Shooting at Columbia

If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, then you know that--despite this entry's title-- all is well at Columbia and that no one has been shot. If you haven't, then I have two things to say. First, where have you been? All the cool people read this blog. I even read somewhere that Bono reads it. Second, I apologize for possibly giving you a heart attack. The apology goes double if you're a family member. Although, as an aside, if the first place you'd hear about a shooting at a major university in a major city is my blog, you may want to consider changing your homepage or something.

But no. No shots were fired. The shooting I am referring to is something likely to do far more harm to society: filming an episode of "Gossip Girl." No, I'm not one of those people that says that watching women gossip on TV will make girls gossip. I mean, I watched X-Men as a kid and you don't see me shooting lasers out of my eyes or cutting people up with adamantium claws. I just thing it's going to help wreck society because it is terrible and has no artistic merit. Granted, I'm making a bit of an assumption here because I've never seen an episode, but it's on The CW, so I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption for me to make.

On to what actually happened and, more importantly, what I learned from it.

It was an afternoon just like today, because it was today. I was meandering over to the local pizza joint because my plans for free pizza fell through. Apparently EAEE isn't the same thing as IEEE, and the EAEE people aren't nearly as generous with their pizza. So as I went to cross the street I heard a guy yelling at people, telling them to not just stand there. Had I been back in New York for longer than a week, I probably would have ignored it-- we have to yell that at tourists all the time (yeah, I said "we," deal with it). But today I took the time to wonder what was going on. It turns they were shooting an episode of The Gossip Girl right outside Columbia at 116th and Broadway, and they were having a tough time doing it too. See, the target audience of Gossip Girl is, to the best of my knowledge, teenage and 20-something girls. And a bunch of the students at Columbia are... yes, teenage and 20-something girls. Honestly, what did they expect to happen? There's a reason they didn't film "Die Hard" right outside of a hardware store.

So let this be a lesson to all you future film makers out there: if you want to make a film without people crowding around and watching, don't shoot it between your target audience and where your target audience is going.