Trivial Pursuits and More on Hollywood

I'm on quite the pub quiz hot streak! For those of you unfamiliar with pub quiz, it is a live trivia contest held in... you guessed it... a pub. You can play with a team of up to six people. Each person pays an entry fee and after 5 rounds of grueling competition, the top 3 teams split the pot - not evenly, of course. My teams have now placed and won money the last three times I have been. It's awesome! Finally, the knowledge that those who go without like to call "useless" is coming in handy. I knew that one day it would. Now, this money is not quite enough to retire on, but it covers the bar tab and that's something. This week, I didn't feel all that helpful to the team and that's no good. I want to be the king of useles- er- important information. I will have to study if I expect my "Nipsey Russell's Coaxial Juggernaut" teammates to keep me around. Please feel free to use the comment feature below this post to pose a trivia question to me and I shall do my best to answer. You'll be helping me greatly (read: mildly, at best.).

In other news, my mind continues to reel from my movie filming experience on "Walk The Line" last weekend. I observed many things while I was there. Here are a couple:

- Movie stars are tiny people. This applies to Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, whom I saw on the set, and others I have seen in person before. Reese, if you did not know her, could probably pass for a pre-teen. She has had two babies! Joaquin is no more than a suburb of Phoenix. (Wow! That was lame, but I shall leave it. I owe you that much.) He is Julius Weiss-like in stature, but maybe smaller? (DISCLAIMER: I never saw Chris Farley in person.)

- Stars of movies are not expected to do anything on the set except for film their scenes. That doesn't sound surprising, but I was struck by the way they were wisked away as soon as they finished something and didn't return until like 4 seconds before their next scene was to be filmed. Luckily, I was part of a scene that we did many, many times and they were around for like 4 hours straight, but even then, whenever there's more than about a 1 minute break for the crew to set something up, they are back to their chairs with assistants taking care of them. It's just weird. That is precisely what they are there for, but it seems like if I were being paid 4 million dollars for something, I'd be willing to stand there for 15 seconds while they test the light instead of needing a stand-in. That might change when I'm a star, though, so don't tell anyone.

- The process is incredible. There is equipment everywhere. There are crew members everywhere and somehow, they all seem to know what they're supposed to be doing without communicating. It was hard to tell what each person's job was on the set, but someone had to be coordinating it all. Or maybe they meet extensively to plan out each day's shooting. I'm sure they do that, but it still seems amazing. It's very much like a military operation. People are moved strategically, temporary shelter is provided, equipment is managed and distributed as needed, and the whole project proceeds step-by-step in a carefully planned and well timed manner. I wonder if there were studio executives watching in a secure room back in Hollywood, like they do in the White House during military ops. Yeah, I've been watching too much West Wing.

- I might have mentioned this before, but it still entertains me. We had a lunch break. At 1:30 a.m. We actually ate lunch then. It was beef stew. I was at Camp.

Okay, that's enough. Hope you are having a wonderful day!