(photo: L 2 R Kevin, Noel, Nina)
One of my favorite Doors songs is Strange Days. No surprise Jim Morrison was from LA.
Yesterday was one of my strange and wonderful days in LA. A bit stressful, but fun and wonderful.
Yesterday I was booked to shoot the role of a Televangelist for Nina Menkes, director, in her newest independent film, Phantom Love. (www.ninamenkes.com) I've been booked for weeks and had the day blocked out. On Monday, I get an email from the extras casting director for Pirates of the Caribbean 3 that I have a look-see with Pirates director Gore Verbinski for the featured role of a French-speaking pirate. Awesome, but it's at 9 am in Burbank, at Disney, and I have a 10 am call in Venice, about 30 miles away. If everything went well, and traffic didn't suck too badly, I could have made it.
Then an hour later I get another email that the look-see has been pushed to 2 pm. This would be tight, because how could I know how long the shoot would go, and what I really wanted more than anything was to do both the shoot and the look see.
Well I got what I wanted. The shoot went great, Nina was happy, and I wrapped my scene at 12:50 pm. I took one picture with Nina and her producer Kevin in my Televangelist/priest garb, and headed for Burbank.
My roommate, Circus*Szalewski (www.atthecircus.com) lent me his white billowy sleeved pirate shirt, which I wore with a bandana around my neck and my curly toed renaissance shoes. It was fun to walk through the Disney lot dressed as a pirate. No one really looked twice.
When I got to the location, a courtyard in the Frank G Wells building, there were about twenty other pirates sitting or standing around, filling out paperwork. By the end, about 35 pirates were there, some in full pirate regalia, and some looking more like French cafe waiters. About 10-15 guys were French, about 5 were European, and the rest, like myself, not French. I speak French, but I could hear that some of these guys couldn't speak a word of French but were going to try to get in anyway.
There were some great looking pirates; guys with great character faces who really, if I had to choose 3, I would have cast before me. But I was excited to be there, and the chance to stand before Gore and get a shot. I had been practicing how to tell him to f*ck off in French as a greeting for hours.
In the end, after keeping us waiting for over 2 hours, Gore was a no show and we were taken to a rehearsal room in the basement of a production building where we were taped in groups of ten.
So from a priest in an indie film in Venice to a pirate on the Disney lot in one day; I think that qualifies as a Strange Day. If I end up getting a role in Pirates 3, you will surely read about it here.
Peace.
