Peter Templeman: The Longest Time in L.A.

10 February 2007

Short Courses

FTI member Peter Templeman reports from Los Angeles. Peter’s film ‘The Saviour’ is nominated for Academy Award.

This is the longest I’ve been in LA. It’s been two weeks, with another two to go, which I think is the right amount of time to feel out a city on a comfortably superficial level. You can get to know the local café’s, restaurants and supermarkets without having to be all deep and meaningful with the place by opening a bank account, buying a car and getting health insurance. So far it’s been great.

As opposed to other US cities I’ve been to, you CAN find good coffee. The city is pretty user-friendly all round. We’re driving around a brand new Chevy Impala – just about the best car I’ve ever driven and the grid-structure of the city makes getting around easy. Don’t even know if they have public transport – never seen any evidence. I did look on a map that indicated a train line through Downtown and surrounding burbs, but that could be a hoax.

We started in Santa Monica for a week. It’s a great place. Largely Spanish architecture, miles of beach and three blocks of outdoor promenade bubbling with restaurants, café’s, busking hip-hop artists, and a hellofalot of homeless people.

The homeless like it in Santa Monica for mostly the same reasons the ones with homes like it. It’s warm – even in winter, like now. There’s a good sense of community – something that’s rare in this city (like Perth). There’s a beautiful boardwalk along the coastal cliff that stretches about four miles, offering trees to sleep under or park benches to sleep on (not as soft as the grass but drier). So if you have no home it’s a pretty good second option. But a cab driver told me that the main reason for the numbers of homeless in this beautiful part of the city is the generosity of the Malibu council.

Apparently the Malibu council make deliveries of food down here to feed the homeless. I could only imagine what luxuries they must get from sleeping under the stars in Malibu itself – free movie tickets and a restaurant meal once a week? Not quite, apparently. Because the Malibu homeless are not in Malibu. They are in Santa Monica. And as long as they remain there, the Malibu council will keep feeding them. So I guess the food deliveries to the homeless are less of a donation, more a gesture of appreciation, for staying the hell out of Malibu.

Now we’re in a duplex in West Hollywood. Different vibe – more inner-city. It’s close to Beverley Hills where most of the meetings are. Kind of cool looking up at those massive hills (‘Mountains’ in Oz) as you’re driving around. We drove along Mulholland Drive. (It was weird and esoteric with no real ending that made sense.) Awesome views. We went to a cocktail party on the side of this hill.

The Australian Consul General put it on in celebration of George Miller’s Oscar nomination. It was a pretty normal Ozzie gathering really, but with famous people and in a mansion. The ozzie stars seem to be a fairly tight-knit community over here. Stu and I didn’t talk to many people. Mainly Kate Behan, cos I’d met her in Perth, and the president of Aussies in Film, Rob Massala (also Perth-boy). And Melissa George (yeah – Perth).

This mansion was truly enormous. I was chatting with the Consul General Innes Willox in his back courtyard, and I noticed up the cliff-face a little way perched a beautiful small, turn-of-century cottage. I asked the him if that was his Granny-flat. He said No it’s the shed. !

Seeing the massive amounts of wealth in Beverly Hills and the surrounding burbs has been bizarre. I used to spin out trying to fathom the vicinity of dollars that must be swinging around Sydney-town, for so many people to afford so many spectacular views. But the rows of gargantuan, gated mansions in Brentwood and Beverley Hills give capitalism a whole new eeriness. When it comes down to it, a country is only as rich as its homeless people.