when in roam

By and large, I love my cell phone. For the past six months, the T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition (aka the Dork-o-matic 8000) has done everything I could want from it – fielding calls, intermeshing seamlessly with my over-stuffed contact database, calendar and to-do list, checking email, and even letting me modify complex film budgets on the fly in Excel, allowing me to determine the fiscal impact of changes to production plans while still on set.

Since coming to LA, however (ah, yes, did I mention I’m back in our nation’s smog capital, this time through mid-February?), I’ve been frequently seized by the urge to drop kick the thing against the nearest brick wall. Because, though the breadth of T-Mobile’s LA coverage is indeed impressive, the depth leaves a bit to be desired; so far as I can tell, though I get strong reception in all but the deepest concrete parking dungeons, I cannot actually place a call anywhere if any other user in greater LA County has even considered turning on their phone within the last twenty-four hour period. As a result, I spend quite a lot of my time listening to apologies by soothing automated voices – they’re sorry, but all circuits are perpetually busy.

Like any problem, however, my inability to initiate or receive calls, or even check messages, has a bit of a silver lining: this being LA, people assume I’m purposefully not answering their calls or returning their messages to demonstrate my greater relative power level. Yesterday, for example, David Hillary, the other producer on I Love Your Work, was ribbing me for being “harder to get on the phone than Ovitz at his prime.” And when I called to apologize to an agent earlier today who’s call I hadn’t returned for nearly a week, I found myself instead receiving profuse thanks for taking time from my obviously busy schedule to talk through the relatively minor matter at hand.

So, while I had initially planned on picking up a second cell for the duration of my LA stay, I suspect I’ll instead be sticking with my trusted T-Mobile. If I could work up the nerve to do it, I’d actually switch instead to an exceedingly elaborate and ineffective system of smoke signal and carrier pigeon, as I can only imagine the career gains I could realize by effecting such an approach. Once I work out the details, Harvey Weinstein is toast.

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a brief respite

Back to New York for a bit of a break before hurling myself into the fires of Hollywood once more for the ever-intensifying stretch that leads to the start of I Love Your Work shooting on January 8th. Too stressed out, jet lagged and sleep deprived for genuine pith or wit, I fall back upon these two passages on that most unique city of angels to summarize my thoughts.

On Los Angeles versus New York:

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in those streets.

– Jack Kerouac, On the Road

On the lovely individuals with whom I’ve interacted thus far:

The men who work in this town, and, to a lesser degree, the women, display behaviors that would undo them in any other profession. Egomania and greed that would disgrace any executive in, say, the insurance or aerospace industries are here rewarded. And even for those who run afoul of the law and are convicted of crimes, there is an apparently bottomless well of forgiveness. “Nobody cares about that shit,” one studio head said recently. “If you’re a money-maker, you could have killed and eaten your own children. It doesn’t matter as long as there is the perception that you can make somebody some money.”

-Charles Fleming, “Failing Upward in Movieland”

Boy, I can’t wait to go back.

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conversely

“How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.

“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it:

‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin’, and you say, ‘Oh, nothing’, and then you go and do it”.

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh.

“This is a nothing sort of thing that we’re doing now”.

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh again.

“It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

-A.A. Milne

The House at Pooh Corner

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a very surreal evening

How to look like the King of Hollywood for four hours:

1. Attend the premiere party for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, a huge gala event held at Hollywood’s famed Sunset Room.

2. Bring a date for the evening with whom you were set up, who turns out to have been a Maxim cover model.

3. Meet up at the party with LOTR star John Rhys-Davies (“Gimli the Dwarf”), who seems to have been told by his agent that you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread; have him spend much of the evening introducing you as such to the other stars (Elijah Wood, Liv Tyler, Orlando Bloom, etc.), and to agents and execs.

4. Sit, champagne glass in hand, and wonder quietly how in God’s name this is your actual life.

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the smoggy air, traffic jam, suburban sprawl blues

Despite my initial plan to stay in LA only through today, I’ve since rearranged my schedule, and will now be sticking it out in the smog capital of the world through December 20th. Which leaves me, first, in a bit of a bind from a clothing perspective – my Tumi rollaboard barely fits four or five days of clothing, so expanding the trip to fifteen will leave me recycling clothes at a rather alarming rate. (“Didn’t you wear that sweater yesterday? And Tuesday? And last Monday, Thursday and Saturday?”) Second, I fear sticking around for such an extended stretch may push me dangerously close to my absolute Los Angeles lethal overdose limit.

Sure, LA has its upsides. Warm weather. Beautiful beaches. Vacuous, surgically enhanced, bottle-blonde aspiring actresses (“Like, ohmygod, I was totally Juliet in my high school’s “Romeo and Juliet” too!”). But after a few days, the downsides begin to grate on me. A thirty minute minimum drive from anywhere to anywhere else. Monotonous, vaguely run down, bizarrely never-ending suburban sprawl. Really, really bad bagels. And a complete and total lack of cultural life. (“Why go to the symphony when so many films have great orchestral scores!”)

And, worst of all, film people, nothing but film people, as far as the eye can see. In New York, running an indie production company is quirkily cool. Sort of unusual. Here in LA, nothing could be more painfully run-of-the-mill. I get the sense that, say, a tax accountant could do tremendously well at bars here. (“You add long columns of numbers all day long? That’s so exciting!”) In fact, for the duration of my trip so far, I’ve been introducing myself as a forensic diver – you know, the guy who has to fish up the corpses whenever the cops or the FBI are investigating a death in the water. Business has been slow in the East River, I’ve been telling people, ever since Giuliani started cracking down on crime. Which is why I headed out to LA; jet ski accidents, I’m sure, are the future of the industry.

Of course, even the cachet of such an illustrious imaginary career can’t save me; it’s hard to schmooze it up an LA night club when you spend most of the evening huddled in the corner, clicking your heels, thinking of New York City, and chanting softly: “There’s no place like home… there’s no place like home.”

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rambling man

In a scant six hours, I head out the door to Los Angeles. Monday officially starts pre-production for I Love Your Work, so I’m heading west to meet up with the director and other producer to hammer out the details of actually pulling together the shoot. It needs to be quick hammering, though, as I’m only out West until Thursday – a stretch of agent and investor meetings bring me back to the East Coast for the weekend. Following that, I bounce back and forth between New York and LA for most of December and January. And then head off to France at the start of February for the world premiere of Coming Down the Mountain. Thrillingly jet-set, I know. But involving an ungodly number of suitcase packings and unpackings (right on the heels of packing and unpacking my entire apartment, none the less). Considering that the suitcase for my six-hours-till-embarkment trip is lying on top of my bed, completely empty, this could be an ugly couple of months.

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i won’t grow up

Today being the first real snow of the season, I did the only sensible thing: constructed snowballs from the snow on my windowsill, and pelted passersby on the street below.

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still bubbling

The internet is a strange, strange place, one where knowing what the hell you’re talking about takes a distant back seat to Google thinking you know what the hell you’re talking about.

Case in point: “Bubble Boy,” VW’s new commercial for the upcoming Beetle Convertible. Since I praised it in a post here about a week back, over a thousand unique visitors have found their way to this site searching for information about the spot. Further, quite a few have emailed in for additional information – What other commercials has the director shot? What film stock was used for the vintage look – to which I’m forced to reply: I have absolutely no idea. None. I’m in no way connected to the shooting of the commercial or to Volkswagen (though my little brother does, in fact, own a Passat). The entire extent of my expertise on the matter is encapsulated in the four previously posted smarmy paragraphs.

Still, such Google-appointed expertise isn’t entirely without benefit. Among the emails I received was one from Billy Briggs, the actor who played the lead in the commercial, who wrote in to thank me for my kind words (and I must say, he took my “poor-man’s Jake Gyllenhaal” ribbing exceedingly graciously.) Doing what any movie producer would, I asked him for a headshot – I’d absolutely love to stick him into one of Cyan’s next films.

Weblog-based casting. Another technology breakthrough brought to you by self-aggrandizement.com.

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