The OC, Part I

On Wednesday, August 11 I worked on the set of The OC. I was a little surprised that they cast me in that show because it is about a bunch of kids in high school. Nevertheless, I woke up early and drove to the Manhattan Beach Studios. The hotline stated that there would be specific parking instructions on a different voice mailbox, but as of 5:30 in the morning, they had not left those instructions. So, I drove up to the entrance and asked a group of people that I assumed were extras. They told me to park in the Office Depot parking lot and enter through the front gate. I did that and walked around to the building that we were shooting in. I got to the building and the P.A. checking us in asked me where I parked. I told him and he told me that we were not allowed to park in the Office Depot parking lot and why hadn’t I checked the voice mailbox for the instructions. I informed him that there were no instructions. A couple of other people backed me up on that and he told me that I needed to go back to my car and park in the Marriott parking lot.

So, I got to the holding area about 30 minutes late, but they understood because everyone had parked in the wrong area and had to go move their car. There were about 100 other extras in the holding area. I noticed my friend from Dr. Vegas was there as well. So we began to hang out and talk about a lot of the other extras. We went in for our first shot of the day and it was a club called “The Bait Shop” inside a sound studio. It was pretty cool, but there were a lot of us packed in there and with the crew and cast it was probably close to 200 people milling around. Most of the people that were extras were around 20-25, so I felt like I was the oldest one there. But I didn’t care, because like Dr. Vegas, it was populated with a lot of very attractive young women.

A couple of hours later, I was placed in a group of people for another shot and one of the guys said,

“You look very familiar to me”

I told him that I was from Chicago and it turns out he lived in Chicago for a couple of years up until last November. Then he said,

“Wait a minute, weren’t you on “Brain”?

Brain was an improv group that I performed with at The Improv Olympic in Chicago. It turns out that he was the roommate of a guy I know on the team and he and I had met a couple of times at parties there. So I had run into another Chicago boy.

There was also another guy who I recognized as a bar patron on the set of Dr. Vegas. He was really cool also, so the four of us became our little group. We hung out most of the day and made fun of each other and of the other people on set. We came up with little nicknames for everyone that we did not like.

One of the guys we nicknamed “The Hulk”. Why? Because he looked just like The Incredible Hulk, in a 5’10’’ size. He had the same hair and facial structure as Lou Ferigno when he had the Hulk prosthetics on. I guess wardrobe had noticed this also because they gave him a Hulk green shirt to wear. It was like a long underwear shirt that was skintight, which made him even more Hulk like.

There was also “Bicycle”, who was a young lady with humongous fake breasts. I mean grossly out of proportion with the rest of her body. And she wore a skintight top and bent over all of the time. We nicknamed her “bicycle” because we said that everyone had had a ride on her. Not very nice, I know, but what are you going to do to keep yourself occupied for 13 hours.

There was also Johnny New York, who was a guy that had the quintessential New York accent. He also sweated a lot, which has nothing to do with NY, but I thought I should mention it. He was one of those guys that had done a lot of extra work and had no problem telling anyone around him what he had done, what directors had told him that he was great, and in where you could see him in the movies that he had done. He also thought he was better than everyone, so much so that when one of my friends saw him eating an ice cream cone and asked him where he got it, his reply was,

“It’s not for you, boss”.

Which we found hysterical because that had nothing to do with the question asked.

We spent most of the day doing this.

The last 4 hours of the day was spent with us around the stage listening to a band called “The Killers” lip-sync 2 of their songs and we danced and swayed around like it was a real concert. We did this 3 times to each song. It was kind of fun the first time, but then it got old. The songs were pretty good and the band did a really good job pantomiming their parts.

The day ended around 9pm and we headed home. The call time for the next morning was 8am. So I was going to have to go to sleep and get right back up and do the same thing all over again. But at least I had some friends to hang out with.