According to today’s Fréttablaðið, old Clint Eastwood and co. have been having a spot of trouble with the 400-or-so extras on the Flags of Our Fathers set. Seems they’re becoming increasingly disinclined to show up for work. A couple of factors are cited for the rather bleh! attendance – first, the novelty appears to have worn off and boredom set in [anyone who has ever come near a film set will not be surprised to hear this], and second, the food is, well, non-existent. Evidently the poor mistreated extras are having to sit around for hours on end – in temperatures considerably lower than when the action first got underway – without getting so much as a crumb or two to chew on.
Those are the reasons Fréttablaðið speaks of, anyway. Another factor that YT has heard drifting through the grapevine is that school has started and they haven’t killed off all the extras that needed to start school. Evidently that’s what they were aiming for, but according to reports they’ve been so disorganized that they’ve botched that bit. So they’ve got all these extras that are supposed to be running around getting killed – but aren’t showing up because they’re at school.
OH AND THE PAY SUCKS
Personally I can’t understand why anyone would volunteer to be an extra on Flags of Our Fathers because in addition to being left to starve, those poor sods are getting paid a grand total of ISK 5,000 a day for their services [USD 75 / GBP 44] – and of course in the film industry ‘day’ means anything from daybreak to, well, whenever. Plus – and this is the shocking bit – they’ve had to sign a contract forcing them to pay something like ISK 2 million [USD 30,000 / 18,000] if they lose or damage any of the props they’re supposed to be using. [Like guns and tanks and whatnot.] This caused a lot of well-documented concern among the extras earlier in the summer, since some of them have had to jump into the sea and stuff, and they were worried about their props – oops! – accidentally sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
But apparently some union or other got on the case and the production company went on national tv and proclaimed that this was just to guarantee that they didn’t run off with the guns because what with 400 extras iceland could soon have a gun problem of usa-caliber and nobody wanted that and really it was nothing to worry about and let shooting now resume as soon as possible please thank you very much.
I think it would have been a much better idea if they had just got all the soldiers off the US army base in Keflavík to be extras. After all they’d know all the right moves and don’t speak with an Icelandic accent and are right in the vicinity and… why didn’t anyone think of this brilliant idea before???
THE WEATHER
Rained a whole bunch of drops this morning but now it’s stopped and is sort of grey and blustery and fall-like-cold. Am trying to decide whether to attempt driving out of the city for some blueberry picking today – the weather has not been conducive to blueberry picking lately and soon all the little blueberries will be all shrivelled and withered and YT will not be able to make that pie she’s been planning to make for, like, the last several years. Temps at the mo’ are 7°C and daybreak was at 05.13, nightfall is due at 21.40.