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brad and me___________ 
A humble aerospace engineer-turned-stand-in discovers that after you've experienced the high of being mistaken for His Blondness by packs of drooling girls, the rest of life is the Pitts.
"How would you like to be Brad Pitt's stand-in on a movie called 'The Devil's Own'?" the casting director asked me. Someone in Hollywood thinks I resemble Brad-freaking-Pitt? I don't see it, but who am I to argue? As an MIT aerospace engineering grad, this couldn't be further from what I imagined my life would be like. The only stars I expected to deal with were ones with names like Alpha Centauri. My first morning on the set I was fumbling with the coffee maker when I heard the unmistakable voice of Indiana Jones ask, "Coffee ready?" I turned and tried to think of something witty and nonchalant to say, but what emerged sounded more like "duhuh um." I had definitely blown my first meeting with Harrison Ford. Next I was apprised of a stand-in's duties. A stand-in does not appear in the film. All your work is done before the scene is shot. You go through hair, makeup and wardrobe and are made to look as much like the star as possible. You do the action and say the dialogue while the director and the cinematographer make final adjustments for lenses, lighting, sound and extras placement. You may rehearse the scene for hours while the star relaxes in his trailer drinking fruit smoothies. When the set is perfect, they send for the star. What makes being a stand-in exciting is that you are in the spotlight. Crane-mounted Panaflex cameras zoom in on you, fastidious wardrobe supervisors pick lint off your shoulders and doting makeup artists blot away the sheen produced by 50,000 watts of blazing tungsten lights. You stare into that lens and get a small dose of what it's like to be the star. You fantasize that the director will have an epiphany: "No sense disturbing Brad. Now that we've got it all lit and in focus, whaddaya say we lens a few reels with this guy?" Another term for stand-ins, the "second team," fuels this Stand-in Syndrome. It has a nice junior varsity ring, as if you might fill in for the "first team" should the need arise. "Excuse me, Mr. Scorsese, someone on the first team isn't feeling well today. Shall I send for the second team?" In the theater, an understudy may be called to perform in place of a featured performer and get his big break. Alas, in movies, there is no such luck. In the cast and crew food chain, a stand-in is ranked slightly above an extra but well below the honeywagon (portable bathroom truck) driver. My first scene on "The Devil's Own" was a 4 a.m. outdoor shoot in the quiet suburban neighborhood of Montclair, N.J. A horde of female admirers strained against police barricades on that insanely cold February morning, hoping for a glimpse of Brad. With Brad's hairstyle, identical brown leather jacket and dark pants, I left the holding area for the set. I nearly drowned in the palpable hormonal gush from his mistaken fans. "Oh, oh, oh! There he is! It's him!" I'd only seen such female frenzy in old Beatles footage. I tucked my head and shielded my face, as if from the cold, prolonging the masquerade. I sauntered; I swaggered; I savored the moment. "So this is what it's like to be a sex symbol," I thought. "Yeaaah mama!" Then the crowd got a closer look at me, stopped squealing and grumbled, "Aww, it's just the other guy." Mercifully, one girl murmured, "Well, he's kinda cute, too," making me feel somewhat less of a leper. Such intense idolatry is scary. One day I wanted to see just how far a fan would go for a piece of the Great Blond One. When Brad set his half-eaten bagel on the craft services table to dash to the set, I noticed a group of admirers spying the abandoned morsel from behind the rope line. I wandered over and asked if anyone was interested in a saliva-laced souvenir. The crowd became a many-limbed Hindu god and made me offers that would make Howard Stern blush. My curiosity sated, I left the treasure undisturbed. As the shoot drew to a close, a Washington Post columnist called. She was amused by how I had gotten into acting: I was working for a government contractor when a modeling agent cast me as a German terrorist in "Die Hard With a Vengeance." It was a crunch period, but I figured I could take a few days off for a one-shot deal. When people from "12 Monkeys" called the next week, my boss gave me an ultimatum: "What's it going to be, government work or Hollywood?" Well, when you put it like that ... So I quit my day job and began a yearlong odyssey as a full-time actor. The day the Post ran its article on me, my answering machine received 42 provocative messages, mostly beginning with "I never do this, but ..." or "I'm not a psycho, but ..." Even the TV show "Extra" was trying to reach me. They wanted to do a "rocket scientist turns actor/model/Brad Pitt stand-in" segment. The next day "Extra" was prepared to shoot footage of me modeling for Details magazine, but when they wanted to shoot Brad and me on the set, the movie's unit publicist, Rob Harris, had to say no. "Things are pretty tense up here. Lay off the publicity," he told me. "If 'Entertainment Tonight' calls, this is going way too far," I thought. It wasn't a long wait. The next night the woman next to me at a restaurant turned out to be a stringer for "ET." Earlier that day she had pitched the idea of profiling me, but without access to the set the idea was nixed. My 15 minutes were up. Until Monday, that is, when Newsweek quoted the Post article and an irate Rob Harris called again. "What the hell are you doing down there? Holding press conferences? Cool it!" "But I'm not doing anything," I insisted lamely. Harris was understandably tense; last-minute script rewrites, contract squabbling and threatened walkouts made "The Devil's Own" the most strained shoot I ever saw. Even BOP magazine interviewed me. Millennium watchers, take note: When a geeky 35-year-old aerospace engineer is profiled in a teenybopper magazine, it is surely a sign of the apocalypse. That spring MIT invited me to join a panel discussion on "Alternative Career Paths for Engineers" with a handful of alumni who had majored in engineering but subsequently strayed from the nerd herd. I explained to the panel coordinator in advance what a stand-in is and is not. Yet somehow posters all over campus blazoned: "MEET BRAD PITT'S BODY DOUBLE TONIGHT!" The crowd that night had an unusually high proportion of Wellesley coeds. I felt bad for the other star panelist, who was a former U.S. congressman. Nobody seemed interested in his tales of genuine accomplishment in our nation's capital. Ironically, seven years ago, I was the co-recipient of the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest award for technological innovation. Past recipients include Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs and Robert Noyce, inventor of the microprocessor. Did MIT ask me to speak to its student body then? No. But now, with a Brad Pitt connection ... In a way it makes sense: MIT grads usually go on to do important things. That is expected. What I had done was something cool. This whole stand-in experience taught me something most people figured out a long time ago: Derivative fame is a heady but shallow thrill. Better to accomplish something yourself, even if it is tiny, than to bask in the reflected glory of someone else. But if you happen to see Leonardo DiCaprio's stand-in, tell him if I got that much mileage out of being Brad's stand-in, he should settle for nothing less than his own TV series and a book deal.
Steve Altes is an actor and author of "The Little Book of Bad Business Advice" (St. Martin's Press, 1997). He only returned one of the 42 steamy phone calls. |
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