On Location in Movie Town

If you’ve lived in Los Angeles long enough, its only a matter of time before you stumble across a film crew on location. This is after all a company town, only we don’t make cars or computers — we make movies and TV shows.

When you happen upon a film shoot, the scene is usually consistent: five or six big white trucks lining the side of the road, dozens of people quickly moving around unloading lighting and camera equipment, and tables over flowing with sandwiches, fruit plates, and bottles of water.

But the most tell-tale sign you’ve stumbled upon a movie sight? Motorcycle police officers standing around.

It always seem like they just shot the scene or they are about to shoot the scene. Very rarely do you catch them actually filming the scene. So suppose you want to see Entourage or 24 being filmed on location in LA. Or you’d love to see Sex in the City 2 or The Green Hornet, both being filmed on location in the City of Angels. What do you do?

In order to film on the streets of Los Angeles, production companies must obtain a permit, issued by the (drum roll please) Los Angeles Film Permit Office. Before 9/11 anyone could stop by the office and for a small fee, obtain the list (called the “shoot sheet”) of permits pulled by production companies for that day. But now in our post 9/11-world the shoot sheet is only available to people in the entertainment industry. So until the LAFPO makes the list public again (don’t hold your breath) we’ll have to be thankful or annoyed the next time we see those big white trucks.