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March 14, 2006
Towne's L.A. Dust: there are occasional baboons
The Philadelphia Inquirer's Steven Rea talks to Robert Towne about the $19 million Ask the Dust. "Towne wrote his... adaptation in 1993, and tried to get it off the ground with Johnny Depp... But the money was never there... Both Towne's screenplay and Fante's novel...became the stuff of legend." Why was it shot in South Africa? "There were pockets of Los Angeles in 1971 and 1972, when I first read the novel, that could still be exploited as the 1930s... but that was 1972," explains Towne..."But by the time I'd written the script in 1993, there wasn't much of it left. People were saying you couldn't shoot in L.A. because it was too expensive, but it was equally true that you couldn't shoot in L.A. because there wasn't that L.A. to shoot in." So they "re-created downtown L.A.'s Bunker Hill neighborhood on two football fields in the shadow of the Cape Town hills. "There were unexpected benefits of shooting in South Africa... The quality of the air and the sky was so much like Los Angeles, and it wasn't just that we were able to afford building downtown L.A. The location we found for Laguna Beach was more like Laguna than anything that's left in Laguna today. And the desert: three hours from Cape Town, there is desert that looks like the Mojave. There are occasional baboons out there, but you keep them out of the shot."
Posted by pride at March 14, 2006 09:48 AM
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I've posted my thoughts about Ask the Dust over at my blog Mere Words at http://chidder.livejournal.com.
Posted by: chidder ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mcnblogs.com/mcindie/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 15, 2006 11:45 AM
On a semi-L.A.-location-shooting-related note, does any one know if and when Los Angeles Plays Itself is gonna hit DVD? If copyright issues do indeed make an official release an impossibilty, does anybody know of a bootleg floating around? I'm going to be flying out to CA from the east coast at the end of April, but couldn't find any information on whether or not screenings for the film are still going on. If any are, please email me with info! ohsweetsatan@yahoo.com
[I've talked with people about licensing everything. I think it might be an issue for television. I don't know. We'll see. I've been surprised that people who are part of the film industry like my movie and don't seem to object to it. It might make fun of a few movies, but I think it does so in a fairly sympathetic way. I haven't run into hostile responses yet. Maybe down the road I will. says Thom Andersen in this interview.]
Posted by: Ju-osh at March 15, 2006 12:51 PM
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