Confessions of a Friday Night Lights extra

Not so much anymore. I have a production company and band.

 

Although I wouldn't mind getting back into it eventually. My main concern lately has been the band. But if I ever do jump back into acting it'd prob be for one of our own productions.

 

Didn't catch this before but how ironic, an ex of mine just became one of the main characters on GH... so yes I have been brushing up.

I'll hit yall with some more stories once I return to ATX

 

One of the hidden perks about working on Friday Night Lights is that you could throw a rock and the person you hit more than likely smoked bud. So people would often secretly grab a few of their other extras friends here and there and would meet in their cars a bit before the call times (aka the time needed to be "clocked in" and on location) to smoke a few bowls before starting work. Especially on game days seeing as they were the longest work days with the largest windows of downtime. Only after a half day your high is gone and you're weed groggy trying to score more trail mix from the snack cart.

So one day we were chopping it up with one of the reoccurring characters that has popped up in many episodes (wont say any names because 1. protection, but mainly 2. I don't remember his name although honestly 3. No one in the industry would give two sh1ts if anyone found out they smoked regardless) and we'll just refer to him as ROC (aka ReOccuring Character).. and one of my fellow extras mentioned how they were coming down from the 'morning' bowl. (Time isn't a factor on sets other than being bookmarks on when to be wherever.. but no matter if you're starting the shooting day at 9am or 9pm, the first meal is breakfast and "lunch" occurs midway through the shooting schedule regardless of 4 hr, 6 hr or 12 hr days) And ROC's ears perked up and was like "Y'all smoke???" He goes on to tell us how he too had been making secret visits to his car to recharge on his THC vitamins only he'd even do it during the lunch break. As mentioned before, the food was so scarce on game days many people swarmed for lunch and were never wandering elsewhere in fear of not eating. So ROC started letting us accompany him to his car for a quick bowl and often times even hooked it up with the fancy food they'd feed the day players with speaking parts aka an "Under-5" (Anyone with 5 lines or less of scripted dialogue for that episode or shooting schedule gets a mini trailer, make-up, full meals, the whole package)

And for those unaware - as far as the roster of CREW members working a television show, it's HUGE. There's people running like chaos back and forth doing anything from make up runs, wardrobe, gripping/lighting, equipment, assistants, 5 levels of producers, 2nd units, 3rd units, the list is endless. Those same people typically keep their head on a swivel to watch anyone outside of the cast/crew getting into mischief as well. So whenever you're wandering around by yourself its the equivalent of New Yorkers being able to spot out the tourists. Only we had our special friend the ROC! So anytime a known under-5'er is walking around with some others, everyone automatically assumes they know where they are going and that they are heading somewhere they were instructed to. This gave us the golden ticket to head out to the parking lot and spark up without any interference.

Well this became habit. To the point when ROC wasn't working, we'd be pulling a mission of getting to the parking lot to toke and quickly slide back in line for lunch (often missing the boat). And each day we're getting more comfortable doing this until myself and 3 others were heading out to the parking lot when a wardrobe lady chased us down. She caught us JUST as we passed the crew area and were breaking into parking lot city limits. Everyone froze up. I looked at the three others faces and they looked like deers caught in headlights. No one was going to say anything and I pulled something that had always worked for me when caught in the middle of skipping school mid-day…



CREW LADY: HEY!! Hey you kids!! Where do y'all think y'all are going???"

OTHER EXTRAS:

ME:

CREW LADY: …Well????

ME: We're sneaking off to my car to smoke some weed!…….

OTHER EXTRAS:

-brief silence-

CREW LADY: …………………..[sarcastically] "Well don't get caught! "


And walked off leaving us with our golden ticket to hot box

Lol We were all status.

Suffice to say, we decided to wait till ROC was working for lunch-break bowls from then on out



ABRIDGED VERSION
- Found out one of the Reoccuring Characters (aka R.O.C.) smoked buddah during lunch breaks in his car
- Me and 2 or 3 other extras started accompanying the ROC to his car to smoke with him
- To reach parking lot, one had to walk through the crew area
- Seeing as he was a ROC, he pretty much had free reign to walk about the crew area without anyone questioning him and he'd be our invisible cloak as no one questioned us whenever we were with him
- But if we're wandering around by ourselves, crew would interrogate and wrangle us back with the other extras
- Made this a habit to the point we'd sneak to the parking lot on days ROC didn't work until we got caught
- As wardrobe lady interrogated us, all of us froze up until I decided to throw a hail mary
- I proclaimed to her that we were "sneaking off to my car to smoke weed"
- After a scary silence, she smiles and sarcastically tells us not to get caught and goes on about her duty
- We reverted back to only smoking with ROC on days he worked after such close call


More to come...

 

Lol sorry.. I've cut it out a bit since these posts

Hell yeah man! He was a cool ass dude. Prob the coolest one there out of the all of the main stars. Here's a lil write up I made before of my experience with him..

Spoiler

Landry
Jesse Plemons is AWESOME. He was easily the most down to earth of the cast. It really felt like he was just another one of the extras. We would all have little side games that we'd play amongst us extras to keep everything entertaining and he was the only one of the principle actors that would take part in them. Ex: I started a game we'd play on game nights during some of the two-hour windows of down time called "Getting Got" where you're talking to someone face to face, and someone else gets on all fours behind said person and you quickly nudge to trip them backwards. Then you yell "YOU GOT GOT" and everyone points and laughs. Well Landry decided to get ME got hahaha Thus throwing his hat into the ring.

Plus dude was really funny. Lol A lot of the stars would try to entertain us extras and be goofy and funny from time to time but would mainly provoke courtesy laughter. Jesse Plemons was actually funny. I don't think anyone else on the cast could have executed the subtle awkward behavior/situational humor that he could if you watch the series. I was happy to see him in Observe and Report although he still wasn't given an ample amount of time to flex his funny there.

 

So do you want the white emoticons or not, dammit?!