musicshapedhole

This week has been fairly hectic, but in a good way. On Wednesday, they did filming for the documentary "Breaking Vegas" for the History Channel. April 25th, 8:00pm. Watch it.

I get there at about 3:55am ready for action. I stopped off and said hi to a dealer friend of mine just prior, but then I went over to pit two where they were rearranging the blackjack tables a bit. People were wheeling the camera and lighing equipment in. I was just about overwhelmed with how much lighting they had, but you've gotta do what you've gotta do. It felt like I was outside at noon on the sunniest day in San Diego after they had all the lights set up.

My role? Extra. I was an extra. Which means my first job was to walk by in the background. "Oooh, look! You can see my legs...." Truth be told, I didn't mind so much about that. They had roped off a fairly large section of the casino for us to use, which was interesting. Old ladies really are damn crazy about getting to their favorite slot machine... they climb under the ropes, sit down, and are completely oblivious to what exactly is going on around them.

My next role? I got to play a spectator. I do believe I have several head-shots in this, so it's easy to pick me out. There was this scene where the pit boss, Sal, comes up to one of the big players, Simmyon, and asks him to come with him. And my face is right between Sal and Simmyons. Ooo, it was great. They snapped a 5mm lens on the camera for that shot, so it got quite a bit in. I'm thinking that may be my big role.

All that took about 3 hours to do. Just two shots. After that, we broke for some time for lunch and getting everything else set up. So what do we do, we have a seat and play blackjack for about 90 minutes. It was so kick back and casual.. the whole goal of it was to, ironically, teach the actors how to play blackjack because they had quite a limited knowledge of it. The director pulled me and 3 others guys away from our tables to do some shooting on this handheld 8mm camera. We sat at a table and he filmed our hands as we played. Chances are, my hands won't be included in it because, to him, it wasn't "old fashioned" enough. He wanted to do some effects shots, sort of having a mid 1950's feel to it, so he mainly stayed focused on the guy with the suit jacket, cufflinks, and the glass of whiskey, yes indeed.

And by now, I should've been dismissed, but the assistant director asked if I'd be willing to be a card player for a shot involving this camera on a crane that did some neat spiraling effects and the whatnot. And of course, I said yes. So I get assigned a girlfriend, get a drink, and sit at a full blackjack table. The sequence was shot at 12 frames per second, which means it will be sped up quite a bit. It already sounds like it'll be a tweaker movie of sorts. After that, they filmed some stuff dealing with a big player who had the dead-center seat, and I was two to his right.. but the most interesting thing about that is they decided to shoot it from his perspective, so they replace him with the camera man, and we're supposed to look into the camera and aknowledge him as if he were the actual player, by giving a nod or mouthing "hi" or somethin'. So, there may be a shot of me looking directly into the camera, sort of oddly. We'll see.

And that was the end of having all the camera equipment on the floor. They got all that cleared off, but then they decided to do shots from surveillance. Which meant, we had to act while they watched us through the surveillance cameras. And at this point, everything had been unroped off, so guests were free to roam around. So we reshot the scene where we had to say hi to the player in the middle seat, only this time he was replaced with an actual person. And finally, we reshot the second scene that was shot that morning at like 5:00am. The one where Sal pulls Simmyon out of his seat, which his huge stack of chips.

I'm tellin' ya, the look on people's faces. People were trying to crowd around us while we were doing this, and this really tall guest accidentally got stuck right in the middle of it.. he legitimately must've thought "Oh God, look at that guy's stack of chips! Jesus. OH shit! The pit boss and two huge security guys just yanked him away from the table.. oh man..." The look on his face was priceless, along with all the other guests. They thought all this was real. Crowds of people formed to see the guy with $100,000 in chips. Mmm.....

Anyway. That's my story. It would've been much more effective if I had told it the day after it was shot, I'm sure, but eh.... can't win 'em all.