SAN FERNANDO, Calif. — For six days in March 2020, a large cast and crew occupied Majers Coin Laundry here to film scenes for a motion picture featuring a family of Chinese American immigrants whose laundromat was being audited by the IRS.
The family-owned business serves to ground directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s mind-blowing sci-fi action comedy “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which sees its lead actors jump into a crazily diverse array of alternate-universe selves as they attempt to save (or—spoiler alert—destroy) the multiverse.
Shutting down the laundry for nearly a week to host the motion picture production grabbed the local neighborhood’s attention at the time. But now that the 2022 film did well during awards season and won seven Academy Awards (including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and both Best Supporting categories) in March, Majers Coin Laundry has become a destination for “Everything Everywhere...” fans and other film buffs.
Owner Kenny Majers remembers the filming experience positively but admits that he’s still trying to figure out how to monetize his store’s newfound popularity born from the film’s success.
QUIET ON SET, PLEASE
The deal to film at his laundromat was straightforward, Majers says, and he signed a written agreement without involving an attorney. Trucks started rolling in a few days before production was scheduled to begin.
“They had strike days. They had days where I was allowed to remain open while they were setting up,” Majers says. “They paid me for partial days. They paid me half their rate, then on days I had to close, they paid me full rate.”
He recalls set decorators wallpapering the columns inside and installing signage to augment his own. Workers applied a “rust” paint to age the folding tables, “like a ’70s laundromat.”
While curious, those living in the neighborhood, and the laundry’s regulars, respected the production.
“They had a lot of security. I didn’t think they had any issues. I’m pretty well known in the community. If the crew, if someone, had come to me and said something … all the neighbors, some were looking in from a distance. It was pretty safe.”
By choice, either Majers or one of his attendants was always on set, just in case.
“I told the location manager that I need to be here at all times, or my attendant needs to be here at all times, because ‘A broken water hose can mean a disaster for you guys in a matter of minutes. Who’s going to be quickest to turn it off, with all this electrical and power lines you’ve got coming in through here?’”
He mistakenly sat in the wrong chair on set and a production assistant asked if he wouldn’t mind leaving the store and they’d call if they needed him. He said he’d get out of the chair but he wasn’t leaving.
“Either me or my attendant was on at all hours while the crew was there,” he says. “Sometimes they were walking on top of the machines to hang things from the ceiling, and I’m, like, ‘No, guys, you cannot walk in the center of the machine. If you’re going to get up there, you have to stand on the corner, the edge.”
Majers implored them to place a 2x4 board atop the machine and then stand on it to evenly distribute their weight, protecting the computer components inside.
But destruction was the goal when filming an actor shattering one of the large windows at the front of the store.
“I guess they call it sugar glass,” Majers says. “They took out my old window and then put this glass in. … When they replaced it (with a new window), I said, ‘Can you break all the windows? Can you replace them all?”
Everyone with the production knew they were working on a tight schedule, according to Majers.
“You could tell, they were on a time constraint,” he says. “It was a well-oiled machine, the way they worked, the production, the staff, the crew. They were on the ball. A few minutes here or there costs a lot of money.”
For one shot, the crew wanted a dryer to be running but it was making a sound like it was out of balance. “‘I can fix it, it’ll take me about five minutes.’ They said, ‘Are you sure it’ll only take five minutes?’ I said, ‘This is what I do.’ I had it done in five minutes and then it was running smoothly.”
All of the main cast—Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Stephanie Hsu and James Hong—had scenes in the laundromat at one point or another, Majers says: “I met them all. I talked to them all.”
He remembers sharing with Yeoh a video of his daughter playing violin, and asking Curtis to say hello to his family while he was FaceTiming them. But his biggest thrill was meeting Quan, who got started in Hollywood in the 1980s as a child actor in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “The Goonies.”
“When Ke was there, I insisted I get a picture with him: ‘You don’t understand how big an impact ‘Goonies’ had on my life. You can’t say no.’ I don’t think I would have let him say no.”
At least one powerful scene filmed had Majers drawing parallels to his own family.
“A lot of the (flashback) scenes, they had a little daughter running around the laundromat. Another scene, Stephanie was fighting with her mom (Yeoh) and she was running out to her car. I think all the cast and crew were outside; they were filming her running out of the laundromat. Then she’d come back in, all emotional, and they’d do another take.
“She saw me crying, like, getting emotional. I said, ‘That triggered a lot, of 26 years of being here raising my daughter in this laundromat. You triggered something,’ and she just nodded her head yes.”
Majers Coin Laundry receives roughly 24 minutes of screen time in the 139-minute spectacle. Majers would do it all again given the chance but says he’d probably charge more: “If there’s a sequel, I can have more demands,” he quips.
“It’s probably the most famous laundromat in the world now.”
“Everything Everywhere All at Once,” rated R, is available from various streaming outlets or can be purchased on DVD or Blu-ray.
Miss Part 1? You can read it HERE
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Bruce Beggs at [email protected].
