Sales in a City of Dreams

He moves and talks like a guy selling Jesus through a bullhorn from the back of a pickup, but what he’s selling are dreams.

His movements are choreographed and his pitch is fast and fierce, burning with the kind of subdued emotion you see among televangelists who suddenly can’t contain it anymore and fall to their knees crying and praying.

Watching and listening to Dov Simens, it’s easy to lose track of what he’s saying, because there’s so much, well, style going on, so much pointing and turning and firing volleys of facts that go whistling by your ears.

He’s a pitchman without parallel, and if he weren’t selling techniques on making movies for under $5,000, he’d be selling fried chicken franchises in Georgia. For 10 years, he ran a metaphysical bookstore, and while he wasn’t all that interested in metaphysics, he sold one hell of a lot of books.

It’s a joy to watch a man like Simens because he’s so good at it. Superb salesmen stand alone in this world, no matter what they’re selling. They perform so well that after a while your skepticism blows off like dust in a wind, and you reach almost automatically for a checkbook or a credit card.

Simens was a line producer on no-name movies when he founded the Hollywood Film Institute a few years back and began holding seminars on filmmaking.

Some of the courses last two days and others 99 minutes, but either way old Dov comes at you with so much heat and light that you almost believe him when he stares down into the crowd and says, “I’m the best film instructor in the history of the world.”

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I dropped by one of the two-day sessions being held in a hot, upstairs theater of the Raleigh Studios, just across from Paramount on Melrose.

The place was jammed with more than 100 people, most of them young, who had paid $289 each to hear Simens recite the techniques of writing, directing, producing, financing and distributing movies.

According to his p.r. man, a sweet, amiable old-time Hollywoodian named Julian Myers, Simens has taught the course across the country and around the world to 5,000 people, many of whom are out there making movies right now.

I don’t know who did the counting, but Simens says he gives the people who take his wham-bam course 20,000 facts in two days, and if you want to buy copies of his books stacked on tables near the stage, so much the better.

You can’t be a self-doubter if you’re in the business of selling, and Simens doubts himself not at all. He says there are more people making movies who have taken his course than any other film school in the world, maybe even in the entire universe.

There’s no baby-talk in his crash course methods, Simens tells his students. No preaching about having great talent or high ideals. You just learn how to do it from him, and with a little luck you’ll grow up to be Steven Spielberg.

The mixed crowd of eager people savored every word the self-proclaimed “Guru of Low Budget” flung at them, like kids catching candy from a circus clown. I could almost hear them dreaming.

You can make a movie for as little as $5,000, Simens told them, but the more money the better. “Give me $1 million and five weeks,” he proclaimed with Sweet Jesus fervor, “and I’ll give you ‘Sex, Lies and Videotape.’ ”

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An ex-Green Beret from Myrtle Beach, S.C., Simens burns with the kind of energy that creates millionaires. The seminars are only part of the package. He offers cassettes of his courses, holds his own film festival and is moving into cyberspace.

It’s an ideal business for L.A. There’s not a waiter, a window washer or a mud wrestler in town who doesn’t think he or she was born for show biz.

I know both an ex-preacher and a reformed cat burglar who made their own movies, mortgaging their houses and selling their sisters to finance four-day shoots that produced films not quite as good as home movies.

The ex-preacher caught his wife in bed with a parishioner and was going to kill them both, but decided instead to make a movie about a preacher who caught his wife in bed with a parishioner.

He shot the movie, rented a theater to show it to friends and then dropped out of sight. Call it therapy and wish him well.

I don’t begrudge anyone their dreams. You’ve got to walk among the stars once in awhile because Earth is a hard place to be without hope, and life is a hard thing to live.

Guys like Dov Simens are in the business of selling. They rarely create anything that will last forever, but, hey, if the dream you buy gets you through today, what’s wrong with that?