I signed up to be an extra in the Bottle Shock
movie when the production
company came to town, and I was on the set for one day, August 22, 2007.
Among the stars are Alan Rickman and Dennis Farina, who were on the
set when I was there. The film released in August of 2008.
Since then the movie is released for DVD. Below are some links to more a more detailed account of the various blips and fractional seconds that I appear in the film; fame really is fleeting:
A Day as an Extra in Bottle Shock
They're gonna put me in the movies,
they're gonna make a big star out of me.
We'll make a film about a man that's sad and lonely,
and all I gotta do is act naturally.
August, 2007
In July a local paper ran a story about a film being made in Sonoma County
called Bottle Shock
, a comedy loosely based on the 1976
international blind tasting in Paris that jolted the wine community
when Napa's Montelena Chardonnay placed first in the whites and Napa's
Stag's Leap took a first in the reds. The article challenged the
reader: So how come you haven't signed up to be an extra in this film?
and provided the American Eagle Studios email address to expedite
enlistment. On a whim I responded to the casting call since I was
between careers, had never been involved in a film production and was
curious about the process.
There is another film in the works about the tasting called Judgment of Paris
(not to be confused with the mythological contest by the same name that
kicked off the Trojan War) that hews closer to the facts and asserts
that it is the official
story of the 1976 event, but that is not
this movie.
All communication with casting was through email; shortly I received a message requesting a head and body shot. Since we had just acquired a digital camera it was a snap to make some exposures and attach them to the reply. And don't give us a hard time about being slow to get on the digital band-wagon - we are late adopters of all things technical out of sad experience and bang-for-the-buckism.
Soon another email arrived asking about availability on certain dates
and my measurements, including hat and shoe sizes. Even between careers
it is amazing how busy one gets, but I was free for August 22 and let
them know that. Yet another email arrived saying to stand by and be
prepared to be a French pedestrian, to bring fabulous clothes . . .
darker, more coordinated outfits, scarves, hats . . . tweed jackets,
berets
, and to wait for final directions to the set, parking and
time to show up.
Hmmmmm. Fabulous? This is a word foreign to my wardrobe. One thing I
do have out of the ordinary is a fancy silk bow tie that you really
have to tie yourself - it ain't a clip-on. After seeing the Bertie
Wooster series on PBS it was obvious that if you are ever invited to an
English great house to ride to hounds or to have tea with the Queen
there will always be a black tie event involved, requiring all males to
manage a real bow tie; a clip-on Just Won't Do. Rumor has it that the
Queen can look daggers at a man and strike him dead at twenty paces
should he be found wearing a counterfeit in her presence. So I bought
a bow tie of darkish-red a few years ago and practiced tying it on
during commercial breaks while watching Law and Order
reruns,
sometime wearing a T-shirt, sometimes wearing something with a collar.
Fabulous! So far I've not been invited to have tea with Her Royal
Highness, but I am ready.
The night before the shoot email with directions and starting time arrived: downtown Sonoma at 6 a.m. I staged a closet raid to make an initial assessment of things to bring.
The alarm went off at 4 a.m., early enough to make a final selection of extra clothes, pack them into a wardrobe bag, gas up the car and get to the town of Sonoma in time. Parking was behind a church a couple of blocks east of the square; it was dark when I arrived and I had to run around the block twice to find the entrance to the parking lot.
The wardroom crew wasn't set up yet; I ran into tall, broad, rather
intimidating-looking guy that bore a faint resemblance to Popeye's
nemesis Bluto (or Brutus, depending which cartoon series you might
have seen) with a wire coming out of his head. He was muttering into a
mike dangling on his chest, punctuating the flow with a copy that!
every so often. He noticed me and asked if I was an extra - he seemed
friendly enough, but I saw later that his function on the set fit in
with the Bluto character - crowd control among other things, so that is
how I'll refer to him. Bluto approved of showing up early, gave me a
pen and a form to fill out, saying that I needed to turn it in at the
end of the day and told me to wait by the wardrobe trailer when I was
done.
A few other extras queued up behind me and we chatted a bit. When the wardrobe staffer came out to process us I showed her what I had, and she quickly picked the two-piece suit, the bow tie and the tweed cap in the bag, and the blue shirt and brown leather lace-up shoes I was wearing. She then brought out a white shirt with some blue dashes on it from the trailer and selected a blue tie I had with tilted squares on it. She gave me some notes for three changes I'd be making during the day: 1) the suit, bow tie, no hat, 2) take off jacket, add hat, and 3) remove hat, change to wardrobe shirt and the long blue tie.
There were some new portable changing rooms marked for men's extras so I changed to the suit in one of them but left the tie off since it takes awhile for me to get it right and the changing rooms were in demand. The men's room had a mirror so I did the tie routine there; I had just gotten it pretty much the way it was supposed to be and was taking up the slack when a Falstaff-like character with long white hair and a goatee exited one of the stalls. Seeing my labors, he observed that bow ties were a lot of bother; I replied I just about had it wrassled into submission, no worries, and he remarked clip-ons were the way to go. It wasn't the place to lecture about having tea with the Queen, so I let it go. This fellow is called Seamus in real life and he appears under the Male Talent in the American Eagles website.
One of Bluto's helpers directed us to the common room in Community Center to drop off our stuff and wait. There was a guard hired for the day to keep an eye on it. After all of the extras in the 6 a.m. group had gotten into costume and the women had had a fast pass from the hair stylist and makeup artist, Bluto appeared and walked us over to the set two blocks away, close to Sonoma Square. The street was closed from the point where it left the square on the south east corner to the intersection two blocks further east.
We extras stood around chatted. A tall, slender young woman standing with us had been outfitted sunglasses with inch-wide white rims, a mod style leather dress and tall boots. She said that her head-band was her own and that the dress made her feel like Pocahontas. A short woman said she couldn't stand the butterfly polyester dress that wardrobe put on her for the 1976 French look, and said that back in the 70's her style was to wear her hair in two braids and dress like the locals on the reservation where she taught. I said her sandals looked very 70's, but she said they were quite contemporary, actually, and hadn't I paid any attention to styles back then? Ouch!
After a bit Bluto handed us off to Brandy, a woman in her mid-twenties sporting white baseball cap with a pony-tail emerging from the back, the obligatory earphone in one ear, a tool belt with communications devices and batteries and otherwise dressed for the heat. We stood and waited awhile, then she led us toward the square. As the day wore on it became obvious that Brandy had been delegated the task of coordinating the movement and rhythm of the background extras, making up little vignettes that would make sense for pedestrians on the street; this left the director free to manage the filming of the actors, which today were Alan Rickman and Dennis Farina.
The street was covered with lights, shades and reflectors on poles and scaffolds, trucks loaded with all sorts of stage gear, power cables ran every which-way protected with heavy-duty hollow speed bumps where they crossed the road. On the north side of the street the lights and scaffolds ran thick and in the center of the commotion was the main camera on a dolly that rolled on tubular tracks. There were approximately forty to fifty staff on the street acting as grips, gaffers, soundmen, cameramen, props, wardrobe, hair, makeup, still-photo, director's entourage, Bluto and his people for overall coordination and crowd control, Brandy and her people for wrangling the extras, full-on security to guard against professional pilfering of the equipment trucks, a Sonoma policeman at the square and whatever else a small independent film production needs.
There were French cars from the 70's parked along the curb on the south side of the street, a few Vespa motor scooters, some period bicycles, a vegetable stand, a folding sign, small round tables on the sidewalk with glasses half full of what looked like red wine and of course, ash trays. A number of store windows had been filled with French goods and signs in French; this was Paris, the City of Lights, circa 1976! A couple of the staff carrying what that looked like weed sprayers walked slowly down the street and blacked out the yellow lines in the center.
Shoot 1: We were sent over to props; I was handed a bag of oranges but when I crossed back over Brandy took them from me and substituted a newspaper. She chose me and the short woman in the butterfly dress for a little background vignette - I sit at one of the tables with the wine glasses (half-filled with Welch's grape juice) and read a superficially French news paper; on the cry Background
I look up from the paper, stand and greet approaching woman, kiss-kiss, sit and chat quietly. Brandy organized other extras lined up behind us to walk by on cue; one was a man wearing a suit in his late thirties with a briefcase - his story was he was late to a meeting, so walk briskly. Behind him was a couple that were to stroll casually, and so on. Back at the table the short woman pointed out that the kiss-kiss starts on the right cheek; this is good to know.
By now the fog had burned off and I had to hold up a hand against the sun to see my partner as she approached after the Background
status was announced loudly and repeatedly by the staff. The normal sequence was Camera Frame
, Rolling
, Background
, Action
, then Cut
and usually Reset
for the background extras to go back to the starting point for another take. There are several takes before we were done, so I had a chance to look at the paper. Strange, it had the banner Le Monde
but was purged of any large-font dates and had story headers that didn't always match the contents. My high school French is pathetic, but when the story header says socialists and right-wing radicals disapprove of an upcoming Woodstock-style rock concert and the content goes on and on about slavery and freedom and Haiti and Thomas Jefferson . . . well, this paper did come from a Hollywood prop department, oui?
Shoot 2: Brandy linked me up with Marcia, a patrician blue-blood. Our story is to stroll and chat. We stood next to the table I sat at in the scene before; now the Energetic Guy and Kat sat there. A staffer came by and asked if anybody smoked. Energetic Guy and Kat did and seized the cigarettes with gusto; I have no experience smoking cigarettes and didn't want to look like a dork trying to learn how. As the status of the shoot was yelled out and repeated - Camera Frame . . . Rolling . . . Background (our cue) . . . Action (actors' cue)
it seemed there needed to be another one for the smokers: Light'em
. Herbal and real French cigarettes were available, but the non-French packs had to be hidden under a napkin. Kat and Energetic Guy burned through four or five cigarettes on this one shoot.
While we waited between takes Marcia and I talked; she had come up from Marin, said she had lived in Europe for a long time, that her son went to school there and spoke French quite well, then looked down and said, Oh dear, you wouldn't be mistaken for a Frenchman. And you know that when a woman looks at a man she starts from the ground and goes up.
I looked down and what caught my eye was a rather long thread hanging from the juncture of my trouser legs. I resisted the urge to yank on it and replied casually, Oh, really?
. Oh, yes, my son says that everyone polishes their shoes over there, and my gracious, yours could do with some wax and a brush!
. Ah
, I said, relieved, actually these are supposed to be oiled, but they're overdue for that too
. She didn't look convinced.
Brandy put a Tobey Maguire look-alike in a peaked cap on a bicycle to ride down the street after the period cars rolled by. She handed us over to another staffer whose name was Harry, I think - mid-twenties, cheerful, sandy hair and beard; he would give us the signal to go.
As we waited some more Marcia observed that I was not positioning her gallantly on the sidewalk since she was next to the street, and said that perhaps it was no longer the case that people pitch garbage out of upper story windows, but still it is customary for the man . . . I replied that I was taller than she and the camera across the street would give both of us coverage instead of me blocking her out - she appreciated this and didn't contest it. On cue, first the period cars ran in both directions, then the bicyclist pedaled away, then we promenaded slowly and chatted quietly. Alan Rickman and Dennis Farina (detective Joe Fontana in the Law and Order
television series) conversed in a doorway as we passed. Cut!
Brandy and Harry passed the word to mime-chat silently as we strolled, and this was to the extras in general; the microphones on the actors were sensitive. We did several more takes, hotly pursued on our promenade by Dan the business man and an English woman in a primal green polyester dress carrying a bouquet of flowers.
Shoot 3: We moved to the north side of the street and, as in most of the shoots, the extras formed two groups on either side of the scene being filmed so that they could be launched in both directions. My group was right up against the square; it was hard to get into any shade. Harry was in charge at our end; on his signal I walked alone followed by other pedestrians spaced out. Farina and Rickman were in the street conversing as we walked past some ten feet away. The director noticed that there were passers-by reflected in a storefront window caught by the camera frame; Bluto called for Harry to move them across the street into the shade. After the first walk-through one of the staff members came over and had one of the women pedestrians hand over her shoes; they were clacking on the pavement too noisily so the staffer put a thin layer of adhesive rubber on the heels and toes. The walking space was narrow and cluttered with sandbagged light/reflector/shade supports; we had to dodge the gear as well as approaching extras coming from the other side. (early in minute 12: as Rickman and Farina look into the frame, I appear for a half second behind them). There was a lot of road noise from the square from buses and trucks rumbling by randomly; Rickman was visibly annoyed by it. The director ran many takes because of spoiled sound before he was satisfied.
We took a break. There were snacks, drinks and sodas for the taking and a high-tech porta-potty available - spacious, odorless and spotless, not like any others I've experienced.
Shoot 4: Brandy rounded us up and took us to the shady south side of the street. Harry set me up with Extrovert Woman who loved to talk. She and her husband owned a couple of French cars, Citroën 2CVs, called Deux Cheveaux if you are French. You would recognize these if you saw them - flat-sided but curved in profile from the top of the windshield to the rear bumper, and carried somewhat protruding fenders. The one closest to us was a convertible with the top rolled all the way back; the top can be rolled open just halfway if desired. The 2CVs have two cylinders and get something like 45mpg if not better. Casting wanted Citroëns and other European makes from the 70's for stationary as well as dynamic props, and needed extras to drive them. They contacted local Citroën clubs as well as scouting for them in the general casting call.
While we waited a large guy across the street in some kind of harness wrestled with a camera attached to it, doing something to get the camera to rise and fall smoothly on a vertical three foot cylinder. This had to be a mobile steady-cam
, so this would be a moving shot. On our side of the street, forty feet away, Rickman and Farina waited on the steps of a storefront.
The background extras' task in this shoot was, on Harry's command, to walk up the street and mime-chat. Simple enough, but on the first take we found that Rickman and Farina strode briskly down the same sidewalk we were walking up and there were parked bicycles, a folding sign (in French) and a vegetable cart that made for a narrow thoroughfare. There were also exposed bolts from a pole that must have been removed for the shoot; one of the staff jammed apples on them to mark the hazard and moved the folding sign so nobody would walk on that part of the sidewalk. It was an urban obstacle course and avoiding collision was tricky, but it looked as if that was what the director wanted - actors dodging people on a busy street while talking. It took many takes to get the timing right; at our end extras were reshuffled, and when Extrovert Woman and I got moving she had to precede me to get around the vegetable cart so that neither of us bumped into Rickman and Farina as they swept by (late in minute 12: as Rickman remarks to Farina about making a donation, I appear for a half second wearing a hat and no jacket as they stride past me). One of the rules for extras is to not look directly at the actors, but in this case we had to in order to get out of the way.
We took a break for lunch; on the way back to the community center we passed the refreshment stand where a piratical crew member handed out fruit slushies to us; tasted great. Lunch was brought in from Hollywood if you could believe the logos on the catering trucks. A cheerful woman with a German accent wearing a cowboy hat (jawohl, lil' dogies!) appeared to be in charge. It was buffet style with a good selection; the lines moved quickly and there was enough to go around. I found an empty seat across the table from one of the extras whose name was Caroline; we had a long chat over lunch. Somehow teaching came up and I talked about my brother in law and his wife who both teach elementary school; she was married to a college professor who taught philosophy. I observed that the pasta sauce was surprisingly spicy which lead to Indian food and restaurants; I mentioned a Himalayan food restaurant in Rohnert Park across from Sonoma State University (Shangri-La
, I think), she said she had been to it - something like Indian food, but different. It was rumored that some of the guys in the kitchen had made the Everest summit more than once - if they were Nepali Sherpa I could almost believe it. Caroline asked if I knew there was a sizeable Tibetan community in Sonoma and that they held an annual festival? No, and did they have throat-singing there? Yes, they did. She recommended renting a movie called Genghis Blues
, about a blind black blues singer that taught himself Tuvan style throat-singing and so impressed visiting Tuvan singers with his accurate rendering of their native songs that they invited him to come to Tuva. He did and became the 1995 champion in one of the throat-singing styles. Because of his deep voice they nicknamed him Earthquake
.
We finished lunch and I made a wardrobe change, shedding the jacket, donning the tweed cap and retying the tie. Since I had eaten outside it wasn't until I came in in search of a mirror that I saw that Alan Rickman was seated in the crowded common room mixing with a few people. Rats! A chance missed to brag about doing lunch with my buddy Alan! Shortly Bluto came by and announced that we needed to vacate the common room and to put our stuff outside. After we got that taken care of I schlepped extraneous stuff to the car, came back and settled in a chair to wait for the next round. As I waited the other extras trickled back from more involved wardrobe changes. The young Pocahontas swapped the mod leather skirt and boots for a more elegant, longer, clingy white knit dress and tonier shoes; this turned out to be Giselle who, along with Seamus, also had a photo on the American Eagles web site talent page. To my eye the costuming generally was more elegant than the morning shoot.
On the way back to set we ran into a bubbly young hula dancer - I asked if she was in the movie just to get a rise, then asked if she was going to a Polynesian dancing session. How did you guess?
she asked. It would have been easier had you been wearing coconuts
, I said. We do have coconuts for the class, but only for the kids
, she said as she turned into a dance studio.
Back on the set some of the female crew sported fake black moustaches from a joke shop located on the closed part of the street. Bluto sent us to a courtyard away from the street to hang out. It was a nice place with plenty of chairs and shade. The crew brought in an ice chest of bottled water and sodas. Harry came in and asked for ten extras for a restaurant scene. Ten trotted up immediately, so I stayed in the shade and began to nod off. After some time Bluto came in and asked if anybody had not yet been in a scene. A few came forward including a woman of a distinct appearance who could convincingly play a French nun or maybe a French peasant selling produce in a village market. Bluto looked around, saw me and told me to come along too.
Shoot 5: Out front he had Distinct Woman and me stand on the porch of a small Victorian next to the restaurant and mime-chat in place a couple of times, then moved us closer so that we were next to a couple of Vespas at the far corner of the restaurant. After the first take the crew went out and masked off parts of cars that are reflecting the sun into the front windows. When we finished I went back to the patio.
Shoot 6: After awhile Harry came in and looked for some game extras. He sent us out to the north side of street - not much shade and pretty hot. Kat, one of the extras I met that morning, was miserable yet she said she was from Sacramento, a place where hot happens. I guessed that her ancestors were from colder climates and she allowed that was so - Germany and the Czech Republic. After a bit Harry came by and sent me back to the Vespas on the shaded south side of the street. Brandy linked me up with a woman, Anne, who resembled Laverne from Laverne and Shirley
. She wore a felt jacket with a wide collar and shrugged it off when we aren't shooting because of the heat. Every time we got ready to do the stroll she'd shrug it on and I'd check that the collar wasn't curled over. We chatted between takes; she had spent a year in France when she was younger so I asked what one should see when in Paris, and she recommended the Musée d'Orsay over the Louvre, saying that the Louvre collection was so large it was overwhelming. Depends on what you want to see, I guess; the d'Orsay contains art from 1848 to 1914 so if you like Impressionist painting that's a place to go.
Brandy was on other side of restaurant standing by to give cues to the extras. Giselle and a shorter companion stood in front of us. One of the crew, who chatted up Giselle while she sat on a Vespa waiting, carried a camera that appeared to be ten inches square and four inches thick; I asked if it shot sheet film, but no, it was just for sound-proofing a camera to take stills with while filming was in progress. Anne asked me if I knew who the director was. It had to be somebody with a shaved head and a monocle - just kidding! I guessed it was a big (big as in former college ball big) dude in a baseball cap that was the go-to guy near the camera, and that turned out to be right: his name is Randy Miller.
This scene has Rickman and Farina run up to front door of restaurant; Rickman says, Is he in there?
almost combatively, and Farina says, Yeah, he eats here every day
, and Rickman runs in while Farina watches. We extras do the walk on cue from both sides of the restaurant. There was a problem with the sound; a guy with a boom mike came out, another take was made, the sound guy put a big foam cover on the mike, another take was made, then more takes are made, each one shorter, and finally it's a wrap.
We went back to home base and a last costume change; it was maybe 5:30 p.m. I changed shirts and put on the long blue tie with squares tipped at different angles. Anne put on a green polyester dress and hated it, it was so hot. Giselle was now in a black evening dress looking very elegant, Kat was in black with a huge hat, Dan was in a brown three-piece suit. We waited awhile, then headed back, this time to the square proper and around to the back of the Ledson building. This was our staging area for the rest of the day.
Shoot 7: Harry took us over to the plaza where I walked with other extras on the sidewalk across the street from the Ledson building on the square itself - I had a newspaper for a prop. We did this for several takes. Between takes I spoke with one of the extras in an ice-cream suit who owned one of the period cars; he had been at the Kunde winery set the week before and said that he was in a shot where he and some other extras in cars zoomed up and down narrow dirt roads. A number of tourists on the plaza were watching the shoot and asked all kinds of questions; we told them what we knew.
Shoot 8: Harry moved us over to the sidewalk directly in front of the Ledson building; Brandy gave us the cues to start. The scene had Alan Rickman approach the maitre'de and converse while we crossed behind him (in minute 6: just as Rickman enters the building to take his place at a table inside, I walk by on the street behind him, without hat or jacket). Sometimes I was directed to turn around and walk back, appearing twice in the background action - Dan slid into an overcoat before walking back like a quick-change artist. We needed more extras! They ran many takes before wrapping this scene.
I snagged an illicit chocolate chip cookie from the staff spread (the staff eat before extras is the rule) before going around back to the staging area. The chips were gooey and the cookie itself was crumbly. I got a cold Sprite and a napkin to wash off the chocolate and newsprint from my hands using the condensation from the can. Someone came around back with a tray of half-sandwiches for dinner; there weren't quite enough to go around but the staff said more were coming.
I talked with Seamus; he told jokes and stories from other films he had been in, showed us a magic trick with a quarter, told us to practice in a mirror to get it right and swore us to secrecy because now we were magicians. The staff circulated: the hair stylist primped hair, the makeup artist went over the women's makeup. A staffer on a cell-phone got a call and used the space we were in as a telephone booth - she was furious. It sounded like an agent giving her some bad news and she lit into him/her like napalm on a sunburn, that it wasn't OK for a client to back out of a picture (no names, no tabloid exposé for you, sorry); this went on for some time although she sounded mollified as the call progressed.
Shoot 9: The next scene was going to be dressy; since I didn't have a jacket I didn't think I'd be part of it. The second set of sandwiches arrived just as Harry came back and told everyone to go around front; it was twilight now and the big lights outside were shining into the windows of the Ledson foyer. Everyone was sent inside, so in we went and milled around for awhile, clumping naturally as if we really were at a party. Brandy came in and handed out wine glasses with grape juice to most of the extras and gave the various clumps of extras short routines to mime through.
Unexpectedly a young woman from wardrobe approached me with a burgundy jacket; I slid it on and it fit. Somebody had decided to use me in this shot; wardrobe had my measurements and must have sent the jacket over knowing that it would fit - it was like, magic, man!
The waiters and everybody else has instructions but me so I flagged Brandy down. She put together a routine on the spot - I talk to Distinctive Woman and a British Woman, the waiter comes by, then I leave them to go to the bar and greet Seamus smoking there next to Extrovert Woman, then cross over to Caroline (now in a hat with her hair done up and in evening dress) who is in conversation with Patrician Woman, we greet, then Caroline leaves, Patrician Woman and I talk.
As extras, we put some meat on it so it had a more natural flow for us: British Woman makes a tasteless joke about the party being like a funeral for somebody you were glad was dead; the three of us laugh, the waiter comes by, I shake my head at English Woman (tasteless!), move over to Seamus and Extrovert Woman, good to see you, and you too, shake hands with both, they both hold up their wine glasses, they mime how good it is, see I have none, I point across the room (where do I get a glass?) they nod, I leave, run into Caroline and Patrician Woman, mime glad ta see ya, Caroline grips my forearm to say see ya later, I turn to Patrician Woman to mime talk, waiter comes by with a drink or hors d'oeuvres, what the heck, I grab one, mime on . . . Alan Rickman is at the front door talking with the maitre'de, who turns and leads Rickman in, passing behind Patrician Woman. Cut! We did this several times; once it was a wrap we could see Rickman applauding quietly at the door.
Shoot 10: The crew began setting up for another shoot; there no announcement about leaving so I shrugged off the jacket, got a chair near an open window to catch the breeze and watched to see what the next shot was about. After the setup had gone on awhile the director summoned some of us and promoted us to be wine judges. I got the jacket back on and sat at a table where there were four wine glasses with grape juice in them, a scoring sheet and a pencil. The setup continued on around us awhile longer, then Rickman sat at a table in the back and we were ready. The director had me scoot into the table as far as I could; I was blocking the left side of the frame otherwise.
Our directions were to taste, swirl, sniff and lift wine glasses to observe the color in random order while Rickman's tasting table got whacked by a swinging kitchen door when extras dressed as hotel staff emerged with decanters, bread boats and such. Rickman suggested making a series of takes with an increasing amount of force on the swinging door; on the first take the director laughed out loud (I couldn't see a thing), but we made several more. On the last one Rickman seemed to be satisfied with the degree that his table got smacked and apparently did a fine piece of silent comedy in response to it - the director and others that saw it were impressed (I am seated on the left at the beginning of the scene, with my face in profile as I'm looking up at the wine glass). It was a wrap.
It was 9 p.m. and we were done for the day; I headed outside and saw Rickman posing with a passer-by while the spouse took a picture. There weren't many of us left so we got to ride a van back to home base. We picked up our gear, returned the wardrobe clothes, filled out our timesheet with the assistance of an Asian staff member that could write long-hand blazing fast, and then went home.
Sean Butler
Cotati, California