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Porn shoots in the hood...can you give me a heads up?
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6187 Reads
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I was reading yesterday's LA Times and was outraged...OUTRAGED, I tell you, to hear that various porn production companies were shooting in my neighborhood. In my zip code. Just One block away!
And no one told me ...
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Sure, there were the weird, boisterous, frat-party like sounds emanating from the back yard of one of the homes on the very block that hosted this illicitness, but the same house had a band doing really bad Beatles covers about a year ago, so I assumed it was their annual moment of bad taste. And it might have been. But maybe - maybe - people were having sex for money within 300 yards of me and I had no idea.
Really.
I make light of this, but I am, in fairness, a full block away. The production trucks don't park on my street and I'm not home much during the day, so I can be blissfully unaware of this depravity taking place so close to home. I'd like to try blissful awareness, just to see how that feels.
But I digress.
The problem started on Easter, Claire Hoffman's Times article reported, and so here's my first question:
Who was the idiot in the Film LA office who authorized, on the highest holy day on the Christian calendar, a film shoot in a residential neighborhood? Much less a pornographic one? (That's pornographic film, not neighborhood.)
I understand the concern about people doing immoral things nearby, but if it was my street, I wouldn't care if Billy Graham was filming The Story of Easter next door - don't mess with my life on a family holiday.
The plot thickens, though: the property owner, Hamid Banafsheha, didn't know anything about it, but realized quickly that as he was planning on selling his house shortly (good luck in this market), it wouldn't do for his house to host things that brought down local property values.
It turns out it was his tenants, one of whom, Odelia Bustenay, curtly pointed out that everything was legal, and then griped that the neighbors were nosy. Well, maybe if they were peering over the fence, but it's hard to ignore an armada of trucks driving up and down - and parking on - your 650-foot long street.
So here's my second question:
Who leases their house without specific provisions regarding sub-letting generally, much less to film production companies?
Every lease I've signed during my life as a renter has required permission to sublet, and the generic lease linked to here is no exception. So if Ms. Bustenay was subleasing the property to adult film
crews, Mr. Banafsheha should have known, or he'd have cause to evict. Or at least ask for a piece of the action.
OK, maybe piece was a poor word choice here.
Apparently porn producers have rights too - LA Film won't discriminate against adult productions as long as they follow the terms of their permit - and the co-founder of Vivid Entertainment Group [it's a link to financial info, so don't get excited - unless, of course, that's what does it for you] Steven Hirsch says his crews are careful, and don't bring lots of equipment. Which makes sense - he's not losing sleep over production values.
Or so I hear.
I'm not trying to make light of this situation. OK, I am, but I think the larger issue here is having lots of film trucks and crew crammed into a tiny cul-de-sac, not what they're shooting behind closed doors.
All right, maybe larger issue was a bad choice of phrase.
Everyone dropped the ball here. Film LA permitted an Easter Sunday shoot on a quiet residential street. They then permitted the house continuously for several weeks. Mr. Banafsheha wasn't paying attention to his tenant's entrepreneurial spirit. And, by only leafleting Hayvenhurst and not the next block over, the production companies denied me contemporaneous cocktail party filler about porn shoots down the street.
Oh, and a private cable feed of the raw footage would help, too.
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| Posted by: JAmussen on Monday, May 01, 2006 - 03:13 PM
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