Beverly Hills Fllm Festival - A Blogger's Gaze and Memory

I arrived to the fest tired, half-asleep, straight from Mexico – who else but yours truly can go from a Tijuana slum to the heart of the heart of Beverly Hills within 4 hours?

This is the third year I have gone to BHFF, with a screenplay “in competition” for the screenwriting award. This year it is for Antarctica, set in the South Pole. I wrote it based on a story idea by my friend Will Beinbrink (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1080718/), who is also the lead male actor in my film The Watermelon. The script was short-listed for the Sloan Initiative at the Sundance Screen Lab, is submitted for the Sloan thing at the Hamptons Film Fest, and is in talks to be optioned with a certain entity/someone (more on that later as it does or does not develop).

In 2006 when I went to the BHFF, I had three scripts in the running, two co-authored by Liv Kellgren, the other The Watermelon. All have been optioned, one was made, none won the main award – so what does hat say abot subjectivity and judges? It says no one in Hollywood knows shit and cannot tell the difference between a good screenplay and a bad one.

I don’t know who won this year, yet, and I am not going to the awards ceremony @ $125 a plate; it all brings back bad memories. Two years ago, things really fell apart with Liv, badly, and at the last moment she not only failed to show up in Beverly Hlls, she attempted to cancel our dinner reservations on her credit card. She was told there were no refunds. She did this solely to make my happy experience a bad one. Her act of malice cost her $250. I had intended to reimburse her – since she tried to cancel dinner hours before it happened, without informing, I decided fuck it, if she wanted to hurt, it would come out of her pocket.

There is a price to pay for betrayal, and Liv Kellgren has paid it ten-fold.

All of this coming from someone who, weeks before, said, “I feel like I am living in a dream” because many of the things she (we) had dreamt of were starting to come true – many meetings with producers and studios, scripts being finalists and winning here and here and there…it was closer than she ever got…

Then she turned her dream into a nightmare...and has a bogus money scheming biz with fake testimonials: www.ConsciousEnvironments.com.

And I am always reminded of that time when I go the BHFF.

Last night, I told someone about my other bad memories of Beverly Hills, when I lived there back when I was 24, with Sharon, and how that went south and I truly became “down and out in Beverly Hills.”

9 months there…another life…

Maybe I should avoid that part of L.A. – Beverly Hills truly is where dreams are born and die…

As for the festival, as every year, I saw many great short fllms. Of the features, the best was the doc on The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, A Dutch Connection.