I'm Ready For My Close-Up, Continued...

The casting guy explained that Screen Actors Guild performers would be auditioned first. But first, he went through the room and told everyone what parts might be suitable for them. He turned toward me and I wondered: what sort of part would be the right fit for me? Distinguished foreign diplomat? Sexy, mysterious stranger? Tough-as-nails detective?

The guy pointed at me and said, "Cemetery Custodian!"

Well, I guess Antonio Banderas doesn't have to worry that I'll ever steal the limelight from him!

Hours passed as all the other parts received their auditions: clerks, taxi drivers, even mental patients (part of the movie, I learned, took place in a mental hospital). At last, around 11 p.m., it was time for Cemetery Custodian auditions. Stardom, here I come!

The casting guy told me the character had to be strange and memorable, so I read my lines with lots of spooky nervousness. Cemetery Custodian had to tell a distraught widow that a dead body was missing. Suspense!

Did I get the part? I wouldn't know for a few weeks...

Part 2: Lights! Cameras! Luggage!

"This is the scene," cried the director, "where you take the leading lady in your arms and carry her over the threshold into your romantic hideout!"

Those were the words I imagined director Pupi Avati might say to me, when I found out I had indeed received a part. As it turns out, I did haul something over a threshold--but it wasn't the leading lady. Instead, I carried her character's luggage.

I didn't get the part of Cemetery Custodian after all. Instead, I was chosen to play a very different role: Male Nurse in Mental Hospital.

Male Nurse isn't a very big part--but still, Clint Eastwood started his career with a bit part in one of those old Creature from the Black Lagoon movies, and he went on to play all kinds of movie tough-guys. Who knows what Hollywood doors my little role in The Hideout might fling open? Today, Male Nurse... tomorrow, James Bond! Heck, I'd take Fifth-Cenobite-from-the-Left in Hellraiser 19: Pinhead vs. SpongeBob SquarePants.

My big day on-set began at 8 a.m. The woman in charge of costumes gave me some surgical scrubs, a t-shirt and a name-tag that read CORY JOHNSON, R.N. Other actors and actresses slipped into dark-gray hospital gowns. They were to play the patients at the movie's fictional setting, a psychiatric hospital. Director Pupi Avati and the casting guy greeted the actors and then the movie crew made sure we were all in our places.

In the scene we were shooting, the main character, played by Italian leading lady Laura Morante, was leaving the hospital. Apparently she'd been a patient and was now ready to go home. Scenes aren't shot in the order in which they will appear on the screen, so I'm guessing this part will be used near the end of the movie.

My job in the scene was to carry the main character's luggage out to the waiting shuttle. They gave me a tan suitcase and a gray one, and loaded them with sandbags to give the illusion that they were full of clothes. Clothes...? From the weight of those sandbags, I think that character may have been smuggling gold bars.

The movie crew shot the scene from several angles, and I had to carry the suitcases again and again--and again and again and again--out to the shuttle. But I didn't mind: it was a good workout.

After one shot, the folks in charge of continuity reminded me to always carry the tan suitcase in my left hand and the gray one in my right. After all, all the details had to match up after the various angles were spliced together. It wouldn't make sense for the tan suitcase to be in my left hand in one shot, and then in my right a few seconds later.

One of the actresses playing a patient had to shed a few tears every time she hugged Laura, and I admired her ability to cry on command. I wonder what she had to think about to get those tears to flow...? The price of gasoline, maybe?

The patients all waved to Laura's character as the shuttle driver whisked her away. Of course, they had to wave many times, since those shots were filmed over and over and over. Hopefully none of them came down with carpal tunnel syndrome.

All that film will result in just a minute or two of screen time, but that's the way the world of film works. Most footage ends up on the cutting room floor.

Now I'm looking forward to the release of The Hideout, when the world will get to watch me haul two suitcases... tan on the left, gray on the right... out to a waiting shuttle. Will my superior luggage-handling skills bring me any more acting gigs? Let's hope the Samsonite luggage people will watch that movie. Maybe they'll put me in their future commercials instead of gorillas!

END