And We Shall March

Conversations With The Man - Michael Bay Edition

The Man: Have you ever seen a Transformers trailer you didn't think was awesome?

Me: Already you're trying to break us up???

I'm taking my panties and going home to my cat! My cat understands! My cat doesn't judge me!!!

 

! Visual Evidence of Me In The Transformers Movie ! (With A Bonus For The Blooper Reel)

Whether or not this is a productive use of my *entire* day  depends on your definition of 'productive'. I'm happy not only because I figured out how to do something technical I've never done before, but now I have pictures to show to the nephew and end the Tone of Doubt that had been creeping in when talking about the movie and me being in it with the robots!

If you think the images below are photoshopped, follow these instructions to see for yourself. The only photoshoppery below are the captions I layered onto the pictures.

From the top, shall we?

1. Kid is running down the street with the All Spark. Gets bounced off the Escalade "driven" by the brunettes. Meanwhile, I am clutching onto the pole for dear life.

2. Kid goes up into the air and back down again. Behind him I'm up and off (after first falling on my ass).

3. Death! 40 feet tall! Run!!

4. If you stop running Alpha 1 might have you killed!!!

Thus ends my Two Seconds Of Glory In The Transformers Movie! Now I'm going through trying to spot Kris & Joe. They were on set far longer than I. They've got to be visible somewhere.

Bonus! The move goes so fast there's a whole bunch of stuff you can't see on screen in the theater or even at home with a high-quality dvd player. Among items you spot only when going  frame by frame on the computer:

The above shows up at 2:02:10, and you can see the guy holding the camera, too. He's  wearing a blue shirt. I think his hair is brown, but even at frame-by-frame it's hard to tell. Here! Judge for yourself!

And we'll end with two of my favorite pictures taken during those two days of fleeing invisible robots.

Okay. Back to the Golliwogg thing. Aiming to have that up by mid-week.

!! OMIGOD YOU CAN SEE ME IN THE TRANSFORMERS MOVIE !!

I'll skip how discovering this joyous news came about, save to say the guy who revealed this to me pointed out that if I were not so stubborn and used the full capacity of my computer, I would have discovered this weeks and weeks and weeks ago. The movie moves too fast to spot this in the theater or on a regular dvd player. It has to be done on computer.

Here's what you do to see Me in the Transformers movie!

1. Put your dvd into the computer. Go to Chapter 20 (the climactic battle sequence). Click 'play'.
2. At 2:02:03, hit the 'slow motion' button, and slow it down to 1/4 speed. The kid is running down the street with the cube, and is just being hit by the Escalade.
3. When the kid bounces off the Escalade and into the air, move your cursor over the 'step' button.
4. When he hits the ground and blue sparks and a fog come out of the cube, hit the step button. Keep clicking until you get to 2:02:05. The kid is just starting to get up, while behind him on the sidewalk, the guy with the X-Box is about to fall down.
5. Focus your attention on the light pole at the left of the screen.
6. You will see a woman with a black shirt/dress, silver belt, grey pants and black high-heel boots pop up and haul ass down the sidewalk. You only see her from the back and side.
7. THAT'S ME! I run right past the X-Box guy and in front of the homeless guy. I'm running behind a guy in black pants and a dark greenish dress shirt.
8. I am on screen from 2:02:05 through 2:02:07!! TWO SECONDS OF GLORY!
9. Just realized that at *exactly* 2:02:03 you can see my arms clutching the light pole for dear life, and you can see the very top of my head.
10. Because it doesn't look like I have the purse when running, this take is the one where I jumped up, promptly fell over because my legs were cramped and scrambled on my knees until I finally managed to get up and run. I dropped my purse during all that and just left it there. One of the other extras behind me grabbed it and handed it back when we were all down the sidewalk a little bit trying to recover.

Screen cap as soon as we can figure out how to that.

Update! Got 'em! Going to put them in their own post.

From The Department of True Words Spoken, Now With More Optimus & Bumblebee (With A Wee Bit Of Peter Jackson's King Kong)

This post was started on Nov. 2, with the intent of posting on Nov. 8. I got about halfway through, got busy elsewhere, hit 'save as draft' and didn't get back to it. (There are more than a few draft posts like that in the hopper.) But this week four people who do not know each other each brought up the TF dvd, reminding me that I meant to ramble about it. So I went fishing through the draft posts and here is the completed part 2 of that first TF dvd post. I blame society.

Did I say November? Well, that's just a couple of days away. Certain people, knowing that I'm not really responding to email during this month, have resorted to a string of ! show us the pictures ! texts in an attempt to wear me down. They won. There will be revenge. Text messages annoy me. Probably has something to do with my age bracket.

If you went to get the dvd from the Target inside that ridiculous mall they built at the corner of LaBrea & Santa Monica, you got to spend quality time with an 18-foot tall Bumblebee out in the courtyard!

It was lunch hour on release day when I zipped down there. No, I could not wait for a used one to show up at Amoeba, which is my usual dvd approach. Too bad that day I wasn't wearing my OMG This Is The Best Shirt EVER Shirt (which I'm not sure I can talk about here without getting someone in trouble, which is why I haven't mentioned it. Let's just say that for the first month I practically lived in that shirt, showing it off. Now I wear it at least once weekly. THANK YOU again. I have a shirt-related anecdote I might share down the road. Adults for the most part don't notice. Little boys FREAK OUT when they realize what they're looking at.)

Anywho, straight back to the dvd section, where there was a pile of other fully grown people heaped around the Transformers endcap. Two Target worker bees nearby, one of them baffled, both of them apparently unaware that we could hear them talking:

Worker Bee #1: "I didn't think we'd get swamped until school let out."
Worker Bee #2: "That's not who they made this for."

The clutch of us fully grown people standing there with our transforming dvd boxes in hand bust out laughing.

Outside in the courtyard, people passing by in cars shouted ! BUMBLEBEE !, as did people getting off the bus. Again, it's middle of the day so we're talking adults - all ethnics, all (first glance) economic strata, about 75/25 male/female breakdown. A guy in a Porche took the corner with his arm out the window, cameraphone held high, huge grin on his face. I was like, white or not, if there were a cop around his ass would totally be pulled over for what he did when he spotted Bumblebee. He's a couple of tons and 18 feet-tall, but depending on the direction you're coming from you don't immediately notice him standing there. The direction this guy was coming from, he didn't see the robot until the last minute.

Walking through what has got to be one of the most poorly designed underground parking lots on the planet, many high signs from people going and coming. Folks leaving with dvds in hand getting the yeah, baby from folks heading up the escalators. It was fun, and extremely unusual for this town.

My god. The money they're going to make off this movie...on top of the money they already made off this movie. As a fan/consumer I don't care about the numbers, but as a person interested in things beyond my personal experience, I can't help but to wonder what that must feel like.

• First data bit pulled from the director's commentary: what James & I had running as a joke turns out to be ABSOLUTELY TRUE, right down to the Pentagon offering Bay up old tanks to blow up. (If you click, scroll down to the very bottom, the teeny bits in red.) The only thing we had wrong was it's not his EA making the call. It's him calling them direct. Jesus.
• Second data bit: Bay seemed not to understand why people in the theaters cheered when Bumblebee went from the old Camaro to the new. Considering the source, that's just funny. I'll repeat what a friend who is not at all interested in Transformers or anything geek said when she went to see the movie - this is the most thrilling car commercial I've ever seen in my life.
• Third data bit: One can say you were creating "any city," but there's only one city with the Griffith Observatory, and tons of people all over the planet know what it looks like. Not to mention the clearly identified signs reading 'Wilshire'. And the that stadium built in the ravine that was once a vibrant Latino community. And, you know? Only one Hoover Dam! (okay, true, a lot of people might not know exactly where the dam is, so he's on point with that, but even those folks are probably aware that it takes longer to drive from LA to the Hoover Dam than is implied in the film, Autobot or not. Though the disconnect of intent vs. execution isn't as strong here as it is with King Kong, it is there a little bit in Bay's commentary.
  
  • Don't think I've put the full thoughts on the Kong remake on this or the other site, so unless you know me and have endured this conversation, this point might not make any sense. If you want to guess at what I'm talking about, get the superdeluxe 3-disc edition,*** listen to the commentary - paying particular attention to the few parts where Jackson talks about race stuff - and then watch the "Return to Skull Island" mini-documentary, which confirmed and expanded on what I thought I saw the first time I watched this movie. It's pretty clear that Jackson's *intent* in regards to the racial messaging in Kong did not at all in any way shape or form make it onto the screen, and as of the day he recorded the commentary anyway, he's completely unaware of this. My assumption that he decided not to address the race stuff in his remake was completely obliterated when I listened to the 3-disc commentary track and watched that mini-documentary.
    
    • On the other hand, what he did with the ever so gorgeous Hayes, one of the lead secondary characters, and what he dropped in among  the  background characters in NYC  (particularly in the vaudeville sequences) made up for the deficiency.  He went into it Aware on a racial level. He just didn't notice that he came out of it widely missing that mark he (possibly) thought he had hit.
    • Then again I could be equivocating when it comes to Jackson's Kong remake, not unlike what those Whedon fans do when folks point out the glaring racial weaknesses in that guy's entire oeuvre.
      • The difference is Jackson remade a work from the 30s. Whedon was working with the world of now and the near future. Neither of which are, or should be, quite so Caucasian.
• Fourth data bit: Douglas was absolutely right that they had Jazz fighting in Capoeira. In one of the extra bits they showed stunt guys hired to help the computer people work out the fights throwing down, and one of them was using Capoeira.
• Fifth data bit: Back when the movie came out an acquaintance immersed in low-rider culture told me he didn't think the paint job on Optimus was done by anybody in Hollywood. To me Optimus is pretty and shiny, but beyond that I didn't see what he was talking about. Plus, big huge Hollywood movie, so Hollywood guy did it, yeah? Damn if it didn't turn out he was absolutely correct. In the director's commentary Bay talks about the paint job on Optimus, and how he told his production team "I don't want a white guy touching this truck." He had a cholo brought in to decorate Optimus. (Though I must point out that his use of the term "cholo" as relates to the man he brought in from Mexico to paint Optimus doesn't quite fit the general current use of that term.) This acquaintance of mine spotted that instantly, where I bet it flew over the heads of 99% of the viewing audience just as it did mine. Behold the glory of Geekery.
• Not a dvd-related data bit, but it hit me after I went to see the latest version of Blade Runner ... Those chunks of tile missing from the wall in the 2nd Street tunnel 25 years ago in Blade Runner? Still missing DECADES LATER when Bumblebee drives through that same tunnel and morphs from the old Camaro to the bitchin' pretty new Camaro! Your local transportation department at work.   

Anywho, good dvd, though not at the level of the Criterion Armageddon. My fave part is going through all the transformations at 1/8th speed, which takes a while, but at 2 a.m. you've got nothing but time and a bottle of Whaler's. It looks like every single piece in the vehicle forms *truly* goes somewhere when becoming a robot. Wowie. I am in awe of the visual effects team. What a job they did.

So! You texting bastards, here are your picts. Unfortunately I was never able to get back there at night to see how they had him lit. This ridiculous mall has one of those overly-done electronic billboards on the side where they were showing clips from the movie. At night, I bet it looked cool.

This will have to hold through next week, I think. Busy elsewhere.

Perhaps it's just me, but the fact that BB's tags are now expired is giggle-worthy.

In the one above, that's the transforming Optimus that comes with the dvd, with BB in the courtyard below. The two dvds are mounted on his back. Dunno why I didn't think to take a picture of the back.

*** Yeah. I have every single version of the Kong dvd because I am that pathetic. I love that movie (old & new), especially the part where he starts beating the shit out of New York City. Also, the Monkey vs. Dinosaur sequence in the Jackson remake is damn near perfect. For a good chunk of the USA population of A Certain Age, it's just not Thanksgiving without Kong.

Briefly Interrupting for !! OPTIMUS !!

Update! If you are reading this via a feed, I changed the picture later this night.

I was going to zip down to Amoeba tonight after I get off of work to pick up the dvd. But our building manager went to get one this morning on his way in because the kids have been going aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh since the release date was announced, and to save his sanity it was best to get it early so they'd have it when they get home from school.

What did I learn from the building manager? The two-set at Target ACTUALLY TRANSFORMS!! He just showed it to me. It's a larger version of the Target gift cards they had as a tie-in back when the movie was released.

So now it looks like I'm going to go to Target. At lunch hour. Because I am indeed that pathetic. What if they run out by the time I get off work??? OPTIMUS WOULD NEVER FORGIVE ME.

Update! (later this night) I'll explain this lunch hour picture, and share far more pictures than you probably care about, in November.

Recent Family Funnies

The Official Dad of BGF Central stumbled across the shoot for Batman when he went into the city recently, and not only did he not realize it, he absolutely did not care. All he wants to know is why the latest season of The Wire is not yet out on dvd and what can be done about this. I'm like, write a letter to HBO? Who cares? It'll be out eventually. I wanted to know if he saw the motorcyle. The only thing that seems interesting to me about that movie is the motorcycle because that thing sounds awesome. He does not recall a motorcycle. He declined, several times, my request to go back and look. And take a camera.

The Official Mom of BGF Central strayed off track from the nine or so channels they actually watch on that massive 5,000+ cable system they have, found herself at the SciFi Channel, recognized the telephone box and watched the episode while she was doing laundry. Later she picked up the phone.

"I didn't see the metal dog."
"Different guy, Ma."
"You didn't like the metal dog."
"Yeah. Still don't. It was stupid, like the screwdriver. What's the point of having -"
"I don't care that much."
"Sorry."
"And you know his hair is different. I don't think that's the same man."
"Nope. Different guy." (ed note: She's talking about Tom Baker, who is my favorite Doctor. Back in the day on PBS episodes showed up at random. For some reason, whenever she happened to wander past the television there was ALWAYS a Baker episode on. I remember telling her once that the guy in All Creatures Great & Small was one of the Doctors, and she didn't believe me until I brought in a magazine article.)
"It also looks like he lost weight."
"COMPLETELY different guy, Ma."
"He would be older."
"And not so much hair. I saw an article about him a few months ago. He still acts."
"They don't have the dog anymore, then."
"Thank GOD."
"It's just a metal dog. I don't understand why anyone would get so upset over a dog."

What I find particularly hilarious is that my Mom has seen at least one episode of the new Who, while I still have not. (The first season is in the house, I just haven't gotten around to it.) I can't wait until she accidentally comes across Battlestar and I get the call wondering what happened to the metal soldiers.

The Official Sister of BGF Central has been forced to go around telling her friends that SWEAR TO GOD I was in the movie. She's irritated I got cut mainly because nobody believes her. ahahaahahahahaha

But the little ones still think Optimus comes over to the house and takes me to the grocery store when the car is broken. The reality they have created without my help or prompting is fascinating. All I do is listen and affirm. Only the oldest one is going to be allowed to go see it in the theater; big and loud as the movie is it would scare the hell out of the rest of them. They might be allowed to watch it on dvd.

Meanwhile, I think the new James Ellroy/Forrest Whitaker/Keanu movie that was shooting across the street from the office a couple of weeks ago is now shooting at that weird House Of Mystery at the corner of Adams & Arlington. More on that later, if I remember, find the time and am able to dispatch one of the Seasonally Employed over there with his camera...

Transformers Movie: "Death! 40 Feet Tall!" (The Ecology Of Background)

These overly-long posts recounting The Greatest Days Of My Life as an extra in the Transformers movie contain spoilers. They definitely have spoilers for the current movie. They might contain future spoilers for the dvd release(s). On the other hand, they might not have future spoilers, because really I know jack about what the production team is planning for the future. Just in case, this is your warning. IF YOU HATE SPOILERS, STOP READING NOW.

What does this post, which was supposed to go for Thursday, tell you? It tells you I didn't get around to it until Friday night. Which means the final post in this series, which was supposed to show up on Friday, is not going to show up until Sunday sometime once I find a free stretch to sit down and write it.  Which means certain friends are going arrrrgggghhh because they were *massively* looking forward to Friday being the last day of obsessive TF blather. This is not my fault, choombas. Blame the day job. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Also, Ms. C is right, these should have subheads and be better organized. On the other hand ... SHUT UP.

Glossary bits are provided as needed. If you're coming in at the middle and you see a term that doesn't make sense, check out the earlier entries of this week. Chances are that term showed up in an earlier glossary. That said, the first glossary entry for this post is a repeat because I felt it would be useful.

• Background.  That's the Hollywood term for extras.

• SAG. Screen Actor's Guild. Any actor who is SAG is union, but not every actor is SAG, particularly among background. Obtaining the credits needed to become SAG is not unlike taking the Ring to Mordor.

• Reset. You do a scene, then you go back to where you were and do it over and again. For the uber-blondes, that meant sitting in the Escalade. For the rest of us, that meant sprinting then going back to where we started sprinting. For the PAs, that meant we weren't resetting fast enough. Apparently after you sprint for 200 - 500 feet you're supposed to either sprint back or teleport to your starting position. After a while we tended to walk while ignoring the PA cries of "Background! We're in RESET. Let's GO people! We need to RESET. NOW."

• Catering. That's where you go for breakfast and lunch.

• Craft services. This is where you go for food when catering is closed. I'm still not entirely clear on why catering and craft services are not one and the same, but it might be because the outlets are run by different contractors. I really don't know.

I'm going to repeat this, too: These are the observations of an outsider. I am not an actress. I've been on a lot of movie sets over the years because of the previous day job, but stuff that struck me as weird or wildly fascinating probably wouldn't seem so to someone who spends every working day on a set. Factor that in as you read on.

One thing I like to do is talk to people, or rather, poke them a little bit and then listen while they talk. This is a trait common to my previous profession. When they're not getting on my nerves, I like people. Since there's a lot of down time on a movie set I figure if if I'm going to be around a bunch of folks who probably have interesting stories to tell, they may as well entertain me with them. People who like to talk about themselves need an appreciative audience. Everybody wins!

Which means perhaps you're wandering back from craft services and you see a group of guys in uniforms unlike all of the other Army uniforms. Theirs are kind of like jumpsuits. You change trajectory and wander over to them, stop in front of the black one and say "Hello! Your outfits aren't like the other Army outfits. Is there a Sector 8 or something?"

And he'll say: "We're the flight crew."
And you say: "Oh! You're playing the blackhawk pilots."
And he says: "We ARE the blackhawk pilots."
And you say: "Oh. ... Do you ever get a headache from them being so loud?"

After a round of shaking hands, they tell you a little bit about what it's like to fly a blackhawk and how they got involved with flying a blackhawk for a movie. But before you can get into all the questions popping into your head, particularly the most important one,*** your Alpha Sense starts tinging. So you say "gotta go!" and flee into the bunker with the rest of the background herd.

Then a few minutes later (and from a safe distance) you watch as Bay gesticulates wildly as he describes to them how he wants them to fly. Just as you're wondering where the helicopters are parked because you don't recall seeing any around, it hits you that you get to tell your friends you met real life blackhawk pilots. Only two of them will be impressed.

Yet almost everyone was impressed by the stories I shared from the blonde I had an enormously fun time listening to over those days. She was there with her mother, also an actress. She had been in couple of Bay's other movies, and her stories of what everybody (background and principals) had to go through for The Island were both horrifying and hilarious. She said Bay called his approach "Method Directing," and half the people at the table just about fell out when she said it. Her energy was great, and she had the timing of solid stand-up comedian. She was pulled for a highlight on Sunday night after they got rid of the rest of us. I don't know what she shot, but I was so looking forward to seeing her on the screen. She got cut, too. I regret that I cannot remember her name so I can keep an eye out for her as her career goes on and cheer as she makes her way up the chain.

Though I was massively entertained by all sorts of people during those days, there were only two others in background that I bonded with - Kris and Joe. They are both smart, funny guys. Joe has working the Hollywood game for a while, while Kris is a newbie. Both vibed to me as participants in life...as in, the life you want? You have to go get it.  Kris left medical school one year ago when he realized what he really wanted to do was act. He risked, moved out to Hollywoodland, and within seven months had earned the third voucher needed to qualify for SAG. Even I know that is amazing. An effort of five years between starting out and SAG eligibility is more common. (I mention Kris' details because he does so on his site. Joe's efforts and history are also impressive to me, but I don't put other people's business into the public sphere if they haven't already done so.)

For the record, only the first picture in this post was shot by Kris. The rest, which were shot on the set, were were not shot by him. Nor were they shot by me because I don't own a camera. Those background people were taking pictures of each other ALL THE TIME, which was so funny considering how the PAs guarding the perimeter would scream at passer-by that they were not allowed to take pictures, even though those folks were standing on a public street watching what was happening on a public street.

I don't have a picture of Joe, but here's Joe's website. Off to the side is a picture of me, Kris and vehicle mode Bumblebee, provided by Kris from when we all went to see the movie. Here is Kris' website. Here is what Kris wrote about me a few days after filming back in the fall. Here is what Kris wrote about me after we went to see the movie.

What I find a complete hoot about Kris' first post, besides the fact that his Mom thought he *must* have been making it up, is what he describes as being the flame crazy people are drawn to I call a Weirdness Magnet. I am also a Weirdness Magnet! I can be sitting quietly minding my own business and weird people or situations will Manifest in front of me. I hardly make special note of it anymore it happens so often. To learn that I was the weird thing for someone else's magnet slays. Knowing how many oddballs can show up on a set, I am Deeply Honored to be officially ranked among his collection of crazy people. In fact, I am THE most crazy one he's come across to date. Thank you, thank you. No pictures, please.

Anywho, besides getting a chance to talk to all sorts of people trapped someplace they can't leave, I was very much looking forward to being able to encounter a big studio movie set without the protective layer that comes with being press. Having over the years talked to or been buddies with below-the-line folks (along with reading articles like everyone else) I had developed a working hypothesis of what it must be like in that life. Though I realize two days inside one set is probably not enough to make Grand Sweeping Generalizations, I'm gonna do it anyway.

A big movie set is its own ecosystem. There is a firm and obvious overall heirarchy, and subsets of rank within each section. Every single thing and person on a set exists as a tool to be used by the top being (that would be the director) to bring the vision to life. How those tools are treated largely depends on the temperment/interpersonal style of the director, and that person's vibe *will* set the tone for the entire shoot. There is a peculiar teamwork at play; yes everyone wants to work together to pull off the Work. But that the same time there is constant intercine among each strata. I am now convinced there are a few rules that apply to any big movie set anywhere. (I'll note that when I first started trying to work this out, a couple of people told me this isn't something special to movie sets. Perhaps it's more obvious on a movie set due to it being a closed system. I think they're correct.)

• There is no time to coddle anyone, except maybe the principals.
• For background, and whatever you call the people who are somewhere between principal and background, there is the constant hunt for the Moment that will bring you to the attention of the right people.
• Same with the PAs.
• If being here is your job, it's only partially about the work you're filming at the time. It's mostly about what you're going to be doing when this is over. It's ALWAYS about the Next Thing and the attempt to make your participation/role in that Next Thing bigger than whatever you are doing in the current work. It's a life of hustle and constant networking. (I'm not sure if this one applies to those higher-up, but it was the default vibe for background, PAs and some of the lower level crew.)
  
• Everybody knows where they fall in rank. They will often behave accordingly.
• It's not that They don't care, it's just that They don't care. It's not personal, even if it feels like it at the time.

The situation with the pack of brunettes is a good example of the last. I don't know if these women knew each other beforehand, or if they gravitated to each other in the background pool for support as it became clear that if Bay was going to pull a background female for a highlight, 9 times out of 10 he was going to pull a blonde. (This is why I was flummoxed when I realized neither blondes nor ubers were anywhere to be seen in the final product. I think you had to be there to get just how weird it was that none of these women showed up in the final battle sequence.) One of these women was relatively new to both acting and background operations. When she realized what was going on she complained many times to various PAs, who did not care and could not do anything about it even if they did. She was taking it personally, fearing every lost potential Moment signaled the destruction of her future career, and she wasn't listening to the others in that pack who were more experienced and tried to explain to her not to worry about it. When the stress of all of it hit her, she started crying. The others in that pack talked her down, helping her get together enough to head back on the street and flee with the rest of us.

What stood out about that situation was what happened Sunday night, when we were done and waiting for the vans to take us back to the parking lot. One of the crew guys walked over to that brunette pack and gave each of them a single flower, said nice things to them about their effort. I have no idea who this guy was, but I don't think he was very high up in the crew hierarchy. It was the sweetest thing, and the one who had been crying earlier beamed.

I don't want give the impression that background were meek sheep victimized at every turn. They fought back in so many ways. Sometimes it was a matter of ignoring the PAs as they screamed for us to teleport. Occasionally it was telling a PA that if s/he wanted the background person to do something that would involve clothing destruction, compensation was due. (SAG voucher or money. Always SAG voucher or money.)  The clothing compensation request was a slightly bigger thing than it perhaps it comes across in reading. Though 9.5 times out of 10 the answer was "No," the request was made just the same. The point wasn't hoping for a "yes." They knew the request would be declined. I got the sense those little skirmishes were more about signaling I Am Not Furniture. I mean, think about it. The term used in Hollywood is "background," not "extras." An extra implies someone who is an extra person, someone who is human. Background implies a thing, like the ground you're walking on, the telephone pole you're hiding behind, the smashed taxi in the crater.

Or not. Sometimes I overthink...

I, of course, did not care about my clothes because I was there as a thrilled fan and not as a professional actor. The dress I wore that day still smells of that foul smoke, and my favorite boots, which I have kept in pristine condition for nearly a decade, are now scarred and scuffed. I will happily relate the origin of each and every scar on those boots without prompting.

Some of the veteran background would argue with even the Alphas! Early Saturday, just a couple of hours in, Bay was about to blow some shit up. It was way down the street from where the group I was with was standing. It was the first BOOM of the day and a couple of us wanted to see a little bit of it.  The two PAs herding us told everybody to get on the sidewalk, stand under the awning, and as long as we did not go past the awning we were fine. Whatever they were shooting was straight down the street, and if stayed under the awning we wouldn't be in the shot. This was great because we could see some of the smudge pots used for the explosion.

We hear the countdown guy. There is a BOOM. Windows rattle. (Loft dwellers surrounding us above were taking picts of us waving at them, and they were filming the boom, but I've yet to find any uploads. I'm done looking.) There is a glorious bloom of fire, smoke and debris. Those of us who cared were cheering and clapping. The PAs stood chatting with each other and smoking, uninterested.

And then Alpha 1 uncloaked out of nowhere, speaking sternly at us. It turned out he
was across the street trying to signal us to move back further, but none of us saw him until he appeared asking what the hell we were doing. (Unlike the PAs, neither of the Alphas had a headset. I think this omission explained several of the minor communication breakdowns.)

I began apologizing as the guy cheering with me explained that the PAs told us to stand there. Of course when we turn around to dime them out, both of them are gone. This happened ALL THE TIME. A PA would tell you to do something. You'd do it. Someone higher than that PA would show up and yell at you for doing what you had been told. The PA responsible would always vanish right about then.

Gentle disobedience was another background resistance tactic. One of those days we were running flat out down Broadway, the thought hit that if we took a hard left and flung ourselves under the marquee of the Orpheum we could stop running. First a few did it. Next take, a few more. Next take, a few more. Then one of the Alphas showed up.

Or when we had to do worrisome things near the tow truck when it was not being  operated by The Good Driver. We're on the sidewalk. The truck is going to move toward us. We are to run across the street in front of the truck. It is to keep going past us. Thing is, NONE of us wanted to run in front of that moving truck if The Good Driver was not behind the wheel. We had seen enough over those two days to know that would be a bad idea. When the unit director (a Latino guy, which was awesome to see) said "action," we all took off and were across the streeet before the truck had a chance to even move. That's when he told us we weren't allowed to run until the three count. Half of us listened to him, and the rest of us didn't. 

By the way, Kris, who is touched by the gods, got to stand NEXT to Bumblebee and run behind him instead of running in front of the truck. During reset he kept popping out from behind Bumblebee and waving at me. I flipped him off every time. Afterwards, he told me that the women running with him all took pictures of themselves while they were standing next to Bumblebee. ENVY! but hahaha he got cut like the rest of us.

I suppose I should say that while you can't tell it in the film, there were at least 100 of us fleeing during that final battle sequence. There were a lot more Army and Sector 7 guys running around and involved in highlights. All added up and not counting principals or ubers, I would not be surprised if there were nearly 150 to 200 people fleeing around.  I think most of us were cut because, in the end, we weren't needed. If you have obsessively tracking this movie you're aware of at least a few things you might have been expecting to see. Remember the casting call for people who could pass for high school students? There's an entire sequence in the script about the destruction of a high school that is not in the film, yet that stuf was shot. There's the character of
Big Rhonda, who runs a pawn shop and has scenes in the script but none of those bits on the screen (though I don't know if those parts were also filmed). There was a set of twins, big guys who are real life Army vets involved in highlights, but not up there on screen. I was looking forward to seeing them. I've already told you about the uber-blondes, and mentioned in passing the fight between the Army and the Sector 7 guys. All gone!  Personally I'm fine with that, as it would have just gotten in the way of the fantabulous 35 (or so) minute robot throw-down.

I cannot end this without talking about the food, which was INCREDIBLE. Full breakfast, full lunch, massive amounts of treats from the craft services. All of it delish, most of it delish and healthy. They made omlettes to order for breakfast, if you wanted one! We only had 1/2 hour for lunch during the 14-hour days, but there was plenty of down time to nosh outside of that. You know how blackberries are obscenely expensive? There were blackberries HEAPED all over the place at craft services. They even had an industrial espresso machine set up in the parking lot. Every few hours new food would appear in craft services and I made a point of going over and checking it out several times a day. Fruit, buns, chips, cream, hot dogs, Polish, popcorn, cheese, veggies all types of drinks, chicken, beef and on and on. I ate so much I believed them when some of the other background said that when they're working, they don't even bother going to the grocery store.

At the same time, several of my background brethren told me the level of food was unusual. Bay compensates for what he does to everybody by making sure all on set get top of the line food no matter who they are. Some of them knew this because of being in his other movies, some because they had heard it through the background grapevine. They said it is more common for background to get crap or minimal food on other sets. Wild, huh?

And that's enough typing for now. One more entry to go, which I will throw down sometime on Sunday.

*** The first thing I should have asked the blackhawk pilots, but didn't because my brain froze just a little bit, was if they were active duty and if Bay had called them and told them to bring some helicopters. Another silly thing James and I would do is The Executive Assistant For (Insert Name of Famous/Infamous Person). This one I do remember the origin! It grew from my first encounters with a group I called the Legion of Secretaries back when I was a newbie cop reporter. Their function was to keep you away from what you wanted to get. If you figured out how to work the Legion, you had much improved access. Somehow that grew into the Executive Assistant thing.

Once James did a riff on being the EA for Pol-Pot. I will not even *attempt* to replicate that here, but lord was it funny. He's probably in hell right now just for that. Another good one he did was the EA of David Mamet dealing with a photcopier repairman. Around the time Armageddon came out I came up with one involving the EA for Bay's production company calling the Pentagon to tell them to send the 33rd Fighter Wing to Burbank. In an hour. They're busy patrolling the Soviet Union? Huh. Well, see ... if they're not here in an hour, that's REALLY not gonna work for Michael. It always ended with the planes showing up in 55 minutes, and they brought along a tank the Pentagon said wasn't needed anymore in case he wanted to blow it up.

Good times.

Transformers Movie: "Death! 40 Feet Tall!" (Michael Bay Cares, Dammit, And If What Was Up On The Screen Wasn't Enough For You To Believe This, I Have Eyewitness Testimony To Prove It)

Before we start out today, allow me to share this "Letter to Optimus Prime From His GEICO Auto Insurance Agent." This had me giggling quietly to myself all day long!

These overly-long posts recounting The Greatest Days Of My Life as an extra in the Transformers movie contain spoilers. They definitely have spoilers for the current movie. They might contain future spoilers for the dvd release(s). On the other hand, they might not have future spoilers, because really I know jack about what the production team is planning for the future. Just in case, this is your warning. IF YOU HATE SPOILERS, STOP READING NOW.

Glossary bits are provided as needed. If you're coming in at the middle and you see a term that doesn't make sense, check out the earlier entries of this week. Chances are that term showed up in an earlier glossary.

• Principal. Actors who are not background. Star, co-star, supporting, et. al. Basically these are the people who actually matter, unlike, say ... background.

• The Kid. That principal who turned out to be Shia LaBeouf. At the time I didn't realize I was surrounded by principals, what with me being there for the robots (more on this, myopia later). Figured I should go ahead and use here the terms I used there at the time.

• The Good Driver. This would be the guy who drove the Escalade. (That's right, the brunette staring in horror at the steering wheel as it transformed wasn't actually driving that car. Hollywood magic!) He's the one we really, really, really wished was driving the tow truck when we had to do worrisome things near the tow truck.

Delayed posting because I appear to have set the autopost for 6 p.m. today instead of 6 a.m. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Okay, so mostly we're focusing on that amazing final battle sequence, specifically the parts filmed along Broadway and that intersection a couple of blocks away where Megatron died. Not the stuff at the Wilshire & Hope location.

It was a couple of hours into the first day before the people in my part of the background herd actually saw Bay directly, as opposed to absorbing his commands by listening to the Countdown Guy or experiencing his will via the Alphas. Most of this I witnessed either between running, or while sitting at the light pole that was one of my launch pads. When I realized how many highlights were going on around me (all within five feet or so) I was so very happy.

• Bay is beyond detail-oriented.
• Some of that stuff I am convinced he made up on the spot.
• When he is working one-on-one with someone for a highlight, he is completely into it, focusing the broad energy into a narrow loop between he and the principal he was dealing with. Bay never changed his energy level, he just altered how he cast it and went back and forth as if flipping a switch. I'm probably not doing a good job of describing this. It would make sense if you could see it.
  
• Perhaps there was a little Type-A obsessive, maybe.

Examples!

Let's start with the guy with the X-Box and the uber-Blonde in the pink bikini.  Remember the brief glimpse of the guy on the street holding the X-Box? They filmed him a couple of different ways, a few times with a stack of dvds on top of the box and a few times without. He also had to backup/fall/stumble in different ways. What was happening was one of the new Transformers was to burst from the box, grow six arms and attack with a frenzy (partly out of confusion). Bay showed him how he wanted him to react, and told him in which direction the new baby Transformer would be taking off.

What does that have to do with an uber-Blonde wearing gauze and a pink bikini? Well, she was just ahead of the X-Box guy on the sidewalk, another innocent bystander who happened to be directly in the path of an angry six-armed newly-hatched robot! When the X-Box Transformer races past her, it gets its arms snared in the cloth of her gauze dress, spinning her around, ripping the cloth from her body and revealing her pink bikini!!!!

I know it sounds stupid.

No, truly. I UNDERSTAND that it sounds stupid.

Really. I get it. Totally.

But!

It was delightful to watch Bay explain to her what was going to happen. I think this is one of the things he made up on the spot. He acted it out for her while the crew was wiring up her clothes. It was hilarious  - he was really into it and he wanted her to be, too! She wasn't, really. But by the time he was done spinning and waving his arms and talking talking talking, I was COMPLETELY sold on the idea. The way he told it, it was funny as hell.

I must admit that I was looking forward to seeing this bit in the movie. Alas, it didn't make it.

Next! The segment with the kid, the cube and the uber-Blonde in the leopard print micro-dress, a sequence that was filmed but did not completely make it on the screen. This segment was in two parts. Let's call them A, B and C.

Part A: The principal Kid has the Energon Cube/Creation Matrix (there is some debate among geekdom as to which of these is in the movie ... I'll spare you because we're the only ones who care. During filming it was just a brown foam cube). He's running down the street in the same direction as background. Background is largely on the sidewalk, the Kid is in the street. He gets hit by a black Escalade, which screeches to a stop. He bounces off the car. He drops the cube. He picks it up and keeps running.

Bay worked intensely with the Kid on this, and man it was fascinating to see how meticulous and detailed he is. He got down on the ground with the Kid, showing him how he wanted him to drop the cube, fumble it a bit. Bay snatched at it as if it were radioactive or burning. He hunched over, he told him it was hot, hot, he told him that when he finally grabs it, he's to protect himself from it with his jacket. Then he had the kid repeat his actions. Then he had the Kid get up and execute it.

I kinda liked that Bay had the Kid had to run flat-out just like the rest of us. (over and over and over again.) At the same time, the Kid had to do all of these things while running *and* trust that the Good Driver would stop precisely where he was supposed to and not run him over. (The driver worked his mojo every time to perfection.) 

Part B: When the Kid bounces off the Escalade, the uber-Blonde in the leopard print dress leans out of the car and screams "jerk!" If I told you how long it took them to do this one tiny thing, you would never believe me. They filmed this  a couple of times from different angles. He told her how to shake back her hair, even. Truthfully, this is the one part where I started to get bored and wondered if they had put out new food out over at the craft services camp.

Part C: The Escalade starts transforming. The Good Driver is replaced by the brunette you see in the movie staring at the steering wheel. Bay describes to the women what's happening to the car so they understand how they're supposed to react. Eventually they clamp this huge mecha-hand on the brunette's entire head, and she struggles as if it's killing her. She falls out of the car onto a nice pad placed by the driver's side door. Meanwhile, the two UBs in the car scream, freak out, try to escape, one of them dangles her legs from the window. It was cool.

And though there's more, let's wrap it up with the Mountain Dew pop machine.

To me it appeared as if Bay walked past the pop machine, glanced up, looked at it as if he didn't realize it had been sitting there in the alley all this time, and then was struck with a brilliant idea. He said to somebody on the crew "can we light this up," and they told him sure. Then he'd continue on with whatever he was doing, then a few minutes later would look over at the pop machine as if it just appeared and say to a crew person "can we light this up," and they would say sure. A few minutes later, repeat. This happened four or five times until crew persons actually started to attaching wires and lights and such to the pop machine. It was pretty funny (to us, anyway) in part because of this whole The Mind of Michael Bay interior monologue thing I was doing with one of the background women at the time. Hey! A pop machine! I could blow it up! * Hey! A pop machine! I what if I blow that thing up? * Is that a pop machine? If I blew it up, that would be cool!

I figured they were going to blow it up extreme style, as in actually blow it apart dynamite or something.  It alarmed me just a little bit because I was not aware they were allowed to do that.  And it bummed me because it would be just like the Furby truck, they'd send us all away and I couldn't watch it go off. Lots of time was spent cutting the cage on the machine so it would collapse correctly. Bay also pulled a Blonde for a highlight of screaming and falling down in front of the pop machine.

When I went back downtown a couple of days later searching in vain for an overlooked scorched Furby, the pop machine was gone so I assumed they indeed blew it up after we left. I also figured someone got paid for the honor of their pop machine being blown to smithereens.

It wasn't until I was sitting in the theater and saw the Mountain Dew machine turn into a Transformer that it all made sense. It was gone because it was theirs to begin with! Bay didn't blow that thing to pieces. They brought it in, set it up, knocked it around a bit and took it back when they were done. Which meant every time he looked at the thing as if he'd never seen it before, what he was really doing was looking at it and wondering why the hell it wasn't yet wired up as he wanted it to be.

And that's enough babbling for now!

 

Transformers Movie: "Death! 40 Feet Tall!" (The Hierarchy Of Blondes)

These overly-long posts recounting The Greatest Days Of My Life as an extra in the Transformers movie contain spoilers. They definitely have spoilers for the current movie. They might contain future spoilers for the dvd release(s). On the other hand, they might not have future spoilers, because really I know jack about what the production team is planning for the future. Just in case, this is your warning. IF YOU HATE SPOILERS, STOP READING NOW.

We're going to start out with a bit of glossary. I should probably do just one glossary post, but my goal is to keep the Transformers posts to five days, so I'll give you new glossary bits as needed. If you're coming in at the middle and you see a term that doesn't make sense, check out the earlier entries of this week. Chances are that term showed up in an earlier glossary.

• Bay. That would be Michael Bay. It's his world and we are LUCKY to be in it.

• Background.  That's the Hollywood term for extras.
  

• Blondes.  The women with blonde hair who were among the background pool. When the pop culture machine tosses out "Hollywood" or "LA" as shorthand, this is the type of woman they're trying to invoke. In general we're talking beautiful women. On this set they were more the urbane type than the surfer type. 

• Uber-Blondes. Like Blondes, only moreso. Think Maxim or Playboy. If you've ever played Champions, there's a character trait called "presence attack." That's what these women had, in SPADES. In the movie, the blonde who is the hacking expert? She would be classified an uber-blonde.

• The Alphas. That's my codename for two men who seemed to me to be the right and left hands of Bay. They made decisions about what to do with us in background without first obviously consulting him. I'm 99% sure that these two were, if not assistant directors, then something close to that role. Alpha 1 I codenamed The Man With No Eyes. He wore mirrored sunglasses so you could never tell what he was looking at, but you could always feel his glower. Alpha 2 was gorgeous. I think I've already talked about him enough. Though they had different approaches, what they shared was that predator ability to set off your fear/flight response from a distance, and they seemed to have a personal cloaking device. When you were doing The Wrong Thing, you'd feel the hairs on your neck buzz, or maybe a cramp in your gut, but you'd look around and nothing was there. Then you'd look around again and suddenly one of the Alphas has appeared right next to you. More often than not it was Alpha 1, and it was NEVER a good thing when Alpha 1 uncloaked in front of you.

• PA.  Production Assistant. It's a hell job involving being yelled at by every production staffer higher up the chain, dealing with many communication breakdowns, and being whined at by background. If any of them were older than late 20s I'd be surprised. This is a job primarily about background crowd control and covering your ass. Though I appreciate how difficult their jobs are, by late Sunday I grew extremely weary of being shouted at by a PA using his or her I Am Talking To Second Graders tone.

• The Countdown Guy. A bearded guy in a baseball hat with a megaphone and  (possibly) an Australian accent. Along with the Alphas he was often near Bay, and whenever we were about to film something he'd do the countdown or say rolling. Sometimes Bay would take his megaphone and yell specifics at us. I might be wrong on the accent...it's been a very long time since I've heard an Australian accent.

• Highlight. This is my term for when a background was pulled from the herd to do something special.

I think I should also say that these are the observations of an outsider. I am not an actress. I've been on a lot of movie sets over the years because of the previous day job, but stuff that struck me as weird probably wouldn't seem so to someone who spends every working day on a set. Factor that in as you read on this week.

How did Eddie Izzard put it? 70% is how you look, 20% is how you sound, 10% is what you say. People make snap judgments based on appearance; we are drawn to surface pretty and shiny. Anyone who has been around a person who is physically attractive has witnessed the It Takes A Few Effect, as in it takes others a few minutes for the mark to notice that you're standing there, too. Back in my youth when I lived elsewhere, I ran with a crew of women that included several employees of Hooters. What made it fun was watching how these women handled constantly being hit upon, and how this particular set despised how guys would assume they were bimbos and so tortured them accordingly. I never got so many free drinks in my life as I did when I was with them! One thing those years and friends taught me was how many different ways there are to be treated as invisible (and I don't mean Me...other women often treated them as if they were constructs instead of persons. At the time, witnessing this was kinda wiggy. I get it, now.). By the time those men figured out they had it all wrong, it was entirely too late.

During these two glorious days fleeing invisible robots, it did not take long to notice that Blondes were under constant assault on this set. There's a lot of down time on a movie shoot. The Blondes spent a lot of that time fending off (or toying with) come-ons from male background and from lower echelon crew.  Eventually I broke down and asked a couple of them if that got on their nerves. The answer was fascinating. On the one hand, yes, obviously. On the other, it's part of the game. You never know who might network you toward the next job, and that job could be the one where you get the Moment that pulls you out of background. That wasn't the first time I've heard this, but it was the first time I got to see it play out up close.

(Aside...Being an actor is a far more complicated thing than I think we consumers of pop on the outside can ever truly get. That is the reason I don't crit actors as I do the rest of them when I start going on about The Race Thing in Hollywood. More on this when I return to the Anansi Boys adaptation next week sometime.)

At the same time, the Blondes were the favored background decoration on this shoot, and they knew it. Whenever Bay was doing a highlight, eight times out of ten the Alphas or the PAs culled Blondes from the background herd. It got to the point where a newbie brunette who ran with a pack of three other brunettes was in tears by late Sunday.

But I didn't completely piece it together until late Saturday, after Moiself and two men were pulled for a highlight involving Megatron's death scene. When Alpha 1 and a couple of PAs went off to find a female volunteer for this, of course I was all MEMEMEME, jumping up and down and waving my arms. They took note and kept going. Eventually Alpha 1 came back to my area, talked to one of the female PAs, she pointed at me, and when he told me to come with I practically skipped behind him. I was also babbling all sorts of dumb shit at his back about studying aikido, stage fighting and doing stunts at faire as he took me to the intersection. Happily, because I know background doesn't register for anyone higher up the chain, I take comfort in knowing that even if he thought I was an idiot at the time, the reality of me fell out of his head when the whole thing was over.***

A few hours later, when when the fourth Blonde said to me a version of "you know they asked me to do that first," it hit me that I was not Bay's first choice for this. He wanted a female crawler, but he wanted one of the Blondes. None of them were willing to risk their outfits without compensation (background often wear their own clothes to a shoot) and most of them were in filmy and/or clingy and very short outfits. Frankly, I wouldn't have wanted to scrape up my  arms and legs either if I were wearing what they were. By then I had learned the proper response to that was NOT "so, why didn't you?" but to act like my feelings were hurt to hear this and walk away. I think I could do that because I was there as a fan who lucked out. Not being an actress, I wasn't Career Invested as they were, if that makes sense.

What's hilarious is all three of us got cut from the Megatron death scene, so in the end it didn't matter!

But as favored as the Blondes were, the uber-Blondes were something else entirely. That's why noticing their absence from the final product struck me so.

Those women showed up when I was at the light pole. You saw the effect of their approach before you saw them. Everybody, man or woman, stopped and backed up. Idiot Girl (that would be me) thought this vibe meant the Optimus semi-truck was coming down the alley, and I risked the wrath of Alpha 1 to stand up and look. When the uber-blondes walked past me and got into the Escalade, I'm still looking toward the alley waiting for Optimus to appear. It wasn't until I was trying to work out how Optimus could be in this scene in both robot and semi-truck form did I realize that everyone was staring at the women who just got into the Escalade.

In case I haven't made it clear, I was there for the robots! And also for the glory of being a fleeing extra in a movie done by one of the kings of Lets Blow Some Shit Up. I didn't really care about the human characters in the movie. In fact, I  didn't find out I was surrounded by principals until James told me a few days after the shoot.

It's not clear in the movie, but the truck that was blown to bits in the final battle sequence was filled with Furbys. Though we had to suffer in bordeom through the hours it took for them to tip up the truck and wire it with explosives, we weren't allowed to be on the street when they fired it off. Just when it got interesting the PAs came around and herded us into the bunker. DAMMIT. We were not allowed to be around when the Blackhawks were flying, either. They said it was "for safety," but more likely it was "for insurance" because they blew that truck in the historic core while there were loft dwellers watching from their windows. At least one of those people filmed it!

So a lot of us watched the truck blowing up and flaming Furby dolls rain down from the base camp parking lot, much to the consternation of the PAs. What most people did was slowly take their time walking back from craft services (the food truck). I was inside the bunker eating and talking to a cool woman who was in Lost and a bunch of movies so I missed it, but I heard it. That explosion shook the entire building!

I ran into the parking lot in time to see Bay and his pack return. The man looked exhausted and relieved. The pack looked tense and exhausted. I wanted to watch them for a while, but Alpha 1 was with him so like everybody else I lowered my eyes and fled back into the bunker.

They brought us back onto the street a little while later, which allowed us to see the aftermath up close. Hundreds and hundreds of scorched Furbys littering the street! Glorious!!!! I, of course, wanted one as a memento. There was just no way I could steal one easily, despite the attempts of Kris and Joe to provide cover. Every time I tried to snag one a PA yelled at me to put it down. (Hmm... should I provide Kris' description of Me over those days now, or should I wait until later? What the hell...now AND later!)

HOWEVER, at the very end of the day I saw a couple of Blondes with a Furby, and someone told me they saw one of the uber-Blondes with one. This annoyed me to no end because it told me that when THEY picked up a Furby, no one yelled at them to put it down.

Certain of the Sector 7  and the Army guys also walked off with a Furby at the end of that day. I was not irritated that the Sector 7 and the Army guys were allowed to take a scorched Furby. Like us, they were there at an ungodly hour of the morning, they were running around all day, most of them were running around in that foul movie smoke. The Sector 7 guys were also running around in all black costumes, and had to haul large guns on top of everything else. Though I was envious, it didn't bother me so much that a couple of Blondes had one, either. Those were my peeps from background.

But the uber-Blondes? They showed up out of nowhere, worked for a couple of hours in a cushy Escalade and then vanished again. They did not EARN Furbies. The rest of us SUFFERED. I wrecked my favorite boots while running around as ordered! We DESERVED Furbies! I needed a Furby for my shadowbox! The uber-Blondes did not CARE that this was TRANSFORMERS for the love of God; that some of us have waited 20 YEARS for a live action version of this property to be possible; that they were sharing a space with Optimus himself! And at least one of them got a Furby? OUTRAGE! UPSET!

I am so pathetic. Not to mention, petty.

Anywho...what else? Oh! It was because of a Blonde that I learned that there was another of the geek tribe in the background pool. There I am with the rest of the herd, standing on my mark at the mouth of the alley a few feet from the Mountain Dew pop machine, using these few moments between running to catch my breath. On the sidewalk behind me a little to my right is the Blonde in the micro-mini blue denim dress, CFM heels and a bolero sweater. (She was nice. I had talked her her a little bit on and off during the shoot. She was one of the blondes Bay pulled for a highlight that didn't make it into the movie involving what happened before the Mountain Dew machine transformed.)  Next to her is a guy with brown hair and glasses trying his best to chat her up. I'm tuning most of it out because every single time any of the Blondes were not running, some guy would approach and try to chat her up. But then I hear this:

Blonde: Siff what?
Guy: I was moderator for the SFWA forum on GEnie.
Blonde: What is that?
Guy: It's the premier organization for science fiction professionals.
Blonde:  Oh.

OF COURSE I had to turn around! I look at him like you have NO play, she looks at me with how is this my life, and he's staring at her with no conception that this woman is so far out of his league she might as well have been on Mars. Just before I am about to fail at not collapsing in giggles, we are all saved by the PAs screaming at us to get ready to roll and the countdown guy doing his thing.

Tomorrow: Michael Bay Cares, Dammit, And If What Was Up On The Screen Wasn't Enough For You To Believe This, I Have Eyewitness Testimony To Prove It.

*** When Megatron is finally killed he falls to the ground in the intersection with a huge BOOM. There were explosives involved to create the BOOM. Moi and two men were stationed about eight feet from the exploding pots with orders to start freaking out at "5" in the countdown, and, when the BOOM hits, to scramble away in the debris as if in fear of our lives.

Alpha 2 had me practice while the BOOM people were setting up.

"How are you gonna get away?"
"Umm...How do you want me to get away?"
"SHOW ME how you're gonna get away!"

I did, a couple of times. He said like that, only MORE. He said that in a very manly and commanding way.

I totally <heart> that man.

When camera rolled I scrambled away with such panic and force that I slammed into the knees of one of the cameramen. This was mainly because I didn't see him there. He wasn't standing there during practice. I also dropped my purse but left it behind just as I figured I would do if actually scrambling away from giant robots fighting on Broadway. Also I had snot dripping because of that horrible smoke stuff that was everywhere. I decided that was verisimilitude and didn't worry about it.

At "cut," Bay glanced at my general direction and said yeah! as he stalked past on his way to yell at somebody else. I figured that meant I wasn't gonna get kicked off the set for slamming into the cameraman. I also think that he wasn't directly complimenting Me, but expressing his general satisfaction with what just happened because it was cool. When Alpha 2, trailing him, said "good job" at us I was so very happy. Alpha 2 complimented as well as he commanded, in his own Special way, that is. He's so dreamy.

Transformers Movie: "Death! 40 Feet Tall! Run For Your Fucking Lives!" (Part One)

I LOVED IT so much that I do not even CARE that you can't see me in Megatron's death scene! (Update! But you can see Me in another part of the movie. Woo!)

Oh. There will be spoilers in this post.

I LOVED IT SO MUCH that it's quite possible I'm not going to go see any other movie the rest of summer but this one!

I LOVED IT SO MUCH that I'm going to buy every single version of the dvd when it comes out, and I will not bitch like I usually do when different versions of the same movie come out on dvd!

NOTE! THERE IS AN UPDATE/CLARIFICATION BELOW. Also, post has been newly illustrated with picts provided by Kris.

So far, my favorite response from friends who are not the target audience has come from Ms. Classy, she who saved me when I had scant hours to figure out what to wear for those two days. She only went to see it because of Me & Mr. Classy. Her reaction? This was the most thrilling car commercial I've ever seen in my life! This is a woman to whom we always have to explain that Optimus is the semi-truck and Rachet is the Hummer. She gets them mixed up because they're both large and brightly-colored.

Review? Not gonna write one up. There's 1,001 out there already, some in very odd places, considering. Personally I've been pointing normal people toward the Kenneth Turan one. He pretty much nails it. The only thing I would emphasize is how true it is that everything that's wrong with the story, elements having to do with the human characters, is quite easy to overlook due to the glorious perfection of the rest of it. Which is what we hoped for around here.

What I'm going to share over this week's entries are a few highlights from The Greatest Days of My Life spent fleeing invisible robots downtown; what I learned on a creative/storytelling end by comparing the final product to what we saw and read ahead of time; and whatever else pops into mind when I sit down to type each entry.

The title for series of posts is my favorite line from those two days. It was said by Alpha 2, my codename for the devestatingly gorgeous guy who was one of two men who seemed to be the right and left hands of Michael Bay. (The other one I called Alpha 1. I have no idea what these people's actual names are because it doesn't matter.) The Alphas made decisions about what to do with us without first obviously consulting Bay. I'm 99% sure that these two were, if not assistant directors, then something close to that role. Alpha 2 was built kinda like He Who Shall Not Be Named, was constantly covered in a sheen of manly sweat, was funny, and I would have jumped through fire if he had Commanded me too because he was THAT hot, swear to god. He had an edgy hotness, a If I Have To Kill You To Get This Shot I Will, But It's Not Personal sort of hotness. Maybe you had to be there to understand the full effect.

What? Just because you're running from invisible robots doesn't mean you can't pause to admire the view!

UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: Just to be clear, Alpha 1 never said "run for your *fucking* lives." Monday night, while throwing down the post for Tuesday, I remembered that I sent a run-down of the events to friends a few days after the shoot, which meant there were reliable notes. Double-checking, I found this in that ramble:

Alpha 2 stands in front of the background herd, points to the right and says "DEATH! 40-feet tall, coming at you." He points to the right, down the street, and says "NOT DEATH. Run for your lives!"

By "run for your lives" Bay meant RUN FOR YOUR FUCKING LIVES. All out sprints, over and over and over again. If someone wasn't sprinting, they got a visit from one of the Alphas. NOBODY wanted a visit from the Alphas.

I'm the sort of Type-A person who cares about that type of detail. I feel better, now.

Anywho,  Douglas and I are going to call our band Death 40 Feet Tall in his honor because it's a great line that will look fabulous on a T-shirt. (More on that later. Maybe.)

Me and my friends went to see it at the Arclight. There are pictures of that day which I will come back and add to this post once I get hold of them. They had all of the vehicle mode Autobots on display out front (except for the black one, what with him being dead*** due to the Law of Conservation and all), which was nifty. People were piled up around them taking pictures.

Originally both of the extras ("background" in Official Hollywood Parlance) I bonded with during those days of fleeing were going to join in, but one of them ended up being off filming something, so only Kris could make it. (I'm going to have much more to say about the fantabulous Kris later, but you can go take a peek at his site now if you like.) We knew that we were somewhere in the climatic battle sequence at the end of the movie, which made watching that part a bit difficult. On one hand we were all yayawesomebattleomigoddidyouseewhatstarscreamjustdid, but on the other hand we couldn't completely focus on it because we were staring at the background trying to spot ourselves and Joe. That's one reason I need to go see this bunches of more times, so that I can truly pay attention to the choreography/timeline of that end battle.

Because we knew what to look for going in, that might be why my head started sending me signals while watching that fight and certain incidents popped up.

• First hint: The Furby truck.
• Second hint: The guy with the X-Box.
• Third hint: The bit with the girls in the Escalade.
• Fourth hint: The brunette in the aqua sun dress.

That's not the order these segments hit in the final battle scene, but that's how the Fred In My Head head processed them. Slowly it dawned on me...Where's the rest of Sector 7? What about the fight between the army guys and the Sector 7 guys? Where are the three (or four) little bots?

OMIGOD! WHAT HAPPENED TO THE UBER-BLONDES???

And with that, everything fell into place. Not only did I suddenly realize just how well that final fight scene was put together, I think I understand why lots of stuff didn't make it into the final edit (and not that it matters, but I also approve). Later, waiting for the rest of them to come out of the ice cream store, I realized that battle sequence is possibly a lesson in storytelling I would not have gleaned had I not been fleeing invisible robots for two days. (Because I figure that aspect of it is of more interest to me and a few others than anyone else, I won't get into it here. You're welcome!)

Tomorrow - The Hierarchy Of Blondes.

Wednesday -  Michael Bay Cares, Dammit, And If What Was Up On The Screen Wasn't Enough For You To Believe This, I Have Eyewitness Testimony To Prove It.

Thursday - The Ecology Of Background.

Friday - Brother Jazz: A Special Note To Mr. Classy

To what is sure to be the unbridled joy of certain people I know, after this run of posts I will finally shut up about the Transformers movie. (At least until the sequel, anyway.) For posterity, every single TF-related post will eventually be rounded up under a new category "Transformers 2007: A Michael Bay Experience." That way when my nephews are older they

*** Thing is, I saw a toy at Target. If the Hollywood People don't want spoilers for upcoming works, they really should talk to the licensing people and tell them to talk to their marketing people about the copy that goes on the toy packaging, especially if the toy hits the streets YEARS before the next movie does. More on this when I get to the final post in this series.