Eddie The Movie

26 May 2000 - My Two Days Of Stardom
The movie “Eddie”, starring Whoopie Goldburg, is probably one of the worst if not THE worst movie I have ever seen. So, why do I bring it up? Because I was in it. LOL. I live about 30 miles from Charlotte. The Movie Company rented the arena in Charlotte. It was a basketball movie. So they put a “casting call” out in all the surrounding areas. I have never had any designs to be in the movies. But it sounded like it might be fun. And it was definitely something I had never done before. And they were paying. So I asked Cal if it was ok with him. He didn’t mind so I signed up.
I spent 2 days on “the set”. The first day was a lot of fun. Whoopie Goldburg was there. I am not a big fan of her’s, but she is famous and it was fun seeing her. And she did do funny things in between takes that made the day more enjoyable. Fabio was there that day too.
Then the second day was a really long day. No stars were there. We were doing crowd scenes all day long. Maybe 10% of the people needed to fill up the arena were there. So to make it appear full we would sit in one area for part of a shot. Then have to run over to another area to fill up a different side of the arena for another view of the same scene. So we would have to watch the same “play” of a basketball game played over and over. I am not a basketball fan anyway. I had no idea what was supposed to be happening. The director would just tell us, “Cheer, this is an important play” or “Boo, you hate this guy”, then “Be all broken up that the ball is going to miss the hoop, then get crazy when it does go in”. So I cheered, booed, and got crazy on command. Then ran over to the other side of the arena and did it all again. The funniest thing to me was another trick to fill up the arena. They had 100s of stiff cardboard life size cutouts of people. They were of 3 different people; a white man, a black man, and a white woman. But they all had different outfits on. We carried those with us as we moved from spot to spot to make it more populated.
Early on the director noticed that we would all stay in our places during the scenes. We were supposed to be New York Knicks fans in NY. He told us that he realized that we were all polite southerner but we were supposed to act like New Yorkers (rude). LOL. And we needed to always have the aisles full of people coming and going and pushing. The next scene not enough people got up. So he assigned the task by telling all the people born in January, February and March to get up and walk up and down the stairs. My claim to fame is that during the “championship game” at the end of the movie, I was chosen to be the person that held up the big O, in the GO KNICKS! Sign. I thought, “Oh boy, now I am sure to be able to see myself in this movie.”
It was about a year later when this movie came out. I went of course. I was bored out of my mind, but held out because I was going to be seen at the end of the movie holding that big O. The scene finally came. I knew exactly where to look. And was looking as hard as I could. If the camera was on me for half a second that is stretching it. I think I saw my shirt. But it was blurred.
That was my first and last movie experience. It is nice to be able to say I did it. But I wouldn’t care to do it again.