Hollywood Here I Come!

It's not everyday you get to rub shoulders with some of Hollywoods finest, and its definitly not everyday you get to work with them on a movie. I, however, did. Jealous yet?

Currently Brad Pitt is filming "The Assination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford" a western biopic. They are shooting parts of this film right here in Edmonton, using Fort Edmonton Park as the location for part of the town that Jessie James lives in.
Back at the end of July the producers of this film held an open casting call for extras to play background actors. They were looking for men with facial hair, scruffy-looking types, and women with long hair. It was my brother who got our family interested in this. a "friend of his" wanted to be in the film and try out (though i think his motivation to help her out was something more than simply friendship). Regardless, my mother had some contacts with some talent agency located in Red Deer and she signed us all up with it. So now the whole family had an agent and we were going down to try out to be in this film.
We stood in line for 8 hours outside of the hotel where the director and the extras casting people were. It was a total gong show. We didn't actually get in to see the people. by about 3pm some people who were working on the film started handing out forms so that people interested could mail in their photo and measurements to the film crew. I grabed the form and we were out of there as soon as possible.
In the last week of August i asked my mom about the status of our "auditons." Whether or not she had heard anything from the film company. turns out she thought that myself and my brother Will (the one who got this whole thing going) weren't interested anymore. So i mailed in my photo a couple of days later, though i didn't expect to hear anything, because i thought that the date to have these things in was past.
two weeks later, the day before uni started back up, i got a call from a woman named Roxanne, she was incharge of extras casting and they wanted me to be a reporter for the film!

I went down to Fort Edmonton Park for a costume fitting a few days later. There, along with many other extras, were ushered through the costume area like cattle trying on clothes circa 1882. It was a lot of fun dressing up in that time era, though i don't envy the women of that time. Talking to a few of them, they were so laced in with corsets and the like that they couldn't even sit down!
I was dressed in black trousers that came up past my stomach and opend up from the side (they had no fly!), a white button up shirt with a back vest overtop. i got to wear a black bowler hat and a grey suit jacket. They had the collars that were attached separately with little buttons. The ties back then were also rather bizzare.

I was only supposed to work on Tuesday, sept 13th, but due to the weather (it has been well rainy and cold for the past 2 weeks) htey didn't manage to film all of the scenes that they wanted to. So they asked me back on Wednesday.
Some of the scenes you might see me in, i stress might because i could just as easily end up on the cutting room floor, would be the funeral of Jessie James, the press conference for Robert Ford (after he shot Jessie James), the chase of the photographer from the funeral home to the Photo Studio (i might actually get some screen time in this one!) and when the photographer takes the photo of the dead Jessie with all of the reporters. Mary-Louise Parker was in that shoot, as the greiving widow.
I was also a background extra in a sceen where Robert Ford and his brother, played by Casey Affleck and Sam Rockwell respectively, run across the street into the telegraph building. Though i don't think anyone would be able to recognize me as they were filming the glass of the building and i would simply be a reflection, a very small reflection.

It was an awesome experience, i got to see first hand how a big budget movie is made, i gained a new respect for all of those people who work on movies but don't star in them, honestly it is a lot of work and INSANE hours. They were working 12-18 hour days. On the tuesday that i needed to be there, i had a call time of 6:30am! we did the first bit of shooting and then all of the extras were ushered into extras holding where we just sat around for hours. luckily enough though, extras holding was located in the upper floor of the photographer's studio so we were warm (when the rain came) and we could watch the filming in the street below.

Will this be the start of my Hollywood film career? No, I don't think so, but hey who knows.