Extra, Extra: On the Set of Angelina's Life

May 1 -- SEATTLE — I wasn't cast. I wasn't picked for my acting ability, or my looks. I'm not famous. Yet. But still, I wanted to be a part of a movie, just once. So I decided to take the day off from my doomed dot-com job and infiltrate the set of Angelina Jolie's latest movie.

The film I was "working" on is called Life, or Something Like It, which is supposedly about a bored Seattle reporter (played by Angelina Jolie) trying to add meaning to her life when she finds out she's going to die. I'm not really sure what type of movie it is going to turn out to be, but the few scenes I was in suggested some kind of bad romantic comedy type thing.

Most of my day involved being herded from one section of Seattle's giant baseball field to another in order to offer the illusion of a capacity crowd. A capacity crowd that was actually only 400 randomly chosen extras, all of whom were pretending to be really, really excited about the local baseball hero (Christian Kane, from the WB series Angel). Kane, you see, plays Angie's baseball stud boyfriend (everyone on the set calls her Angie). Doesn't that sound cute?

It's odd that 400 people could be relatively easily convinced to "act" for 13 hours for a paltry $41, but I guess the economic downturn really opens the floodgates. We all stood and screamed our guts out on command, and when it was time to eat, we fought over the boxed lunches like hungry chimps.

I took two and saw others walking away with five or six boxes, stuffing them into backpacks, smiling smugly and probably thinking very highly of themselves for solving the "what to do for lunch for the rest of the week" dilemma. There was an ice sculpture in the lunch area when we first went in. I think it was a swan. By the time we left, it was broken.

My 'Big Break'

Toward the end of the day, the crowd was getting tired and we were informed that we would be filming the final scene: a shot of the crowd reacting to something exciting on the baseball diamond. I took my seat toward the edge of the extras pool and psyched myself up (my idea of getting into character), when I noticed someone pointing at my friend and me and shouting, "You two, switch with these two down here!"