So what if it’s been 20 years between projects! In between my accidental “debut” in the 1986 psuedoc Stripper and now, I must confess I hadn’t really been focusing much on my career as a film artiste, but I have to redouble my efforts now that I just found myself currently appearing as someone named William Cambell (the missing “p” in the last name might be misconstrued as a muzzafuzzin’ spelling error but is really a much more subtle yet telling character differentiation) in a three-minute online film titled Silver Lake Part I on the travel website TurnHere.com about Silver Lake by local filmmaker Rob Sobul (no, I didn’t spitefully leave any letters out of his name; I’m waaaay above that).
Seems that it’s been at least a couple months since Rob contacted me to see if I’d be interested in participating as an on-camera interviewee for his latest local shorty about my neighborhood. I told him there were far prettier people with much deeper ties to the community to put in front of his lens, but if I remember correctly I think he found me via my Blogging.la post about the string of shootings and deaths that have occured since I moved in with Susan and he liked the idea of that take on the community. While it’s not usually a good peg to hang a travel doc on, I enthusiastically offered to show him the tarnished side of Silver Lake by taking him across the three-blocks around the corner from me where five people had been killed in a 16-month period.
He was game and so was I, and after he showed up at the house one afternoon and wired me for sound he shadowed me and Shadow with his camera as we strolled over Sunset from Benton Way westerly approaching Micheltorena and back talking about what I think makes Silver Lake such a special place to live… and die.
The end result was that he got somewhere around 40 minutes worth of footage of me rambling on about the various justifiable homicides and cold-blooded murders, none of which made it into the final cut of the film… and I totally understand that Rob’s goal was to promote this area not demote it. But then again, maybe he’s saving my gruesome gabbing for Part Deux?
Bottom line, at least I talked about enough besides grief and sorrow to end up with three blink-and-you’ll miss me appearances in the nice little ditty that Mr. Sobul pulled together, including the clip’s closing line. And here’s a link to a bad transfer from VHS to Quicktime of my moments onscreen in Stripper. Enjoy.
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