Leatherheads Day 6 - The play of the game

Most of htis week is filming of a football game. As you can imagine like most sports films we have important plays in the game. Today, they worked on the final play of the game all day. I started in the end zone on the home team side next to some "band members". I reminded me of a smaller version of the Stanford Band. A friend playing a police officer was also nearby. I was basically just background at this point as the play was taking place way down the field.

I have learned from the assistant directors that movement is preferable in a scene so I walk up the sidelines once they yell action. You actually hear the words,
Pictures Up!, Rolling, and then "Background Action" to know when it is time to move about in the scene.

As the play moves up the field toward the endzone of I move with it and by the end of the morning end up next to the cheerleaders 3 men and 3 women and end up doing my pantomine talking and photography.

They continue to move fans in the stands around behind us as fillers. They fill in the first 5 rows of the stadium in about 6 sections. We have a long hot morning.
Ginger who is one of the wardrobe people, comes up throughout the morning to work on extras to make sure they are authentic and their scarves, hats and coats are on correctly. She has straightened my hat a few times. Our pants also need to be hiked up to show our socks...think of an old man pulling his pants over his belly and that is what a lot of us had to do during filming. Of course this was hidden by our overcoats.

Ginger, who has a resemblance to Carmen Diaz was really in her element as a wardrobe expert. She was really a stickler for detail and even noticed the little things such as whether we wore the same tie each day or how our winter scarves were tucked under our coat. As far as my brown jacket, I would have these wardrobe experts tie a square knot to make it look authentic.

Most of the day was fairly uneventful, except it occured to many of us it is taking 6 days (60+) hours) to film these scenes. George Clooney is all over the field that day. He is a player on one of the teams. Both teams are on the filed for most of the day. Some are professional actors such as Ed Miller (who is from Los Angeles), others are from local casting.

The players were having to do many of the scenes repetitively while camera's and audio folks captured a variety of shots from closeups and dialogue to shots from a distance...This is a romantic comedy, so there were a couple of scenes that had George Clooney laughing right after shooting.

The players on both teams were playing in the "elements" (which I can describe in detail, we'll have to wait for the film promotion to start) and they had "heaters" on the sidelines to warm them up when they were done shooting.

We are told they need an extra day to shoot so we will be back on Tuesday...