Score reading in Studio City - Getting 'under the hood'

The cabaret room of Vitello's in Studio City (the same suburb where Mack Sennett built his film lot in 1927; where The Brady Bunch lived in the early 1970s) is not the sort of place you'd expect to find composer activity on a Friday morning. But once a month, of a Friday, 50+ LA composers meet there as members of the Academy of Scoring Arts.

The morning comprises not only breakfast but Adventures in Listening, an hour's critiquing of each other's anonymously-submitted demo-CDs, followed by The Ravel Study Group - an hour-long, bar-by-bar, stave-by-stave study of orchestral scores. The last hour is always a guest.  On the mornings I've been there, the guests have included Mike Lang with his Trio, Tyler Bates who co-wrote the theme for Californication, Jonathan Wilson (maker of guitarviols), Emmy-winner Richard Bellis (who won for his theme to Stephen King's It) and Eddie Karam (who worked with John Williams on the orchestration of Harry Potter films after reconstructing the lost scores of Busby Berkeley musicals for Williams and the Boston Pops at a week's notice).

Ron Jones leads a listening session

The Academy of Scoring Arts is a growing operation. There are chapters in Seattle, Toronto, Portland (OR), San Diego, New York City and, soon, Chicago. And the LA-based Academy has also begun hosting 'happy hours' for film, music and media professionals and offers conductor masterclasses and copyright seminars. I went along to a Friday morning session after hearing that this group was aiming to maintain Hollywood's high standards in musicianship, something I've been interested to find out more about since I arrived in LA a year ago.

Some of the critiquing in the first hour is quite vigorous. 'If you know the producer reads Emily Dickinson, sure', says convenor Ron Jones of one particularly gentle passage of music. 'But most producers are AAARRGGGHHH. They drink too much coffee. They meet you in Starbucks. Their eyes are like [he mimes eyes prised open.]'  'Be careful of too much,' he later exhorts. 'Whatever plays, changes the equation....If you've been using a lot of timpani, maybe change it to Gran Cassa...'

But the musicians comprising the Academy of Scoring Arts are not aspirants. They're working composers and sound engineers - credited and uncredited film, TV and video game composers, underscorers, jingle writers, the folk who write the music for trailers (yes, there are such people), staff composers, orchestrators, the people who sometimes have to make several pages of sketches sound terrific overnight 'in time for a 10 o'clock downbeat'. In fact, the morning is mostly about orchestrating: how to use the orchestra in the most telling fashion in terms of the story to the highest level of musical excellence to the greatest satisfaction of the players - to deadline! At the moment they're studying Star Wars. They get through about 12 bars per session.

'This is why you need to study counterpoint' says convenor Ron Jones, pointing to a passage in Williams' score and explaining why a composer needs to give every player a line. 'You don't just stack stuff'. Jones, who until recently wrote the music for the 75-piece orchestra that plays under the cartoon series, The Family Guy, set up the Academy back in 2011 because even composers in LA feel they need to keep honing their skills. 'Everyone in this town is great,' he says, 'so if you're going to make a dent, you have to be sharper....plus you want to connect with people. If you tried to ring everyone in this room to have lunch, you'd kill yourself.' Del Engen, vice president of the organisation, says another aim is to start getting directors and producers thinking more about the music in their films, and that's the reason for a monthly industry networking 'happy hour' recently launched at Busby's on Wilshire Boulevard.

I asked Mark Smythe (a New Zealand-born composer and former Melbourne resident) why he takes part. He's recently signed on to write the music for Chris Sun's 'Aussie Horror' Charlie's Farm. Isn't he busy enough as it is? 'Because I would not be so arrogant as to think I had nothing more to learn,' he says. He also says he loves the quotes. And Jones is full of them: 'Don't forget listener reaction is also a "score".' Or, 'Doubling doesn't make it bigger.... when you double everything all the time, you cancel things. You cause problems. But when you see it's just a clarinet with the strings, all of a sudden it opens up. That's Mozartean. Mozart was on a whole other plateau.'

Dara Taylor arrived in Los Angeles from Brooklyn, NY about five months and has come to every meeting since. Why? 'We all know who the "great" composers are.' she says. 'But with that knowledge we can either quietly stew in jealousy or get under the hood and find real, applicable reasons WHY they're great. I personally love being able to look at how John Williams approached a certain flute motif and then find a way to incorporate that technique in my own work. It expands my orchestration palette beyond what I learned in school.'

Dara Taylor studies Star Wars on her tablet

The thing that strikes me about the Academy of Scoring Arts is they're studying the repertoire greats. 'I'm studying Ockeghem because I read that Stravinsky was studying it when he wrote his late masterpieces,' says Jones. 'My brother,' says Don Williams, percussionist brother of the composer of Star Wars, 'rang me up the other night. He says, "I'm looking at the second movement of Beethoven's 9th". He's always going back to the originals.'

The score study part of the morning is called the Ravel Study Group after the first score they studied: Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe. I've come too late to participate in the two and a half years they spent on Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (whose composer lived almost directly south across the Hollywood Hills from here). Next up, they're thinking of Respighi's Pines of Rome. But if it took the group two and a half years to get through Rite of Spring and they're only at bar 182 of Star Wars after several months, Pines of Rome might be a ways off. Of course, it doesn't matter. The gems they pick out of a morning's 3-minute demos or 12 bars of orchestral score intensify each participant's own awareness of musical texture.

As I walk out onto Tujunga Avenue's restaurant strip busy with lunchtime customers, I muse on the fact that in this capital of media entertainment there are so many composers concerning themselves with orchestral writing (and that includes emulating the nuances of human performance if they've only got enough budget for a Midi). 

'As I walk out onto Tujunga Avenue's restaurant strip...'

I'll probably never watch a trailer or ad or cartoon again without listening more intently to the use of orchestra as well. Of course, Beethoven didn't have modern media, but Stravinsky's favourite TV show was Daktari. He'd possibly be happy that his influence was spreading so far.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2014

This article first appeared in the 1 May edition of The Podium, published by Symphony Services International, Sydney Australia.

Founded in a spirit of science

A recent article in The Global Post headed 'Australia's war on science' reports that the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is bracing for a 20% budget cut in the Abbott government's forthcoming budget. The government has already announced that the Department of Environment will have its budget cut by $AUD100 million over four years resulting in the loss of a quarter of its staff.

I'm quite happy to kick the Abbott government, but I think there's a broader concern here. The modern state of Australia was founded in a spirit of scientific enquiry. Cook journeyed to the South Pacific to observe the transit of Venus; an observatory was set up at Sydney Cove in the early days of settlement. I know from my own research that the writings of Spencer and Gillen were influential on Freud. But how many Australians know any of this? Can they name our Nobel Laureates? Do they know, as Green deputy leader Adam Bandt points out in that same article, that Australian researchers contributed to "the flu jab, the quantum bit, blast glass and Wi-Fi..."? As far as I know, there is no book on Australians' contribution to science.

1874 photograph of the observatory at Dawes Point, named after the marine who was charged with establishing an observatory in NSW. Dawes Point was originally to be named after the Royal Astronomer, Maskelyne

Interestingly, last year, another Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz warned the incoming Australian government not to launch into massive cuts ('Australia, you don't know how good you've got it,' Sydney Morning Herald 2 Sep 2013 - http://www.smh.com.au/comment/australia-you-dont-know-how-good-youve-got-it-20130901-2sytb.html): "...substantial cuts to the government budget...would be a grave mistake, especially now. Recent experience around the world suggests that austerity can have devastating consequences, and especially so for fragile economies..."  I guess, there's my 'kick'. But then, budget cuts are about the only tool conservative governments have. And Australians don't admire great thinkers.



 

 

Nothing, my Florestan

Another observation in the perennial argument over words and the music in opera:

To those who say that music is more powerful I often say that no composer can match Abraham Lincoln's prose. Copland's Lincoln Portrait is okay, but he doesn't allow a single speech to dominate. And is there a composer in the world whose phrases could match the length of thought in Lincoln's letter to the bereaved mother, Mrs Bixby:  "I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save."

I would also note that the most powerful moment in many performances of Beethoven's Fidelio is not musical. After Leonore has risked her life at the end of a gun to save her husband, he turns to her and says, "My Leonore, what have you done for me?" In the German original there is an exchange of dialogue, but in Klemperer's 1962 recording her answer is reduced to "Nichts, nichts, mein Florestan." (It was nothing, nothing, my Florestan.) It needs no music right at that moment, it is throat-swallowingly moving, although then the duet ('O namenlose Freude') swells up.

The odd thing is that in Bernstein's recording he omits this exchange and goes straight from the thwarted murderer Pizarro's exit to the duet. I have always thought Bernstein understood words (he composed some gems for Candide), but this is a real dramatic moment missed.

      

The whole isle full of noises

After a first two weeks in Hong Kong (doing a residency at the excellent Chinese International School) there are, granted, visual impressions -the dizzying heights of buildings hemmed in between mountains and harbour:

Quite a hum down there. Hong Kong from Victoria Peak

the night lights:

the poetry of the street names:

and the little remnants of British-ness (like double-decker buses or trams):

But I also noticed the distinctive sounds.

For a start, it's another polylingual city. But what was the PA saying in the MTR? It was only after a couple of visits that I could tell: "Please. Hold. The handrail. Don't keep your eyes. Only on your. MOBILE PHONE."

And I arrived on a Sunday, Maids Day Off. The streets, parks, undersides of freeways were full of Filipino and Indonesian young women, the airwaves jammed with the sounds of thousands of women chattering away in Tagalog and Bahasa all at once.

Other little things I noticed? The slopes in this steep city are 'registered' (to make sure they're on someone's maintenance inventory, I guess). Cab drivers take a while to interpret the directions that a friend has written out in Hanzi and then go, "Aha". (The friend took a while working out how to write it, before saying "Aha" and writing it.) I'm guessing the characters are interpretable until put in context of all the others.

Of course, it wouldn't be me without noticing the natural beauty, which is most obvious on the southern side of the island.

I hope urban pressure won't force the authorities to 'reclaim' too much of the harbour on the northern side. I hope it will always be possible to remain impressed with this megapolis's charm.

Making use of the arsenal - orchestras in video game music

Music journalist Rebecca Armstrong observed back in 2011 that video game music has come a long way from the sort of music you heard in the early days, ‘a series of bleeps accompanying pixilated figures on screen’. You can believe it when you hear the sort of full-blown orchestral score that is excerpted in video games concerts.

No-one who manages orchestras needs to be told how successful video game concerts are. The administrators have seen the new kind of audience drawn to them: the fans going nuts when they recognise the theme from ‘Zelda’; the rapturous applause from a full house for the second flute who has possibly never before had audience members scream for his/her solo.

Video Games concerts have even had their own evolution. What started out as a concert devoted to the music of one game, say Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda, has evolved into a more fluid structure drawing on an ever-increasing pool of excerpts (the beginnings of a repertoire perhaps?) Not that all the music presented in games concerts was originally conceived for orchestra, but this is increasingly the case. Indeed, video game music is a genuine new genre for orchestral composers. What intrigues me though is what it tells us about orchestras and what it might mean for orchestras long-term. Los Angeles is one of the centres of game creation and there is no shortage of people to ask.

Admittedly, I once assumed that video games were just outlets for violence - and you do come across games described as ‘an action-adventure third-person shooter video game’ or ‘containing melee combat’ - but I’d never realised the range of cultural references they might embrace. Assassin’s Creed, for example, is based on a 1938 Slovenian novel by Vladimir Bartol which was dedicated, ironically, to Benito Mussolini. Journey, whose composer Austin Wintory I interviewed for this article, ends with a song whose phrases come from the Aeneid, Iliad, Beowulf, Bashō and Joan of Arc. On a YouTube playthrough of the score, Wintory posts a comment saying he was amazed how much conversation there was on one of the producer company’s forums trying to identify these texts.  

Video games in concert, with flautist Sara Andon. Photo courtesy of Austin Wintory

Perhaps I am most struck by how many games are modelled on the hero’s journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell is a name you hear a lot in Los Angeles. He seems to be cited by every second film worker (and that includes musicians) from one side of Los Angeles to the other and his ‘monomyth’ can be discerned beneath movies as diverse as Star Wars and The Cider-House Rules (or even operas like The Magic Flute and Parsifal). In so many video games, even those that look like nothing more than splatting bad guys, the gamers themselves are often replicating a hero’s journey. Of course, they may ‘die’ and not get to the ‘inmost cave’ to find ‘the elixir’ (to use ‘heroic’ terminology). But I suppose that’s how video games resonate with life.

So might I be proposing a high cultural value for video games? Is this why orchestras have been brought in? Australian conductor Brett Kelly proposes that video game employment of orchestras is trying to draw on a ‘sense of cultural profundity’. I asked Bruce Broughton, the composer of the first video game score conceived for orchestra, how the score for Heart of Darkness (1998) came about:

Because Heart of Darkness was an early video game, it was somewhat different from contemporary games.  It contained a 30-minute animated film, the narrative of which was interrupted by game sequences.  In the game/story the hero would come to a crisis, which could be only solved by the gamer.  Once the solution was revealed, the story - the film - continued.  Essentially I was writing music for a 30-minute animated film interspersed with game sequences, the music for which I wasn’t responsible. The game’s producers liked the Disney film The Rescuers Down Under and particularly liked the score, so they contacted me to see whether I would be interested in doing their game.  I had never done a game before, and it sounded like fun.  So, my answer was ‘Of course I would.’

I asked Broughton, whose brother Bill is an Adelaide-based musician, what he thought an orchestra brought to the experience of the game. ‘An orchestra,’ he says, ‘has emotional depth at its heart. I have to think that that quality helped the animation; the story and the game become more involving and entertaining.’

Austin Wintory, composer of Journey, the first game score to be nominated for a Grammy, echoed this view when I phoned him at his studio in Burbank. ‘It’s the expressive depth and potential of the orchestra. The symphony orchestra is one of the greatest artistic achievements in human history. It has an inherent emotional communicability that fits naturally within the vocabulary of most games and most films.’

Actually, Journey was an eye-opener for me. Not violent at all, the player undertakes a mystical journey across desert (and stunningly beautiful graphics) to a mountain. It’s almost a meditative experience, supported by music which is essentially a cello rhapsody accompanied by bass flute, serpent (yes, the old medieval instrument) and strings (in this case, the Macedonian Radio Symphony Orchestra).

Video Games concerts have been such a boon for orchestras that an instinctive doubt creeps in. Will they run their course? Will this good news story come to an end? And, while gamers are currently providing a bump for orchestras at the box office, will they migrate to what orchestras consider their main business: the perpetuation of the classical repertoire?  

There’s no doubting the enthusiasm for video game music. Derek Raycroft runs an online radio program on live365.com ‘dedicated to playing symphonic music of film, video games, television, and more’ (http://www.live365.com/stations/djraycroft). When we meet in North Hollywood he rattles off a new list of Essential Listening for me – Garry Schyman (Bioschock), Brian Tyler (Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag), Michael Giacchino (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault). I’d heard of Giacchino before. He wrote a highly energetic score for the 2004 animated feature The Incredibles. What’s also interesting is that I’m skipping the game and going straight to the music.

But the orchestra’s core business for 100 years plus has been the presentation of music that is to be enjoyed for its own artful elaboration. ‘And what people are mostly looking for in video games concerts,’ says conductor Jeffrey Schindler, ‘is reliving an experience.’ Schindler wonders how tolerant game enthusiasts will be of ‘variations of interpretation, of tempo’. The people who go to these sorts of concerts ‘know how this music goes on the original soundtrack.’ When gamers hear the Halo Suite, says Raycroft, ‘everybody will go nuts for that because it’s so memorable. These video tracks that the concert organisers are choosing are memorable to the players and when they listen to them, it’s instant nostalgia to them.’

There is always, of course, the possibility of video games nurturing an audience that will then follow a composer into the concert hall. Austin Wintory talks of the gamers who came to hear Woven Variations, the fantasia for cello and orchestra that he derived from his music for Journey. They certainly accepted, even enthusiastically, the change of medium. And likewise, he says, ‘I had season ticket subscribers come up and say I’m going to buy this game.’ (Wintory tells of Woven Variations influencing the Journey game: ‘We were struggling at the time with kind of a big, cathartic, grand finale. And it was not landing and we were trying different things, mainly just getting bigger and bigger. Then virtually all the studio attended the premiere of Woven Light and I got a call the next day from the game’s creator Jenova Chen saying, “We think you’ve solved the end of the game”. It kind of metastasized. The ending of the game was inspired by the ending of this piece of music.’)

And what if video games are a new way for composers to enrich their musical palette? Broughton mentions at least one technique that he might incorporate into his other writing. ‘When I worked on the animated series Tiny Toon Adventures, I learned to make very quick transitions and modulations. It’s not a technique I need often, but if I ever do, I know how to do it.’

There are possibly quite a few people invested in the future of classical music who  bemoan the fact that much of the music composed for video games is what could be described as a film composer’s digest of Richard Strauss, Mahler, Wagner, early Stravinsky, Holst of The Planets, or Orff of Carmina burana. The language almost supports mid 20^th-century critic Henry Pleasants’ contention that audiences and classical repertoire parted company sometime around Wozzeck’s premiere in 1925. But there is another clue: all the composers cited above take the audience on an adventure. It may not be the sort of participatory adventure you get from playing the game, but perhaps, as Schindler says, even if people ‘aren’t looking for the meaning of life, they’re looking for an experience of living.’

As the music in games increasingly becomes a plot device – and there are signs that it is – will an audience develop that is knowledgeable about video game music in a way that nurtures concert culture? What if there is an orchestral answer to Guitar Hero in which a gamer can make decisions about orchestral performances in such a way that they develop their own opinions of tempo and interpretation? Pie in the sky, perhaps. But somehow I doubt that video games will cease to offer classical music possibilities after games concerts per se have run their course.    

The answer may lie in keeping the channels of communication open and allowing the symbiosis to gather force. ‘Part of the problem,’ says Austin Wintory, ‘is that listeners and musicians alike put everything into categories. I think that orchestral musicians who command the most powerful emotional arsenal in the musical landscape need not limit themselves the way they do. I would love to go to a concert where the first thing on the program is Prelude to the afternoon of a Faun; next, wham, the hunt sequence from Jerry Goldsmith’s Planet of the Apes. Then, as soon as the dust is settled, say, Aaron Jay Kernis’s Musica celestis or the Samuel Barber Adagio for Strings and then from that something from Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy VII which hearkens back a little bit to Faun. Here is music, not classical music but music.’

It could be an adventure, too.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013

This article first appeared in The Podium, the e-newlsetter of Symphony Services International, in Dec 2013.

 

One musical lesson for Hollywood

At the end of an email exchange I had with Linda Aronson, author of The 21st Century Screenplay, Linda asked, "BTW, since you're a musician, have you ever noticed that three act structure resembles classical sonata form?"

In fact, I had. Linda was referring to the musical form most often used in the symphonic first movements of composers like Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. It's in three distinct sequences, which could be related to Acts. More than that, though, Classical Sonata Form describes the sort of rising conflict we expect in drama. It can be shown diagrametically, like this:

"Early examples of sonata form resemble two-reprise continuous ternary form." Posted on Wikipedia by Hyacinth

The conflict is expressed not really in themes (which I suppose could be likened to characters), but in the 'play of tonality', the movement of keys away from and around the tonic, or home key.

Let me see if I can explain: The form's First Act, or 'Exposition' in musical terminology, sees what Linda would call 'the disturbance', the first sign of conflict as the music modulates for the first time. If you started in C, say, you would normally end up in G. In really intense music, like Beethoven's 'Eroica', this disturbance occurs, or is at least foreshadowed, before the end of the first phrase. A composer like Haydn might use one theme to express this disturbance; others might mark the change of key with a new theme. (Would it be stretching things to think of this secondary theme as an antagonist? Perhaps, since further disturbances can be carried by any other sub-theme, even the principal theme itself; but you get my point?)    

Once this principal disturbance is introduced and cannot be dislodged (and the principal themes have been sounded), the Exposition comes to an end and we are into the Development section, the musical equivalent of the 'barriers, reversals and complications' Linda describes the protagonist of a drama facing, until they reach a point of maximum danger to their goal and decide to fight back. In music, the Development is turbulent, the themes are tossed around through changing keys getting further and further from the tonic and heightening the listener's anxiety for 'home'. In a symphony in C, the furthest 'out' would be the key of F-sharp. In a symphony in G, D-sharp the most alien. (Classical composers rarely went this far out of bounds, but Beethoven's E minor in the middle of the Eroica's first movement is a long way from home.) 

Finally, at a moment that often sounds like 'seizing the sword' (screeenwriting students will be familiar with the term), the music returns to the principal theme in the tonic key (home base). Thus begins the Recapitulation, our Third Act wrap-up. The themes first sounded in the Exposition will now be re-stated, but all in the tonic key. Unlike drama perhaps, this 'return' compounds the sense of home by the repeat of the secondary subject matter in the home key but there are composers, like Schubert, who leave this sense of return till quite late by approaching the Recapitulation under the tonic and only getting home close to the end. (Beethoven extended Classical Sonata Form, in music like the Eroica, by suddenly launching into another Development just at this point where the listener thought s/he was safely back. It's no wonder he often had to ground his first movements at the end with such forceful, if not brutal, strokes.)

But why mention any of this? Is it any more than a parlour game? Yes, I think it is. If there is any criticism I would make of Hollywood (and I haven't many) it's that screenwriting technique has become too prescriptive. I totally agree we're hard-wired to appreciate Three-Act Structures (or Five Acts, if you want to elongate the drama's wave). But must we always reach the end of Act I at page 30 or make Act II last 60 pages...? If not, Classical Sonata Form could stand as a model of the fluidity that's possible. Haydn and Mozart sometimes wrote quite short Developments with no lessening of tension; Beethoven could launch another Development just when the listener thought s/he'd gotten to the end. Shostakovich and Prokofiev in the 20th Century rethought Sonata Form. Stravinsky wrote 'symphonies' where, in Robert Craft's analogy, Mozart's squares and rectangles became trapezoids and rhomboids.

This, then, is a lesson that I reckon Hollywood might learn from classical music. But before anyone at the philharmonic breaks out the champagne, I honestly think classical music in its present state has more to learn from Hollywood. And that will be the subject of a future piece of writing.

Thinking of readily-available examples, the first movements of Beethoven's 3rd and 5th symphonies would fit. The first movement of his Eighth is a nice, nuggety example.  




For more of my blogs on classical music, you might like to visit:

Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2011
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2011/08/sousa-and-sioux-i-am-reminded.html

Doors slamming shut - where to for American opera, published 23 Oct 2012
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/10/doors-slamming-shut-where-to-for.html


Noblesse oblige - arts philanthropy in the US,  published 26 October 2012
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/10/noblesse-oblige-arts-philanthropy-in-us.html

Walking with Stars, published 10 Apr 2012
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/04/walking-with.html

A Culture in Exile - European classical musicians in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s, 25 Apr 2013 
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-culture-in-exile.html

'Traditional terms?' - an interview with John Adams, published 5 Sep 2013
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2013/09/traditional-terms-interview-with-john.html 

Experimental city - Los Angeles' operatic dimensions, published 22 Sep 2013
 @ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2013/09/experimental-city-los-angeles.html



On my website, you could also click on "USA blog" to scroll down the full range.

The whole county a workshop

LA - Of course, it was impossible to escape the Oscars last night. But the whole town talks movies all the time. And seriously. The whole 4,752 sq miles of LA county is like a giant campus or drama workshop. I almost can't describe how inspiring it is.

When I was at the Conservatorium in Melbourne in the 1970s, I remember waking up one morning and thinking, 'All I have to think about today is music'. It's not totally like that, here, but close. Just about every time I sit in a cafe I see people working on scripts. I hear people working on scenes, testing dialogue perhaps with their drinking companion.

Today as I walked up Lankershim Blvd toward North Hollywood station, I found people reading scenes in the street, practising audition techniques. Los Angeles must be the most productive 'arts precinct' on the planet.

I ran into them in the street. Katja Gerz and Colin Flynn practise their audition technique.

 (A quick note: I know that the last few posts have been on the short side. A lengthier one is coming up, I promise.)