The Day We Became Famous

Our agency got drafted as extras for a film shoot at Sat.1, which meant a full day of running around in costume looking busy. First thing: they didn’t like the slogans on our shirts—too on-brand, apparently—so we got marched off to a costume woman who’d apparently decided that all agency people needed to look exactly like each other. Mission accomplished, I guess.

The actual work was ridiculous. We’d run through the hallway, sit at desks, flip through magazines, pretend to care about spreadsheets. The kind of performance art that everyone knows is fake but nobody says anything about. In between takes, we were stuck with Caroline Beil, who was genuinely nice about the whole thing and didn’t mind when we started watching YouTube videos on a break instead of looking contemplative.

There was this film assistant—actually the best part of the day—who couldn’t stop laughing when she sat at my Mac and found Photo Booth. I don’t know what she was doing, but it was clearly funnier than whatever we were supposed to be doing on set.

One of the early scenes: I threw a newspaper across the room. Completely unintentional. No idea if they kept it in. The food was decent, which is honestly the best you can hope for on something like this.

The whole thing aired somewhere in October, though I never actually watched it. Still not sure if that newspaper made the cut.