How I Became A 'New Moon' Extra (from MSN.com)

I love the articles I find on my home page at work, especially when they are about The Twilight Saga!  Look what I found this morning when loggin on from work!

How I Became A ‘New Moon’ Extra


By Myriam Gabriel-Pollock

For MSN Movies

Don’t let Maile Roundtree’s appearance fool you. She looks like a normal adult woman. She’s a wife and a mom who owns a successful jewelry design business. She loves to entertain and to travel, spend time with family and friends, and curl up with a good book. But underneath this seemingly conventional exterior lurks one of those people. Yes, Roundtree is a Twihard, defined by UrbanDictionary.com as, “a serious and obsessive reader of ‘The Twilight Saga’ by Stephenie Meyer.” As the Twilight Superfan on MSN, I was awash in awe and envy when I first heard about Roundtree’s Twi-umphant quest to be an extra on the “New Moon” set in Italy. Over coffee and pancakes, she happily shared her fantastic story.

Roundtree, her husband, and young daughter were on holiday in Cortona, Italy, when she learned that “New Moon” would begin filming in nearby Montepulciano on the day they were scheduled to return to the U.S. Though she had discovered the “Twilight” books only four weeks before, she devoured the series in a matter of days, and her husband graciously let her delay her return so that she could take part. With a new plane ticket and her family returning home without her, Roundtree headed to Montepulciano.




When she arrived in the picturesque Italian hilltown it was already overrun with hundreds of starry-eyed young girls and “crazy moms like me” from all over Europe. Roundtree likens this female pilgrimage to the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” with actor Robert Pattinson drawing in the faithful like Devil’s Tower. She had to ask the film crew three times to be cast as an extra before they finally relented.

[Continued from MSN Movies here...]

Montepulciano was already beautifully decked out with red banners, which were actually owned by the town for use during the Palio, an annual athletic contest and festival celebrated in many Italian towns, with roots going back to the Middle Ages. In the wine-producing town of Montepulciano, the contest requires the competitors to roll a huge wine barrel through the steep, winding streets; the first person to the piazza wins
 

Her first day on set started very early, but Roundtree gleefully admits, “I have never been so happy to be up at 4:00am!” Although it was still dark out and the rest of the town was asleep, the film crew had no problem getting 1200 extras signed in and distributing the red cloaks. Through most of this day the extras got a crash course in the unusual rhythms of filmmaking, waiting up to three hours for a shot to be set up, three quick minutes of filming, and then starting the cycle all over again.


For most of the extras the most difficult thing to deal with was the heat, up to 100 degrees in the unshaded cobblestone piazza. The red woolly cloaks were incredibly hot, particularly for the women, who had to keep their hoods up most of the time. Perhaps not surprisingly, this was because most of the extras were female, and the director, Chris Weitz, did not want the crowd in the piazza scene to look so obviously female-dominated.
 
Read the complete article here