People were reimbursed when a Claude Van Damme movie, one of the first shot on the 100 block Powell Street, disrupted their lives. People remember it because it was in the early days of “Hollywood North”. This movie lit up the entire block late at night on a week night when people had to get up in the morning, and people came streaming out of their apartments to find out what was going on. People who had apartments low enough that they couldn’t sleep were personally given $100. But dealing directly with individuals affected by filming soon became a thing of the past for the film industry on the Downtown Eastside. That’s because the poverty industry on the Downtown Eastside smelled money.

The poverty industry organizations soon arranged to divert the film industry money toward themselves. The Downtown Eastside Residents Association, for example, got donations from the film industry to publish their newsletter and they got funding to hire local people to work with the film companies as “liaisons” to the local people. And they often, of course, hired their friends and relatives. (The woman in my story, though, was pleased that the DERA liaison supported her by confirming to “It’s a Girl Thing” that there was no permit to film at her address.) But by giving DERA and other organizations money, the film industry took the position that they no longer had to deal with individuals whose lives were directly disrupted by the filming. (I don’t know which organizations currently get film money; filming has slowed down.)

And the film industry representatives even started to talk like the big earners in the poverty industry who constantly have the word “community” on their lips. (The left-wing handlers who run the poverty industry favor collectivism over the individual; there’s more grant money in it.) The film industry were suddenly finding ways to “give back to the community” instead of the individuals affected by filming. One thing the film industry started doing was put on a turkey dinner at Oppenheimer Park every December. Oppenheimer Park is a favorite hang out for drug dealers and addicts; povertarians are paid to run it. So residents have the option of lining up there with junkies in the December drizzle (remember, David Duchovny said it rains alot in Vancouver) for a turkey dinner. This has been going on for years now, at least five, may seven years. The turkey dinner has a reputation for being tasty, but people on the west side of the City, far from the heart of the poverty industry, are not given turkey as a substitute for compensation.

I saw an example of this on the local news. Some homeowners on the west side were upset that a film company sprayed phony snow around and people could feel it in their lungs. A woman was on the local news complaining about it. Then she said, as accurately as I can remember, ‘Of course, we got compensated’, as though that was a given. This woman has no poverty industry handlers standing between her and the film industry.

You said that the woman in my story sounded paranoid. According to records in the case, she spoke to a fireman on the block — there’s a fire station at the end of the block — on the evening of the Honda incident and he said that the conditions created were dangerous. She wasn’t the only one who complained either. A teacher also complained and arranged to have the generator moved from a school doorway.

The percentage of carbon monoxide from an outdoor generator going into a window is minimal. Hint: wind. She might be chemical sensitive, of course, and I sympathize: like most women who are “chemically sensitive”, I could easily become neurotic about it and then paranoid…this lady’s obsession suggests she prefers paranoia to simply moving or setting a fan in her window on exhaust…