OMG-He's Gonna Have Famous Furniture!!

As I type this, 550 miles away in the home of my brother, Dude, Oliver Stone is behind a camera filming a scene from the upcoming movie "W"!!!!! How wierd and cool is that???

If you've read anything about the movie industry, you know that many films are shot in Louisiana. Must be just "sumpthun" about our little banana republic. Post-Katrina, many of those movies planned for New Orleans moved to Shreveport, and a whole huge industry has been born. Seems that "Hooterville on the Red" has just about everything movie moguls like--cheap labor, various outdoor and indoor scene selections, a wide variety of architecture, plenty of hotel space and damn good food. "The Guardian" , "Mr. Brooks", and "Mad Money" , "Factory Girl", "Premonition" and "The Great Debaters" have all been filmed in S'port.........

So when a location manager approached Dude and Jula about using their house, it wasn't a big deal. Their friends' home had been used in "Mad Money" --so they knew the drill. Oliver Stone--yes Oliver Stone- came by to look at the living room....and he liked it. So chez Dude and Jula has become Barbara and George 41's Houston living room for a few days.

It has been a wild daily report for the past week as my bro's living room has been emptied of furniture, only to have most of their things brought back in as "they are nicer than the stuff we WERE gonna use." The crew has photoshopped pics of the Bush twins into picture frames, they changed out some paintings and brought in a very un-Jula rose-covered chintz couch.

The latest happening was that the site manager asked Jula yesterday if "James and Ellen" (as in Cromwell and Burstyn) could use the upstairs of the house for downtime between takes. My sister-in-law was thrown for a loop, as they have kids ranging from 14 to 9 and so the upstairs is not as "done" as downstairs.... but with an "it's a mess, but sure" she has removed the clothes from the "very expensive clothes hanger" aka the treadmill, and pushed a pile of clean but not folded towels from an armchair to behind her dresses in her closet and is going with the flow. At this moment, she is ensconced in her kitchen, in a comfy chair brought in for her use, needlepointing and drinking Diet Coke after Diet Coke as the magic of moviedom works around her.

So when you go to see Oliver Stone's "W", be sure to notice the linen press, the books, the fireplace, and the portrait of the young belle above the bar in the dining room...that would be Gran!!!!!!!!!

Oh, and did I mention they get paid a right nice figure per day for all this hoo-hah??

I wish Hollywood would discover the Middle-Of-Nowhere..........