On Location: Forested Plains

I was working on a movie, helping move set pieces and vehicles around. At one point the director asked several of us to step in as extras, as were were on location in a remote area, and he didn't want to wait for people to be bused in from several hundred miles away.

We shot a fairly large number of scenes, and the writer and director liked what they saw and wrote even more for us to do, telling us it might all end up on the cutting room floor, but since we were here...

Several days later, we were wrangling the vehicles and animals onto large rail cars to be taken back to the border, where we would load them on trucks for a short hop to the next set of trains. It was getting cold and everyone was looking forward to getting back to California. I wondered how I had gone from driving vehicles to leading cows and horses, and a bear around.

Time jumped ahead, and we were in a San Diego theater for the premier party, when we arrived, there were several dozen reporters gathered around the cast and director. S, G and I were about to go by when we were spotted and dragged into the cast photos. At first I wondered why, but then saw that the image that they were using to promote the film was from one of our location shots. There S and I were, me with an ax over my shoulder, offering a quilted jacket with the other hand, S with a chain saw and G sitting on a log opening up a  steaming steel thermos, the rest of the cast huddled around a small fire looking up at us. The blue light of the Canadian dawn cast very dramatic light across our features. The funny part of this was, I knew this was an non-acting production shot, we were actually in camp trying to get our cast warmed up on a very cold morning.

When they showed the movie, that scene was part of a very touching montage (as they had no actual audio to go with the story) and it blended into the film so nicely that we were the only ones who knew that it hadn't been shot for the film. The way the film was edited, they had to have used nearly every scene they shot with our hastily written dialogue and our ad-libs as well. When it was done, there were a ton of questions from the director; about whether or not there would be a follow up to tell the story of the three woodsmen.

It was not what I was expecting. The director turned to us and asked (in front of the reporters) if we might be up for a prequel.

I looked at S and G, then back at the main cast, who were all nodding and saying things like "go for it!"

One of the reporters, a little grey-haired woman, said "please, it would be so nice to see a film with people our ages, no offence to you youngsters." She smiled over at the very twenty something main cast of our film.

It was a little weird that we were getting more press activity than the main cast, and I was thinking that wasn't really a good sign for the film.

When they unveiled the giant movie poster. Our three pictures had been added to the cast's photos along the bottom of the image. The producer and a couple of lawyers rounded us up after the photo session at the end of the night and told us they were going to offer us a slightly improved contract, as we'd taken on a slightly larger role in the film after it was all said and done. The money was nice, it was a few thousand dollars each. The offer of a new contract with us in starring roles was the real surprise.

I really didn't want to wake up from this dream.