HMO v PPO and Guerilla style filming!!

Hopefully I'm back to normal after my 'almost' flu; not so for my wife who has pneumonia; this is the third time she has had pneumonia and they are the same symptoms each time so you don't need to be a doctor to diagnose it but as in the previous two times the doctor was the last person to cop on.

It's a bit like going to the barber; the barber knows how to cut hair and get your hair to look the way he wants it but we all know our own hair better and as in the case of the doctor we know our own bodies.

The girl who answers the phone at the doctors arranged for the x-ray when I suggested my wife might have pneumonia and yesterday another girl from the doctor's office called to say she had it and ask if my wife was allergic to any medications.

I know it's fashionable to knock the American Health System and the insurance companies but it's no wonder they are fashionable to knock as they deserve it: both of them the insurance companies and the health service.

We have HMO insurance; we didn't know the difference between HMO or PPO when we came here so we elected for HMO. There are two doctors at the practice (or the office or whatever you call it here) and the senior partner only takes PPO and Medicare patients. Our doctor is the junior partner and handles the HMO patients too; this means he literally sees you for about four minutes then disappears; he doesn't say where he is going but sometimes he goes to the phone and talks to his PPO patients or tells the nurse or the receptionist something who will come back into the consulting room and tell you; sometimes he comes back (are you following the world series? he might say) and says something else and then he is gone. Very rarely bringing the consultation to an end; we have to guess that!

Since we have been here we have had four doctors and we were spoiled by the first one; he was eighty nine years old and when you went to see him for your annual physical he would give you a thorough examination: everything from looking into your ears, your mouth, even under your foreskin; obviously he didn't have many of those examinations in America because the average American doesn't have one.

You can't help but notice these things at the gym; it's not just the Jews and the Muslims without the valuable prepuce but the average WASP too as it is the American misguided policy to barbarically take it away within the first few days of a man's life; maybe they love to hear the screams of the little kids that get it done – I don't know.

Anyway my wife is now on the mend as she is being treated properly but I can't keep her in unless I hide her clothes. I know she has a deadline at work so she goes there every day and comes back to sleep and I know it would put a lot of stress on her if I insisted on keeping her at home but she is warm there and not doing anything physical.

So what am I doing? – sweet FA!

By now I should be starting on the film I said in a previous post we would be shooting guerilla style – but no.

Let me take you back and fill you in; in April I was supposed to be doing an Irish film set in Belfast but shot here in Los Angeles; I agreed to do this for very little money way way below my usual fee. It was a goodish script and for some reason I was going to play one of the only two Englishmen in it. At the table read in a cast of about twenty only about five of them could do an Irish accent.

The table read was at the film company's office and afterwards I was very pessimistic about the whole thing as the acting and the Irish accents were atrocious.

I came back from London after doing my show there ready to shoot here and was told that they had shot half the film but wouldn't be getting to my part for about a month as they were raising more money; September was put back to October, then November and so on.

In the meantime a friend of mine wanted me in his Internet series which we would shoot guerilla style – just setting the camera up in the street and getting on with it; we have shot hundreds, if not, thousands of feet of film doing this – well the equivalent of feet in High Def.

My friend asked me if I knew an office where we would shoot a lot of the first four episodes and I immediately thought of the office where we had the table read; so I sent the woman (the writer/director of the Irish film) an e-mail and asked if there would be a possibility of filming there. She wrote back and said of course; then she wrote and asked me how much we would pay.
As I was going to do a film for her at an ultimate low budget rate I was a little surprised she wanted anything. I wrote back and said how about $100 and she wrote and said $200 would be better – per day.

I put it to my friend who said if the office is right that would be okay; so we went to see the office which I wrote about before in a previous post and he liked it so he set about writing the script with the office in mind.

When I was in London a few weeks ago the woman sent me an e-mail and said I should tell my friend to get worker's comp insurance and ask permission from the owners of the building and get a licence to film; this is after me telling her we would be shooting guerilla style!!!

I pointed this out to her and she said we couldn't have the office unless we adhered to what she wanted so we called the whole production off.

I told her what she could do with the Irish film, of course!!

By the way here's a tiny URL for Chris Jones' book on Guerilla Film making - http://tinyurl.com/yfhoz4d