Sitting on the hotel roof deck, by the pool, drinking lemonade whilst a collection of multi-ethnic bikini clad beauties lounge in front of me. Truly, this is the only way to blog.

Here is the syllogism that describes my current happiness:

Sunshine makes everything better

No major city in the world has better sunshine than LA,

ergo - *everything*  in LA is better….

Whether or not you buy that, the warm rays of the sun, fresh fruit and homemade muesli is definitely a better welcome to Hollywood than the one I got at LAX last night. After an 11 hour flight (viewing included: I AM LEGEND, DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN and as much of HAPPY GO LUCKY and HAROLD & KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO as I could manage, 2 Eps each of 30 ROCK, GAVIN & STACEY and a classic ep of FRAISER ‘Ham Radio’) I landed at  LAX, one of America’s more ugly airports and, eager to get to the hotel (the very comfortable almost opulent, yet understated Le Park Suites in West Hollywood), sped through emigration and was about to get my bags…

But alas, my gratification was to be delayed. Because, just as I reached out to get back my passport from the charming boarder control lady (do they need the guns sitting behind the desk, really?) something started flashing ominiously on her screen and suddenly the passport proffering hand was withdrawn, and I found myself whisked towards a room marked ‘Secondary Inspection’.

Here my documents and baggage was taken away from me and I was told to sit (don’t get up, dont walk about) in a row of chairs along with a collection of Indian dentists, Arab holiday makers,  Eastern European women with good cheekbones and bad hair, a British football lout (who kept loudly proclaiming that he was an ally who had stood shoulder to shoulder with the yanks in Iraq, fair point, really) and a collection of old people in wheelchairs (one of them, a straggly haired gentlemen who looked like he might have been Hannibal Lecter in disguise, kept trying to get out of his wheelchair, but was firmly instructed to stay put).

What the sins real or immagined of my colleagues could be, I never found out. Mine, it appears, is that in the 14 months since I last visited the US of A, my name has been adopted as a nome de guarre of a suspect in the war against terror.

Now hold on a minute.  Arvind ETHAN DAVID. Really? This is what some undercover operative of Al Queda has decided is a non-descript name? Because it sounds a bit Jewish?

Click here for google search results of my name:

What you will notice, if you can be bothered to click through the first 15 pages or so of results is that it’s all actually about ME. The real Arvind Ethan David, with a whole bunch of really easily verifiable information about my life. And that even if you get to page 20 of results - there is no one else with this name out there in the whole of the googleverse. Now this isn’t because I’m particularly famous, it’s because we live in the internet age and (this is the key bit) I HAVE A REALLY QUITE UNUSUAL NAME.

None of these arguments, however, assuaged Office Huang (who to be fair was fairly embarrassed and apologetic about the whole thing) and instead of doing a google search to verify that I was who I was, he instead made a succession of phone calls to his superiors (who apparently in turn were calling their superiors in Washington, and thereafter for all I know direct to the Oval Office) and discussing such thrilling information as:

- my father’s full name

- the town of his, and my mother’s birth.

- my mother’s maiden name (Khelani A/P Kirshnan (MA -  I know - see comments below) for those who care. And even if you don’t try explaining that the A/P stands for Anak Perumpuan, meaning ‘female child of’ to a gun bearing Korean-American Home Land Security Officer and you have some idea of the world of pain I was in).

As the minutes ticked into hours, and with memories of Harold & Kumar too fresh in my brain (it doesn’t help that Kal Pen, the actor who plays Kumar, looks considerably less like a terror mastermind than I do) my irritation started to morph into worry. This would not be a good way to start the Hollywood phase of my career.

Kal Pen or me - you pick the terrorist mastermind
Anyway, eventually his superiors, satisfied that my mother’s maiden name was such as to guarantee that no son of her’s was a terrorist, gave me the clearance - along with the cheerful assurance that this would almost certainly happen at least once more on my next visit to the US, and only if I passed the same set of checks a second time would they consider taking my passport of the watch list, and I got to escape here to the gorgeous Le Parc Suites, where even reliving the tedium and terror of last nights experience is failing to annoy me.

Sunshine. It just makes everything better.

Hello  - for the next 10 days I am in LA LA land on an Inside Pictures trip. Inside Pictures is this great innovation of QWERTY Films, Cass Business School and Skillset which every year selects about a dozen of the rising young Turks of the UK Film Industry and offers us a few weeks of intense networking, executive education and a general high powered boost to our careers.

The highlight of the program is the LA week, which starts this weekend.
I will be blogging on it regularly, not just for usual readers but at the request of Skillset, who are sponsors of the scheme, and indeed great supporters of our development and training activities here at slingshot.

So watch for more than usual activity over the next 10 days as I attempt to chronicle my adventures in the epicenter of the screen trade….

Randy Paunch continues to teach. GooTube really does reach beyond the grave.

So, in the world of web 2.0 the most exciting thing to happen in the first ten days of shooting TORMENTED was my post about Alex Pettyfer and his (alleged) penchant for taking off items of clothing (see below if you missed the controversy, which brought home forcibly to me the difference between real life and web social mores, as brilliantly illustrated by this sketch from The Wall)

In life 1.0, the shoot is going well. Cast and crew have gelled and 10 days in begun to settle into that reassuring pattern that signifies a healthy shoot. Each morning starts relaxed, each day ends in a mad frenzy. Or as Jon Wright - puts it “in the morning we are shooting THE GODFATHER, by the evening its NEIGHBOURS”

The results, so far, thankfully resemble the care and craft of the former rather more than the latter. Albeit the GODFATHER, with rather more hot teenagers and zombie demons.
Today we embark upon our first big stunt sequence and we have been joined up here in the West Midlands by our evil scientist, prosthetics professor Paul Hyett who joins us fresh from creating a new crop of albino nasties for THE DESCENT 2 and our Stunt Superman, Nick Chopping.

I won’t give away too much about the sequence, other than to note that it involves a variety of screwdrivers, a sofa and an indecent amount of blood. None of which belongs to Alex Pettyfer or April Pearson or Larissa Wilson or Mary Nighy or Georgia King.

Not yet. Their time will come.

We started shooting our 4th film, the high school horror TORMENTED on Monday. You can read about it all:

on Variety

or on Movie News

or in Metro, if that’s the way your taste goes

I should clarify, though, that despite a lot of erroneous web chat Alex Pettyfer is NOT starring as the movie’s revenging ghost, Darren Mullett. That honour belongs to the remarkable young actor Calvin Dean, pictured below.

Alex, who is also a talented young actor with a charming tendency to take off his shirt whenever possible is, in point of fact, playing another of the leads, Bradley - a fantasically charismatic but viscious bad boy who deserves everything that he gets.

It’s day 4 of shoot and all is going well, here at Fairview High. Not a fatality yet. More news, and full listing as and when.