In high school and college I performed or worked on over 100 plays. I loved theater then and still love it today. Unfortunately, the last time I performed in a play was in college when I played Stanley in Brighton Beach Memoirs.
I went to high school in Broken Arrow, OK, which is a suburb of Tulsa. Tulsa is the location of several books by S.E. Hinton. Two of those books were made into a movie and filmed at my high school: The Outsiders and Rumblefish. They were directed by Francis Ford Coppola, of Godfather fame.
I had the pleasure of going to a casting call with him and I was called back for screen testing. It was an awesome experience! He was pleasant and very instructive. As I was reading lines with a few others around the table, he coached me and told me to slow down. He laughed at how fast I was reading. The screen tests were held in a big warehouse type room in Tulsa. Everyone testing was sitting around the makeshift set so not only were you reading with Coppola and the others in the scene, you were also reading in front of your competition.
I was so excited to get called back for work. Honestly, I can’t remember how many days it was. On the first day of filming, they asked several of us to read some lines. I did very well and the casting lady told me that if they added any lines to the classroom scene, I would get them. The classroom scene shown in the photo above took hours to shoot even though it was only about 10 seconds in the movies. Diane Lane was a little snooty as she complained about the heat, needing more juice, and with how she looked.
During the filming I tried to do something silly on film and I succeeded. They took several shots and I was playing with my nose. If you ever watch the film, you can see in one of the shots that I was so doing. You can almost see it in the photo below. It is very obvious if you actually watch the scene on video.
Here is a list of folks who were in the movie: Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Mickey Rourke, Nicholas Cage, Dennis Hopper, Tom Waits, and Laurence Fishburne to name a few.
No autographs please.
The Umenum 