It Takes a Village . . . to Make a Movie

The excitement on our campus for the past few days is that our theater was chosen to film a scene from a new Jerry Bruckheimer film, Confessions of a Shopaholic. For those who know (I wasn't one of them), there are a series of books about the main character. This is the first though I guess there is some controversy as the first book takes place in London, and the film is in New York. Ah well. Our theater is supposed to be a board room in New York. They did set ups on Thursday and filming on Friday. It was rather interesting. We thought we might get to be extras, but that wasn't the case. I guess we couldn't fool anyone into thinking we were successful stockholders. About 6:00 a.m. on Friday, the extras started showing up. I guess no one told them they didn't have to come in until 10:00. I don't think they actually started shooting until late afternoon. They were all dressed in black suits. There was a huge tent set up on the grounds for them. I heard there were about 150 extras. Though there were some gorgeous women, most of them were just people in suits. The catering was impressive. Too bad they couldn't stay on and run our cafeteria. I never did see any of the stars. I'd never heard of the actress playing the main character (Isla Fisher) though some of the secondary characters are well-known: John Goodman, Joan Cusack, and Lynn Redgrave. Anyway, I took some pictures from the roof outside my office (it used to be easier to step up onto the windowsill) to show how many trucks and how much equipment were needed to film one scene.