The Remix Hotel at the SAE LA Campus

The whole Remix Hotel thing is designed to level the playing field between the paid professional and the starving artist. For a weekend, no one is unreachable, not even Rick Ross, who reminisced about producing, among other things, Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing”, less no one know his reason for being there. Following a panel, everyone shakes hands, exchanges email and phone numbers, and talks about possibilities and new markets. The panelists get armloads of demos and make for the VIP lounge while the attendees make connections and attend Avid classes. Between panels, the various modern drummers, popular mechanics, DJs, producers, songwriters, filmmakers, and hip hop artists may visit kiosks for Avid, M-Audio, Roland, Vestax and many others.

Most bum-rushed the “A&R: New Era, New Challenges” panel. I squeezed in late to hear ASCAP seniors Jay Sloan and Alonzo “Focus One” Robinson declare that Fruity Loops isn’t enough. A good songwriter never looks for work, i.e., she’s always employed by someone sitting on that panel. Then a man from Mississippi came in. Maybe he wasn’t from Mississippi. He called out Rick Ross, interrupted the moderator, told us he was happening right now, in Mississippi, that the panel felt him. He wanted to know what to do with his imminent fame, how to proceed. The panel said, “If you’ve got Mississippi on lock, and your MySpace is on lock, and local radio knows who you are, I could call right now to confirm it!” But it was a hypothetical Mississippi on lock. Rick Ross could go fuck himself if that wasn’t clear. The man needed to know what to do were that the case, were Mississippi on lock. The answer to that is you get a kick-ass EPK, you make a top notch MySpace page, get at least 15K friends, and play at least 100 shows. Then they could get started with you. For real.

“Building a Successful Production Company”, more or less crowded with young filmmakers, was a big pep talk about coming to Jesus with the new technology. Evidently a lot of filmmakers aren’t tossing edits back and forth using iChat or farming their post SFX to the Philippines. There were six filmmakers on the panel. However, moderator Cynthia Wisehart (Editor, Millimeter) went out of her way to address 70% of the questions to Sundance winner (for Dig!) Ondi Timoner. Ondi starts talking about making music videos and winning for Dig!, but the more attention she gets, the more off-topic she wanders until she’s going on about any old shit, her birthday, how cocktail parties at Yale are for deconstructing Gone With The Wind and not for serious filmmakers. You know when they mention Yale, it’s all over. That’s when I left.