The West Chester Film Festival. It may be 15th in number, but in my heart it’s #8.By the way, friends and family – this is West Chester, PA, not Westchester County, NY. Apparently, 16 festivals is the minimum requirement for gaining any street cred in my old neighborhood.
I hear West Chester is the Cannes of Eastern PA. Just without the naked beaches and P. Diddy yachts and 6-year-olds sipping chardonnay. And while you don’t fly through gay Parie to get there, Wilmington, Delaware's Newcastle Airport is pretty damn gay.
Like shooting fish in a barrel, Delaware.
Every time The Beneficiary is honored, I like to throw out a tidbit about the film. Today: one of the shooting locations.
Part of Ted the Director’s vision for the movie, whose plot centers on a world in which murder runs rampant, was to keep the locales as gritty as possible. And Ted really ran with it on our first day of shooting, which took place in the most vile home in East L.A.
The place was a boarding house far beyond the wrong side of the tracks. Padlocks were on the outside of the doors of the tenants. The carpets were blood-red and sticky. We shot a scene on a waterbed so full of cooties that at the end of the day I yearned for one of those nuclear-meltdown contaminant showers Meryl Streep took in Silkwood.
I was also quite convinced the bathroom had some sort of toilet-cam in operation. Though for the record, I don’t mind people filming me while I take a whiz – just cut me in on the profits.
Ah, showbiz, with all its pageantry and glamour. And me without my tetanus shot.
