THE DEVIN’S ADVOCATE: L.A. STORY
By Devin Faraci
Cinematic Happenings Under Development, NY
Aug 6 2007
After I finally made the decision to move to LA, I had to figure
out how to do it in reality. I hate moving, and most of my big moving
experiences had been within sixty miles of New York City. I’ve actually
moved as far as seven blocks and found it to be a harrowing nightmare,
so moving across country seemed to be especially daunting.
After looking around and checking prices, I went with a company called
Door to Door Moving; the concept is that they supply you with a
‘moving pod’ – ie a big ass wooden crate – that you fill with your
stuff, they load it on the back of a truck and it slowly makes its
way across country as the truck loads and unloads other pods. The
price was right, and other people I knew had used them to happy ends.
Since this move was such a big one and I wanted it to be as personally
stress-free as possible, I hired movers to do the actual loading and
unloading of the pod. Fuck sweating in the sun for hours.
Of course nothing ever happens the way I plan it, so the first leg
of the journey got off to a bad start when there was confusion about
loading the pod – I was supposed to take my stuff to a warehouse and
load the pod there, but the warehouse closed early and no one told
me. I had planned my whole move to the day, and all of a sudden I had
only one more chance to load the pod, and that was the day before I
flew to LA. Thankfully, after much gnashing of teeth and sobbing of
tears (I was seriously on the edge at this point), the pod was loaded,
with a delivery date right before San Diego Comic Con. The idea was
that I would get my stuff (which included my full wardrobe and not
just the eight t-shirts I packed to fly out to the west coast) and
then go to Con.
Of course that didn’t happen either. The day my stuff was to be
delivered (they leave the big crate on the street in front of your
house), my street was shut down to film an episode of The Shield. I
couldn’t believe it, and began wondering if this was an attack on me
by the evil forces of Fox (but I fucking liked BOTH Fantastic Four
films!). By this point I had developed a zen-like acceptance of all
these setbacks, mostly because I had been living without any of my
belongings for two weeks anyway, and looking around my new bedroom I
couldn’t quite figure out how to make all my stuff work in the space
allotted. I set a new delivery date for a couple of days after Con,
and laughed to myself, ‘Oh how Hollywood!’ I stood on the street for
a couple of minutes watching Michael Chiklis making his way through
a big crowd of Armenians protesting the Turkish genocide of the last
century, but since I’m from New York City seeing TV shows being shot
isn’t that exciting, and the LA sun is like a brutal Lyndie England
to my half-Irish disposition (give me foggy days!).
But I had no idea how ‘Oh how Hollywood!’ this shit would get. When the
mover I hired showed up, he asked me a question: ‘Your email address is
@chud.com. Do you write for that site?’ I told him I did, and he said,
‘I directed a movie called Vampire Assassin, and you guys reviewed it.’
Uh oh. Had we been kind, I asked? Turns out we tore the movie a new one
(check out Wade’s withering review right here), and here was Ron Hall,
star and director of Vampire Assassin, with all of my belongings in
his care. I had already run into people who had been unhappy with
stuff written about them on CHUD (Brett Ratner just got all mad at me
on the phone the other day, in fact), but that was usually a social
or work situation – I can ignore Joss Whedon in the bathroom at the
Slither premiere just as easily as he can ignore me.
It’s totally different when boxes upon boxes of my belongings are
hanging in the balance.
Now, I don’t know what kind of a director Ron Hall is, but he’s
an excellent and professional mover. Ron didn’t hold Wade’s review
against me, and was in fact excited to tell me about his next project
(a new Dolemite movie, which is pretty cool), about how the money
people interfered with him on Vampire Assassin, and to talk about
movies in general. Ron and his helper got everything moved in nice
and fast, leaving me plenty of time to make it to G4’s studios to
tape an appearance on The Loop for Attack of the Show (which still
isn’t online. Someone YouTube a clip of it for me, huh?). If I was
to be moving in the Los Angeles area again and Ron was still in the
business and not getting a three picture Dolemite deal, I’d totally
use him again. If you’re moving in the Los Angeles area, you can find
Ron at emove.com under the company title of Instant Assistant. I’d
run his number, but I don’t know if he’s cool with that. Email me
and I’ll hook you up.
Next time: My sink leaks and I call a plumber. Brandon Routh shows
up to fix it.