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!