I just came back under the pouring rain and actually I kinda enjoyed it. I guess that’s to do with framing: before class, rain = :( while after class with the perspective of home-cooked chilli-con-carne enchiladas, rain = :)

So I was thinking of all the songs with the word “rain” or “storm” and I have to create a playlist for my iPod so that next time I don’t have to sing them myself (in France we say that bad singing brings bad weather so I don’t want to make the matter worse). Hendrix has “Him from the Storm” and “Rainy Day”; the Doors have… well see the title. I was of course singing and whistling “Singing in the Rain”. And “Feels like Rain” from Buddy Guy came to my mind as I saw him live at the House of Blues this week-end (more on that in a future dedicated post).*

The whole city of LA is such a gigantic studio that I couldn’t help noticing that Westwood in that weather at night would have been perfect to shoot a movie scene. I was told that different kind of trees are planted on different avenues around Hollywood and Beverley Hills so that studios can shoot “localised” scenes: let’s take this boulevard to pretend the action takes place in Italy because it has Cypresses or let’s shoot that Hawaii driving scene on that avenue with palm trees.

When you think about it, this approach to cost-cutting is self-reinforcing: you shoot in LA because it is cool (you have the ghettos à la Training Day, the rich Westside à la Clueless, the beach à la Baywatch, etc.), so LA is cool because it is on screens big or small all over the world and thus you want to shoot in LA which is great because that’s where you are. So, as far as cost-cutting goes, I hope some crew was smart enough to take advantage of the rain to shoot a nice scene and save on the “fake rain” budget to pay main actors their usual $ 20 million. Firewall comes to my mind: I saw it last week and it’s set in rainy Seattle (btw, it’s ok but the end is lame/rushed).

After all, you only got five days of rain per year in LA – or so I was told. I am up to three now and I have blogged about each of them. Isn’t that pathetic of me – I leave London to blog about rain in one of the sunniest civilised place on Earth. Or perhaps it’s logical: when it’s sunny I am outside enjoying it (in the “blogging industry”, winter is considered “blog time”). Anyway, I’m going to sun-blog about San Diego and the Orange County soon.


*: hey, come up with your own songs about the rain: comment! I have “November Rain” and Blind Melon’s “Rain” but the list above was quite long already. :)