Uh. That area’s got a few high-rise office buildings (it was planned as sort of a “new downtown, with better freeway access”, back when that was the kind of thing planners were planning).
Also not quite there but just south of there, across the freeway in a natural gulch, is a pretty street people-heavy area, but they’re pretty well behaved, a lot of them who came over the bridges to escape the shitshow downtown but stay in commuting range of social services.
What it probably is though, that’s the intersection of the major light rail lines that go out to the suburbs, including the methier ones.
But as I understand it, yeah, Portland’s just like that.
Yeah that is a big change. I worked for LA talent managers for a while and I’d spend all day reading breakdowns (descriptions of roles to be cast in upcoming productions) to flag ones to submit clients for. You’d see a lot of roles listed white, a few various types of brown, but the majority were unspecified. This being America though, unmarked race is implicitly white and while you can often get a nonwhite actor an audition for an unmarked role it’s rare to get a callback, let alone cast.
So all those cast at once for unmarked (or even other-marked!) major roles, yeah that is huge.
That said I guarantee you she’s right on the money when she chalks this up to the success of Empire and other minority-led shows last season, and if we don’t see any more such hits who knows. Hollywood output is easily 80% attempts to pattern-match to recent hits (and even that more the window dressing than the load-bearing elements).
The one exception though, the DisneyLodeon empires had very carefully engineered diversity, the ethnic mix of shows was calibrated before the concept was even fleshed out. (DisneyLodeon is the closest thing to the old studio “star system”, where roles and even whole productions are less important in themselves than as opportunities to “break” a member of your talent stable as a star, then to have lead roles and movies and music careers crafted around them).
Like, if a Disney show was written with roles for asian girl A, black girl B, and caucasian girl C, they might consider reworking B around a particularly good-fitting asian actress, but then A would definitely be reworked black to rebalance.
Back around the casting of the Wizards of Waverly Place pilot, we had a client, girl of 14 (but you might not have guessed it - among teen actors, boys tend runty so they can play younger than their age; girls tend short but precociously developed so they can play hotter than their age). She was maybe a quarter Mexican so we had two headshots and contact sheets, one with her real name and everyday blue-eyed appearance for white or unmarked roles, one with brown contacts, black hair, and a Spanish surname for latina roles.
We had a former child star who once I knew him I noticed had bit parts in everything, and voices in half the kids’ cartoons in production. He actually took the biggest chunk of our time, mostly mediating between his (stage) mom and (former child star) girlfriend as they tried to outmaneuver each other for control of him. He booked hella jobs tho, so worth it.
Anyway when he was coming in we had to lock the door to the waiting room because otherwise he would burst in and monopolize our time because he’d just never learned how not to be the center of attention at all times. Like once when the managers were taking a call while they waited on a contract to print he used the time to come out to the assistants’ room, pull out a deck of cards, and do fucking magic tricks for us.
And the weirdest thing about it, it wasn’t actually grating. They were good magic tricks! And he was very charming and charismatic! Dude just didn’t have an off switch.
What else… oh, there was a guy who had been a soap actor but hadn’t worked in a while and the calls I overheard pushing him were these ridiculous dances of talking around things, like “Oh yeah, he’s GREAT, and everyone loves him, ALWAYS HAS, and aah, you know, that’s just catty rumors, really he’s never even been ACCUSED of ANYTHING, certainly not raping his costar in her trailer, anyway WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE, he’s a WHOLE NEW MAN now, have you heard about his newfound passion for animal rights activism?”
Oh also we had Aaron Carter for a while, which among other things means I’ve actually seen his shitty motocross movie. Dude would never ever return calls, if we actually needed to talk to him we had to contact him through Lou Pearlman’s office. Now this is an industry of assholes and these managers held their own, but that’s the only guy I ever saw them tangibly afraid of.
Yeah, yeah, technology’s a bitch, ever since cell phones you can’t write stories where someone is alone and unable to summon help. But you know what you can write now? Stories where someone knows they only have 10 minutes before their compass and map stop working because they left the flashlight on like an idiot.
The funny thing about vaping is it’s this one bit of the postwar Tomorrowland future that showed up all of a sudden after we’d finally written that all off. Like, can’t you totally imagine
filmstrip announcer:You might notice something missing. That’s right, in the future no one smokes cigarettes anymore… because they’ve all switched to odorless, flavorful electronic cigarettes!
CUT TO: a montage of guys with goddamn TOS props in their mouth
Crystal will then slurp up public data from around the web, run it through “proprietary personality detection technology,” and spit out a detailed report on that person’s preferred style of communicating. It’s one part oppo research, one part algorithmic astrology.
Write the Perfect Email to Anyone With This Creepy Site | WIRED | http://ift.tt/1HzuOxL | April 25, 2015 at 01:06PM (via jhavelikes)
