Lots Of People This Week

This post could get long, so I'm gonna get straight to the point. Wednesday and Thursday I worked on the set of a new movie called This Christmas. It is produced and narrated by Queen Latifah. It stars people such as Morris Chestnut, Loretta Devine, Regina King, Gabrielle Union, and Chris Brown. It will be released Christmas 2007. It was a fun two days. We shot a church scene and I am straight up in the front row! So, we'll see how much camera time I got when it comes out. In the scene, the choir sings, and then Chris Brown's character sings (he doesn't play himself). It's amazing how it takes 2 days to film just 6 minutes of material. About some of the cast.......first of all, Regina King is tiny, just as most actresses are. She is really pretty and nice too. She hugs me toward the end of the scene we were filming, so that was cool. Chris Brown has ADD, seriously. He's 17 or 18 and the kid could not sit still. He even broke the microphone playing around with it inbetween takes. He's a cool kid, but you could just get a sense of his immaturity, which is normal. I don't mean immature in a bad way, like immature for his age. I mean, just like you'd expect a 17 year old to act I guess. On the second day, Mekhi Pfeifer dropped by the set to watch. He's not in the movie (I don't think), so he must've been there just visiting someone.

On the way home from the set on the second day, I had to drive through Studio City, and there was a group of war protesters on the corner with all kinds of big signs saying things like, "Jail Cheney", "Bush is stupid", etc., etc. I'm thinking to myself, "what is going on?" Well, I got home and saw on the news that I guess Bush is sending 21,000 more troops over to Iraq. I couldn't believe it. There were a lot of protesters there and all the cars were honking their horns in support as they drove by. That's the first time I've ever seen anything like that. I wonder if people in other cities did the same thing? I'm sure they did.

Yesterday I was on the show Jericho. It was a miseable time. Jericho is a new show this season about a small fictional town in Kansas in which the people there have survived some sort of catastrophe, but they don't know what it was. One day, they just saw a huge mushroom cloud in the distance and chaos ensues. War erupts, etc., etc. The scene we shot was when the war was finally over and all the townspeople are gathered outside of City Hall watching fireworks as the National Guard comes through to check everything out. Ok, so you might be asking why this shoot was miserable. Well, first of all, it took place during winter and at night, which means we had a night shoot. I was on the set until 1 am. Not only that, we didn't have to act. That night, L.A. set a record (I think, ot it was close) for the lowest nighttime low. It dipped down into the 30's. Just 4 days earlier it was 82 degrees. Now, me being from Ohio, I should be used to that (especially since in Ohio it can be 70 one day and snowing the next), however, I think I've become acustomed to the climate here, because that night it felt like it was 0 degrees. I couldn't even feel my feet by the end of the night. It was terrible. It was cool though to see them using the big snow machines to spray the set down with foam snow. Honestly, if there were any kind of moisture in the air that night, it would have snowed for real. Oh, and the other things was that there were tons of kids working that night too. I'm already a person that doesn't have a lot of patience (which I'm working on), but when I'm cold and miserable, I have NO patience.

That brings me to today. I had a classic embarassing moment at an audition today. I had to go to Venice Beach for this audition for this student film. I walk in, and the 2 girls (director and producer) are really cool, we chatted, I read the scene 3 times and we chatted some more. It went really well. So, I'm getting up to leave, I'm saying goodbye, and I go to open the door to leave and walk right into the bathroom!!! I opened the wrong door. Doh! One of the girls was like, "ummm.....that's the bathroom". I said, "that camera isn't still rolling is it?". Thank God it wasn't and then I promptly left. I felt so stupid, but of course I was cracking up as I left. Maybe that incident will make it so I stick in their heads and they pick me. We'll see.

Quotes for the day:

"If you don't get out of the box you've been raised in, you won't understand how much bigger the world is."
--Angelina Jolie

"I think crossroads come at many times during your life. Up to this point, I've had several. You get to a certain point in your life and you're like, Am I supposed to be doing this? And it's usually in the face of some failure - something that didn't work out the way you wanted it to. And you're faced with a decision: Do I keep trying to do this or do I give up?"

--Jennifer Lopez

Of course we all know to never give up!!