DVR Note : Ok, all --> that has been taken from the Darling Violetta Official Site and... Im not sure if its legal or not... (Yeah, I suck. You be quiet) What you expect me to do? Reword --> all that? YEEEEEEah, sure. Anyways, I'll cower in the corner from fear of lawyers hunting me down now. So thats the disclaimer. ---> All that text is not mine, im just borrowing it. 
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"It's All Ass": The Buffy ChroniclesAt last! Our first foray into the living rooms of Neilson families! Will it be high ratings for DV or cancellation faster than Magic Johnson? Only time will tell, but read on for a blow-by-blow (suck by suck? These are vampires after all) account: The Buffy Chronicles. 12:30 We disembark in a Santa Monica parking lot where we receive cryptic allusions to The Shuttle, a phantasmagorical carriage to wisk us away to Dreamland. Several hot minutes later the van arrives and we stuff our bags in with a few others of similiar ilk: the co-conspirators of atmosphere, the bodies of background, the icing on the visual cake...the Extras. We met Fab (the Nice Boyfriend) en route, and he really is nice. Good casting. A short drive deposits us on the Slayer lot and we soon locate our forward command center, the upwardly mobile Home Office--the trailer. 12:50 Having been on the lot a whole five minutes, Cami decides our dressing room Won't Work, as if anybody really needs more than a 2' x 5' space for 5 people?! So she immediately removes the sign on the adjoining room to give us some space to stretch out. And it might have worked had it not been for Paul the A.D. who happened to be standing witness to the flagrant desecration of his trailer. After a light spanking we knew we were going to be his new best friends for the day, so we decided to wait until he had his back turned before hurling the TV out the door. Wardrobe ideas include a full body shave by a midget, self-immolation by the bass player...most are scrapped. 1:00 Do you know the muffin man? We do. He's the breakfast god of catering. Yum. 1:30 Places, people! We follow a herd of Background (a special sub-class of Extras) onto the set. The Bronze is relatively deserted, activity currently focused elsewhere on the set, but we meet Seth, Nick, Alyson and David and other various and sundry cast & crew members. Very nice people who, for the moment, are unaware we're a Real Band and not some bizarre concoction of the wardrobe department. An instant classic photo is snapped of Seth jamming on the crap drums with Steve on bass. King John King, the show's music coordinator and all-around Slick Guy, gives us a tour, including the Alley Set. All the phones are props. To make a call you have to bring your own phone. Or a walkie-talkie. Anybody who's anybody on the set has one, and some of the Really Important People have ones with a headset. We make no calls. 1:45 The scene shifts into the room and a crush of crew floods the place, bustling around props, lighting, the camera, Sarah a.k.a. Buffy, extras, actors, makeup, wardrobe, lion trainer, mime... We get less attention than the floor. At least some guy's running around laying colored strips of tape on that. We stand on stage, surveying the pandemonium below, feeling something akin to the redwood trees with highways drilled through them. It's there, but you don't pay much attention to it, it's a tree. Take a picture, honey. We're driving through a tree and you haven't even been drinking. 2 something Strains of "Cure" on the P.A. Starting and stopping. First verse. Background in place. People will be dancing to us for a change. How unusual. Steve is faced with air-drumming on the most pathetic drumset ever hollowed out of a tree. (Should have let it grow so a highway could be drilled through it.) But our name proudly hangs behind us. The only person who should have to ask who the band was is Ray Charles. A few takes in, a lady representing wardrobe comes onstage and Cami's busted again. Seems her dress is a wee bit too see-through for Family Television, necessitating a strategic tying-together of her feather boa. Troublemaker! What a real DV show would do to these people... 3:15 Raid the backstage food platter. Cause we can. Jymm hasn't figured out the meaning of the buzzer that keeps sounding. Are we quiet now or can we make noise? And do we have to move in slow motion during Quiet Time? Apparently Jymm thinks so. Looks like he's having some sort of painful Marcel Marceau flashback. We watch like a crowd waiting for something interesting to happen. Nothing does. We return our attention to the free food. 4:00 During one of the longer breaks we're hanging in a school lobby, admiring the posters admonishing us not to sniff glue (it "burns the brain"), and posing the age-old question: What color are a smoker's lungs? Toblacko!! To our delight we learn we'll be having lunch at five. No bucket of KFC for these Extras. The call sheet for the episode lists us as 5 sideline musicians. Sideline? Are we injured? Did we not make the cut? How do we get to be frontline musicians? Is it dangerous? Heady discussion indeed. One of Jymm's contact lenses starts giving him trouble to the point where his eye is running freely and horribly bloodshot, leaving him legally blind. (No Jymm, the camera's over there!) 4:45 One of the seemingly endless supply of A.D.'s, this one a nice woman with a walkie-talkie/headset and just the slightest hint of mania in her eyes, ushers us back onto the set. "Cure" again in the P.A. First chorus now (after about 200 passes on the first verse). Buffy is shunning a potential suitor, Fab the Nice Boyfriend. (Buffy's asked if she likes the song ["Cure"]. Buffy says yeah, she likes it a lot!) And the band plays on, then the music cuts out, it's dialogue with us making like we're still playing and the extras making like they can still hear what they're dancing to. If the finished products looks a little off, now you know why. Movie magic. 5:30 Lunchtime! We join a queue (after the actors, of course) for the foodline. Seth is the tipster: go for the fruit shakes. We do. They're good. Pasta, shark, steak, salad, fruit shakes...we could get seriously used to this. We sit at a table with Fab and Seth and Buffy herself, along with a few others. Some are recognized. Most aren't. We eat like ravenous hyenas. 6:00 Naptime. De-nied! We're first after lunch. A dance number. Disco, no less. To "Cure"! Who'd have thought? We do the shot a few times until one of the actors is winded. Then we do it one more time. There's a rumor floating around we might do "Blue Sun" in a second club scene. There's another rumor that after the dialogue is done they'll film us doing "Cure" in its entirety. Multiple angles. Closeups. We wait. 7:30 Scattered around the stage, we lazily watch them work through a laborious scene involving damned near everybody but us. We watch. We yawn. We've since realized all our extra wardrobe choices were for naught: we could have walked on set in gorilla costumes and nobody would have cared. Us trees wait. 8:30 Fully calling our photogenicity into question, we're informed that They have decided They already have enough footage of the band. There won't be any closeups of anybody airplaying anything. We're thanked and dismissed. All the flyers we brought for the Martini Lounge disappear. Come to the show, we tell them. We're not SAG, we tell them, we really do play. 8:35 Raid the backstage food platter. Stock up. Make for the door with fruit cups and granola bars cradled in arms. Cause we can. 8:50 Back at the forward command center, the latrine has apparently backed up and the air is thick with somebody's ass. We hurriedly gather our things and pile into one of the vans retrieving the Background and Sideline Musicians for deposit back at the parking lot. Questions: Are you guys a real band? Questions: You mean that was your song? Questions: Will you be back tomorrow? Better to leave 'em wanting more. |
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