Don't look for the Blind Pig Bar And Grill in your phone memory. Don't expect to find it by wandering the halls of your neighborhood mall. If you should somehow discover its location, don't expect to be let in unless you know a regular who can vouch for you. All I'll say about it is that it's within walking distance of three major movie production studios, and is reached through a door with a totally misleading sign on it.

The Blind Pig is the place where journalists and movie people can mix without watching their mouths. Like its political counterpart over by City Hall, the Huey P. Long Memorial Gerrymandering Society, you can let your hair down without fear of reading your words in the padloids the next morning-at least, not for attribution. It's the place where gossip, slander, rumor, and

character assassination are given free rein, where the biggest stars can mix with the lowliest stagehands and the slimiest reporters and not have to watch their tongues. I once saw a grip punch a ten-million-per-picture celebrity in the nose, right there in the Pig. The two fought it out until they were exhausted, went back to the set, and behaved as if nothing had happened. That same punch, thrown in the studio, would have landed the grip on the pavement in microseconds. But if the star had exercised his clout for something that happened in the Pig, and Deep Throat heard about it, the star would not have been welcome again. There's not many places people like that can go and socialize without being bothered. Deep Throat seldom has to banish anyone.

A reporter once broke confidence with a producer, printed a story told to him in the Pig. He never returned, and he's not a reporter anymore. It's hard to cover the entertainment beat without access to the Pig.

Places like the Pig have existed since Edison invented Hollywood. The ambiance is dependent on what is shooting that day. Just then there were three popular genres, two rising and one on its way out, and all three were represented around the room. There were warriors from Samurai Japan, taking a break from The Shogun Attacks, currently lensing at Sentry/Sensational Studios. A contingent of people in old-fashioned spacesuits were employed at North Lunar Filmwerks, where I'd heard Return Of The Alphans was behind schedule and over budget and facing an uncertain reception, as the box office for Asteroid Miner/Space Creature films had turned soft in recent months. And a bunch in bandannas, cowboy hats and dirty jeans had to be extras from The Gunslinger V. Westerns were in the middle of their fourth period of filmic popularity, two of them coming in my own lifetime. TG,V, as it was known to the trade, had been doing location work not far from my cabin in West Texas.

In addition, there were the usual scattering of costumes from other eras, and quite a number of surgically altered gnomes, fairies, trolls, and so forth, working in low-budget fantasy and children's shorts. There was a group of five centaurs from a long-running sci-fi series that should have been axed a dozen Roman numerals ago.