Material Girls (Haylie and Hilary Duff Movie)
Show: Material Girls (new movie with Hilary and Haylie Duff. oi.)
Job: Sexy Club Goer (Yes, that is the official title on my voucher.)
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Ok, yes, I know. I haven't written most of the jobs I've done in the past couple weeks. But after a while, they all blur. You see people on set that you know, they look familiar, but regardless of whether you just worked with them yesterday on a show, you have no idea where the hell you know them from. Someone asked me what show I had worked on the day before, and while I remembered the name, it took me a full five minutes to remember where we were shooting. Sets are their own little universe.
The scene is in a nightclub. Naturally, this means smoky, so the cough that has resulted hasn't quite gone away yet. It is also a three day call, so all the extras have kind of banded together in these little groups (did I mention there were 200 of us? The poor PA's are running themselves ragged trying to control noise level and keep the non-union away from the little craft service set up by the club). We're shooting at Club Ivar in Hollywood (no, I didn't know it either).
I have a little test for celebrities at this point. At some time, if you're anywhere near them, they're going to be moving past you to get to their mark, or to go back to their comfy chair, or....no, that's pretty much all they'd move for. The director comes to them to tell them what to do, hair and makeup comes to them, etc. Anyway. As they come past, I just don't immediately move. The test is whether they will just push past you, stand there and wait for you to recognize that an Important Person is behind you and you'd better move your non-scale ass, or have the decency to say "Excuse me" as they move past. Haylie said "Excuse me", Hilary just waited. Give it time, Haylie, give it time. One day you too will have the bored annoyed expression permanently etched across your face while you survey the Hollywood masses.
Anyway, one of these days I'm going to come up with a job that I can do while sitting on my ass in holding. As it is, I've become insanely good at Rummy and Egyptian War. It's either that or a book, because you can only talk to the same people about the same things for so many hours while sitting in the same place. Cards not only keeps you occupied, it keeps away the bad homicidal tendencies. You do get the occasional crazy white guy in the do rag who decides to dance in place to music only he hears, but at least this time that guy is across the room from me.
Today is the last day on the shoot for us. We're waiting for the PAs to snap and start beating a noisy extra with a walkie talkie.
Las Vegas
Show: Las Vegas
Episode: Centennial (Season Finale)
Job: Cashier
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First off, let me just say that I am quite annoyed. I don't schedule work for Thursday because of an audition, which, hey, is what you're supposed to do. Regardless of when you ask for the sides beforehand and they just say "Oh, there aren't any sides. The audition will consist of a little chat and some short improvisation." In general, this means that there may not even be a script yet. Bad news. But hey, as I said, it's what you're supposed to do. So the audition is at 10:30 am, its just around 9am, and I get a phone message: "Sorry for the inconvenience, but the auditions today have been cancelled. We will be in touch to schedule you for another time." Gah!! 9am is too late to start looking for other rush calls for the day, so I sat on my ass the whole day and wasn't able to work at all. I honestly considered sending them a bill for my usual $100 a day paycheck. Grrr.
In any case, today? I got to see Jon Bon Jovi and John Elway spray each other with silly string. And oh yeah, Superman stopped by.
Dean Cain is a bit shorter than I thought he would be; there's something a little wrong with being taller than the Man of Steel. But he was still pretty. And Bon Jovi was just as shaggy haired and smooth as I expected. So it was not a bad day. I even got a bit elevated in stature; I was a Montecito (the casino) employee, not just one of the gambling-addicted Powerade-masking-as-cocktail masses. Oh yeah. Champagne? = Ginger Ale. White wine? White grape juice. All cocktails are various flavors of electrolyte-replenishing liquid, and Red wine is generally anti-oxidant happy cranberry juice. The food is almost always real, but never edible.
The season finale? Nessa has a sister, Mary's going away with Jake, and it ends in explosions. No, I really don't know much about those characters either.
All of the crew people seemed just a bit strung out and most seemed almost delirious through lack of sleep and the happiness that this was the last episode for the summer. The wonderfully nice wardrobe people were giving us employees black hose (since our company failed to deign to tell us what actually to bring to set), although they snagged on absolutely everything in sight.
Working on a new pilot on Monday
Cold Case
Show: Cold Case
Episode: 'Best Friends"
Job: Catholic School Girl (oh not THAT kind...)
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Another job in another establishing scene. I first have to temper my boyfriend's inevitable glee at my job description and fend off other guy friends' requests for pictures. This was my first rush call, as in, I woke up with my boyfriend at 7:30am and wanted to work. Managed to make it up to Pasadena by 10am only to find that it's a catholic school girl in the 1930s. This means a button up, long sleeved white shirt with a long, boxy, apron-like maroon smock that was starched within an inch of it's life and came down to my knees. It was absolutely incredible. I saw 20 or so girls, most of whom were really pretty, get completely transformed into shapeless 12 year olds. My boyfriend would've been so disappointed.
Apparently the deal is that one of our classmates is not only a lesbian in love, but also in love with a black girl. Dealbreaker in the 30s, I'm sure. The story is that both she and the girlfriend pulled a Thelma and Louise, but only the girlfriend died. Our pretty little blonde friend survives. I didn't want to ask the actress (who was very nice) her age, but she had to have been early 20s, and she's been in L.A. for five years. That seems to be about the barometer year-wise of making a career here or not.
(ugh. side note. Watching Bend it Like Beckham on TV with Keira Knightley's insanely toned abs and legs and vowing to myself that I really need to be running more.)
The hair people decided to give me a bit of a Shirley Temple complex and curled the hell out of my hair. Considering I'm 5'11, this tactic didn't quite work. But they threw me and two other girls to walk with the heterosexually-challenged blondie, so apparently it worked for me. Or else short haired tall girls scream "overly friendly with the same sex."
Not too long of a day for once, and again learned quite a valuble lesson. Do not make light of the craft service's food, for more than likely, they're SITTING RIGHT NEXT TO YOU. (No it wasn't me, it was one of the more boisterous girls bragging about the self-restraint it had taken to eat only one bite of their cheesecake and then throw the rest away.)
Gilmore Girls
Show: Gilmore Girls
Episode: Blame Booze and Melville (Ep. 21)
Role: College Student
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Other than the particularly noteworthy fact that they wrapped us after only being there AN HOUR (completely unheard of,and they still always have to pay us for the full 8 hours...47 bucks an hour, hah!), there's not too much more to tell. We were shooting on the "Yale" soundstage, in the dining hall, where we hear Rory's side of a phone conversation with her mommy. It was earlier in the episode where Lorelai first tells Rory she thinks she might be pregnant. It's apparently finals week, as we are all studying very very hard, the food in front of us only an afterthought.
Incidentally, considering they hadn't fed us, the food was a bit cruel.
They slightly redeemed themselves by having the weighty tome I was studying at Yale be Harry Potter's adventures with the Goblet of Fire. Good times. Done for the week! And I have Monday off for auditions and such. I will be spending the weekend enjoying the particularly GORGEOUS weather that SoCal has seen fit to provide me with.
Gilmore Girls
Show: Gilmore Girls
Episode: Blame Booze and Melville (Episode 21 I believe?)
Role: Nurse
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Ok, it should be pretty obvious, but if you don't want spoilers of various shows, don't check out this blog. I work on set, filming episodes that generally don't air for at least a month, so I'm privy to fairly detailed bits of spoilerage. This isn't a spoiler site per se, but just know, in advance, they will probably get mentioned.
End disclaimer.
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10:30am
Ok, I admit it. I'm a little giddy. I'm sitting on a front stoop across from Miss Patty's School of Ballet, kitty corner to Luke's Diner, and I can see the town gazebo. Hee.
This is one of the rare shows that I'm a real fan of. I've watched this show since Day One. Love.
Was actually a bit surprised to learn that it was an actual town set up. Not that I would know how else they would do it, but at this point I just assume nothing is real in LA. Roads, trees, AND the one traffic light that they have in Stars Hollow! Hee.
I'm working as a nurse today, which means only one thing...The episode where Suki is having her baby! Ok, I guess one of the Girls could've been stricken with illness, but the few extras who are being fitted with pregnancy bellies tell me differently. They've converted the town church interior into a hospital interior, and I have to say its quite impressive. They've even got real baby pictures on the walls. I can't quite believe someone would be trusting enough with those Precious Memories moments to a camera crew, but doubtless there will be limbs flying if anything happens to them.
The most amusing thing is that quite a few tour buses come through Stars Hollow. Almost all of the people inside the little carts peer at me, attempting to figure out if I'm someone they should pay attention to. Nope. Although we get a little peeved at one of the tour guides pointing us out as extras and adding, "They don't make much." Um, buddy? I'm relatively sure my paltry non-union salary outweighs yours, AND I don't have to deal with midwestern jackasses asking the same questions to me day in and day out. Nor do I have to intone anything about keeping little arms and legs inside the trolley o' peeping. That's not even touching the SAG background who's making twice what I make plus any little penalty salary bump the ADs can think of. So step off.
Moving on.
So our scene just entails listening to Lorelai having a phone conversation avec Rory, who today was being spoken by Lorelai's stand-in. And I gave myself major bonus points because I totally called that she was a stand-in when I saw her arrive on set this morning. I dunno, something about the shiny hair.
Anyway, Suki has had a little baby girl (name still not decided). It will be a heartwarming episode I am sure. But hey! What now? Apparently Lorelai has had a pregnancy scare? From the little production schedule/mini script I had, there was a scene where Lorelai wakes up at Luke's and sees all their clothes completely astray at his place, and she looks "concerned." Was it the drunk monkey-no-condom sex with Luke? Who knows. Either way, she's not. She's talked to a doctor in the hospital after having a pregnancy test (which is why I don't get it. You can't tell you're pregnant mere days after the sex. So what was with the concerned look after implied drunk-monkey-sex?), and no more babies.
But hey! Featured bit for me. I wheel a pregnant girl next to Lorelai after she gets off the phone, and she offers her congratulations to the girl. Although as Lauren Graham pointed out, its kind of unsure why she's offering congratulations, she hasn't had the baby yet! Something could be wrong!
Rumors concerning Lauren Graham's bitchiness were unfounded, she was perfectly nice to me and the other extras. Particularly amusing was her blue-streak cursing whenever she fucked up a line (which, if you've seen Gilmore Girls, you know is very likely to happen often). Sample: "Well, it's a beautiful baby --- little---fuck! shit!" Heh.
We were all recalled tomorrow for three more hospital scenes (Suki! Jackson! yay!). What this really means is that I will not get to see Alexis Bledel (Rory), Luke or Logan. Or Kelly Bishop, who plays Lorelai's mom. *Love* her acting, would love to meet her. Ah well. Longish day tomorrow I'm sure. And yay for work.
Las Vegas
Ok, I suck. I now understand that I simply cannot recreate two days worth of background on the fly in my head the night afterward. Especially when I've been up since 4am and it's currently 11:12 pm. No thanks. So again: the highlights version
Show: Las Vegas
Episode: 223 : Magic Carpet Fred
Job: Casino Patron
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About 100 of us once again. 6am call time the first day, and I learn that 5am is apparently the one sparse hour in LA that there isn't any traffic. Hallejujah. Both days we're there over 14 hours, although the nice thing about Las Vegas is that they're used to having large calls, so the food is always forthcoming.
Some celeb stuff? I got to hear James Caan say "double the schizzle". The man was in Godfather, for christ's sake. Sonny Corleone saying anything that P. Diddy originated is just wrong. Molly Sims only seemed about as attitude-filled as Vanessa Marcil, and that wasn't very much,so good on them. Both of them are shorter than I'd imagine, and Vanessa just has the body of a ten year old plus ass. Josh Duhamel isn't as good looking as I'd hoped, and he made very little eye contact with anyone. The guest stars were fabulous though. Booger from Revenge of the Nerds! And from Better Off Dead! I loved that character, and it took a lot for me to not jump into : This is pure snow! Do you have any idea what the street value of this mountain is?! Love him.
And the second day? Why Jon Lovitz, for one. He's lost a lot of weight and looks suspiciously tan for it only being midway through March. During one of my crosses that happened to be mistimed, I very nearly got run over by the man, if you can imagine someone who's head comes up to my breasts as being able to run over me.
Then of course there was Jay Acovone. He's been in such a shitload of stuff, even after looking him up on IMDB I couldn't pin the guy down to what I knew him from. Very sweet friendly little lech, who very nicely asked me if he could give me his number after talking to me on set for the past two days, and who knew I had a boyfriend from the get-go. Nothing too sleazy about it, but the fact that he was born a year after my FATHER was is a slight no-no with me. I'm prudish like that. And oh yes, if anyone needs their car detailed, his prices start at $160 per car. Apparently a lucrative side business for him.
I'm exhausted, I'm going to get a shitload of overtime for those two days (yay!) and I'm on Gilmore Girls tomorrow. I promise to take better notes.
Happy Easter
Happy Easter all. Workin on the set of Las Vegas for Monday and Tuesday. I hear Molly Sims is a bitch (big f'n surprise) and Josh Duhamel is (surprise!) nice. Enjoy the holiday
