Exciting things are happening out in Thermal, as Coachella Valley High School recently started a collaboration with United Kingdom media personalities Barry Tomes and Monica Price.
TomesPrice Production will work with the Digital Design and Production Academy (DDP) at CVHS to produce episodes of The Monica Price Show. The talk show featuring musicians and celebrity guests will have a home in the desert for the remainder of the school year.
So … how did these U.K. personalities find their way to the California desert?
“I’ve been going to Palm Springs itself since 1984,” Tomes said during a recent phone interview. “… A few years ago, I was in Palm Springs, and I went to an amazing place called Pappy and Harriet’s, and I saw this young band. I was with Monica Price, and her daughter was also performing on that showcase. Afterward, we all got up and said, ‘Wow, that band had blown us away,’ so I went to the young guy, and I said, ‘Look, here’s my business card. You’re a little bit young to talk to me without your parents, but I’m more than happy to chat to your mom and dad or whoever.’
“That started an amazing relationship with Pescaterritory, which was a great band we worked with for a while, and Jason Zembo, the singer and guitarist. His dad, John Zembo, was the gentleman who called me, so we started a good friendship over a couple of years, and one thing that came out to me was that John Zembo was very passionate about his job. … He’d been working at the school for 35 years.”
John Zembo, a science teacher at CVHS, invited Tomes and Price to speak to students.
“I thought, ‘Why are they going to be interested in a 67-year-old white guy from England, other than the fact he’s from England, and they’ve probably heard of the queen or something?’” he said.
Tomes said he was impressed by the students at CVHS.
“These kids are well-organized, and they’re really passionate,” he said. “They want to learn, so we had these two seminars, and I really enjoyed it, and they loved it. … We talked about England and the music business and how media works, how TV works, and why I am in America, 6,000 miles from home, and they all really absorbed it and took it in.”
Tomes was planning a concert in Idyllwild that weekend with Jason Zembo’s new band, Whitewater, and he invited the school’s DPP Academy to document the concert for some on-site experience. (Full disclosure: I performed at this event with my band Empty Seat.) Mother Nature did not make things easy: Rain caused the outdoor stage to flood in the middle of a performance, and the concert eventually had to move inside to a movie theater. What resulted from this experience is Altitude 5400, a short film created in partnership between Tomes and the CVHS DDP Academy. It is available to watch on xptvhub.com.
In the process, Tomes said he fell in love with the area.
“I love Mexican culture anyway, and I met the mayor in Coachella, and I had lunch with him, and I was talking about my passion for the area, and that tourism could make him so much money,” he said. “Coachella is known all over the world for two weeks of the year when the festival’s on, and every newspaper reports it, but then you don’t hear about it for the rest of the year. We talked about various ideas, and I went back to the school toward the end of the term, and I said, ‘Look, I’d love to work with you.’ Monica Price came back with me to visit them. I said, ‘We’d love to make one of the Monica Price TV shows here, and I’d love to work more with the kids and just encourage them to aim for their goals and go for the stars.’”
Beyond producing episodes of The Monica Price Show, Tomes also intends to get students work placements in the U.K. and at Tomes’ television company, Rockefellas TV, based in Corona. He also plans to work with students to make a documentary focused on Día de los Muertos.
“The Monica Price Show has been broadcasting on and off for 10 years,” Tomes said. “What we hope to do is to film broadcast-able episodes at the school, and they’ll be broadcast both in the U.K. and the U.S., but also, it’s on every app. … Because it’s about media and production, I intend to do at least a couple of my US10 Radio shows from the school. The idea is that all the artists on the show are American artists, but what I will do is a special episode with only artists from the valley.
“They’ve got a great department there. They’ve got a lot of room; they’ve got green screens; they’ve got about two or three areas to film, so we’re not stuck to space. We’re not stuck for enthusiasm, and we’re not stuck for ideas. … I really can’t believe we’re doing it. I’m so chuffed.”
Monica Perez, the DDP Academy’s head teacher, has been helping students grow their creative abilities for many years. (Being a former student of Perez and the DDP Academy, I can attest to this.) Perez said the collaboration with Tomes and Price should further elevate the level of education.
“These first few weeks, what we’ve been doing is setting up the staging, setting up the format, and showing students what works in terms of what you see on camera versus what you need to have pre-prepared before you go to production,” Perez said. “(Tomes and Price) have been very instrumental with trying to find different business partners to help donate some equipment, some time and some expertise, and so it’s really a collaborative effort between us and them, and then some of the business partners that they’ve gathered, to show the students the many different avenues of being in the industry.”
Perez said students are excited about these opportunities.
“Since we are on the eastern side of the Coachella Valley, (students) understand that they don’t get as many opportunities as our friends in the western side of the Coachella Valley,” she said. “The fact that they’re being given this attention means they’re really open to learning and growing, because they know that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be working with people on an international show.”
Perez and her students plan to complete six episodes of The Monica Price Show and the Día de los Muertos documentary by the end of the school year.
A few students talked to me about their excitement.
Luis Hernandez, senior: “I think working with Barry is pretty great, because it gives me a more real-world experience into the film industry, because now there’s someone—a complete stranger who I don’t know—who is directing me and my crew. It’s good, because it helps me understand what I’m going to be up against when I work with more people, and working with Barry has been absolutely, absolutely great. I learned about filming on-site when we filmed the Idyllwild video. … I want to pursue film and animation, so it’s an insight of how I’m going to be working with other people in the future.
Alejandro Cobos, senior and DDP vice president: “These are really influential people who are coming in from a whole place that 90% of us have never even thought that we’d meet someone from. … Everything moves really fast, and at first, it was overwhelming, but now we’re getting really used to it. Now, we work a million times more as a team because of their influence and what they’ve done for us. … We know that they’re here to bring out more of what we are, and who we are as a people, to the rest of the world. We see it as an honor, and as Coachella is still a developing city, it’s a great thing to have more attention … that we really are something that is developing and that we like to be taken seriously as a city.”
Destiny Cordova, CVHS junior: “This collaboration means a lot to us, because it’s getting our small-town school out there in the world. I feel like CVHS is a very small school. Nobody really knows about it, and the things they do know are just what’s put on the news about our school. I feel like this project truly helps us by putting a name on our school and putting a name on the students.”
This story was edited to correct a band name.