All Vigilant on the Set

It’s an average late-summer weekday in Hollywood. At the intersection of La Brea Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, tourists mill about the Walk of Fame, keen for anything related to movie-making. Aside from a few famous names in the sidewalk, there is nothing in sight. Three blocks away, however, the crew of the forthcoming NBC crime series “Boomtown” has commandeered much of Orange Grove Avenue, a tree-lined street of tidy bungalows, many of them trimmed by white picket fences.

The neighborhood looks familiar, primarily because it’s a popular place to film, says Jodi Strong, whose company (Entertainment Industry Development Corp.) monitors all location shooting in Los Angeles and unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County.

“It’s got a great look,” she says of the street as she pulls her SUV to the curb. Strong and her boss, Darryl Seif, walk up to the shoot. Spotting them, the director shouts: “Nobody should be on the sidewalk!”

The director doesn’t realize whom she’s addressing. Usually, when Seif and Strong show up on a set in Los Angeles, they inspire the same type of paranoia that a police officer might. That’s because Entertainment Industry Development Corp. is contracted by the city and the county to ensure that filming doesn’t violate any laws or annoy the neighborhood. Theirs is a big job, considering there are 150 location shoots taking place on any given day here. And it’s good business for the city and county. Location filming in Los Angeles generates about $4.7 million a year for both governments.

When the location manager’s assistant spots Seif and Strong she looks apologetic and quickly motions them over. “Our house is your house,” she says.

It has been a busy summer for filming in Los Angeles. The number of location shoots in July was 38% higher this year than in 2001, Seif said. Last year, the pending actor and writer strikes slowed summer productions. Then, Sept. 11 brought most everything to a halt.

This year, downtown Los Angeles, where a third of all the filming in the city takes place, has been crowded with big-budget shoots including “Terminator III,” Jim Carrey’s new film “Bruce Almighty,” “Charlie’s Angels 2” featuring Demi Moore, and “Torque,” a biker picture starring Ice Cube. Later this month the crew for “The Italian Job,” a remake of the 1969 film, will be filming throughout the city. It stars Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron.

On this day’s “Boomtown” shoot, the biggest concern seems to be getting the actors to leave a peach-colored bungalow on cue. “What seems to be the problem?” the director asks. “Is the little girl too afraid to get going?” Tomorrow Seif and Strong have bigger fish to fry, like deciding whether the “Charlie’s Angels 2” crew can shut down Hollywood Boulevard for a night to film an action sequence. “The companies generally ask for the world,” Seif noted. “And we bring their feet back to the ground.”

Fade In

Director Phillip Noyce knows an effective opening shot. By cell phone from Telluride, Colo., he described the scene:

“It was 3:30 in the morning and I was in my Hollywood Hills house, behind my gate and wall, secure in the knowledge I would be working on the next blockbuster movie. The phone rang. It was this strange female voice.”

The voice told him an old story: I’ve got the perfect script, and you’re the perfect director.

“ ‘Oh my God,’ I thought, someone’s penetrated my wall, worse still, she’s a writer and she’s ringing in the middle of the night,” he said. “I just wanted to get rid of her.”

The voice in the night belonged to Australia-based Christine Olsen, who was pitching the true story of three aboriginal girls who in 1931 traveled through the desert to escape a camp in western Australia where they had been forced to live more than a thousand miles from their parents.

Based on a book by Doris Pilkington and Nugi Garimara, Olsen’s script described a time when aboriginal girls were taken from their homes by a government-sponsored program and taught to be domestic servants.

After reading it, Noyce found himself in New York, talking to Harrison Ford about a movie adaptation of a Tom Clancy book, and realizing that “it was this real story of the three little kids that kept spinning in my head--a real story as opposed to a manufactured one.”

The little movie, “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” about “three seemingly powerless girls taking on the system,” beat out the big one, said the Australian director, who didn’t work on Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears.” He previously directed “Clear and Present Danger” and his other project this year was “The Quiet American.”

Noyce said his heart just wasn’t in “the Herculean effort of another $100-million movie, working with the studio system, and the star system.” There was “this tiny little film that my heart tells me I should be making.”The movie, being screened next week during the Toronto Film Festival with a November premiere in Los Angeles, stars Kenneth Branagh and David Gulpilil.

When it opened in Australia earlier this year, the Miramax marketing campaign created a controversy with a poster reading: “What if the government kidnapped your daughter? It happened every week in Australia from 1905 to 1971.”

Australian government officials said the movie gave an unfair portrait of the country. One official distributed leaflets warning constituents against seeing the movie.

The movie provoked controversy because it challenged perceptions about Australia’s past, Noyce said. “The truth has been the opposite of the Crocodile Hunter, the Mick Dundee image [that] they like to project.”

Quote/Unquote:

“I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m an itinerant singer and guitar picker. I am what they used to call a troubadour.”

--Willie Nelson in the Sept./Oct. issue of AARP Modern

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