Do you know what it feels like to have a location scout come to your house? Well, the house I grew up in has it's own agent. No joke! My father is still referencing the time we had Life Goes On film its pilot there, 20 years later. The show was responsible for inappropriate "Corky" down syndrome jokes nation-wide in the late 80s and early 90s. To mention it now would be dating myself and the reference is often lost if I mention it to anyone of the opposite sex that has a twitter account.
These ubiquitous location scouts are quick, clean and precise like Navy Seal snipers. No time for chitchat they never want to talk about the final project or what other things they are looking for and have scouted for in the past. It often gives the scoutee a sense of connection or inter-connection and some kind of pride that their piece of property may be selected in a commercial, TV show or feature film. People here will always find a way to weave the goliath entertainment industry into a personal story in this increasingly impersonal Los Angeles.
When so much of the industry seems to be re-locating in Detroit, Canada, Romania, north Carolina and even Australia it is nice to see these dented rental cars filled with wide angle lenses and memory cards fluttering around the city like Monarch butterflies in late September.
In the hope of giving you a more graphic interpretation of the city I went and bought myself a camera for the first time in years, a digital camera. I see people all the time just fanning out on themselves at bars, restaurants and even in their cars. How can there be enough room on our servers for all of these photos? What happened to the important information like the ICBM launch codes of War Games? I hesitate to even call them photographs maybe "pics" or even "pix" should be more appropriate. My promise to you is I will only use this Camera for story telling purposes and will not clutter the Internet with more useless pix.
Let me be a Location scout for you, for a movie in constant revision, with more colored pages than a Pantone look book which will never, ever be green lit.
My friends and glorified acquaintances often ask, "how come you are everywhere I am, are you following me?" Well sometimes I am following them but for the most part I am actually just omnipresent. Sure the gas bill is high but I find it hard to say no if invited somewhere, and especially hard when I am not welcome there at all. If I had a map of my daily routine around LA it would probably look like the Star of David from space.
I have to go home now, this guy next to me at the caffeine warehouse keeps reiterating loudly on his StarTAC "It wasn't actually a sincere scene as much as it was a joke about making a sincere scene" Welcome to LA.