Best Day Ever

24 is a really great show. I was lucky enough to be chosen to be an extra on it. I have heard good things from other background performers that they treat people well, and that you get to do cool stuff. I was a CTA agent for the beginning of the day and the scene was that a double agent in the Counter Terrorist Agency was running out of the office building and is arrested at her car. Then the agents leave and take her into custody, but one agent opens her car and it blows up killing the agent. When I heard that they were going to blow up a car, I got excited and hoped that I would get to watch them do it.

In the first part of the scene, the double agent is running through the parking lot pursued by the good agents. The Assistant Director placed me at the back of an SUV and told me that I was just getting to work, and that I was supposed to be surprised that all of these people were running past me in the parking lot. We rehearsed the scene once, and the Director decided that he wanted more movement in the scene, and since it was a parking lot, he wanted someone driving a car that the people had to run around. For some reason they chose me.

Now, about the setup of the scene. The parking lot is a kitty corner to the office building that they are running out of. So they have to run out of the office building, take a left run down some stairs and they run into the parking lot. I noticed that when they placed me in the car I was supposed to drive that I had no way of seeing the people running out of the building. I was to drive the car and just inch the hood out into the passage that they were running through, and divert them into a better shot in front of the camera. The problem was that since I had no way of seeing them, and they were sprinting at top speed I had a split second to react to them running from behind a car, before I killed them.

I was very nervous about that and wondered why they didn’t have a stunt person driving. The Assistant Director came over and said,

“Okay, since you can’t see them, I am going to smack the roof when you are to start driving, just take it slow so you have time to brake before you hit them.”

This did not instill me with much confidence, and I was sure that I was going to smack into at least one person. We did a rehearsal and sure enough, I pulled up to my mark, and the double agent woman came sprinting right into my car, had to put her hands down to stop herself, screamed and then ran off yelling,

“That damn car was there too early!”

I backed up to my starting point and noticed that I had broken out into a cold sweat. The Assistant Director came up and said,

“How you doin’?”

“Okay, I’m really nervous”, I replied.
“Ahhh, don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine” he reassured me.

“Umm, shouldn’t we have a stunt driver doing this”? I asked.

“Nah”. He said quickly. Then he thought about it and called over the stunt coordinator to the car. He asked the stunt coordinator why they didn’t have a stunt driver for this. The stunt coordinator looked at him, then at me, then said.

“He’s going to be fine.” Then he limped away. HE LIMPED AWAY! A stunt coordinator whose job it is to keep everyone safe had a limp. Now I don’t know if this was a limp he had all of his life, or if he just got the limp the day before doing a stunt, but I was not filled with a lot of confidence.

We did the scene about seven times and after the first take, the people running knew where they had to go to avoid me. So we didn’t have the catastrophic accident that I thought we would.

With the first part of the scene done, we moved on to the car explosion. Which is what I had been looking forward to all day.

We had a safety meeting with the special effects guy, and you guessed it, the gimpy stunt coordinator. The told us where we could stand to be safe and how the explosion would go. Basically there were three explosions, one right after another. The first was to blow out the windows, so the air could get to the fuel that would burn the car. The second one was to blow off the roof of the car, and the third one lit the whole car on fire so it would burn real nice and pretty.

Everyone took their places, including a couple of crew guys who knelt down to the side of a car to take some pictures. They were outside of the danger area, so they were safe, but just to make sure one of the guys moved a plastic trash can in front of him for added protection.

They counted down and the car blew up. It was extremely cool. I saw a piece of the roof fly of and go sailing like a Frisbee right at the crew guys taking pictures. Only the plastic trash can saved him from being decapitated. I asked him later if he got a picture of it and he showed me a digital shot of the Frisbee piece of metal flying right at him. It was pretty cool.

A couple minutes after the explosion, an LAPD helicopter did a fly by. Just in case it wasn’t a television show, I guess.

They set up for the shot after the explosion where they had people run up with fire extinguishers and a fire truck pulling up to the car. They chose me to have a fire extinguisher. So they lit the car on fire and I ran up and began to spray it with the extinguisher.

At the end of the day, the Assistant Director put an extra fifty bucks on my paycheck for the driving that I did.

All in all, it was a cool way to spend a day.