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

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?