Extra Shuffle

By Tony Vallone story, screenplay, associate producer

The last two nights we shot interior party scenes and required a bunch of extras to fill the first floor of our party house. We figured about 50 or so would do it but apparently you need a lot more than that. 50 filled out about half of the house and we needed our character to walk through the entire house.

The solution we came up with was an extra shuffle where we'd walk through one half of the house and then move all our extras into the other half and film there. It got pretty ridiculous because some of the extras were more distinctinve than others so we had to make sure the same 8 foot tall chinese guy with the top hat wasn't in every shot. Our AD (Ian Dickinson) had the difficult job of directing all the extras who were mainly teenagers.

On the second night the same kind of thing happened. Except with a twist. All of our extras were girls! We had maybe two guys total. So to mask the fact that it was an incredibly unrealistic party turn out we filled the scene with crew members that had some down time. In one particular shot, Ben Savage (patrick) changed outfits and played an extra in his own scene. We'll see if you guys can find it when you see the film.