“Oh, REX!” Daphne sighed in relief as the Daring Dino appeared at the top of the ridge.

“Let her go!” Magnus Rex commanded, levelling a bazooka at the procession of the Jurassic Reich below.

“Ah, Mr. Rex... so good of you to finally arrive” Herr Blaupunkt called up mockingly. “We were beginning to wonder if we had lost you in the spider-pit. It would have been a shame had you not been here to witness our final triumph!”

Rex heaved with his tail and flung the singed body of one of the great black spiders down over the cliff. The soldiers below scrambled out of the way as the massive bug descended into their ranks, bursting like a watermelon full of noodles on the hard stone of the canyon floor. “Spiders aren’t the ones that give me the creeps on this island, Blaupunkt. You and your insane horde, however, make my scales crawl! Now release the girl, or your precious Evolutionary Serum is going to be blown back into primordeal ooze!”

“Ha!” the mad Nazi Dino scoffed, caressing the side of the glowing glass cask that contained the bubbling elixir. “You know as well as I do that you could never destroy your father’s life’s work! This brew holds the key to our survival as a species... and the Jurassic Reich will be the one to usher in the new age of Reptilian Supremacy!”

Magnus scowled, his lips turning back against his giant incisors. “Nuts to that” he said as he pulled the trigger.

---

Okay, everybody still here?

Sorry about that little camouflage bit of story... I have to be careful. Sure, they *say* that the film production of “Magnus Rex” has pulled up and left town, but what’s with those white vans that slowly go cruising past my house at odd hours of the day and night? Should the driver be wearing big headphones and hanging a parabolic microphone out the sides of an ice cream truck? I have my doubts. Hopefully, that bit above will throw off their Google-Fu for the time being, and Christopher Nolan will not have me in thumbscrews for giving away anything vital.

It’s been a while since I first started to tell you about my day on the set of *Censored* here in Pittsburgh. I don’t think the movie has come out quite yet though, despite the long lag between posts, so secure in my bunker, let me get on with my account...

Magnus Rex part 2: Where the magic happens.

So there I was, slaving away at my regular job in order to meet a deadline while knowing that my big break in showbiz would happen the very next day. Admittedly, there was a good chance I’d die of sun stroke in the process of filming scenes under a crippling summer heat wave while bundled up against the imaginary winter cold of *Censored* City. Why couldn’t D.C. establish that *censored* worked out of Maimi? It certainly would have made the Schumacher pictures more accurate in hindsight.

The next bit of bad news came with the phone call directing me to be signed in on-set at 6 am. On a Saturday. Following a night of scrambling to make a deadline. So that meant getting up at something like 4:30 am in order to get ready, drive down there, park, catch the shuttle and sign in.

Considering that I had been crunching all week in order to make the project deadline that was looming, I hadn’t slept much in days. I hoped the film production needed some extras to look “catatonic”, because I was sure I would put in an Academy worthy performance if so.

Finished with real work around 11pm, I spent about an hour getting things laid out for the next day. Apparently, I was expected to provide my own the wardrobe. Sadly, the pickings in my closet were kind of slim... most of my clothing is still in storage. Plus, we weren’t supposed to wear anything with recognizable college/sports/company logos on it, so there went most hats and sweatshirts I wear in the winter. I did have a wool coat and a variety of shirts and sweaters, which was something at least. I tossed a few in a carry-on bag, threw in a book and some sketching supplies, pulled out my leather work boots and a pair of jeans and called it good. Then I got my 4 hours of sleep.

Really, I only have vague recollections of the following morning (if you could call the pre-dawn hours that.) I do recall that the Garmin GPS that I had borrowed to direct me to the right parking garage proudly stating “Arriving at destination on right!” on the foggy, pre-dawn streets of Pittsburgh nowhere near anything that remotely resembled a parking garage. I suppose I should have been thankful that it didn’t drop me off into the Monongahela river instead, as in my state of consciousness I would have likely made any turn it asked of me.

The actual parking garage was 2 blocks away and on a completely different (but somehow named the same) street. Or maybe reality is different buried in the fog in those hours before the sun rises. Pittsburgh is the Iron City after all. I’m guessing all of that iron is a necessity for keeping it grounded after they built it on a Fairy Burial Mound or something.

The shoot itself was on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. The Carnegie Family had a little bit of money, and it definitely shows in the architecture of the area. It would make a good *censored* City. It wouldn’t make nearly as good of a Maimi, come to think of it, so maybe that earlier suggestion would have just cost me my shot at stardom.

After parking, I was herded onto a bus and shuttled a few blocks away to the shoot’s base camp, a series of wedding-style event tents and trailers huddled on one half of the city park. Massive air-conditioning units were pumping cold air through flexible 3-foot diameter hoses into these structures constantly, keeping the average temperature inside somewhere just south of 40 f. The winter clothing would have actually been useful had I spent more than 15 minutes of my day there.

Instead, after signing in (including putting my name on that pesky non-disclosure agreement) I was rounded up and sent to wardrobe with all of the stuff I brought. It was then that I noticed that many of my fellow extras were pulling around full suitcases as if they were embarking on a grand sea voyage. The shoulder bag with an extra sweater seemed a bit light in comparison.

Still, the wardrobe lady cast me a critical eye, decided that my winter coat did indeed look like a winter coat, and deemed me acceptable. So then it was off to hair and make-up.

It’s been a while, but I believe the exact conversations I had in those tents were as follows:

Hair stylings:

“What are you?”

“Onlooker.”

“You’re fine. Go through there.”

Make-up:

“What are you?” (Somewhat perturbed)

“Onlooker”

(Heavy sigh) “Fine. Go get some sunblock.”

I was then ready for my close-up!

---

We Onlookers were gathered into a nondescript van and shuttled another few blocks away to the shooting location for the day. This required a great deal of radio chatter between the driver and persons unknown before it was decided to drop us off on a street corner with no visible production action and telling us to walk in “that direction”. As it turned out, this would be a recurring theme for our little troupe. Aways up the street we encountered a sign with an arrow pointing to the “Extras Holding” area. This pointed us down an alley to nowhere in particular. Naturally, we were looking for an area well stocked with donuts, but apparently after some confusion we came to the conclusion that the alley itself was to be our holding area. It was a bit disconcerting, as it was also the holding area for a great amount of very large equipment: cranes, cameras, electrical things that were manned by teamsters and the like who didn’t really look all that friendly to a group of random people in winter coats.



Luckily, we weren’t left to mill around for very long before a "P.A." (which I’m guessing was a Production Assistant) came and began to wrangle us into place for the shot. He picked us out in ones and twos and placed everyone on a mark, pointing down the street and explaining “When you hear someone yell “Background!” start walking that way.” No real motivation was given, so I guess that was left up to us to flesh out between takes.

This was along a 3 block stretch of street, and while I couldn’t quite tell where the cameras were, I could tell that at best most of us would be tiny little specks on the screen, and about half would be walking away from the camera. If only I had worn a stylish and large hat to help family and friends pick me out.

As it turns out, it didn’t really matter to me anyway, as I was never placed in the scene. Twice I was picked and then exchanged for a different extra. The first time it was decided to pair up two women instead of doing a guy-girl combo, just for variety’s sake. The second time I believe it was because the woman they were going to pair me up with was a young college kid, and I guess I didn’t look rich enough to be a sugar-daddy and/or we just looked kind of creepy together. This really doesn’t explain why I wasn’t just placed walking down the street by myself, as even *Censored* City has to have guys who can’t find a date to take to the prison break (not to mention that a few others were indeed walking solo) but I believe the truth is they simply forgot about me. I was, as it turned out, the “extra” extra.

However, I wasn’t too broken up about it. One, this meant that, unlike the others, I didn’t have to wear my damn winter coat all morning (although I kept it hanging on my arm to serve as a visual reminder that I was there and not just a guy from catering or something.) Two, it meant that I got to hang out through the shoot with all of those other peons that were herded into that side alley, which included guys with walkie-talkies so I could hear what was going on at all times, a security guard and the set medic who I chatted with all morning. (The medic was a nice lady with a couple of coolers full of various drugs. I’m assuming they were all legal like, as I only observed people asking for Advil and such, but I didn’t question the ways of Hollywood too closely.)

I also got to hang out and chat with the various actor’s stand-ins. These are people with the same builds as the actual actors, given the same haircuts and then they get to serve as props, standing in place while the camera-men and director block out the shots so that the real actors don’t have to bother showing up until someone actually needs them to “act”. One benefit of being around them is that I got to see that I was in fact taller than the primary villain *Censored*, the man who broke *Censored’s* back in the comics. Somehow, this was good for my ego.

Shooting that morning lasted for a few hours. It included scenes of nothing happening on the street, followed by a few scenes of multiple *censored*-mobiles driving down same street, and then finally an army of mercenaries pouring out of various alleyways (my own included) to follow the *censored*-mobiles.

About halfway through the shoot, I look across the street and there was Anne Hathaway sitting opposite the intersection from me reading a book. I also noticed that inside the parking garage directly behind her was a table full of donuts. This clearly cemented it: That side of the street was *way* better than mine. However, eventually a small swarm of handlers showed up to usher Ms. Hathaway into an SUV, and the door to the donut garage was closed at around the same time... but for a brief, shining moment the promise and glamour of Hollywood filmmaking was readily apparent.





Oh, and I did eventually manage to remind a PA that I existed, and was placed in the scene (about ten yards upstreet from Ms. Hathaway’s former location.) However, right before they were about to film, someone changed their mind and all extras were removed from the block I had been on.

That was, as it turns out, the closest I got to appearing on film.

---

The rest of that morning is relatively uneventful. Gradually more and more extras were removed from the street and joined me in hanging out in the alley. I sketched a shark on the college girl’s notebook... I think she was a physicist or something. Anne Hathaway’s stand it was a real looker, but didn’t really chat with any of us. I think she’s her permanent stand-in and goes on all of her film shoots with her. Tom Hardy’s stand in was a fun, local guy. (He had to shave his head to match the villain’s look, and was given a painter’s mask on a jury-rigged harness to approximate the villain’s headgear. He was rightly concerned that the summer sun would give his pale bald scalp tan lines that suggested he had fallen asleep with a thong over his head.) There were some guys who do a lot of extra work in the area, and really people from all walks of life, though most were from the college scene. We all got along well.

Eventually, the morning shoot was done and we were moved around the block into a classroom that was to serve as the holding area for all extras in-between shoots. No donuts here either, but quite a few snack foods and water (which was constantly being handed out on the set.) We were all in high spirits, as the morning had been interesting and the heat of the day hadn’t really built yet, so even the winter clothing wasn’t too horrible yet.

My favorite part of this move to the new holding area was the abrupt halt that the front of our group came to upon entering the classroom. It was filled to the brim with about a hundred of guys in orange prison uniforms. Convincing looking guys in orange prison jumpsuits. I’d say some of them likely were able to check off the “prior experience” box on their applications for getting the parts. For some reason (fear of getting shivved) our group of college students, housewives and assorted average looking people were a bit hesitant to go mingle with them.

And really, it was from this point on that the day became like some warped sociology experiment descending into a long nightmare. (Totally not the convicts fault though... they were cool. Even if the part where the were all issued automatic rifles later in the day did seem a bit of overkill.) If there’s a third segment on this, I’ll cover “The Part That Sucked Endlessly” there.