Through a Lens, Wetly

Between sips of a whale-size lemonade, big, personable former surfing cowboy Tracy Trotter stands at the bar of the nautically themed Century City restaurant Dive, spinning big fish, big sea and big storm yarns. He recounts his yahoo days in Texas, growing up along the rugged waterways of South Padre Island. Around him, the noisy, tubular-shaped room is outfitted like a double-decker submarine that cruises and dives fathoms underwater--an illusion created by two large projection screens made to resemble wall-sized water windows probing the gray-blue expanse of the sea.

It is an illusion Trotter, a 46-year-old director of photography, helped to create. On the screens loop four of his comic, technically ingenious film vignettes. Trotter’s lens, done up like a periscope, chronicles the sub’s misguided attempts to resurface: first inside a family’s wash at a Laundromat, then up through a pair of legs in a hot tub, then--mayday!--into the dangerous pool waters at a chubby guy’s barbecue. The lens ultimately resurfaces in the suds of a rambunctious and curious toddler’s bathtub.

With his back to his Dive handiwork, Trotter is immersed in a hurricane tale: “Hotels were totally gone,” he tells the amused guy at the bar. “Nothing but sand when Hurricane Beulah hit. You’d find a sugar bowl that used to have sugar in it, stuck inside a closed refrigerator with the lid on tight. But instead of sugar, it’s now packed with sand. I kid you not, Bubba.”

Trotter, who specializes in commercials and music videos, is expert in tracking down maritime “body doubles”--local aquatic arenas whose physical attributes mimic the characteristics of well-known waterways, from the Bering Strait to New Zealand’s coast. (The “undersea” sequences at Dive were filmed at the Universal lot and in a private home’s swimming pool.)

“Even before El Nino,” Trotter drawls, “the waters of Southern California were cloudy and impure.” He has found the most perfect clear-water simulations in the East L.A. College Olympic-sized pool and the Boeing astronautical test tank in Huntington Beach (“the prettiest water in town”).

For Trotter, whose Laurel Canyon home is a pseudo undersea grotto with sculptured fish and miniature fountains, the beauties of the real thing are matchless: “There’s no such thing as a bad day underwater.”