So today they were filming yet another cop drama right outside my apartment building. Now, when you live in Manhattan, you get used to movie sets, but this experience today was particularly annoying.

Basically, movie crews are like roaches here, both in that they are annoying, and in that they are everywhere. and they love to shoot in my neighborhood. They shoot, among other things, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and others in my ‘hood. Today they were filming a movie, I think.

My crystal ball tells me this screenplay probably features a belligerent “Sarge” and a lead cop that’s “getting too old for this shit”. I think one of the actors was Peter Boyle, but I didn’t bother pulling out my telephoto lens to check.

Ugh…I’m getting too bored for this shit.

But what made this experience different is that they were shooting right outside my building. So, this ends up having irritating consequences.

First, i walk out of my apartment building’s front door and suddenly I’m on their set! So then these idiot P.A.’s try to make you feel guilty because you are interrupting their very important work of polluting the world with more Hollywood garbage, and all you did was leave your place of residence.

As if that wasn’t enough, today’s scene involved guns, so I got to listen to gun shots all day while I worked. It went until dusk. I now have the lines memorized, and I think I can deliver them about as well as the Peter Boyle-ish guy did:

“Freeze! Drop your weapon!”
“I said drop your fucking weapon!”
“Drop your weapon!”
BANG! BANG! BANG!

Imagine hearing that 25 times in a row. Can’t they just go shoot this stuff on a sound stage?

By the way, if you are new to town, and a movie crew is annoyingly in your way, you should know that they don’t have a right to stop people from getting somewhere they need to be. The P.A.’s will try to pretend like you’re “not allowed on their movie set”, but if their movie set is located on a public sidewalk, you have a right to walk right the fuck through it, and I encourage you to, because it’s so satisfying to see their irritated indignant looks.

Today this P.A.. jumped out in front of me as I returned home with a much needed, delicious beverage. I reminded him he had no right to stop me, and he got pissed off, showing his anger with sarcasm: “Thanks for your cooperation.” I just said “yeah, thanks for the inconvenience.”, and walked by him.

The way I see it, they deserve to be delayed anyway; they’re charging us $10 a pop to see movies these days!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2001 at 20:27 and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.