Ogden. Booked Saturday night at the Ben Lomond Suites, the old grand hotel in the middle of downtown, where the two main streets intersect.
Period 1930's look preserved in lobby. Renovated rooms, very ample. Turns out to be part of the Choice Hotels now.
A wedding reception down on the Mezzanine Level. Top-floor restaurant. I dined there and ordered a couple of their cocktails,
Ogden is the place where the native LDS power structure of Utah overlaps most strongly with the power of the outside world. Ogden is the outpost of the imperial Northeast, and old European capital, in their dominance of the continent.
This dominance is summed up in two words, which are a huge key to understanding American history---Union Pacific.
Everywhere in Ogden, one need only scratch the surface of the names of buildings to see the people in whom this dominance was embodied.
Banking, guns, and railroads. And telegraphs and cables of course.
Sunday morning I walked down from the hotel to Union Station. As one would expect, it sits at the terminus of the main cross street like a palace.
The museums there were closed for Sunday, but the building itself was open, with plenty of folks milling around, so I gave myself tour. Still plenty of interesting stuff I could read on the walls, and a cool display of historical skis.
Later while looking at the front case of the Browning firearms museum, a young kid comes around and uses the floor space there to make a sign. He strikes me up for a conversation. Turns out he's a local.
"They're shooting a movie here today," he says.
"Local production or Hollywood?" I ask him.
"Hollywood," he says. He tells me the name of the movie. Most of the people milling around were extras.
He told me the name of the star. I recognized from her having been in a popular recent romantic comedy in which she played a high-value young woman who gets pregnant from a one-night stand with a loser slacker male.
"Her career has been in sort of a skid lately," I mentioned.
"That's what happens when you treat people like cra-a-." the kid said, as an aide, letting his voice trailing down to mask the magnitude of the word he used.
"Don't I know that," I thought.
After that I explored all over the building. The main waiting room seemed an exact architectural replica of the Great
Room at Hampton Court, but with a pair New Deal era murals on the walls
depicting the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, one for the Central Pacific and the other for the Union Pacific.
In the waiting room were about fifty people sitting at folding tables. A family walked in the doors and a woman asked if they had come to be extras. She never asked me that question, as I walked around the room, admiring the murals. I must not have fit the casting.
After I'd satisfied myself poking around the building, even going to the areas upstairs marked off limits to extras and crew (for I was neither), I left by the main entrance at the north end of the building.
There the movie production was in full swing. There were three tables set up with snacks, and the floors was filled with theater lights and tools, with crew members standing among them.
The door to the nearby ballroom was open. Around the door people were clustered watching the shooting of a scene from the movie. The star was in the far back of the room, on stage. She was performing a country music number, ostensibly at community dance. The floor was full of people swaying to her singing. A band was behind her on stage. On her knee was a young girl with the same color hair as the star.
I was fascinated by the use of LED lighting in the curtain behind her, as well as the stationary Chinese lanterns, held in various rigid angles above the crowd. Nice effect. One could use that.
No comments:
Post a Comment