Early mornings and long days should be a crime

Early mornings and long days should be a crime

Got to be a cop again today. Being a background is a pretty fun exercise in acting, vanity and sadism. You get to do a alot of improv--very quiet improv--with other actors on camera, which is good practice. There are also the games that spring naturally from being in front of a camera and having to be as silent as possible. One game is to see how long you can stay in front of the lens of the camera even as it moves. Those who are the most vain and those that know how wide the lens is and, in turn, how much of the set the camera sees are at the greatest advantage in this game. The other game is to whisper absurdities to your fellow background artists in an attempt to make them laugh out loud during a take. For example, a file I was to hand off to another extra simply labelled "Smith File" started as a file for a man named Smith, but then it escalated to two, then to three men named Smith (two of whom he'd already dealt with). From there the envelope contained everything from vintage porn to a recipe for a thin pasta dish in a white wine sauce topped with chicken to an offer for a homemade candlelight dinner and a sensual, drawn hot bath. Clearly I was playing with a professional in that game, but I think I held my own. As a side note, we both won the screentime longevity prize on that shot.

Despite the games, today was a drudge. I couldn't even figure out why. The rain finally stopped. It wasn't an especially difficult shoot day. Bogus. It shoulda been butta.

Ah well. Tomorrow's another day. Tomorrow's another 4:30AM day. *Le sigh*

D