Just Another Day on Spring Street

I walked out the front door of the Alexandria today to the ratatat of gun fire, and none other than Matt Dillon was there in black fatigues and a piece in his hand. Some unknown criminal was lying face down, presumably dead, in the gutter of Spring and 5th. Did Dillon cap this fool in the name of justice? No clue. Don't care. Just another moment where the movie industry uses our Downtown backyard as their Hollywood back-lot. This just a day after the Alexandria was being used as a set for some British pop singer's music video.

What a lot of people don't realize (tourists mostly) is that having movies, television shows, music videos and commercials filmed on your street corner every week is not all that fun. Film crews are hard at work and they treat your normal personal living area as their own workspace, often with a complete lack of respect, and almost always with no compensation to the residents they disturb. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a member of a film crew make some disparaging remark about Downtowners and the idea of living Downtown, I'd have like... $10 dollars... almost. I guess that's fine, I don't really want more of these people moving into Downtown anyway. I like that they think it's some shithole warzone crack den, or whatever they think it is.

Anyway, I often wonder how they'd react if roles were reversed and we came out to their suburban streets and set up shop there. Whatever. The massive crew using the Alexandria lobby today has actually been a lot warmer an more accomodating than many of the other crews I've had the mispleasure of running into around Downtown Los Angeles in the past decade (at least to me), so props to them. Maybe Hollywood is getting a bit more tolerant of local residents as our numbers swell. We'll just have to see if the gunplay continues past bedtime, right?

The film's name is Bone Deep not to be confused with the porn flick of the very similar title, Balls Deep.

In other news, I really need a new camera, this camera phone thing is really starting to blow.