I Was A Whore In The Movie From Hell
HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION, BY ME, AGE 17:

When I was 17 (mid-eighties) a friend had a job working for an extremely low budget film company. When he mentioned they needed girls my roommate and I thought "what the hell, we're not doing anything in particular this summer." We went over to meet the producer, who turned out to be running his film company out of the back room of his father's insurance office. He asked to see our legs, and we dutifully pulled up our skirts. (We were kind of thrilled. I think we half-hoped he'd try something so we could go off on him. Remember, we were 17.)

He asked us if we could dance, we told him yes, and he said "OK, you're hired." The movie turned out to be a western (?!?!?) and they shot it at a theme park that was closed down for the season, halfway up a mountain in North Carolina. When we got there they hadn't left us any instructions for getting TO the park itself - the parking lot was at the bottom of the mountain - and we had to talk a security guard into turning on the skilift.

They put us up in a rented condo with five other girls, one of whom wore three inches of makeup and never took it off, she just kept adding layer after layer. She looked like a half-melted wax dummy and turned out to be the producer's girlfriend. There was another chick who kept nattering the entire time about how she'd been an extra in a Chuck Norris movie. She wouldn't shut up about it. It was her answer to everything. If you asked her to pass the butter at breakfast, she'd tell you they had much better catering on the goddam Chuck Norris movie. I bet their toilet paper was softer, too.

The main things I remember: The cameraman was baked the entire time. He kind of fancied me, and once he took me out to his equipment car and showed me the glove compartment, which was completely stuffed with pot. He once passed out behind the camera - in the footage you could see the picture just sort of slowly drift toward the ceiling - and the guy who wrote the script wound up running the camera for an entire afternoon. Also, someone had left the beer taps loaded in the "saloon," and the bunch playing the bad guys became very dangerous to be around fairly quickly. We were supposed to go sit on their laps and generally act like saloon whores, and we learned very quickly that an accidental elbow to the crotch or a high heel in the instep would distract them long enough to get away.

I also remember I had to improvise a can-can, flipping my skirt up and showing undies. Unfortunately I was wearing my own, it not having occurred to me that they were going to be immortalized on film. They were very little-girl white cotton bikinis with Garfield the cat on them. The wardrobe woman took me in the bathroom and made me hand them over, and quickly stitched scraps of black lace all over them, and I went back to my can-can. I was the proud owner of the world's only pair of black lace Garfield panties. I thought they were hilarious, and I kept them for years, thus tying into LAST week's question as well.

The check bounced, the producer moved and they spelled my name wrong in the credits. I'm not going to tell the name of the movie, because I live in mortal fear that it will rise from the grave to haunt me some day.

Apoligies for length - hope it was worth it!
(RedQueen, Fri 12 Nov 2004, 17:26, Reply)