I had no allusions that I'd be doing that. For one thing, this wouldn't be a restaurant shoot, it'd be Yankee Stadium. When movies gets filmed there, a crowd is needed to fill the part of the stadium that's on camera. The crowd moves several times, and with editing, the stadium is filled in every shot. There'd be a lot of wannabe actors and attention hogs to compete for screen time, but I had a secret weapon to beat them.
The movie being filmed was called Anger Management, starring Adam Sandler. He plays a (SPOILER) guy (OK, you probably guessed that, but REAL SPOILER up ahead) mistakenly put into anger therapy classes. He's interested in Marisa Tomei, but so is Jack Nickolson (beats me how he got tricked into an Adam Sandler movie). Woody Harrelson also shows up for some reason.
I don't like Adam Sandler movies. He's played the same fluctuating dope in everything save The Wedding Singer. He seems to roll a die to determine if this scene he's 1. rude, 2. mind-numbingly stupid, 3. a horny scumbag, 4. five years old, 5. speaking with a 'wacky' accent, or 6. earnest (earnest only coming into play when a girlfriend is present, giving his movies a Zeppo section to go to the bathroom during). I wouldn't mind if the end result was funny, but it's usually isn't.
Having said that, I wanted to worm my way into a scene. Adam would probably be committing idiocy and having the crowd react with shock/dismay/booing/"There's something wrong with his medulla oblongata!" All I had to do was provide something that would make the cameras focus on me. If I had breasts (and a willingness to display them) this wouldn't be a problem. As I didn't, I needed my secret weapon.
My secret weapon was Jeff: my identical twin brother. The film shoot was his idea, as a matter of fact. (I was his secret weapon.) We've intentionally stayed away from any sort of twin exploitation, since twins in movies get the same roles that dwarves do. A party is shown as out of control by having dwarves/twins present, trying to reach the counter or pretending to be a mirror. There's the occasional Mini Me and morphed-T-1000 and guy-getting-stabbed-in-the-eye-by-the-T-1000-morphed-as-him roles, but those are rare gems.
I met Jeff at the stadium a little before 7:00 P.M. It was a night shoot, until 3:00 A.M. or later, depending on how things went. A multi-level parking garage had been turned into a waiting area to funnel people in the stadium. Several hundred people made a U that would take an hour to get through. Jeff got there before me, and let me cut in line. He saved me an hour of waiting time (in the garage, at least).
A snack bag was given out as we entered the stadium, consisting of a water bottle, 4 oz. of apple juice, an bumpy pear, a wafer the size of a stick of gum, and a Hershey's Kiss. This was supposed to be completely catered: the cast of Survivor ate better than this. You want to see real anger management, try realizing a mutant pear is dinner.
We filed up into the stadium, getting a full blast of the delight that always comes when you get your first view of a sports arena. I'm barely aware of professional sports, and it hit me just as hard as the die hard Yankee fans. We sat in seats off right field, waited ten minutes, then got up and were herded to seats behind home plate.
I caught a glimpse inside the stadium as I drove there, and saw several hundred people sitting in a pocket of seats. As we got closer, we saw they weren't people but cardboard cutouts, in the seats that'd get some but not a lot of screen time. Only a dozen different templates were cutout models, so each person had quadruplets and quintuplets a few seats over. That probably didn't help our "Hey, we're twins" approach.
There were at least a hundred staff members just to handle us extras, and another two hundred actually working on the movie. Add them to the 2000 of us, plus hundreds of cardboard people, and Yankee Stadium still looked vacant. It is a big big place.
A production guy talked to a couple hundred of us in our seats, saying that Woody Harrelson had already filmed his scenes here, as had Jack Nickolson. "But he's sitting right there. Stand up, if you could, Jack." Fifteen feet away, wedged among us extras, Jack Nickolson hesitantly stood up and waved.
"Holy crap, that's Jack Nickolson!" was the sentiment of everyone save the people immediately around him. As 'Jack' sat back down, the non-reaction from the eye of the Jackstorm radiated among the rest of us. This was not Jack, just someone who looked like him. Tanned, 60, with a receding hairline. He had a Hawaiian shirt, smiled a lot, and never took off his sunglasses. Either Jack's stand-in, or just an impersonator. Either way, the real Jack would never be hesitant to stand up and wave.
As the thousands filed through the stands, I checked all of them for my friend Sal. He was also attending the shoot (there were online ads from beinamovie.com everywhere to fill the stadium). He'd be easy to find if I checked faces as they walked past. It also gave me something to do. Watching a four hour baseball game is bad enough, but spending twice that time without even a game to watch was downright coma-inducing.
I never found Sal. Sal found me, though, through a very similar crowd analysis. He yelled my name several times, but I didn't hear. I think the stadium sensed I used to live around Boston, and hence swallowed the sound in case I was a Red Sox fan.
Adam Sandler wandered onto the field soon after the Jack Pickleson incident, mixed with fifty production people. He was wearing an unremarkable plaid shirt, and waved to us once the "Hey Adam!"s started. Several people yelled "You can do it!" in their worst Cajun accents. After a couple minutes, he became no more interesting to watch standing around than anyone else.
Us cinematic cattle got led to the nice padded box seats behind the visitor's dugout. A fake Red Sox team was in uniform, as was a fake Yankee team. Derek Jeter was in the movie, but his scenes were already shot. We thought we'd be rotating seats, but we'd be stationed there the whole night. The seats were wet from the day's sporadic rain, but the weather dried up and held at 80 degrees for the entirety of the shoot.
One extra had long spiked hair and vampire fangs, and roamed the aisles for a full half hour. If that guy had ever been in Yankee Stadium before, I'd eat my pear. He was trying to get famous, and he was being more aggressive than the rest of us. I felt embarrassment toward him for trying so blatantly, and also resentment because it might just work.
Jeff and I weren't dressed for anything twin-like. He had a light green Hawaiian shirt, I had a dark green T-shirt. We had different haircuts. Jeff had glasses, I had contacts. We'd barely pass as brothers, much less twins.
We wouldn't be opposed to wearing matching clothes if asked, but we weren't walking in with them. Dressing identically on the off-chance that a production guy would think twins were a cute sight gag crossed an unseen pathetic line. We might as well wear fangs. Neither one of us ended up doing anything to rustle up attention.
The first shot didn't begin until 9:45. The scoreboard clock was reset to 7:58, and perpetually was reset to 7:58 every hour. Time itself was being told to hurry up and wait.
The shots this night were #1. Adam Sandler walking up to the national anthem singer and taking his mike. #2. Adam running and dodging a cop. #3. A security guard in a sweater vest leaping over Adam's head, onto an off-camera foam mat (a cool stunt). #4. The singer entering the stadium, to cheering crowds and one ballplayer scratching his butt. #5. A close up of the singer saying "Nobody messes with my microphone." #6. A long shot of Adam, running with the mike after the sweater vest jumps over him. #7. The police dragging Adam off, as he's screaming "Linda!". #8. The singer snatching his mike back from Adam. In order, they'd be 4-1-2-3-6-5-8-7. Thirty seconds of film, a minute, tops.
Someone (an assistant director, I guess) asked everyone in our group who was a January or a March birthday to stand up. This shot were taking place as the crowd is getting to their seats, so some people would still be standing. Jeff and I are both January born, so we stood up. As did half the others: standing up makes you more visible.
A whirling cameraman ran around Adam as he took the mike (shot #1), catching a shocked and dismayed crowd (played by Jeff and me). We were to play it silent, so as not to mess up the sound of the paid actors. Jeff and I did several variations of mimed shock, blending the wackiness that would attract cameras with the bored indifference that would be our real life response.
That shot ended at 10:30. The multiple takes of each shot went rather quickly, but it was followed by a good hour of set up between each shot, which continued the whole night. #1 was the only shot we'd really have on camera, so we're not the tiniest bit more famous for sticking until 3:00 A.M.
On a later shot (#6, I believe), the A.D. asked everyone who was a April and June to stand up. Remarkably, 50% of the crowd stood up for this as well. Maybe they were all born right at midnight March 31, and can't nail their birthdays down to a single month. Jeff and I, honest people that we were, did not stand up this second time. Unrelatedly, we noticed the camera wasn't passing our way this shot.
Food was available in the corridors the whole night, but 'extra' food was just water and more damn pears. Pastries, soda and popcorn were right on the other side of some sawhorses, with guards perpetually yelling that this food was not for extras.
Dinner was at 1:30. We trudged a quarter mile, picked up our dinner bags from the lobby, and trudged back to our seats. Dinner bags had processed turkey and processed cheese wraps, a bag of chips, and some more water. At least there was no pear.
I knew enough to bring a book. I picked it carefully: a beat up paperback of Silence of the Lambs. A good read, something I can do five minutes at a time if need be, something respectable, portable, and able to generate conversation by the entire stadium. Without even opening it, I got into a conversation about the currently filming version of Red Dragon. Jeff brought Hard Times, a beat up Studs Terkel paperback book interviewing folks about the Great Depression. Bad choice for conversation, unless you're in a senior center.
I ended up reading half of Silence of the Lambs that night. Jeff knocked off 300 pages of Hard Times. We had a lot of times on our hands.
Two middle aged black women constantly insulted each other the whole night. They were actually friends, but whenever someone told one of them to be quiet, they erupted that people should mind their own business. A happy fat guy, perhaps the epitome of the happy fat guy, found plenty to laugh about with them.
One of these women accused a young black guy of stealing her hat. Yankee memorabilia was being distributed to the crowd: foam fingers, programs and hats. Her pale blue hat was missing, and a similar hat was now sitting on this guy's head. The accused said it was his hat, he had it since Friday, that's why it was dirty, and why would he steal a dirty hat? The woman insisted that he give it back, and called him a thief until he angrily stormed out. Half an hour later, the woman found her own hat in her purse. She slinked off to find the non-thief. The happy fat guy could not be happier. "There's a whole lot of drama going on tonight!"
Things on the field weren't as entertaining. The lag time between them gave me more than enough time for Buffalo Bill to have a face off with his kidnap victim, and Hannibal Lecter to have a face off of a security guard.
So much Yankee memorabilia got passed out, I got a secondhand foam finger someone didn't want. I don't hate the Yankees, but me putting on the finger and screaming during shots would cross the line to fairweather fandom. It was also soaked with what I'm praying was coffee. I left it on an empty seat by me, and plum forgot it when Jeff and I eventually left.
Marisa Tomei snuck onto the field for a couple minutes. Jeff spotted her. She wasn't shooting any scenes, and was gathered by the monitors. Either the crowd didn't see her, or no one felt like screaming one of her catch phrases. It would have been interesting to hear a screaming Yankee fan's rendition of "My biological clock's ticking like this!"
Jeff and I left at 3:00. The difference in being a potential speck for eight scenes and ten scenes isn't much of a lure. Especially when the chance of still getting a few hours sleep was possible. I made it back to Jersey City in 25 minutes, a personal best from the Cross Bronx Expressway, and squeezed in four hours.
I don't think I'll do another mass extra thing any time soon. A shoot where I'm not one of 2000 people, I'd be more interested in. As is, it was just a turkey wrap and pear for eight hours of sitting, and a chance of finding my shirt if I pause the Anger Management DVD when it comes out some time in 2004.
Expect that vampire guy to have his own sitcom by then.