Blog · Page 13 of 195 · Author Cat Johnson

March 29, 2019For Hire

Behind the scenes: How the Blair Witch Project inspired me

So much of what I write in books is drawn from real life. For instance, my character of Jamey in HOT HERO FOR HIRE was in a low budget indie film that no one expected to be a huge hit, but surprise! It was a huge hit, to his shock and that of the two indie filmmakers who’d produced it on a shoestring budget.

Does that story sound familiar to you? It should if you have every seen The Blair Witch Project.

I’ll admit, I’ve never seen the movie. I’m too scared. But I have a small connection to it, in a 6 degrees of separation kind of way. There were only 3 people in that movie. One of the them was Mike Williams, who was the little brother of one of my friends in high school. The Williams family had 9 children. Yes, nine! To an only child like myself, that in itself was fascinating. But Mike’s older sister Jeanmarie and I were in lots of classes together. I remember I was over their house once. We played Battleship. The family went to the local pool, where I’d also go. The township of Mount Pleasant was small. Most people knew each other somehow. My best friend’s little brother was Mike’s best friend. Once all 7 of us being young and poor as teens/young twenty-somethings tend to be, all shared a hotel room out in Montauk. Mike slept on the floor, as the surfboard occupied the bathtub.

So when it came time to write a backstory for my hero in HOT HERO FOR HIRE, I was inspired by the Blair Witch Project. It cost $35K to make. Its box office gross ended up being almost $250 million. No, I don’t think the actors made even a tiny portion of that. No, Mike didn’t go on to be the next Brad Pitt, but he did get a few walk on roles on some prime time TV shows. That’s where literary license comes in. I made my hero’s movie launch his fairy tale Hollywood break-out career. It’s the ending I wish Mike and his Blair Witch co-stars had gotten.

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March 11, 2019March 23, 2019Romance Novels

Behind the scenes of HOT HERO FOR HIRE: Location, location, location!

I always look for real life locations to help me flesh out the setting of my books. For HOT HERO FOR HIRE I had to look for a few things.

One was a gym that Jamey might have gone to when he was a foster kid in Chino, California, where he would have learned to fight. I found one, All World Boxing in Rancho Cucamonga, CA. I renamed it and that became Walt’s gym where Jamey goes to try to feel normal between films and to escape his surreal life in Hollywood.

The second location I needed was for the horse farm, and this is where I really found something interesting. I needed the town to be close enough to LA/Hollywood that they could supply horses to the movie lots, but far enough away it was removed from the glitz and glamour and be a real working ranch atmosphere. And I found it all and more in the town that calls itself “Horsetown, USA”, Norco in Riverside County, CA.

Wikipedia says this, “According to city ordinances, the architecture of Norco ‘shall reflect a desired Western theme,’ including qualities “described as rural, informal, traditional, rustic, low-profile and equestrian oriented.” About an hour outside of LA, real life horse farms abound in Norco and so I chose this location for my fictional Circle H, where actor and city boy Jamey Garret goes to learn how to handle a horse for his movie from the sassy riding instructor, Maisie Holtz.