As I groove away on my various music projects, just about once a month...sometimes more...I get a knock on my front door - asking me to sign a production company's consent form for use of my street in their film production. More often than not, it is for TV Commercials that I'm asked to sign these forms -- and my home has been selected in the past by a production company to have photos taken by a location scout to be considered for a commercial. I lost out to a house 2 streets over. They had a better interior for the child's toy commercial (mine's a 1920's Spanish Eclectic...but with instruments and studio gear everywhere - as a "live/work" space...alas...not a convincing setting for a child's toy commercial). In this most recent case, however, the filming notice was for the CBS crime drama, "The Mentalist", starring Simon Baker as Patrick Jane - an independent consultant to the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI).For Los Angeles, seeing film crews around on a regular basis is common...with street closures, large cranes with lights shining down like it's daytime in the middle of the night (photograph below)...craft services....porta-potties and talent trailers set up in the most unexpected places (I once woke up to 2 large talent trailers parked in front of my house). But my neighborhood in particular sees an uncommonly high amount of filming traffic. The Mentalist shot yesterday...and today...I received another knock on the door - signature required...for a Bank Of America commercial - shooting next week.
Location fee for use of a house for one day for a commercial shoot in my area is ballpark $3000 and up...and OK! It's true! Schedule permitting, I certainly wouldn't mind pimping my house out for a day for that-kind-of-cabbage...but I had no idea when I moved to this neighborhood of Los Angeles' 90041...north of Colorado Boulevard on an unusually heavily tree-lined street...no idea whatsoever - that I'd end up running into producers from my audio post-production days at Play Studios in Santa Monica...walking down Hill Drive (street adjacent to mine)...during an eHarmony commercial shoot. These sorts of *coincidences* make L.A. feel like a "small town" instead of the sprawling metropolitan area that it is...populating over 10,000,000 people...but this industry, when it comes down to it - is very small, indeed, and keeps getting smaller for me the longer I'm here.
Heck, one sequence in the Golden Globe nominated, "(500) Days Of Summer" (2009)...I noticed while watching the film, had to have been shot from my front yard - just before I lived here - by a director, Marc Webb, who I went to college with...Not sure what the "odds" are for that kind of coincidence -- but for me -- in L.A. -- pretty high.
 |
| Patrick Jane's classic '70s Citroen parked on my street with Warner Bros TV production crew surrounding. Around 10:00pm and they're shooting a day scene with huge cranes and lights illuminating the scene. |
