Tag Archives: FilmLA

Self Help And The California Public Records Act — The Case Of FilmLA — And Their Weirdly Intransigent Attitude Towards The Law — And A Hacky But Functional Way To Scrape Their Website — Which I Did Over The Last Week Or So — And Now It’s — At Least Theoretically — Possible To Batch Search The Permits

December 28, 2020 Mike Leave a comment

Background: This post follows up on a post from a few days ago, and here’s some useful background from there:
This month Los Angeles activists were forced to think a lot about film permits. First the extraordinary Ktown For All broke what turned into an international story about the City shutting down a COVID test site at Union Station to accommodate a film shoot. 
Then less than two weeks later Streetwatch LA member Ian Carr broke the story that an entirely different film company had somehow arranged for a large encampment in front of City Hall East to be swept away in advance of their shoot. Twitter user @publicownedbus also provided valuable info, and then ace Knock LA reporter Cerise Castle also wrote about this incident.1

Recent events have made it clear that we need an effective way to search the content of Los Angeles film permits for names and phone numbers of location managers, locations, and other essential information. Permits are coordinated by an entity called FilmLA. FilmLA is putatively private but is made subject to the California Public Records Act at least by its contract with the City of Los Angeles.² But FilmLA bossman Paul Audley refuses to comply with the law.

And while I’m not giving up on legal remedies, they take forever and it turns out that it’s not necessary to wait in order to obtain some of the records. In particular, the permits themselves. Audley admits that the permits are subject to the CPRA and they are all in some technical sense available on FilmLA’s website. However, the search is abysmal.

It’s only possible to search on four predetermined fields, which are Permit Number, Company Name, Production Title, and Date of First Activity. If you want other information, like all permits at a given location, you’re out of luck. Not only that, but it’s impossible to search even those fields without being logged in. This excludes search engines from indexing the permits (unless arrangements are made to allow them in, which FilmLA has not done).³

But there’s probably no way to compel these people to let search engines in, even with a lawsuit, so I took matters into my own hands and scraped the site of most of the permits.⁴ I’m in the process of putting these all on Archive.Org. There are presently more than 45K individual files uploaded but there are over 100GB and it’s taking a while to get them up. The Archive allows search engines to index their site, of course, so eventually all the permits will be searchable on the open internet.
Continue reading Self Help And The California Public Records Act — The Case Of FilmLA — And Their Weirdly Intransigent Attitude Towards The Law — And A Hacky But Functional Way To Scrape Their Website — Which I Did Over The Last Week Or So — And Now It’s — At Least Theoretically — Possible To Batch Search The Permits →

Los Angeles City Government

Practical Instructions On How To Obtain Everything You Need From Film Permits On The Day Of Shooting — Even Though FilmLA Chief Bossdude Paul Audley Doesn’t Put Them On The Website Until Two Days After — But There’s A Workaround! — For Instance — That Infamous December 1 Union Station Shoot That Shut Down The COVID Test Site? — The Permit Didn’t Hit The Website Until December 3 But This Method Would Have Let Us Learn — Just For Instance — The Name And Cell Phone Number Of The Location Manager Immediately On December 1

December 19, 2020 Mike Leave a comment

This month Los Angeles activists were forced to think a lot about film permits. First the extraordinary Ktown For All broke what turned into an international story about the City shutting down a COVID test site at Union Station to accommodate a film shoot.

Then less than two weeks later Streetwatch LA member Ian Carr broke the story that an entirely different film company had somehow arranged for a large encampment in front of City Hall East to be swept away in advance of their shoot. Twitter user @publicownedbus also provided valuable info, and then ace Knock LA reporter Cerise Castle also wrote about this incident.¹

On December 1, then, I started using the California Public Records Act to investigate. It turns out that FilmLA is a private corporation but their contract makes them subject to the CPRA, so I fired off a request and a couple of days later, after an inordinate amount of pushback from an inordinate number of City offices,⁵ I received the Union Station permit and wrote a post about it.

In the process of this investigation I ended up learning a lot of interesting things about film permits, how to get copies of them, and what can be learned from them,⁶ which I thought I’d share with you today!
Continue reading Practical Instructions On How To Obtain Everything You Need From Film Permits On The Day Of Shooting — Even Though FilmLA Chief Bossdude Paul Audley Doesn’t Put Them On The Website Until Two Days After — But There’s A Workaround! — For Instance — That Infamous December 1 Union Station Shoot That Shut Down The COVID Test Site? — The Permit Didn’t Hit The Website Until December 3 But This Method Would Have Let Us Learn — Just For Instance — The Name And Cell Phone Number Of The Location Manager Immediately On December 1 →

Los Angeles City Government

Here Is Your Copy Of The Absolutely Most Famous Film Permit Of 2020 — They Shut Down Union Station COVID Testing On December 1, 2020 For This Production — And When The Heroic KTown For All Found Out — They Leapt Into Action Like Superheros Will Do — And The New York Times Covered It — And The City Cancelled The Filming — And Reopened The Test Site — And It Was Too Freaking Late

December 3, 2020 Mike Leave a comment

At 4:51 PM on November 30, 2020 the incomparable activist crew known as KTown for All tweeted out an announcement stating that the City was shutting down the Union Station COVID test site on December 1, 2020 because of a film shoot:

In the middle of a horrible and terrifying COVID spike, LA just cancelled all of its Dec 1 appointments at Union Station (one of the only transit-accessible facilities) with less than 24hrs notice because of A FILM SHOOT!! @MayorOfLA @metrolosangeles @lapublichealth WTF???!!???

As you can imagine, Twitter was incensed, and rightly so. Deadline covered the story almost immediately. The Los Angeles Times published a story at 11:05 PM. It took the Mayor of Los Angeles 66 minutes after the Times published to announce, by Tweet at eleven minutes after midnight, that the test site would remain open. KTown for All knows its way around the media, and soon both the New York Times and the Washington Post had covered the story, the Times attributing the story to Ktown for All and including a quote from organizer Devon Manney.

It’s not yet clear what happened, but the official story has coalesced, and it’s that the company running the test site decided unilaterally to close it down for the film shoot. Whether this claim is true or not is not yet known. However, I did manage to obtain a copy of the actual permit itself.⁷ This despite the fact that FilmLA has not yet posted it on its website along with the others from December 1, 2020.⁸ There are also images of the permit at the end of this post.
Continue reading Here Is Your Copy Of The Absolutely Most Famous Film Permit Of 2020 — They Shut Down Union Station COVID Testing On December 1, 2020 For This Production — And When The Heroic KTown For All Found Out — They Leapt Into Action Like Superheros Will Do — And The New York Times Covered It — And The City Cancelled The Filming — And Reopened The Test Site — And It Was Too Freaking Late →

LAPD, Los Angeles City Government

Surreal Episodes From CPRALand! — Cryptoracist Deputy City Attorney Gita O’Neill Calls Deon Joseph “Articulate”! — Crazed Sidewalk Colonizer Miguel Nelson “Really Needs To Hire Security Guards” According To Gita O’Neill — He Emails LAPD Far Too Much And “He Probably Has The Money” Says She — Homeless Encampment In CD14 Given Highest Cleanup Priority Because Someone Is Making A Movie There

December 30, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Recall that yesterday I received a huge stack of records comprising emails and other materials from various LAPD officers, other City officials, and some property owners having to do mostly with homeless issues on Skid Row. The whole set is available here on Archive.Org.

I wrote one long post about it yesterday and will write some others soon enough, but today I thought I would tell you about a few short episodes that probably can’t support a whole post but are really interesting nonetheless. There’s no theme, no subtext, no larger purpose, no moral. Nothing but gossip, really, but interesting!

Return of Safer Cities? Gita O’Neill calls Deon Joseph “Articulate”

As you may know, the LAPD under Bill Bratton introduced a local version of the reprehensible broken windows theory in the form of the quantum reprehensibility shift known as the Safer Cities Initiative. This seems to have faded away for reasons I can’t determine, but long-time Skid Row cop Deon Joseph has evidently been drooling copiously for years dreaming of bringing it back.

And evidently present Chief Michael Moore is in favor of reviving this zombie jive crapola as well. At least that’s the frightening message found in this June 2018 email conversation between Deputy City Attorney Gita O’Neill and high LAPD muckety Marc Reina. And it’s not the only frightening thing in there. Here’s how O’Neill describes to Reina the role of Joseph, who is African American: “deon asked the question [about Safer Cities] to the chief, deon was very articulate”

And “articulate” is a problematic word indeed. As the New York Times said in 2007 after Joe Biden caused a scandal by calling Barack Obama articulate, when the word is used “in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of amazement, even bewilderment. It is similar to praising a female executive or politician by calling her “tough” or “a rational decision-maker.” “When people say it, what they are really saying is that someone is articulate … for a black person,” Ms. Perez⁹ said. Such a subtext is inherently offensive because it suggests that the recipient of the “compliment” is notably different from other black people. So, you know, evidently that’s what Gita O’Neill thinks of Deon Joseph.

And turn the page for more postcards from CPRAlandia!
Continue reading Surreal Episodes From CPRALand! — Cryptoracist Deputy City Attorney Gita O’Neill Calls Deon Joseph “Articulate”! — Crazed Sidewalk Colonizer Miguel Nelson “Really Needs To Hire Security Guards” According To Gita O’Neill — He Emails LAPD Far Too Much And “He Probably Has The Money” Says She — Homeless Encampment In CD14 Given Highest Cleanup Priority Because Someone Is Making A Movie There →