Sooner or later you are bound to run into Hollywood
If you live in Vancouver for any length of time, sooner or later you'll run into Hollywood.
Or at least you'll run into people who think they're in Hollywood. This town is full of occasional film workers with full-time attitude.
I'd better backtrack. I've been volunteering with Metro, the free daily commuter paper in Vancouver, to improve my portfolio while I wait for the Korean government to finally issue me a work visa.
In the meantime, I've been able to cover the Air India trail, as well as visit locations as diverse as a video game company, a shop devoted to luxury products for dogs, and a bodybuilding competition.
But by far the strangest experience I had was when I covered a crew filming an episode of The Dead Zone, a syndicated show that up to now I was only barely aware existed.
When I got the assignment, I wandered down to the set and immediately asked security personnel for permission to take some pictures and ask some questions. They told me I could take pictures, but I had to clear questions through the show's publicist first.
So, like any good reporter, I ignored them.
By ignoring the (rather silly) rules of a movie set, I was able to talk to a special effects expert, a stunt coordinator, and firemen assigned to the set to make sure a large explosion went off without a hitch. Then I called the publicist, and things got weird. The publicist was beside herself that I would break the rules of the set. Never mind the fact that I'm not employed in the film industry and don't ever intend to be; to her, the rules were sacrosanct and must be obeyed.
But to be a good reporter, sometimes the rules have to go out the window. I'm not sure if this was one of these times, but it sure was fun to test the waters regardless.
And thanks to new technology, I'm not the only one testing the waters and breaking the rules. I just saw Sin City, a film directed by Robert Rodriguez, who has a history of doing movies his own way. He subjected his body to medical experiments to finance his first film, El Mariachi, and ever since then he's pretty much told Hollywood to go stuff itself.
Sin City is shot with new digital cameras; film doesn't even enter the equation. This innovation allows Rodriguez (and others using the technology, such as Star Wars creator George Lucas) to literally make unreal spectacles in their backyard. Almost everything in Sin City but the actors is digital, allowing the filmmaker to create his or her own world inside the screen. In the case of Sin City, this means a film that looks more like a comic book than any other movie in the history of cinema.
And if there are a few innovators now, soon there'll be hundreds, if not thousands of filmmakers taking the digital plunge.
So in a little while, the rules I so flagrantly transgressed will be out the window. Hollywood types won't be able to fall back on their old protocols, because smarter, faster and above all more polite innovators will have replaced them and their goofy rules.
And I still got a story into the paper before deadline, so it looks like my part as an extra in this little drama has paid off as well.
