On The Road with THE GIGOLOS

In his latest despatch from Hollywood, where he and colleagues are attempting to sell their low-budget movie The Gigolos, Punk Cinema's Jon Morrison explains how they are grabbing every available opportunity - and celebrity - to promote the film

"Improvised publicity moment" is one way of describing our behaviour. "Shameless" would be another. We spotted Paris Hilton flouncing out through a nightclub at 3am and chased her down the street. We dragged Sacha - the top Gigolo in the movie - after us, trying to position him next to her and get it all on a camera phone. But Paris, bless her, was either too drunk or too uninterested to play ball, and continued snogging some guy in a hoodie, oblivious.

Bang goes the “Paris Hilton out with top male gigolo” headline. She didn’t even promise to come to the premiere.

So we accosted Andy Garcia at the Filmmakers Reception and got him to pose with Sacha instead, who grinned for Britain. We even got on Malibu TV. It all helps.

In Hollywood, you can’t get away from the stars. We bumped into him again at his own premiere party for The Lost City the following night. He didn’t seem to recognise us. He was more interested in talking to Patrick Swayze and Anthony La Paglia.

Tonight was the first screening. Richard, the director, began his cinema career tearing ticket stubs at the Clapham Picture House. Nine years later, he got to walk across the red carpet to attend the world premiere of his debut film at the famous ArcLight Theatre in Hollywood – a huge geodesic dome that announces films like airports announce departing flights.

We’re still waiting for take-off, of course. The auditorium was standing room only – Sunday night is when Americans go to the movies, and we’d handed out nearly two hundred flyers during the day. Admittedly, a lot of that was done round the pool. There was a strong showing from the hotel staff as well, and a couple of dot-com swingers someone picked up in NoCal. (The northern bit of the state, not a diet drink.) More importantly, the Hollywood executives were there. They were out in force.
They would have taken note of the audience reaction. They’ll take the applause with them into the meetings we’ve set up throughout the week. No one commits to anything without seeing it on the big screen first. Without seeing whether people like it. Whether they get it.

Not everyone does. We got our first piece of negative publicity as well. The LA Weekly’s reviewer has never heard of irony. He thought the film took the characters entirely seriously, and completely missed the point. Presumably he thinks The Office was a documentary, too. We will, I suppose, have to learn to live with the fact that not everybody is going to love the film, damn them.

Tomorrow, we start to find out whether the studio executives did. We’ve now got three days of back-to-back meetings with distributors and sales agents. Household names, as well as smaller independent companies that may well be a better fit. We’re not really after tens of millions for a film. We don’t want to make other people’s films. But as one of the studios said, you can ask for five million or half a million and they’ll treat it the same – they’re both low budget.

This time, though, they’ll have to say what they thought. Whether they’ll give us a deal or send us away empty-handed.

But that’s for tomorrow. Tonight, we’re just focusing on the aftershow party. Our own premiere party. 50 Cent’s it isn’t. For a start, there aren’t any podium dancers. We haven’t got any bodyguards. Lines from the film aren’t projected onto giant screens. But we’re here – and now we’re going to drink as only the British in Hollywood do...