• STUNT_GRANNY@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I worked at a Waffle House as a teenager, and ended up acting in an episode of some kind of show for MTV, called My Life As Liz.

    By which I mean, there were a few actors and a camera crew camped out in a booth, and the director wanted me to bring them waffles, as a part of whatever scene they were filming. It was the middle of a random Tuesday, the place normally would’ve been dead, it was a nice change of pace.

    I wasn’t paid or credited for this by MTV, just “being on TV was enough” according to the Waffle House’s franchise owner. The show’s production was also pretty low-budget, non-union; I only remember four or five people on the crew, plus three actors in the scene.

    I ended up making dozens of waffles for these actors, who would only eat a couple bites per take, if anything. Some of the crew ate them on their lunch break, but the majority of the waffles were just thrown away after each take. To the production’s credit, they did pay for every single one. After about four hours, they’d apparently got all the shots they needed, packed everything up, and left.

    Several years later, unrelated, AMC used a car I owned for a few episodes of Fear The Walking Dead. I was never on set for that though; their production company apparently had a “car wrangler” who reached out to me. They bought the car off of me, took it away, and when they’d wrapped the season’s shooting a few weeks later, they called me to offer first dibs to buy the car back, or else it would’ve been auctioned off.

    When I got the car back, it was covered in fake dirt, the Landau top had been cut up to make the car appear in worse shape than it actually was, and there were several fake bullet holes in the bodywork from a gunfight scene. Although, in the take that made it to air, you never actually see those bullet holes on the car.