Where to Film 30's L.A.? Cape Town, of Course

Robert Towne is letting Cape Town stand in for 1930s Los Angeles as he directs the cinematic adaptation of John Fante's Ask the Dust.

Cape Town has become quite a busy place.

Last year 37 feature films were produced in Cape Town, almost all of them foreign — compared with just five in 2001. The city also was host to 700 television commercials and 1,200 still photo campaigns.

Great locations and bargain prices are main reasons for the surge.

Boys from the blacklist from The Guardian

One of the banned Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo still managed to direct an extraordinary film.

In 1976, blacklisted director John Berry, long a member of the London- and Paris-based diaspora who had fled US senator Joseph McCarthy's 1940s communist witch-hunts, made a rare trip to Hollywood to spend some time with his old comrade, scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was dying of cancer.

"The most positive notion I could come up with was what I call the
canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts. This theory argues that
artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive.
They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled
with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger
is there."

– Kurt Vonnegut, on the usefulness of the arts

Hollywood Writers, Producers Resume Talks

And they ended them just as quickly.

Producers made a final offer to the WGA that Guild president Dan Petrie, Jr. says was not acceptable to the guild.

He has not called for a strike, nor is he willing to completely cut off negotiations saying, "The fact is, the economic well-being not only of our membership but also of the entire industry is at stake in these negotiations."

The simple fact is that the Guild and its membership requires much more than producers are willing to dole out. They complain that box office revenues aren't enough to cover escalting production costs. The DVD market, they say, is their only true chance at turning a profit.

And who's fault is that? Are the writers the ones who've driven the average cost of producing a Hollywood film, excluding marketing, to nearly $70 million. Add another $30 + million for marketing and you have a production system that is completely out of whack.

Writers should not be made to pay for Hollywood's folly.