Frogtown, the movie

Here's the trailer for Frogtown, an "independent handheld" first feature by C. Andrew Hall that is shot along the Los Angeles River and in Downtown. (Atop the Rosslyn, apparently.) The story is about Cassie, who spent her adolescence on the streets of L.A. then got herself together, only to slip back into the rabbit hole of urchins, dealers and characters in...Frogtown.

"After getting my MFA in film from CalArts and living near the river for years, the culture and aesthetic of it inspired me to shoot a love story under the gritty underpasses and down in the river basin itself, surrounded by the amazing street art and the itinerant people who live on the islands in the Glendale Narrows," Hall writes. "While filming, my crew was held hostage by the local gang, while I ran to an ATM to get cash to pay them off. We were assaulted by a naked homeless man. My lead actress accidentally stepped in a pile of human excrement on skid row. (We had some remarkable out takes.)"

It screens tonight at 8 p.m. at the Downtown Independent Theater on Main St.