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| One Tree Hill and me: the true cost of renting your home to a hit TV show |
Other times it's eight or nine in a day. I really don't see them, since I don't leave the house that much, and they're always quiet; they never make trouble. But a month ago my new neighbour, Nicholas, who's just moved in next door, came over to introduce himself. He's a tall, thin guy in his 50s, glasses and a white beard. Very nice, very sociable. Before he left, he said, "Can I ask you something? Have you noticed that people are always taking pictures of your house?"
Yeah, I said – pressing play on my spiel – it's silly, I know, but our house used to be on TV, not any more, those people are fans… Isn't that funny?
"I mean, it is constant," he said.
I know! I said. Hope it doesn't bother you. Tell me if it ever gets annoying.
"No, no, I don't mind," he said. "They're always polite. They almost seem embarrassed."
Well, tell me if that changes, I said.
Nicholas and I have had some version of that conversation three times, one for every week he's lived next door. Each time I've wanted to tell him it's going to end, except that I don't know if it will. It may increase.
When my wife was eight months pregnant, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment on a noisy street with an eccentric upstairs neighbour, Keef. Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tattoos but told us he'd lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he'd saved a drowning black boy's life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience "came to love some blacks". He later fell off a ladder and broke all his bones. A fascinating man, but not the sort I wanted my daughter having unlimited exposure to in her formative years. Not my angel.
We entered nesting panic. We wanted big and solid. We got permission from a bank to buy a giant, neocolonial, brick house. It had a sleeping porch and a ship-like attic where I in my dotage would pull objects from a trunk and tell their histories to little ones.
Around the time it became clear that we'd got ahead of ourselves financially – and, thinking back, that was a seismic twinge in advance of the market meltdown, a message from the bowels that people like the guy with four mobile phones working out of a storage unit, who'd loaned us the money, probably shouldn't have been loaning hundreds of thousands of dollars to people like me – that was when we remembered something our buyer's agent, Andy, had said, something about a TV show that might want to use the house, and somebody might be calling us. We had written it down.
A guy named Greg.
Often, I think of Greg. We only ever saw him once. He was a heavy guy in a tentlike Hawaiian shirt. Goatee, sunglasses. He sat across from us at our kitchen table and explained they'd mostly be using only the front two rooms. The rest of our character's house had been recreated on a set, and the transitions would be made seamless in editing.
He laid out the deal they'd struck with the previous owners. We move you into a Hilton. Meals and per diem. We put everything back the way it was. We take Polaroids of your shelves to make sure we put the books in order. That's how thorough we are. We even pay people to clean up after. The house looks better than when you left it.
We'll pay you $XX for an exterior shoot, $XX for interiors. The total equalled our mortgage.
Yes, I think we can work something out.
"The front two rooms" – that phrase, in particular, we heard repeated. The front two rooms.
A lot of movies and TV shows are shot here in our adopted coastal home town of Wilmington, North Carolina – Wilmywood. For the past several years, the big ticket in town has been the teen melodrama One Tree Hill. A surprising number of people watch it, maybe even you, for all I know. It's one of the worst TV shows ever made, and I do not mean that as an insult. It's bad in the way Mexican TV is bad, superstylised bad. Good bad.
The One Tree character who supposedly lived in our house was Peyton, played by one of the stars, Hilarie Burton, a striking, bone-thin blonde. When we met, she gave us hugs, complimented the house. She disarmed us – good manners had not been what we'd expected.
