Friday, June 21, 2013

A mirror held up to its nature

I have some serious things to say about the influence of the movies on Los Angeles. I think, for starters, "the arts" (what Sir Les Patterson dismissively calls "the yartz") and, notably, contemporary classical music could learn a thing or two from the attitudes of film-makers, particularly their concern and sensitivity to the responses of audiences. This Hollywood film-makers have almost naturally without having to read The Poietic Fallacy, Richard Taruskin's critique of New Music's insistence on the importance of the artist's urge to speak regardless of the audience's ability to hear it.

But I'll come to that another time, suffice to say that I love the sense of film-making going on all around me, the fact you might overhear someone in Starbucks in Reseda say into his cellphone: "I'm just off to Burbank to meet the guy who produced my film," or (as I heard in Tampa Ave today) "The reason I used a long shot was....", or overhear people practising pitches. I've come across these Notices of Filming a few times now.


Apart from warning the passing pedestrian that there will be cables across the pavement, there's also a line here 'warning' the reader that there will be 'interior and exterior dialogue'. How much of LA's interior and exterior dialogue ends up in films too, I wonder?



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