The modeling work continued through her New York years and provided both income and exposure. By the time she was fourteen, she and her mother relocated again — this time to Los Angeles, for pilot season, the annual period when television networks are producing and casting new shows and when the concentration of casting activity in Los Angeles is at its highest. They took a small apartment near Hollywood and La Brea, the kind of working-actress address in Los Angeles that is close to the industry’s geography without being inside the industry’s economic register.
## Los Angeles: The Years of Auditions and Small Parts
The move to Los Angeles at fourteen placed Leighton Meester inside the specific machinery of American television production at the age when that machinery typically offers the most to young actors: there are roles specifically written for teenagers, the demand for teenage actors is real, and the network of casting directors, agents, and production companies that serves that market is concentrated in Los Angeles in ways that no other city matches.
She enrolled in Hollywood High School and Beverly Hills High School, eventually transferring to a smaller private school from which she graduated a year early. She took acting classes when she could, preferring classes with adult students — which is again the specific self-positioning of someone who identifies with the professional world rather than the peer world of her own age.
Her television debut had been in 1999, on Law & Order — which has the distinction of being where a remarkable number of working American actors began their screen careers, given the show’s production scale and its decades-long run. She was thirteen at the time. She appeared in the way that many young actors appear in Law & Order: briefly, in a minor capacity, doing the work and moving on.