Film Follies

FILM FOLLIES

None of the film stories I'm about to relate have any sort of injury involved, so for the squeamish this may be your favorite part. If you have sadistic tendencies and have been enjoying the details of my pain and suffering, you may want to skip this section.

I decided late in life to start my cinema career. Early on I had gone to Suzy McCarty as an 18 year old, and she quite correctly told me there were way too many 18 year olds who wanted to be in films in her agency already. So I waited until I was 38, and then I started looking for film work.

I was working as an extra for a woman named Elizabeth and I can't recall the agency, but she did get me lots of jobs as extras in locally filmed TV commercials, television series and even some nationally released movies.

I recall one of the first films I worked on was called "Divided by Hate". It was directed by and starred Tom Skerrit, who decided like many others that Utah was a great place to film for not much money.

Where else could you get idiots like us, who were willing to show up and play cops and even do some of our own high speed stunts. I'm not kidding. We were a group of police trying to get a fundamentalist preacher out of his house, and for some reason this called for us to drive down a dirt road at seventy miles per hour while only feet from the bumper of the car in front of us. My car even caught on fire as the bubblegum machines used for my cop car were wired wrong.

We did get to see some cool explosions, and I was even mistaken for a real cop as someone pulled up delivering some bottled water for the cast and crew.

You really don't understand the power you feel in a uniform until you are dressed like a fake cop and someone asks your permission to park their car. In the middle of a field. Just until the water was delivered.

There were reasons for me to explain to this delivery person that I wasn't really a cop, and that he really didn't need to ask me for permission to park, especially in the middle of a field in Payson.

But the easy way out of this was to just tell him it was all right. It was a great feeling, and I didn't even have to fire my fake gun.

We must have looked imposing because there were about 15 of us fake officers standing around. The extra-coordinator decided we looked tough enough that she convinced someone to take a picture of us surrounding her. She told us to look mean, and aspiring extras that we were, we did our best to look surly. After the picture, she wrote a note on the Polaroid to her ex, stating that these guys would have something to say to him if he ever bothered her again.

I hope she mailed it.

This was an eye-opening event in my life, and besides the boredom of sitting around for most of the twelve hours the standard contract calls for you to be there, I was learning all kinds of new things. Like the way to get the birds in the tree quiet for filming was to shoot some blank shotgun shells next to the tree.

They would be quiet for a second and then start chirping again, usually after the scene was shot.

I got my first big break in this film as I was called back for second day of shooting over by the Scera pool in Orem. This time I was one of the guards, and I was to look tough guarding one of the non-descript doors to the compound. That was how the cinematographer shot it. When Tom Skerrit realized how boring the scene was, he directed me to be tying my shoe until he showed up at the door, whereupon I was to snap to attention. I thought it was a much better shot.

I even got to play the vice-principal once at my old high school, which would be disturbing to the vice-principal who was there when I was a student.

I sat in the former offices where I had done announcements as a senior, I looked up my father, my aunts and my uncles in the old yearbooks they had brought in for props. I laid the books out on the table and took a picture.

It’s a sweet memory from a place that no longer exists. A property improvement is now in the place of that old high school. I don’t know if I think it is better. Maybe just different.

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