakespeare’s Henry V), but when it came to the sweepstakes prize we were perennial runners-up to the powerhouse that was Hollywood High School. Hollywood was led by John Ingle, who had a singular knack for directing teenagers in bold material that wowed the judges.

Needless to say, we at Hamilton were not big fans of John Ingle. He was clearly a creative talent, and he was wonderful at instilling discipline into his ranks. But he also had this maddening habit of bending the rules. I’ve never forgotten a scene he staged from Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, a daring choice in an era when school administrators expected their faculty to endorse puritanical standards of conduct. It built to a climax in which a martinet Spanish mother discovers that her pregnant and unwed daughter has hanged herself, and Ingle staged the girl’s death in a way that was sudden and startling. The thing was: we were not allowed costumes or props, and Ingle’s staging made astonishingly dramatic use of a long, dangling shawl. Brilliant? Yes! Unfair? That too.

The next year, the scuttlebutt was that if Ingle’s Hollywood High troupe didn’t win the sweepstakes yet again, he was going to decamp to prestigious Beverly Hills High School. Hamilton’s showcase scene from The Miracle Worker actually beat Hollywood that year, and –- however it happened -- Ingle surfaced the following fall at Beverly High, where arts budgets were generous and lots of campus parents had industry connections. Albert Brooks, Nicolas Cage, Richard Dreyfuss, Joanna Gleason, and David Schwimmer are among the famous alumni of Ingle’s Beverly Hills era. And when Ingle retired after thirty years at Beverly, he gravitated naturally into an acting career in film and television, playing powerful patriarchs. On General Hospital he accrued many fans among cast and crew, along with the audiences at home.

L.A. drama students in my era always had a mixed view of the film industry. We considered Hollywood frivolous, at the same time that we secretly lusted after movie jobs. It was always a thrill when a veteran of the drama festival who’d made good on the big screen was called forth to address us as fellow actors. When, years after my own high school days, I covered the festival for the L.A. Times, Mare Winningham was the warmly-welcomed guest speaker. At that later date, I was struck by how cinematic the performances were becoming. Instead of merely presenting a single, well-conceived excerpt from a play, drama teachers were now squeezing bits and pieces of many scenes into a fast-moving live montage (so that a ten-minute selection from Romeo and Juliet, for instance, crammed together meeting, mating, dueling, and death). And everyone’s “street clothes” consisted of long skirts, flowing sleeves, tight leather britches, and high boots. As always, John Ingle led the way.

BTW, I just returned from watching Endeavor (the space shuttle, not the Hollywood talent agency) make a pass over the iconic L.A. Observatory. I half-expected to see James Dean come out and challenge it to a chickie run.