Be vewy qwiet, I'm hunting tweasure

Finally, I can talk about it: Last fall, NBC came to town, and we shot the DC portion of "Treasure Hunters." It aired tonight, and it looked nice. Now, I don't know what kind of time compression they did, but the Southie Boys were blundering around the Library of Congress for hours. I remember sitting in the room just past the printing press, waiting for those fellows to finally find their clue, so we could go home. I wasn't sure where they went afterwards -- turns out if was Baltimore. What I didn't know was they were visiting the Vane Brothers grain elevator on the harbor. No, it doesn't say Key Industries on the top, and to my knowledge there is no hidden chamber at the bottom.

But I'm getting ahead of myself -- three years ago, another reality game show shot at the same location: Spymaster. We had about 1/100th the budget of Treasure Hunters, and the winner didn't get millions -- she got, as I recall, nothing. But the location... man, it was the scariest building I've ever seen. I threw away every stitch of clothing I used while working there. God knows what kinds of toxic chemicals I was breathing, and the smell of rats and their, um, shall we say byproducts was everywhere. To this day some of my tools have a whiff of Baltimore, and until the day I sold it, my pickup had a slight whiff. Probably took five years off my life working there.


The warehouse is this ancient hulk, visible from 95, a massive black building that's been abandoned for at least 30 years. Inside, it's... creepy. There's no other word for it. Ancient, rusty, scary looking machines sit in the corners, the sounds of bats and rats scurrying and squeaking from the upper floors, crumbling concrete, and the knowledge that if I believed in such things, the ghosts of the deceased workers wandering up and down the rusting spiral staircases. I doubt you've seen Spymaster -- nobody did. But you've probably seen Ladder 49. The scenes of the burning building where poor Joaquin Phoenix met is fate was the same location.

Small world, eh?

I would like to thank the academy

Sunday, August 13, 8PM ET, The History Channel. "Countdown to Ground Zero." No, it's not a tie-in to Oliver Stone's film. The budget for this documentary would have covered about 90 minutes of shooting for Mr. Stone. But it includes interviews with real people, and sometimes that's even more compelling than Nick Cage looking grim.

And if you look closely at the guy sitting across from John O'Neil in Elaine's, with the blue shirt and the glasses, you'll get a preview of this year's Emmy awards.

Actually what you'll see is a very sick, uncomfortable art director who happened to bear a passing resemblance to the actual person he's playing.

Then again, not every reviewer seemed to think so:
"Countdown is the better of the two, though that won't be immediately apparent because the broadcast relies on the always tricky, occasionally dubious and often laughable technique of re-creations. Why dubious? Because (really) who can ever know for certain whether a re-created scene is a good approximation or a complete bastardization? And laughable because the acting in these scenes is hardly Emmy-caliber (nor is it ever)."

-Verine Gay, Newsday