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Published: October 17th 2006
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Trying to grow facial hair
The hair and makeup people told me to see how much I could grow in a week. In the end they told me to shave it off. The final baseball practice/rehearsal before the week of filming for The Bronx is Burning was to begin, all of the baseball players/actors were given a shpeel (I use this word all the time but have never tried to spell it) about what the days on the movie set would be like. The gist of it was that filming a movie is boring and tedious, and that most of the time would be spent sitting around doing nothing.
Cal (baseball casting director) and Mike (technical director of baseball) could not have been more correct, in fact thus far it has exceeded my expectations of boredom and tediousness.
I have been on the set a total of five days in the past two weeks; the first day I came in to be fitted for my Royals uniform, which I only tried on after waiting around for five hours. Two of the days we were on set for 14 hours, myself and many of the other non-Yankee players spending every minute in the club house, waiting. From time to time they would call us down to the field; we would put on our spikes , head out onto the field, begin to stretch and warm up in the outfield…….only to be told thirty minutes later that we should head back up to the press box for more waiting. Last night the Royals players finally did a scene(after 13 hours of sitting), it was a 10-second scene where we are in the dugout, in the background of a shot of Reggie Jackson hitting a groundball to shortstop.
The spectacle of the film shoot (I heard Cal refer to it as a 'Circus' the other day) is very amusing to me. It is like a performance in and of itself, each person involved in the project playing out their role to perfection (well, not always). There is the food tent, the costume trailers, each of the principal actors have their own trailor/dressing room, there are big trucks holding all of the equipment for the actual camerawork. There are security guards checking to make sure everyone who enters is authorized, the ESPN executives walking around the set, glued to their cell phones. I spend most of my time with the thirty baseball extras, watching TV and playing cards in the Press Box.
Kraft foods is in charge of feeding this small city of film people; I would estimate that on any given day there are around five hundred actors/crewmembers/extras/workers on set. That is a lot of people to feed. I am told that the food budget alone is about $10,000. Per day.
There is Ginger and Anthony, the hair and wig people, Anthony is the flamboyant hairdresser who hovers around the set making sure that nobody messes up their wig (it is usually the baseball players who are the culprits), and Ginger is the friendly and flirtatious blonde who makes it her business to get to know every player/actor by name.
There's Turtorro, playing Billy Martin, who you can often hear strolling around the set reciting his lines or humming "mmmmmuuh, mmmmmuh, muh," warming up his voice.
There are the baseball extras and Screen Actor's Guild extras who are scattered in the stands, watching quietly and waiting, or reading a book, or conversing with other extras who also have nothing to do.
There is Daniel Sunjata, who playes Reggie Jackson, who constantly has a cigarette in hand when the camera is not rolling. Yesterday I was talking to him and noticed he was drinking herbal tea; ‘for the vocal chords,’ he said to me. I find it interesting that he veers away from coffee because it is bad for the throat but has no problem chain smoking his way through the day. I guess the two counteract each other?
There are the two directors who, though I am sure know what they are doing, seem to be making decisions on the spot for where the cameras will be, what scene will be shot next, what extras are needed. Then there are the local extras. About five dozen people dressed up in seventies street clothes, sitting and waiting to spring into action at a moments’ notice (well, not really ‘spring’ into action, because their only role is to sit in the stands and be in the background). In scenes when they need to fill the stands with more people than are available, they have a large fleet of inflatable dummies that are interspersed among the real people to give the illusion of a full crowd.
The second day of the shoot was the day we filmed my scene with Turtorro. It is a short scene, only about two minutes long, I am warming up before the first inning and Turtorro starts yelling at me on the mound. I get rattled and start throwing wild pitches, and he gets more and more animated and explicit with his trash talking. We did the scene about five times on film, and each time Turtorro had new and funny things to say. Much of the lines he improvised will probably not make the sensors, and will never be in the actual movie. I do not say a word during the scene, I simply glare at him, pound, my glove, look up at the sky, etc......
When we finished, Turtorro came up to me and said ‘hey man, why don’t you have a line in this thing?” I don’t know, I said. “That doesn’t make any sense, I mean, the guy is getting railed up there on the mound, he would say something back, he wouldn’t just sit there and take it.” I agreed with him, of course. “I’ll go talk to the director and see what we can do,” he said to me. And then he walked off after the director, who was headed up the stairs already. I couldn’t believe it; I have just finished filming a scene with John Turtorro, which is pretty cool, and now he is arguing with the director on my behalf, trying to get me a line in the scene!
In the end the director decided to keep the scene as is, with no line, nonetheless it felt good to have Turtorro fighting for me.
According to Cal and Mike (technical director and casting director), giving me a line makes the process more complicated and it is much simpler to keep the baseball extras as baseball extras, and don’t add in lines. If they gave me a line then they would have to rewrite my ‘contract,’ change my pay scale, and pay me more money. They would have to pay me as an actor, not as a baseball extra.
Unfortunately cameras are not allowed on the set, which is why I have no pictures to share. 😞 ☹
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Ann Mom
non-member comment
chuckle
Oh, Will, you make me chuckle so! Great description! At least it reads that way from here! Luv ya! Mom