By March I had employed nearly one hundred caseworkers, all from relatively distant places to avoid overlap with anyone I might have known, and more seemed inevitable. The binders and coffee routine became a daily necessity in order to keep up with the progress. My house and grounds became a hive of creative forces, and the energy powered me. The more efficiently the people finished their tasks, the faster I could hire new people for different tasks, or move existing workers to new or tangential projects. I strove for authenticity in every aspect, and checked each person’s work accordingly, for who better to perform quality control than me, the person who had watched and internalized the show the most?

One of the biggest problems I had to solve was the issue of the television. Because cable was out of the question, I wanted to be able to turn on my 1970s-era model television in Apartment 201 at any time and see what the characters—or, really, any Santa Monica resident—might have seen during the years of 1977–84, day or night. But how to do it?

The eccentric rich came through again. There was a lady—it was usually old ladies whose sentimental preservation of the present eventually became the vital source material of the past—who lived in Burbank and had invested early on in Betamax machines. Not having a particular preference for any one program, she had taken it into her head to record every single thing that played on her television for years. She was a fellow obsessive, a woman after my own heart. She was network loyal—she only recorded ABC programming for most of the duration, but even so this find was a fabulous discovery, for it provided an authentic viewing experience, commercials and all.

Once the caseworker found this woman he also discovered a cadre of older folks who had compulsively recorded television throughout the time period I needed. It was some kind of cult. Whether they were lovers of television or of Betamax technology, or whether they were, in a more existential twist, desperate people compelled to document every hour of every day, as if to say, I witnessed this, I didn’t know. I was only grateful. I bought all of their collections when I could, and where I couldn’t, I rented the original tapes so I could copy them, all for an incredible price.

From these tapes, and using period-specific TV Guides from the local Santa Monica area at the time, several other caseworkers were able to piece together authentic programming that would play around the clock from all the major networks. I would be able to change channels through some digital miracle devised by a young caseworker whose specialty was electronics and digital manipulation. I wanted a finished product that, by virtue of clicking the remote control as one would in 1977, I could change the channel at will and find appropriate programming. I required that nothing would take time to “load” or otherwise hint at its modern framework—I needed the facsimile to be seamless. Somehow they managed it.