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  • In the early 2010s, Cape Girardeau, MO was chosen as a location for some of the filming of Gone Girl. I lived there and it was the talk of the town. People were running into Ben Affleck at the local Andy's and shit.

    Meanwhile they put out a casting call for extras. I didn't care about it but of course my girlfriend and her cousin went psycho about it and signed us up. We waited in line with at least a thousand other people only to finally get up there, and all they did was take a headshot and send us on our way. The girls were all disappointed that there wasn't anything else to it while I the introvert just laughed about it.

    Until I was the one they called back. Not only that, but it turns out they picked me to be a stand-in for Boyd Holbrook. I spent a week hanging out on David Fincher's set, occasionally doing work while trying to avoid getting in trouble for doing things like accidentally sitting in Rosamund Pike's chair. Then one of the assistant directors' mother died and he had to leave, so they "promoted" me to production assistant. At one point I was sent to look for and found David Fincher's missing iPhone.

    Fucking surreal man. But I've got the 20th Century Fox W-2s to prove it.

    • Is Fincher a kind person? He’s certainly talented. Thanks for sharing this story.

  • Walking home from the bus stop, this much younger little kindergarten girl who I could tell had a crush on me, turned to me and said, “you drive me cookoo bananas!” then hastily turned into the street without looking where she was immediately hit by an oncoming car (which slammed on their brakes at the point of impact) and launched literally like 5 meters.

    I can still see her flying through the air in slow motion in my memory.

    The neighborhood Mom who hit her was inconsolable.

    Best part of the story (and the only reason I would relay such a tragic event in this thread): she was somehow almost unscathed and was at school the next week no worse for the wear by all accounts.

    She more than earned the nickname, “Fender Bender” given to her by the mean kids.

    • Glad she was okay, damn. That story made me remember Stacy from Wayne's World

  • Once i had a bike accident. The car was parked and the driver opened the door milliseconds before i drove by.

    The bike smashed into his door and i went flying onto the other lane, where luckily no cars were driving at the time.

    The movie like thing was that i landed rolling a few times and ended up on my feet without any injury or whatsoever. The bike was trashed, as was the car's door. The driver was also pretty shocked about what happened. I was just wondering why nothing happened to me.

    Ok, i was young ( 26 ) and I'm sure my body wouldn't be so lucky nowadays.

  • Once I worked a double with a coworker I had a small crush on. Towards the end of the shift, my sister called me. She was staying in a rural area on the other side of the state. She had started to drive home, and something had popped her tire. She had no spare, and no where was open... and she had an international flight in the morning. I told her, yup yup, I'll go get her.

    As soon as I got off my call, my co worker insisted that she go with me. "You're going to need a co pilot." After some back and forth, somehow we ended up taking her car even. That was at 8pm. It was really nice at first. I learned a lot about her. She told me about her fiance, and her upbringing in the south. We got to our destination at midnight, and both of us were bushed. We asked my sister if she could take the wheel for the way home. We both fell asleep.

    My sister hit a deer at around 2am. We were still about 90 min from my car. Who do you call at 2am to drive that far to turn around and drive all the way back? I started making calls. We were dropped off at this truck stop; I am trying to be strong for these ladies; one of whom just had her car totaled and one of whom is my literal baby sister. One of my friends made the drive; and Ive got stories about her (which also might just be movie esqe). In any case, I took my co worker home, and then handed my keys to my sister gingerly, because she had some stuff to do at her house before my dad took her to the air port. She made her flight with 20 minutes to spare, at 830 am. My car was the first one she left in working order that night.

    I spent the next month helping my coworker get around while my sister was abroad. Didn't get the girl, but that's the story of my life. This had stakes, and acts, and a second act turn!

  • The most movie-like event for me was when I got a job working on a cruise ship and they sent me and a bunch of other people out to Baltimore for training. When I got there, my luggage never came down the coral thing and I ended up missing the bus to the training facility. A couple others had the same issue and the company had us stay at a hotel nearby the airport for the night. It was me, another guy who was gay, and two girls. We all had dinner together and then went to our single room and the girls were arguing over who's tits were better because one had implants and the other didn't. So they asked our opinion and had us feel them up at the same time to compare.

    I honestly couldn't tell the difference. They were both awesome.

  • I did a summer contract in forestry, up north, in the mountains, middle of nowhere. We had to get into an area that was beyond a pipeline blockade - meaning a group of indigenous leaders were blocking a pipeline from being built on their land.

    The higher ups negotiated with them while we spent days off gaining bad reputations in town.

    When we were allowed through, they welcomed us individually and explained their reasons for being cautious. They told us that people dressed as (or actually were) cops tried to convince them they were on public land and force them to leave, they had people pretending to be blockade protesters who came in and tried to burn down their buildings, they had people blow up their signs, they had helicopters drop off equipment and workers beyond the blockade in the night. Taking all this with a heavy pinch of salt, we got through to work.

    Not an hour after we started, black goddamn helicopters showed up. About ten of them. They hung out all the first day, there were fewer the second and only one for the next two. And they were low, I could feel the wind from the rotors at times.

    I don't know why. We discussed it over plenty of drinks without coming to any good conclusions. I don't know if they thought we were with the blockade and wanted to intimidate us, or why the pipeline people didn't talk to the forestry people to figure out we were just labourers. As it turns out that kind of thing does happen in real life.

    A bunch of us took big shits in the open where they could watch.

  • In college, rowing for state championship. Sitting in the bow position rowing against the best team in the state. You're not supposed to look out of the boat because you need to keep your head inline so as not to upset the boat. But because I was at the front I could see the other boat peripherally. When the gun went off and we started rowing I expected to see the back of their boat disappear, but it didn't. And after pulling for a couple hundred meters they were still there. We were IN this thing. We weren't losing.

    To explain a little about rowing. The coxswain basically communicates with the stroke, the person right in front of him, the strongest rower that the rest of us follow. But he has a bull horn, or at least back then that's what we used. So he communicates with the whole boat. If he calls a "power 10," that means we are supposed to take 10 harder strokes to pick up some speed. A good coxswain knows when to call these. Obviously you can't pull harder 100% of the time or you'll burn out. But this time he was calling them more often than usual sending a subtle message that we were in the race of our lives. You can also hear the other boat calling power 10's and we were matching them. The boat started to have what we call "swing." This is when the rowers are all in sync producing a sort of harmony. The boat feels like it's going faster. Like it's up on plane (not a real thing in an 8 man racing shell).

    As the race proceeded, we were neck and neck. At one point the boats got close. Our oars, nearly made contact with their oars. But it wasn't our boat that was off coarse. It was theirs. We held the line as they corrected. They were supposed to beat us, but we were right there. We could hear the excitement in the voice of our coxswain. The finish line was approaching. We were all fighting from hitting the wall. Pushing harder than we ever had, knowing we had a chance. We heard the call from the other boat for a power 10 but our coxswain did not call one. I could see the back of the other boat pull slightly ahead and I thought, this is where they play their trump card. Ten strokes passed by and still nothing from our coxswain, we knew the finish line was coming up but nothing. At this point there is nothing else going through you mind. It's just raw focus. Like tunnel vision. Then it happened. Our coxswain called out, "Power to the finish!" And then something like, "Row like hell! We've got this!" In my peripheral vision that boat was still right there, just like we were still at the start line. They had one of those old timey metal flag things that would rotate 90 degrees making a ching sound, then again when the next boat passed. It had gone ching-ching rapidly almost like a cha-ching, because we had crossed the finish line so close to each other. Then the moment we had been waiting for. He called, "Let it run," meaning we could stop rowing the race was over. He kept us going straight while we all collapsed, laying backward in the boat, oars spread on the water haphazard. I could hear a guy in the other boat dry heaving. After a moment, when it momentum was spent, we were all just sitting there looking at each other asking the rowers on the other team, who one. No one knew. It was a photo finish. We had to wait for the results. It felt like forever. Our teammates were on the shore yelling something to us. There was some chaos we didn't understand and I realized then, this was just like being in the movies.

  • I somehow got the highest possible score in an English exam without properly studying for it, and I ended up getting voted as the class rep after a single speech.

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