So, the wardrobe thing on "Vegas" was alright, but I decided I don't like working in the wardrobe department. Fashion is just too silly. Sure I got to see Cameron Diaz at her costume fitting, but dealing with $5000 shoes and $500 t-shirts makes me laugh too much. Some people and some movies just have more money than they know what to do with, so they just pay retarded prices for things that they have no concept of how much they should be.
Working on "Damages" was alright. My friend Soren, who I've been working with since "Satan's Little Helper", is key PA on it now, so she got me a lot of additional work on it. One night when we were shooting Woody Harrelson dropped by to visit Ted Danson on set. One of the grips said I should try to burn one down with him because Woody's a big pothead and later I heard the director, who, for this episode, was Timothy Busfield from that old "30-Something" show, say that he had to turn Woody down because "...You know I don't smoke anymore, Woody".
A few days ago when I was on "Damages", some guy gave me an elbow to the chest for no good reason. I was standing on the corner, and the weird thing was I wasn't even stoppin anyone at that point. I was just standing there with my walkie in hand and this Big meathead-type dude comes by and whacks me with his elbow in my arm and chest, so I immediately got on the radio and said "Hey! This dude just punched me over here! Where's our cop at?" So, I followed this guy until the cop we had for traffic control showed up (along with a good bit of the crew that wanted to see what was going on). The cop told me the most I could get the guy for was a ticket for "menacing", so he just chewed the guy out and made him apologize to me. All in all, it was pretty funny. Hey Meatheads- Rule 1 - Never punch a guy with a walkie!
So, I also worked a bunch of days on the new CW show "Gossip Girl", which was a lot of fun. The first day was the week before it premiered and was incredibly easy. Nobody knew what the show was or who the actors were so we didn't end up with any crowds at all. The next week was a different matter. We were filming on the upper east side, where the stories are based, and after only one episode had aired we had huge crowds of schoolgirls all talking at once and going crazy. At one point I looked around at all the extras dressed in schoolgirl uniforms and all the real schoolgirls and said, "I really should be more specific about my fantasies. When I said I wanted to be surrounded by schoolgirls... this isn't exactly what I had in mind."
My work on the Coen brothers movie was fairly uneventful, to say the least. I've probably said it before, but PAing on big budget movies is pretty lame. They put you far away from the actual set on some street corner and leave you there to rot all day. That's basically what happened on this one. I was supposed to be with a cop to lock up traffic around Grant's Tomb up in Harlem, but my cop got called away to help with crowd control for the Iranian presidents visit to Columbia and they left me at my pointless lock-up for two hours then put me on an equally pointless one for the rest of the day. Then they didn't break us for lunch... at all. We don't even get paid meal penalties like the union guys. The only thing we get is hungry.
Working as a grip back on "Naked Brothers" was sweet. Nothing like coming back on a job you were fired from at a hgher rate. :-)
I worked a couple of days on an HD docu-show called Artstar where we followed around some odd artist types as they tried to make it in the NYC art world. On Saturday, we shot at the DUMBO art festival where I had some hot chocolate at Jaques Torres, saw an elephant paint, and looked at a bunch of crappy "art". Some of it was okay, but most of it just reminded me of that guy at school that tried to be goth but never really got it.
That night we hung out with some old friends for my friend Drew's birthday. We had some drinks at a gay bar and then went to a burlesque show, which was a whole lot like a sideshow at a circus. There was a chunky belly dancing sword swallower, a juggler that kept dropping stuff (which became scary when he was juggling fire batons and dropping them), and an old lady host with a lot of incestual "Momma" jokes. It was pretty fun and that guy, Ian Something-or-another from the Travel channel, was doing a segment during the show.
Okay. I'm tired of writing. I'll try to write more often, but I'm not promising anything.
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