“Shooting a movie with 140 characters”

The Hollywood Reporter has this fun piece about the impact of Twitter on the movie production process:

In the old analog days — that is to say, before cell phones, e-mail, instant messaging and blogs — filmmakers viewed their sets as sacrosanct domains. Although hand-picked journalists occasionally were invited for a visit, sets were closed to the public — and sometimes even to the prying eyes of studio bosses. As far as some directors were concerned, the more far-flung the location the better, since that meant the actual on-set visits from the suits would be few and far between.

Today, though, filmmakers are opening up their sets to any electronic interlopers who wander in.

Twitter. A few weeks back, I wrote this post about how some screenwriters have taken to Twittering about their daily lives. In order to do the research for the post, I had to sign up for Twitter. I now have over 20 people who are following me on Twitter — only I’ve never Twittered one damn thing! Think of it as Zen Twitter. Or my yin to Ashton Kutcher’s yang:

When he showed up to begin shooting his new film “Five Killers” in the south of France last week, Ashton Kutcher encountered one of those unexpected glitches that regularly pop up on any movie set. His stunt double had arrived for work with a shaved chest, so Kutcher would have to submit to a little chest waxing of his own.

Kutcher’s first reaction was to turn to Twitter, the 3-year-old micro-blogging service that lets users communicate in word-bursts of 140 characters or less, which they send to one another’s cell phones and computers.

“Love that they can cgi the sun in but apparently cgi doesn’t have chest hair capabilities yet,” Kutcher tweeted wryly.

Undaunted, the actor not only submitted to the waxing, he also captured it on video, issuing further tweets once he’d posted the video evidence on Facebook and YouTube.

Here’s the YouTube video in question: