Once, about twenty years ago, I appeared in a short movie, Left Shoe,+with Gael Garcia Bernal.* In what has to count as one of the greatest casting blunders ever, I was the star of the film (which flopped) and not him. At the time I had already decided to become a college philosophy professor; but as I struggled through the first few months of graduate school, after we shot the movie, I would amuse myself with selecting philosophical quotes to accompany my Hollywood star/footprints down the road. Until I re-read Grunberg's summary of the movie's conceit, I had assumed I had played a traveling salesman selling foot-materials; but I just learned that I was supposed to be "a shampoo salesman." (Perhaps that explains my generally bewildered look in the film?)
The morning of the shoot, I was introduced to Leonard Cohen's Take This Waltz and, of course, First We Take Manhatten, while we were driving from Queens (with a stop in the Village to pick up Garcia Bernal)) to Coney Island to shoot the film. I always think of my failed career as a movie star and that glorious Summer day when I hear Cohen.
During the shoot, a crowd gathered at a distance when I shot the scene in which I walk into the ocean and find a floating body part. After we completed that scene, we even got applause. An old lady with a faint Russian accent walked up to me (my suit dripping with sea water), and told me she thought it was a brilliant campaign commercial, and would vote for me in the next election.
+ You need to go to this link; then press "click to play movie." A youthful Garcia Bernal appears around 6:30, and we have a fifty second scene together. And then he returns with me near the end.
UPDATED that link is broken, so here it is:
*This means my Kevin Bacon number is absurdly lower than my Erdős number.
Very funny !
Posted by: elsdemuynck | 03/14/2016 at 08:54 AM