 Title: Leatherheads, feature film
Cast: George Clooney, Renee Zellweger
Extra: Thomas Wolfe
Producers: Grant Heslov, George Clooney, Casey Silver
Director: George Clooney
Script: George Clooney, Stephen Schiff, Duncan Brantley, Rick Reilly
The trip of a lifetime
It has long been a dream of mine to travel in time. Being a history major, there are many places I would love to see, people I’d dare to meet, experiences to redeem from lost eras: to listen at Jesus’ feet as he taught on the hillsides outside Jerusalem; to drink with Hemmingway in a Parisian cafe; to watch the Lakota hunt buffalo along the plains or dance with them around a midnight fire.
It was a phone call from my friend, Jim, which got me closer to another time than I suppose I will ever get.
“I’m in a thrift store looking for wardrobe items,” Jim said over a poor cell connection. “I need an old looking white button down shirt and black pants. I’m going to be in the Leatherheads movie.”
I laughed in disbelief at first, then nervously to hide my envy.
“How did you manage that?” I asked.
Jim said that he had turned in a photo of himself to the casting agents that had come to Greenville and they needed men to fill in the crowd at the football games in the movie.
A couple of weeks earlier I had played the “part” of a paparazzo for the movie. At least, I had tried to get a few candid shots of Renee or George as they filmed in downtown Greer. I was nowhere near successful, and at 2 a.m., with a wind chill of 18 degrees, I retreated. I would scarcely think about the movie again until that phone call.
“I could get you in if you want, they still need men of all ages,” Jim said.
He had a wonderful tone in his in voice that I had heard before—slightly mischievous, a bit privileged—as if he had the last available ticket to the big game, or had somehow gotten his name on the list of the most exclusive club in town.
I told him it sounded like fun, trying to be modest and quell my giddiness. After all, if I were to be a movie star, I needed to practice playing it cool.
I took a name and phone number from Jim which I dialed as soon as he said goodbye to me. I was asked to join the cast of extras, no questions asked. As if I were being drafted as a spy in some novel, I was told to call another number for further instructions. The voice on the line told me to be at a certain place at a certain time, to dress in a certain way.
When I arrived that first day on the set, it was not unlike being drafted. I signed some papers for a minimal amount of pay, had my head shaven and was given some articles of clothing to complete my “uniform” which would grow ripe with dust and sweat over the next four days.
It was an extraordinary moment walking onto the Leatherheads movie set at Lake View Middle School in Traveler’s Rest. Men dressed in top coats and fedoras with heavily oiled hair and freshly shaven faces crowded together in clouds of bitter-sweet tobacco smoke.
Pretty young girls and elegant women, some dressed as cheerleaders and others as flappers or fur wrapped socialites, wondered to and fro, smoking, giggling and pushing up bobbed ringlets against powder white cheeks with upturned palms. They checked their makeup in reflections in windows, in compacts and car glasses and in each other’s eyes.
There were t-models and a vintage motorcycle and strapping football players making their way to the field to take their marks. They were clad in blue and mud-colored uniforms and, of course, those iconic leather skull caps for which the film was named.
The light was perfectly attuned to the scenes scheduled to play out before us. It was overcast and a bit dreary. From a southerner’s point of view, it was just as I imagined a Midwestern winter’s day would be. Over the four days I was there for filming it would turn from cool to cold to rain to a heat near unbearable for a wardrobe of topcoats and wool hats.
As a boy I grew up imagining myself to be a pirate or a cowboy or knight in shining armor. I built castles and hideouts from old refrigerator boxes when it was too cold to play outside in winter, and in summer stripped down nearly naked and performed war dances complete with red face paint and tomahawk. On a movie set, surrounded by authentic costumes and props and the excitement of imagination, it was no stretch for me to be transported to one of the greatest times in history.
So the most real time for me during the filming was not when I made my way back up the hill to the holding area from the stadium, walking only an arm’s length from George Clooney.
Nor was it the moment I came face to face with a petite blonde named Renee Zellweger, dressed in a handsome tweed jacket and sharply tailored skirt, hat drawn rakishly over one eye, with a parasol bearing attendant following closely behind.
The most real moment of my four day journey in time was the first moment I walked into the Lake View gymnasium to see a sea of other time travelers, who, by their dress and their manner resulting, with cigarettes and fedoras, furs and cloches, by their pure imagination, conjured us away to a place nearly five decades before my birth.
It was all so perfect for a silly dreamer like me. As I looked around that room I saw the friends and strangers that Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby met on their trips to the city. One gent could have been a friend of a friend who fished with Hemmingway, one young lady a budding starlet who dreamt of being the next Marlene Dietrich. There may even have been a distant cousin of the Vanderbilt’s attending, come out to see how the other half lived and to watch the barbaric spectacle of America’s new game. They could all have been apparitions and I for a moment, just a moment, I was immortal too.
It was a phone call from my friend, Jim, which got me closer to another time that I suppose I will ever get and for that I am very grateful.
It was the 1920s and I was in heaven.
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