My new love/hate relationship

BWW had a previous commercial where a football referee looked into the replay booth to review a play and suddenly was looking into the restaurant’s TVs. “So guys, what do you think?” “Well, we’re not done eating yet.” So the ref comes out, makes a ridiculous call so the game goes into overtime and there was much rejoicing (yaaaaay…). This time, it’s taking place at a basketball game. I don’t know what happened at the restaurant and I imagine that Jordan wants to forget about the whole experience as soon as possible, so I’m not going to ask. Suffice it to say that at Target Center, we had a photographer who uses his flashbulb to blind a player who’s about to score an easy basket, he misses and the game goes into overtime.

First, they moved us all into the seats behind the photographer (so the hoop was on our left). Then they started playing “Musical Extras”, having people get up and move seemingly at random. Somehow, I ended up in the front row just behind the photographer’s left shoulder, so you’ll likely get a good look at… well, at my legs, if nothing else. (I swear to God, I didn’t do anything to get in a better spot to be on TV—some dude just pointed at me, said “Glasses!”, then pointed toward the seat, so I moved.)

So they filmed for a while, during which time the crowd had to keep getting excited over and over again. They even gave us three levels of excitement:

• Level 1: One team just called timeout, some clapping, you can chat with your neighbor, etc.
• Level 2: Start getting excited and cheer, although we weren’t allowed to clap the entire time we were at Level 2. That’s right, the director said we couldn’t just clap—apparently, watching basketball games on TV has been a bad influence when it comes to my understanding of Level 2.
• Level 3: You’ve just been invited to have sex with Jennifer Aniston and/or Brad Pitt. But even at Level 3, standing up was only allowed once, which confused the hell out of me. Again, watching basketball games must have completely distorted my idea of how to root for the home team.

When did they want us all to stand up? When the player missed the basket, sending the game into overtime. I ask you, why would we be excited about that? “Yay! The game is still going! We don’t get to eat at Buffalo Wild Wings yet!” Is that the message they want to get across? (It took them 12 hours to decide that maybe the crowd should groan and look shocked when the home team couldn’t pull off the win in regulation.)

That was probably the most frustrating aspect of the day: The director would have a moment of inspiration, then decide to film it. “Let’s have the player miss the basket. Okay, let’s have him look like he was clotheslined. Okay, let’s have him bang into the standard. Okay, let’s have the referee get knocked over and do a flip.” Spontaneity in the bedroom with Jennifer Aniston and/or Brad Pitt is nice; spontaneity when you have limited time and patience from the extras… not as nice. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I was sitting behind Mike (the actor/photographer) and chatted with him and the others for a while until the director suddenly decided that he didn’t want denim jeans in my spot anymore—he took someone with black pants and made us switch seats. Sure, it was a little odd, but not unexpected at that point. What was unexpected was when they decided they didn’t want black pants anymore and had someone else in jeans sit in that seat. Given that it was my seat (plus it was for the sake of continuity), I figured I should ask, “Shouldn’t I be sitting there again?”

I know, it’s not a facial tattoo that switches sides during a scene in Hitman, but people might get confused if they’re watching the commercial and notice suddenly, “Hey, he’s wearing different shoes… and a different shirt… and he’s got a different skin color.” Continuity.

So I moved back to my seat and we went back to working on the same scene. Before, he was looking down at a special “Buffalo Wild Wings” beeper on his belt, which was a serious piece of crap. It kept falling apart. Constantly. I suggested duct tape since duct tape fixes everything, but no one listened. But now he was looking back up, then putting a giant flashbulb onto the camera that was supposed to blind everyone.

The only problem? It wasn’t latching onto the arm properly. Well, technically, it was, but the connection was a little complicated and Mike had a little trouble with attaching it smoothly. “Okay, that was perfect. Now do it again, only right this time.” He gave me an amused/annoyed glare after I said that.

But speaking of the arm and continuity, I seem to recall the directors saying that the prop guy didn’t need to attach the arm for the flash right away. If this commercial makes it on the air, keep your eyes open—there might not be an arm on the side of the camera for a second or two. Oops…

Eventually, we finished shooting in that section, then moved to another (and I got placed in the front row again… go figure). It was a little better this time because while Mike was across the court, I got the chance to talk to some Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders. Hey, what’s a basketball game without cheerleaders, right? They were used to chatting with people (whether they enjoyed it or did it for obligatory reasons, I dunno), so a few of us I wiled away some time with a nice chat with some nice eye candy. (As you might expect, it wasn’t long before the basketball players wandered in our direction for a little strutting and preening to impress said eye candy. Whether it worked… much like chatting, I imagine the girls are used to it.)

Along with the conversation, a few people wanted to have their pictures taken with the cheerleaders. I can’t imagine what was going through the minds of those guys… Okay, I can imagine—I would have had my picture taken as well if I’d had a camera. I only bring it up because of something the cheerleaders did for the photos. Each time, they would stand with one leg straight and on their toes and stick the knee out with the other leg (it’s called a toe flair). Why do they do it? I asked and the cheerleader didn’t know. It’s just something they do. Hey, whatever floats your longship…

Oh, and two girls sitting one seat away recognized me from TV. Not that surprising, but it still amuses me when people struggle to think of where they know me from: they ask where I grew up, where I went to school, where I went to college, where I work, am I their baby’s daddy… I get a little fidgety when guys ask me the last one, but they’re usually satisfied when I tell them about Beauty and the Geek, so it’s all good.

A bunch of us were getting bored, so we watched the basketball players shooting hoops and play a little 5-on-5 for a while. Then the stunt director (the guy who showed people how to not hurt themselves while falling down and who played the referee who did the front flip) was showing one of the players how to bounce off the standard properly without breaking anything. Run, jump up, turn your shoulder into the standard, then land on the opposite shoulder. If you try leading with your face and landing on your back… the game is gonna be 5-on-4 pretty quick.

Those guys finished up and we kept sitting around for a while, so I eventually started yelling cross-court to Mike. When I got his attention, I pointed towards the standard to tell him he should give it a shot. He looked back at me, then pointed at the standard to tell me I should give it a shot. Hell, I was bored, so why not?

I ran out onto the floor, headed to the free throw line, then ran at the standard. I heard some criticism afterwards because I didn’t jump high enough—can’t please everyone, I guess—but I hit it pretty close to full-speed with my right shoulder, fell down onto my left, then flopped down onto the floor with my arms and legs splayed wide. People might have been clapping, but I don’t remember—I was busy getting up and running at the standard again. Same action, same equal and opposite reaction. Except this time the extras wrangler came out onto the floor and told me to go sit down again.

I think it was after we finished shooting that part of the commercial when we got to break for lunch. Like I said before, we showed up at Target Center at 8:00. Lunch was at 2:30. And I was running on a bottle of Sunkist. I was hungry.

When getting our food, we walked through the area where the cast and crew were eating. Tables laid out, a nice buffet… not too bad. The extras… not too good. They made us go sit in the stands with our lunches in tiny cardboard boxes: a sandwich, a small bag of chips, a sugar cookie and an orange. Plus you could eat the box if you were really hungry. Thankfully, I managed to restrain myself.

We started up again after lunch and, since I was in the front row behind Mike before, I wasn’t allowed to be in the next scene. Hey, no skin off my neck. It just meant I didn’t get to sit in the stands and get flashed (by a giant flashbulb, not the directors). I was sitting near the light when they flashed it once—it felt hot. Really hot. I changed seats.

I was casually watching as the stunt guy get dressed up in a tiger suit to be the mascot. He was holding one of those shirt launchers, but when the flash goes off, he gets dazed, starts tumbling down the stairs and shoots a t-shirt out onto the court (which eventually hits a player in the nuts). They filmed it a couple times, making sure the stunt guy fell properly and shot the launcher in the proper direction, but I was busy talking to the crew members.

To my delight, the ones I spoke to the most were female (plus Mike, so that was cool). There was the costume girl again, though she didn’t seem quite as friendly, maybe because I ran out of Communist Russia jokes. Then I met Carrie, the makeup girl, who was much cooler. Her job was to powder people’s faces (and bald people’s heads) when they were “glistening” and reflecting too much light. She also used a tiny fan on Mike a couple times because, hey, he’s sitting in front of bright lights, fully clothed with a fleece vest on… he would have been comfy in 50-degree weather with a breeze.

Mike asked me at one point what the colored bracelets I always wear signify. I don’t want to give away any names or relations here in case the people involved don’t want the info spread across the known universe, but I told Carrie and him that the purple one on my right wrist is for lupus and the neon green one is for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (the bracelet glows in the dark, so even in the middle of the night, you always know where your wrist is).

Carrie knew someone with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, so we shared stories while they continued to shoot the scene. When they were done and the stunt guy had taken his last tumble for a couple hours, Carrie headed off and said she’d pray for the person I wear the bracelet for. Given that I had known her for all of fifteen minutes, I thought that was a pretty sweet gesture.

And I know some of you are asking, “You were on TV to get phone numbers and you didn’t get hers? You fool!” I’d share your concern, but I ended up chatting with her again and casually found out that she has both a daughter (not that important) and a husband (that important). No phone number for you, sucka! But she was pretty sweet nonetheless.

Then it was time to move aaaaaaall over the place. “Through the magic of computers”, we got to move from section to section, filling up each camera angle so that eventually, copying and pasting our image would make the stadium look full. The process would have gone faster, but a bunch of the extras were already jumping ship—they wanted wings really bad. So we’d move, they’d tell some people to shift around, have people in two rows of seats move to different areas of seats… really tedious. Especially since we had to go through the various levels of cheering each time.

They decided it was time to focus on aspects of the game, so we all got lined up in a couple rows behind the commentators’ desk and across the court from the cameras. Shot after shot after shot and the directors were never satisfied. What was worse, they asked what level we had been cheering at during similar scenes and one woman piped up that we were at Level 3 while the rest of us said 2. For reasons that escape me, the directors decided that said woman’s opinion overruled everyone else’s.

You would be amazed at how quickly Level 3 can deteriorate into Level 2 after 12 hours of cheering. You wouldn’t be amazed at how disgruntled a shrinking group of extras can get after a 10-12 hour day moves into the 13th and 14th hours of filming.

We extras thought there wasn’t that much left to do, but the directors kept having their moments of inspiration and went back onto the court to try something else. (Of course, one of those moments of inspiration was when it occurred to the directors that maybe we wouldn’t be excited about our team missing an easy layup to win the game…) My stomach sank every time they moved in our direction, but looked straight ahead instead of up in the stands (I don’t think I had enough energy to be pissed off about it by then).

I give credit to everyone who stayed. Instead of storming out with a lot of yelling and screaming, we simply tried to provide little hints that it was time to be done, but it never really sank in.

• A group of us started singing a few verses of “Nah-nah-nah-nah, nah-nah-nah-nah, hey, hey, hey, goodbye…”
• One of the directors walked out and told us, “Hang in there.” I gave a quiet response of “I got your ‘hangin’ right here” with the requisite crotch grab, which earned me a couple high-fives from other extras (even though I used the crotch-grabbing hand).
• The same director told us “One more”, which in Hollywood-speak means “Not one more.” To drive home the point, I said (louder this time), “You said that a couple ‘One more’s ago.” He gave me the strangest look when I said that…

Finally (for really-real this time, but we didn’t know it yet), they moved us to one last section for some more cheering and… well, I probably shouldn’t say “us” here, given that I moved off to the side to talk with Carrie and some other lady instead. It was much more fun to reveal that I had been on a reality show than feign more excitement in the stands. I think my favorite part of that conversation was when the lady asked if I was an extra or part of the crew. Either I blended in really well or she was simply surprised that I would skip out of the final scene.

For those who might be concerned about my getting in trouble for whatever reason, I was well beyond caring at that point. Besides, I figured I had a card up my sleeve: try to tell me get in the scene and I’ll point out that I saved their collective asses when pointing out that I should move back behind Mike. If they couldn’t appreciate that fact… suck it. That’s the mindset I had towards the directors. Not the crew—I was okay with hearing about Carrie’s daughter and husband—but my level of tolerance outside of that was minimal at best.

Then, when the clock reached close to 10:00pm, it was over. They finally got the multitude of hints and called out, “That’s a wrap!” To avoid a riot (it would have been a massive riot, but there weren’t enough of us left), they provided lots of lots of pizza for the remaining extras. I’m guessing that the cast and crew got first dibs on the food, but there was enough left that we got a decent dinner. I myself ate five pieces of pizza and grabbed two cans of pop. Hey, I was running mostly on a tiny boxed lunch for the last… for a long period of time. I was hungry again.

After filling up my tummy, I grabbed my five extra shirts, my two extra pairs of pants and collected my very-well-earned fifty dollars in cash. (I went ahead and spent almost all of it the next day when I went to see the Minnesota Rollergirls beat the crap out of each other, so watching that was a good way to ease the tension of the commercial shoot.) I hung out for a while since Jordan had to wait until all of the Walden-based recruits had left, so once they were all gone, the two of us headed out the door into a cold winter’s night.

We had taken a chilly walk to the electric rail station and rode into the city that morning, but the temperature combined with a general sense of exhaustion inspired Jordan to call a cab to drive us back to his place. I was sooooo happy to accept his offer—large quantities of clothing carried for blocks and blocks gets heavy after a while.

When we got back, I ran upstairs to grab my other stuff, headed down to my car and drove home. I got back at about 11:00, at which point I went to my bedroom and cried myself to sleep. Okay, not really—I was still a little wound up due to the frustrations of the day and was busy thinking about how to turn those thoughts into a blog entry. As you can tell, it’s been an epic saga and took a while to put into print (or electrons, depending on how you look at it).

So now I hope that people understand why my feelings about Buffalo Wild Wings have turned into a love/hate relationship. I still think the food is yummy, but if I ever get a message about them shooting a commercial, I may have to delete the message, turn off the computer, light it on fire and throw it through one of the restaurants’ windows. (Hey, karma’s a bitch…) Considering everything that happened, though, I really wish that the dinner provided by BWW actually came from BWW. It would have been the perfect opportunity to eat some wings with Caribbean Jerk sauce.