I said this world is full of endless abstractions

Posted on | 2 years, 10 months ago, in the late evening | No Comments

It’s positively exhausting, standing around preparing for things to happen. For much of the day, I felt like I was in a church, waiting for a wedding to start — hanging around the outskirts of a room, waiting to be sent for and told where to stand while lots of people were doing very complicated things with cameras.

But it wasn’t a wedding. It was a short independent film, and I was an extra.

Caitlin, Aric, and I met up at a lovely old historic mansion on the backside of Capitol Hill, where we lounged about being tidily dressed and idly chatty while the cameras rolled. Mostly, the cameras rolled on Wil as Ed did the directing* — ably managing a whole room full of folks in a borrowed, pristine, expensive home without breaking a single thing.

Right now, those of you who know me in person are sitting there slack-jawed and gaping, assuming that Ed must be some kind of goddamned magician to have kept me from face-planting into the china cabinet or carving up a Persian rug with my high heels. You’d be right. He’s pretty amazing.

Wil was pretty amazing too, even though I didn’t see most of what he was doing. I was an extra. It was my job not to look at the pro, and to pretend to be deeply engrossed in exchanging quasi-intimate dialogue with a (perfectly pleasant) stranger. It’s downright baffling, really. I can talk all day long, at length, quite happily, to just about anybody; but you put me in front of a camera and tell me to chat at the guy who’s been placed in my personal space and I totally draw a blank.

Mostly, we ended up talking about grievous injuries, strange concerts we’d attended, Ed’s “alternative” (and utterly fictional) independent film career (say no more!), and speculating on the pollen count. We also had to hold a pair of brandy glasses perfectly still for several minutes, waiting for the shot to be perfect, so that we could clink them in front of the lens and step apart. That was way harder than it sounded, trust me.

But it was a lot of fun, especially once I’d been at it long enough to forget that I was being filmed. I highly recommend the experience — and not just because we all got fed some truly nomulent pizza, and we met a lot of neat new people

No, I’m not going to tell you too much about the film itself.

Ed says I’m welcome to blog about it, but there are a handful of elements that should really remain on the down-low; and anyway, by the time it’s all edited together and released, perhaps you’ll have forgotten about this post — and it will come as a nice surprise.

I’m not sure precisely how the final product will appear, but it’ll almost certainly be available on the internet, and it will likely end up screened at the odd festival or two here and there. Believe me, when it goes public, I’ll point you to it every which-a-way. The script is really great — ominous and funny — and I can tell you already that the production values are superb.

I can’t thank Ed enough for inviting us to be part of this.
It was a total hoot :)


* He also wrote the script.

Category: misc

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