31 years ago this month I spent 3 days working as an extra on the film School Ties. This is the story of how it all went down. What happened was this: about halfway through the September of my 8th grade year at Grafton Middle School, I noticed that a quartet of my fellow classmates kept going missing for several days at a time. My entire class had a population just shy of 100 so it was easy to spot the missing dude folk. One afternoon, I decided to ask my history teacher Mr Coleman why these fellas kept disappearing from the scene. His response: “Oh them? They’re in Boston filming a movie with Steve Martin called School Ties.” When I heard this I literally exploded (and yes…I know what “literally” means). There were/are few things on god’s green earth that I love as much as Steve Martin. I awoke from my temporary fugue state with a furious determination to get to the bottom of this Steve Martin movie business…which…in 1991…wasn’t gonna be easy. It wasn’t like I could just Google “Steve Martin movie Boston” and have all the answers in the palm of my hand within seconds. I had to crack the Yellow Pages. Work the phones. Pound some pavement. Shake down sources for some answers. It wasn’t like I could simply approach these dudes when they inevitably returned to school either. You see–they were all fairly cool…and I was…for lack of a more eloquent term…a fucking loser. There were the MacDonald twins, who were already 25 but still somehow in the 8th grade. Here I exaggerate …but they were suspiciously older and were already sharing a dope red Ford Explorer come freshman year of high school. They were also a couple of good looking motherfuckers…so it totally made sense that they’d wind up in a major motion picture. The third kid, Brendan, was kind of a bully but the fourth, Jake, was friendly enough…so I made a beeline for him the second he materialized back at GMS. He gave me the scoop: it turned out he was the one who’d put the whole scene together! He’d been vacationing somewhere in Maine the previous summer and had been approached by a casting director who asked him if he wanted to be in the flicks. Like Eddie Furlong in T2!?? That shit really happened!? He even gave me the name of the casting agency: Sylvia Fay Casting. I was like “DUDE!!! I’m calling them tomorrow and getting in this movie too ARGGRGFGHGG!!!!! Holy shit is Steve Martin nice!???”
School Ties
School Ties
School Ties
31 years ago this month I spent 3 days working as an extra on the film School Ties. This is the story of how it all went down. What happened was this: about halfway through the September of my 8th grade year at Grafton Middle School, I noticed that a quartet of my fellow classmates kept going missing for several days at a time. My entire class had a population just shy of 100 so it was easy to spot the missing dude folk. One afternoon, I decided to ask my history teacher Mr Coleman why these fellas kept disappearing from the scene. His response: “Oh them? They’re in Boston filming a movie with Steve Martin called School Ties.” When I heard this I literally exploded (and yes…I know what “literally” means). There were/are few things on god’s green earth that I love as much as Steve Martin. I awoke from my temporary fugue state with a furious determination to get to the bottom of this Steve Martin movie business…which…in 1991…wasn’t gonna be easy. It wasn’t like I could just Google “Steve Martin movie Boston” and have all the answers in the palm of my hand within seconds. I had to crack the Yellow Pages. Work the phones. Pound some pavement. Shake down sources for some answers. It wasn’t like I could simply approach these dudes when they inevitably returned to school either. You see–they were all fairly cool…and I was…for lack of a more eloquent term…a fucking loser. There were the MacDonald twins, who were already 25 but still somehow in the 8th grade. Here I exaggerate …but they were suspiciously older and were already sharing a dope red Ford Explorer come freshman year of high school. They were also a couple of good looking motherfuckers…so it totally made sense that they’d wind up in a major motion picture. The third kid, Brendan, was kind of a bully but the fourth, Jake, was friendly enough…so I made a beeline for him the second he materialized back at GMS. He gave me the scoop: it turned out he was the one who’d put the whole scene together! He’d been vacationing somewhere in Maine the previous summer and had been approached by a casting director who asked him if he wanted to be in the flicks. Like Eddie Furlong in T2!?? That shit really happened!? He even gave me the name of the casting agency: Sylvia Fay Casting. I was like “DUDE!!! I’m calling them tomorrow and getting in this movie too ARGGRGFGHGG!!!!! Holy shit is Steve Martin nice!???”