Halloween v Bonfire Night!

October 31st - I have to write a post today - Halloween:

They say there are half a million people on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood about now but who are they? The movers and shakers of the film business; bank managers, finance directors, casting directors, bank clerks, politicians and anybody else you could name and most of them are dressed as ladies; apart from the females, of course, as most of them will probably be dressed as Michael Jackson.

They spend thousands of dollars on their costumes and I have seen people standing there in their glory, being adored and being photographed by a lot of people.

An image comes to mind from a couple of years ago of a man standing there in a dress that resembled a peacock; there were feathers, fans, fantastically looking streamers glistening in the evening neon as other people, dressed in their drag, snapped photographs of him; I had my little, then, four year old grandson, modestly dressed as a skeleton, with me and I pushed him gently towards the fella, and the photographers immediately turned their attention to my grandson and, whilst they continued to take photos of the original man, they started composing a two shot of the pair of them.

Big smiles on both of their faces, of course, and the little fella was really enjoying it but I could see a little wince of the green eyed monster from the man in the million dollar dress so we moved on.

The amount of money that people spend on their costumes to wear just once is something that I can't quite get my head around. I mean has Halloween always been that big a celebration here?
Halloween is a thing that started in Ireland – but I can't remember anything about it when I was a child; I can't remember anything about it where we were brought up in Birmingham, UK either, in fact the only thing we celebrated there was November 5th – Guy Fawkes Night or, as it is more generally known – Bonfire Night.

On that night an effigy of Guy Fawkes is burned on a bonfire and people throw fireworks at each other.

Guy Fawkes, as you might know, tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament back in the year dot and he was a Catholic and against the Protestant Government. So when you think about it my parents, newly over from Ireland, and Irish Catholics to boot, joined in with the locals burning of an effigy of England's best known and most famous, or infamous, Catholic!!!

In the preceding weeks to Bonfire Night we would collect wood and anything else that would burn and, together with our neighbours the Jacksons, we would build a big bonfire at the end of our garden each year.

Then we would stand around with the wonderful heat from the blaze on our faces, eating chestnuts and other goodies and look at the fire as if hypnotized by it; at some point, during the evening, the Guy, which is what he was called the effigy, with the definite article in front of his name, was put on top of the fire. On really big fires he would be up there all the time and we would cheer when he started to burn.

People going about their business in the streets would see kids with prams or strollers standing about the street corners with their guy sitting in the pram and when they approached the kids the kids would say 'Penny for the Guy?'

It was a form of begging of course and sometimes there was nobody in the pram! I do realise, of course, that some Americans don't know what a pram is and I'm not sure what they call them here unless they use the full perambulator??

I don't know what the law is in England now, but we would buy loads of fireworks; Bangers, Roman Candles, Squids, Catherine Wheels; Jumping Jacks and the like and the fireworks would be lit whenever anybody wanted to light one.

Of course they were usually the grown ups who lit them and they would give us, the children, sparklers to hold – till they went out. Then if you touched them they would burn your hand really badly – so you didn't touch them.

On lots of fireworks there was tiny writing 'Not to be held in hand' and of course these were the ones you didn't hold. Some fireworks you could hold but the one I was given to hold one day must have had the 'do not hold' warning; but who could see the warning in the dark?

I stood there like a happy idiot holding a firework with a stupid look on my face and as the thing burned in my trembling hand I got the feeling that something was going to happen so I let it go; like a chicken livered little kid I let the bloody thing drop. A nano second or an atom second later – whichever is the shortest – it went bang!!

So I was right to let it go; it burned my hand and my arm all the way up to the elbow. If I hadn't have let it go it would probably have blown my fingers off and how would I have played the guitar then? How do I play it now? Not good.

What does this have to do with Halloween, I hear you asking? Nothing you might say and you would be right – I have digressed again.

So back to the Halloween party on Santa Monica Blvd – I have never been to Brazil or the carnival there or even to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans but that it what is happening at the moment on Santa Monica Blvd. If you open this up you might see a Fire Dancer on Stilts with candle nipples although it is hard to see.

Hollywood, London and Edinburgh.

Well didn't I forget to write a blog today (yesterday now) after saying the other day that Thursdays was my best day for hits; so all those Thursday people missed out or, should I say, I missed out on their hits.

So what is this really?

I write it down here and it comes out there; on your computer. I don't think we stop and think about the wonders of science and technology; I get hits from India and China in seconds and replies to e-mails almost straight away from there too. It make me wonder why I don't get replies from people just down the street as fast.

I'm due to go to London next Thursday for a couple of weeks; I have three things I have to do there. Number one to go to our grandson's Christening on November 8th; I haven't seen the little darling yet; he has two teeth already and I feel terrible as I missed timed my last trip there and missed the birth – his name is Conor Ruben Johnstone.

Then I have a meeting with someone to set up my one man show at the Edinburgh Festival next year; this should be straight forward just putting a face to a name, have a chat and take it from there. I will probably commit but there are numerous things you need to know when you take your show there. The last time I went I was always receiving bits of bad news from the managers of the venue I took the show to.

For instance I had to pay public liability insurance; this was to be expected, I suppose, but I had to pay nearly ₤200 for my one hour per day. Everybody else had to pay the same rate too which means either the insurance company or the management of the theatre made a lot of money as there must have been at least fifteen shows at the venue.

Some managements make you pay money to the PRS for the songs you sing or the music you play – either live or recorded – and sometimes you don't. I suppose the places where you don't have to pay are usually the places with a music licence and they pay PRS with their licence fee.

I do some songs in the show which I wrote myself and I arrange some traditional ones and that money comes back to me as I'm a PRS member so it's nice to know that someone has my back.

The other plan I have is to shoot a pilot for a comedy series in London in the Spring of next year; I'll be looking for a DP or, as they say in Britain, a DOP – Director of Photography. He's the most important guy in a film crew.

A friend of mine did his first movie with Michael Winner in New York many years ago; everybody called him Mr Winner and the only person he called mister was the DP; so my friend realised straight away how important the DP was.

In England a film crew usually calls the director 'governor' or 'gov' for short; they don't do that here. When Michael Caton-Jones first came here he tried to get them to call him governor but they wouldn't.

Apart from that the film making is exactly the same here as in the UK; the crews in Hollywood have the reputation of being the best in the world – so do the crews inLondon. I have no preference but I have noticed that a lot of the big budget movies get made in London; things like Star Wars, the Indiana Jones series and the James Bond series to name three and a lot of films made in Hollywood do their post production in London too; some films made in London get their post production here by the same token.

But it usually has nothing to do with which place has the better crew – it's usually some kind of tax break or other incentive.

They were all set in Scotland to shoot Brave Heart some years ago but suddenly the Irish Government came in with a deal for the film company and the production went there; they even supplied the Irish army as extras. And what happened to the Scottish money? They made Rob Roy.

By the way no news about the bloody street incident from Sunday evening; it shows how many violent incidents happen here that don't even make the news. Today two people were shot at a Synagogue in North Hollywood and the police cordoned off Sunset Boulevard at about 4.00 this afternoon and surrounded a motel to no avail.

My wife works near there and didn't notice a thing; also two aircraft collided in mid air off the Californian coast; the crash may have involved a Coast Guard plane and a Marine helicopter carrying nine crew members. A search has been launched and debris has been spotted about 15 miles off San Clemente Island.

So we're not without incident here – there's usually some kind of news circus going on but there's not much happening on that front at the moment. The owner of the Dodgers, Frank McCourt (no relation to the late great writer) and his wife are filing for a divorce and of course we have Polanski hovering in the background. And we've just heard news that Dennis Hopper has been diagnozed with prostate cancer - so our thoughts are with him.

So that's it – didn't quite make Thursday; it's a coldish Los Angeles night at 59° and the forecast is 74 for tomorrow leading up to 80 on Sunday.
This is going on at the moment here in good old LA:

How to write a novel in the mean streets of Hollywood.

I mentioned before how I write a novel; I was going to say how I write novels but I've only really written one. I tried one about thirty years ago but it rambled on so much that it was really only an exercise to learn how to type; that, eventually changed when I started a diary which I kept from 1971 till about 1998 when I first went to New York.

The start of the diary coincided with getting a typewriter; someone gave it to me and I had to write something, I suppose.

It also coincided with the birth of our second daughter and the emotions and anticipations together with the final dramatic rush to the hospital twenty miles away makes it good copy to read thirty eight years later. The other thing interesting in the diary is the small talk – the chit chat; complaining about the cost of petrol and the rising cost of property. I have to say our house cost us two thousand, five hundred pounds and in 1971 the price of our house had doubled and when we eventually sold it we sold it for six thousand pounds.

I wrote in my diary how guilty I felt as a socialist making so much money out of the simple price of a house and looking back on that it looks ridiculous. At another time we bought a house for twenty five thousand pounds and sold it two years later for seventy five thousand pounds. At the time I started my diary that prediction would have looked overoptimistic and looking back on that seems as unbelievable – but I digress.

I usually go to the Los Angeles Festival of Books at UCLA every year and one year I listened to a talk by Walter Mosley; it was a fascinating talk and, apart from being very entertaining, it was very useful and informative for a budding writer.

His philosophy was that you sit down at your desk and write; and you go back to your desk every day for many months and write. And it's no good saying you don't have the time; if you have time to watch television you have the time to write; if you have time to go to a game, go to the coffee shop, go to a bar – anything – you have time to write; or you don't want to.

Then, after many months, you will have a novel, a story and then it is time for the re-write.

When I wrote my first novel this is what I did; I also gave myself a kind of schedule; I wrote at certain times of the day. Usually I would start my day with a climb over Runyon Canyon and as I would be doing this I would think. I loved that think as I climbed over the top and as I went down the other side – a lot faster I can tell you – I couldn't wait to get home and start to write.

Of course the ideas were never as good as the ones that came to me as I sat at the keyboard but they helped with the shape of the whole story. I think it was Joseph Campbell who said that an idea goes onto the page third hand: first of all you get the idea – it comes to you like a man on a magic carpet entering your mind – then you think of the idea and straight away something has happened to it; it has been filtered by your mind, your intellect or whatever and then when you put the idea onto the page – or even tell someone about it – the idea is third hand. I think that's what he meant by it at least that's the way I interpreted it; and I'm sure it was Joseph Campbell and I gave it a great deal of thought after I listened to one of his lectures.

He was an expert on all myths but was a particular expert on James Joyce; he claimed to have read Ulysses thirty or forty times; I've read it twice and I have listened to the BBC version of it with Stephen Rea playing Stephen Dedalus and Norman Rodway playing Bloom and then a few years ago I saw the film Bloom with Stephen Rea in it again only this time playing Bloom himself.

So back to the writing – other things that influence me when I am writing are things that are going on in my life; within the past couple of months two friends/acquaintances/ work mates had strokes. The work mate worked with my wife and has since, unfortunately, died, and the other guy is a neighbour who seems to be doing okay considering the circumstances.

So a character in my current novel had a stroke; I needed something to happen to a character so another character could take his place running poteen in rural Ireland in the fifties – and it worked out well.

Other things I use are things that have happened to me, or someone I know or knew, over the years which brings me to the point - at long last I hear you saying.

Yesterday I had a long day; I got up at 6.30am so that I could meet the lads at the beach for our Sunday morning breakfast and bike ride. I get up at 6.30 as I always give myself an hour to get showered, check the e-mail (addiction), check the news on NPR and the Internet (addiction) and sometimes it takes more than an hour.

Then in the afternoon I went to an auction to buy some silver so I could sell it next week at a profit – there are lots of things actors do for a crust. The bottom line is the silver went for too much money for me to make a profit; I went as far as $250 but the other guy was going all the way and so I dropped out.

When we came home we put the TV on and dozed off in front of it; I was woken by ABCs At The Movies (glad they got rid of the other two young guys) and it was too late to start cooking as we like to eat at about 7.00 – 7.30 which gives the food plenty of time to digest.

So I decided to go to El Polo Loco for four juicy thighs of chicken; I had some coleslaw left over from the night before so after a few funnies on America's Funniest Videos I went to the El Polo Loco on the corner of Sunset and La Brea.

When I got into the parking lot on Sunset Boulevard the whole place was lit by floodlights with a fire truck taking a lot of room; on Sunset itself was another fire truck and numerous cop cars.

The firemen were using a high pressure hose pipe cleaning the pavement – something funny just happened, by the way: I put the one word side walk in and the spell check changed it to pavement!!!! - anyway I walked towards the gap in the parking lot and a cop, wearing a black cowboy hat stopped me from going through; I told him where I was going and he told me to go around the street way along La Brea.

As I walked down La Brea it was quite obvious to me that something serious had happened; there were blood splats all over the place and I had to avoid them as I walked.

When I reached Sunset it was lit up like a Christmas tree and the street cleaning was continuing. The manager of El Polo Loco was standing just inside the door with a mop and the floor near the door, in there, had just been mopped.

I asked the him what had happened and he said “A guy – shot I think came in then went next door (the Chinese Restaurant??) and passed away in the street.”

Everybody in El Polo Loco was going about their business as usual; I was asked what I wanted and ordered four juicy thighs; I helped myself to salsa and when my number was called I picked up my stuff and went.

When I got outside I was prepared to go back the way I came but all the cops and fire fighters were gone as if nothing had happened. I went to the parking lot the front way and the fire truck was just leaving. Nothing on the news when I got home but I wasn't surprised as there was no sign of them at the location.
There is nowhere in my novel for that experience – maybe the next one!!

Guerilla Film Making - scouting a location.

Well it's very nice that a few people read this blog; I have noticed that I get the most hits on Thursdays so if I can't write too many through other commitments I will, at least, write one for Thursdays.

I don't plan what I'm going to say I just say the first things that come into my head – as you've probably noticed – and then hope to flow into something interesting. I realise, of course, that what it interesting to me might not be interesting to you but I try.

If you've read blogs on here before – are they called blogs even if the whole thing is called a blog? - if you read the blog before you may have noticed I wrote about guerilla film making and that I was getting involved with a guerilla film soon; actually I said it would be over the 'next' few weeks; well not yet; everything is not ready yet mainly the script. It's being written as I write this. Three episodes came this morning and they look very good. I'm not playing the same character that I played in London I'm playing someone more powerful and he is a crook so that'll be nice.

I won't delve into what it's about but even in guerilla film making some things need to be organised and my pal the writer/producer/director wants to film in an office and I know a film company that has an office on Los Feliz Boulevard; so I asked the writer/producer/director there if we could use her office.

The reason I know her is that I'm supposed to be doing an Irish film for her which is now on hiatus while they raise more money after shooting half of it.

So after a few e-mails back and forth I took my friend into meet the woman in Los Feliz. It was in a building full of offices and, as it turned out, is ideal for the filming; when we got there I walked right in and did the introductions and then we had a look around – really nice. I knew it would be ideal; we sat down on a sofa in the outer office and as the door to the hallway was open I said hello to a rather tall Chinese girl who was walking passed; she asked me if I would like a home made oatmeal cookie and what do you think I said? Of course I took one and then we were offered a cup of coffee to go with it from our host which we accepted.

So then there were four of us sitting in the outside office chatting and the tall Chinese girl told us she was a hypnotherapist who had just moved into the building; I don't know if she was going through the building with her cookies to drum up business but when she found out we were in the film business and that we were actors she started asking us if we knew various stars who needed hypnotherapy; she would say “Oh so and so could do with help and I could help her to lose weight.” or “If you meet so and so can you send her in to meet me and I'll help them too.”

For some reason, yesterday afternoon, we were on top form in the humour department as we found the whole thing very funny and the poor girl didn't know if we were being serious or if we were joking half the time; my mother would have asked us if we'd swallowed a knife we were so sharp. The woman, whose office it was, looked at us as if we were two nut cases so maybe we were the only two who found it funny.

So my friend has an office to shoot in - which really pleased him.

I have quite a few friends who are writers; three of them have shot trailers for their movies to try and help them raise the money, another is trying to raise money for his movie in the more conventional way and another writes scripts for other established writers who just don't have the time to write them. Another friend is a 'script doctor' and gets paid a lot of money (sometimes more than the screenwriter) to tidy screenplays up – he won't tell me which scripts he has doctored as he is sworn to secrecy. Maybe one night I'll get him drunk and get it out of him.

One of my pals who has made a pretty good trailer sent me an e-mail to today and he thinks things are looking good for indie film producers – I hope he's right. He says he has got his ear to the ground and listening to the guys who are supposed to know what's around the next curve and he says that a few studios are going to close as 'branding experts' are replacing the heads of production – and they'll spend roughly the same amount of the annual budget on fewer pictures (big 'tent-poles' like Transformers).

Three hundred pictures a year, as opposed to six hundred, means more available screens - films will stay longer.

Name actors want to work so they'll be plying their trade in smaller budget films so the field will be open for small companies to make more intelligent, adult-theme films.

That's his opinion – you never know he may be right and there'll be hope for all of us.

See ya!

Twitter and Stephen Fry.

Well it looks like I am getting quite a few people to read my blog; the only person I have actually told about it is Jim Makichuk; he has put a link on to his site and, as you can see, I put a link to his site here; the only other person I have told is my wife, Margaret, who hasn't read any of it yet.

So I get a couple of hits per day from Jim's site but the rest come from one of the words I type and from Twitter; I'll deal with Twitter later.

I had loads of hits from all over the world (and many other places) when I mentioned dubbing Anthony Hopkins's voice the other day; I also mentioned the movie Season of the Witch which was what the supposed dubbing was for and these two things were the words or phrases that drew a lot of attention to my site.

In the Internet game these key phrases are called meta tags and they are there to attract the spiders from the search engines to your site and the more hits your site gets the busier it looks and if you get really successful you will attract banner advertising.

Look at the really successful sites and see how many pop ups or adverts they have. The IMDb attracts millions of hits per day so you can imagine how much it would be to advertise on that site – the same with other successful sites.

One little trick a lot of (small) sites use is to put text in invisible writing on their sites; if you know some meta tag that is bound to bring hits, shall we say, Britney Spears, who is the number one hit on Google, you can put her name all over your site in white on a white background when the only way you can read it is by highlighting; the spiders don't differentiate as to what colour your text is in.

You may ask what the point is and it is to attract traffic to your site. I have probably attracted a few hits by mentioning Britney Spears on here now – what I have just noticed by the way is that she doesn't spell her name in the usual way as Brittany; maybe her parents spelled it wrong as Elvis's parents did when they spelt Aaron as Aron.

The other place I mention my blog is on Twitter and that has attracted some hits too; there is a well known actor in London called Stephen Fry; he played Jeeves in 'Jeeves and Wooster' and Oscar Wilde in the movie 'Wilde.' It would be unfair to call him just an actor as the man is brilliant at all things; all things in his field, I might add: I don't know what he's like using a pneumatic drill?? He describes himself as British Actor, Writer, Lord of Dance, Prince of Swimwear & Blogger.

He writes everything from screenplays to articles, books, plays – you name it – and if you want to see an example of his writing output look on both sites of Amazon - http://tinyurl.com/ylgbuho or http://tinyurl.com/yfdnaxq. He is a wit, a presenter and general factotum; well maybe not that, but I wouldn't be surprised, and he does a load of other things and today the followers he has on Twitter is at 851,627 – in two minutes that's gone up to 851,646 so you can see where I am going.

Each day his followers see his tweets on Twitter and his followers love him; a few weeks ago he mentioned a book and the book jumped to number one on Amazon for that day; he has also mentioned sites in the past and his mere mention has attracted so much traffic to those sites that they have crashed.

So he has a great deal of power. He knows this and is very responsible about it – thank goodness.
I'll look again at his followers – up to 851,845.

My followers on Twitter are at the grand total of 42 – pathetic isn't it; there is a long way to go.

When my followers are up to a high figure I will mention my novel and maybe it will sell a few copies; at the moment it isn't selling very well on Amazon – it's doing ok on Kindle but nothing to write home about in paperback – so I won't write home about; I'll just leave you with the (American spelling) blurb:

This is an Irish novel set in Los Angeles. It tells the story of Alfredo Hunter, a depressive Jewish/Irish playwright who is in Hollywood to make a killing in the film business. It also tells the story of the unknown narrator, who observes Alfredo's various fluctuations of mood and humor. Humor is to the fore in this novel of a building friendship between two Dubliners as they encounter the New World, with its new language and confusing mores.

Up Up and Away in Colorado with Balloon Boy!!

I've written before of how I love living where I do; Hollywood. I don't know anywhere else in the state where I would rather live apart from the Hollywood Hills, which I can see through my window from where I type this; it would even be possible to live here without a car as I can go climbing when I want, walk to Rock 'n' Roll Ralphs and to any other service or store.

When I lived miles away from anywhere during the seventies in England it was almost a 'day trip' to take my clothes to the dry cleaners; here, it is fifteen minutes walk and I am just a couple of minutes walk away from the canyon and nature.

Lately we have had some very hot weather with temperatures in the eighties but yesterday it dropped dramatically to the sixties – a summer's day in Canada or Britain – and rained all day.
I walked down to Fresh and Easy on Hollywood Boulevard and it was like walking the streets of Kilburn; but today the weather is fine again: the sun is shining and the temperature is eighty degrees at the moment; what a place to live.

Throughout the day the whole country has been glued to their television sets because a young boy of six had apparently crawled into his father's helium balloon – just before it took off.

In no time the balloon was up in the sky heading towards the moon, for all I know, with no way of communicating with anybody on Terra Firma. The silver balloon, apparently made by the boy's father, reportedly reached heights of 7,000ft in no time; it travelled at around thirty miles an hour headed towards Denver Airport air space and was filmed from a helicopter from an ideal position and this is why we could all see it on our screens. I heard it first on the 12.00 news on the radio (NPR) and, like most people, put the TV on to CNN.

I can't tell you how terrifying the pictures were no matter how spectacular they looked. There was a little boy inside that, relatively, small balloon probably scared to death, crying for his mother and screaming; the balloon was reported to be around twenty feet by five feet and on the screen thirty miles an hour looks really fast.

One report came in to say that a sibling saw the boy fall from the balloon shortly after take off but this wasn't confirmed. Of course every expert then came on TV (where do they find them?) to tell us what they thought was happening; it reminded me of a scene from the comedy movie 'Airplane!' and the various experts gave us their million and one conjectures, hypothesise and forecasts and one of them even said that he thought there was no pay load on board because of the way the balloon was behaving.

When I looked at the TV again the balloon was flying low and was definitely headed towards a landing and, when it got really close, a load of sheriffs surrounded it and started to pat it; it was at this point that I wondered why they didn't just hold it and hold it hard to stop it taking off again!

But they didn't they just patted it! Then one of the sheriffs actually grabbed hold of the downed airship and threw a rope over it; the deputy on the other side of the balloon took a shovel and started to bury that part of it and others started to poke holes to let the helium out; I think the penny dropped in my mind that there was no boy aboard at this point.

Later when I was at lunch in American Burger on Sunset Boulevard it was reported on their TV that a basket had been seen to fall from the balloon shortly after it took off. Questions were asked as to whether the National Guard in Colorado had night sights so they could see where the boy landed if the basket had, in fact, been detached from the balloon. The National Guard were called out to follow the route of the flight to see if they could see where the little fella had landed – either in or out of the basket.

The mind boggled as to what was going on; this was a media circus and I was partaking in it by following it.

I had to leave American Burger to go to the bank and then when I came home I put the TV on only to see President Obama addressing people in New Orleans; in some way it was all over so I returned to where I had started a few hours earlier – KCRW.

The bottom line is the boy was hiding in a box in the attic all the time; the news was greeted with relief by the sheriffs who, I am told, tried hard not to giggle when they gave the good news; but we know what really happened - don't we?

The boy got into the balloon and was taken on a journey to a far away land up in the sky; up there where we couldn't see him he met his friends the giant panda, the giant mouse and the tiny elephant called Ephelump. The three friends took him on a great adventure in the sky where he visited a little village and ate all his favourite food, drank all the fizzy drinks his parents wouldn't let him drink and was returned to the attic just before the balloon landed in that Colorado Sheriff filled field.

His name was Falcon by the way.

Have you ever farted in a supermarket?

I love living in Hollywood because it is a crazy place – it really is and it's unlike anywhere I have ever lived; when I say Hollywood I don't mean Hollywood the movie capital of the world I mean the actual small city of Hollywood itself – a city that doesn't really exist because it isn't a city at all. It has tried to be one but they voted against it so my home address is officially Los Angeles - but it's really Hollywood.

Hollywood has its sleazy places but that's not where we live; we live right near Runyon Canyon and the view from our window is spectacular. Walking outside, and from here to the canyon, the streets are lined palm trees, jacaranda trees, and trees I don't even know the names of, and some very pleasing 1950s type of architecture; it is neither urban nor suburban and when you are in the canyon, or climbing over it which I do occasionally, it is like being miles away from anywhere as you don't see or hear any traffic; there is plenty of greenery notwithstanding the climate and plenty of wild life including rattle snakes - very rarely seen; coyotes - heard and not seen; and humming birds which I see every day and they are beautiful. One day I actually saw a woodpecker; an actual woodpecker after spending my whole life only hearing them.

When I go over the canyon I think of the times when they probably shot movies in canyons like that and I can imagine Hopalong Cassidy movies being shot there and I can see where an Indian might hide waiting to ambush the cowboys and things like that; but then I'm brought back down to earth again when I see and hear the helicopters overhead.

Lots of days we look over the canyon, from where we live, and we see hawks circling the from a great height and watch them swoop to catch their prey; one time last year there was a great big bird sitting on top of one of the trees. We couldn't quite make out what it was even with a strong pair of binoculars. I think we decided it was an eagle but I'm still not sure; it couldn't have been anything else as it was bigger than the hawks. The other birds seemed to be worried about the eagle and they were flying around squawking and twittering and generally trying to annoy it.

They would fly right up to the eagle and then fly away and then suddenly the eagle took flight; when it did this the other birds started to attack it; not the hawks just the little birds. They were trying to get near it and bother it and when we were looking at this it was happening directly above against the clear blue sky and reminded me of some footage I had seen of the RAF fighting the Germans in dog fights during the second world war.

On Sunset Boulevard, which is about ten minutes walk from here, there is 'Rock 'n' Roll Ralphs'; not that I walk to Ralphs much as I usually have shopping to carry. It is called 'Rock 'n' Roll Ralphs' because there are lots of recording studios nearby and when they finish recording, pop stars have been known to go to Ralphs to pick up the odd bottle of booze; this is usually very late or in the wee hours of the mornng before they stop selling alcohol which I think is at 2.00 am.

In 'Rock 'n' Roll Ralphs' you see anything from housewives and businessmen to transvestites, transsexuals, prostitutes, strippers and exotic dancers and most of the time you wouldn't know the difference because most of the time they are like you and me. If you look closely you might be able to tell but we all get on well together without a second look; someone with green hair and maybe a really huge and outrageous breast enhancement might get a second glance – and indeed they have – but what can you expect? This is 'Rock 'n' Roll Ralphs.'
I was in there today (Sunday) browsing around and a very attractive girl aged around thirty walked towards me and said “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Of course not.” I said.

“Have you ever farted in a supermarket?”

Now what am I going t say to that – what would you say?

“Have I ever what?” I replied.

“Farted.”

She said farted with the accent of David Letterman; very polite maybe more like how Christopher Reeve would say it when he played Superman; but she didn't say 'sir' like they might have.

“I thought that's what you said.”

“Have you?” she repeated,

“Well....” I said “ . . maybe I don't want to answer.”

“Why not?”

“Well why would you want to know.”

“I just want to know.”

I could see that there was a fella standing behind her holding on to his shopping cart with a twinkle in his eye.

“Are you two together?” I asked.

“No” said they guy “she just asked me the same question.”

“Can I ask you a question?” I said to her.

“Go ahead.”

“Have you ever farted in a supermarket?”

She nodded.

“What about in an elevator – and then someone came in?”

“Yes!” she said.

She stayed as the guy asked me if I was an actor; I told him I was and then I turned to the girl.

“Are you here by yourself?”

“No I'm with people”she said “but you gave me a good answer.”

“And what was that?”

“In a round about way you told me you did.”

Then she turned and walked away.

Just an every day occurrence in 'Rock 'n' Roll Ralphs.'

Dubbing Anthony Hopkins voice?

When they finish shooting a movie they move into the stage of post-production – 'post'.

One of the things they do in post is to sort the sound out and the sound editor is – or was – one of the most thankless of jobs ion the film industry. They have to strip the sound down so that there is only dialogue and then add sound effects: cars going passed, a radio, dogs barking etc and if some dialogue hasn't been recorded properly they sync the sound afterwards and this is called post syncing; if they didn't do this the background sound would jump about all over the place.

When I say it used to be a thankless job I mean it's not so bad now when they can edit with the aid of a computer as opposed to years ago when they actually had to cut the film and hang tiny bits of it all over the editing room and the bits of sound they cut out would sometimes be as little as an inch long and they had to keep those little pieces somewhere safe.

Well yesterday I got a call from my agent to go and do Anthony Hopkins's voice this morning; when I had gone to these people before it was usually to actually do the job so last night I looked on YouTube for Anthony Hopkins bits and found a few movies and a few interviews.

I listened to the clips and practised it till I got it right – or as close as I could get it; he has a kind of chest voice and sometimes sounds a bit hoarse; he also has a Welsh accent; not very pronounced – shall we say well spoken educated Welsh. For example the Welsh who are not that posh would pronounce 'ear' as 'year' and 'here' as 'year' too and they would say that as an Englishman with a posh accent would say it; something like 'yer' rhyming with purr; clear?? Never mind!

So with all this on board I set out to the recording studio this morning on Hollywood Boulevard – just a walk from where I live.

When I got there the first person I saw was someone called Julian Holloway who was fairly well known in Britain and the son of Stanley Holloway of My Fair Lady fame.

We were given a piece of paper with some dialogue on; so it was an audition! Pretty soon another guy came in who was Irish; I'm Irish too but you wouldn't think it to hear me.

Presently the ADR editor came and she asked us into her office; when we got there she told us that we weren't doing an Anthony Hopkins voice match at all; it was the opening narration to a movie called Season of the Witch starring Nicolas Cage and they wanted an Anthony Hopkins 'type' of voice. The character we were to play was one of the actors in the movie when he grows old and she played us his voice and showed us the opening of the movie. Someone said he sounded Irish then someone else said 'well Tony Hopkins is Welsh.' “Yes” she said “but we want his kind of gravitas.

With that two of us left the room and the first fella had a go at it – Julian Holloway; I was called in second and read it straight – the way I speak - and she asked me to put a little bit of an Irish influence to it and the third time I did it I did a little more.

I left her with five takes to choose from and went about my way ready to do an Anthony Hopkins voice if anybody else should ask.

By the way ADR means Additional Dialogue Recording – watch this space!!!

Guerilla Film Making and football.

Here's a little tale: about two years ago I went across to London to film a series for the Internet; London, England that is, as they used to say in America.

I think we were going to do about thirty episodes and I was playing a very gentle and very persuasive debt collector with connections to the mob; it was shot guerilla style – in other words very little location preparation and no permission to film; just set the camera up and get on with it.

One day we shot a scene in a pub; we ordered some drinks and some food and by the time the food arrived we were filming with a mini tripod on the table. I remember that the barman came over with the food and stood there as we went through a take. He didn't ask any questions just put the food down onto the next table; we told him on the way out that we were trying out the camera and he smiled and waived.

Such is the guerilla style of film making; a friend of mine, Chris Jones, wrote a book called The Guerilla Film Makers Hand Book; I did two movies with Chris and neither was shot in guerilla style, by the way, but if you're interested it's on Amazon.

Anyway, back to the filming; I was only due to be in London for about three weeks and all we were to do for those three weeks was to shoot the scenes I was involved in throughout the thirty or so episodes. Everything else would be shot when I had returned to Los Angeles.

I can't remember how many episodes we shot but one day somebody broke into the crew truck and stole the Steadicam; now the Steadicam is exactly what it sounds like it is; a piece of equipment to make the camera steady and is made up of telescopic parts, bells, whistles, weights and other bits of paraphernalia much too complicated for me to explain here even if I knew how to explain it - but I think you get the idea.

The idea is that the cameraman has to wear it and it makes them sweat – I have to say a camerawoman has to wear it too and they sweat as many buckets as the man; it is a kind of jacket with holes and pockets in where you put the harness which steadies the camera and when you use it you can substitute it for tracking shots, gib shots and any other kind of shot that looks difficult.

Laying a track for a tracking shot, for example, would not be any good for the guerilla type of filming making because you would be moved from your location after you had put the first piece of track down.

So if you will excuse the pun the loss of the most important part of the Steadicam stopped us in our tracks; number one it wasn't insured and number two they are very expensive. I don't know how much they are but I should imagine between three to five thousand dollars for a second hand copy.

We looked all around London to find another Steadicam but had no luck. There was a place which rented them in the Brixton area of London which we tried. Now Brixton is London's equivalent to Harlem or South Central Los Angeles; in other words a very bad reputation for crime probably not deserved.

When we got to the place in Brixton we had to go a particular street and then phone them again; only when we did this would they let us know the actual street address; outside it looked like an ordinary suburban house but when we got inside it was the usual busy looking film equipment house specialising in Steadicams.

They were all over the place; 'big ones small ones some as big as your head!!!' to use the lyrics of a well known song from the fifties; when we enquired as to how much money they were talking about they wanted around fifteen hundred per day to rent or they would have sold us one for around seven thousand dollars; it's approximate, of course, depending on the exchange rate.

They explained that they were very busy as it was the football season (soccer); there is football every night on some channel or other in the UK and they usually use a couple of Steadicam operators to run up and down the side lines – you've probably seen them if you watch football on TV – all kinds of football.

As we were on a very low budget this was the end of the production; there was a chance of picking one up on e-bay but it had to come from India and there were other pieces of camera steadying equipment available but again from India and the delivery was at least two or three weeks – when I would be back in the sunshine of Los Angeles.

So here we are about two and a half years later and we are going to try and do the series over here in Los Angeles and we're going to shoot as many episodes over the next few weeks as we can; it's nearly cast and I'm playing the same character again.

One thing we are looking for is an English woman rather like Ray Winstone's wife in Sexy Beast – Amanda Redman – so if you know an English bird like her drop me a line.

By the way as we are on the subject; soccer or football???? They are all called football and I don't know how many types there are; Rugby Football, American Football, Gaelic Football, Australian Rules Football and Association Football. Association Football was nick named Assoc for short then Soc and now soccer; but you knew that didn't you?