Jolie-Pitt Love

No glitz on this set
My colleagues were all set to be almost famous, but I stayed behind the scenes
By Chris Garcia
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Thursday, February 08, 2007

I'm not an actor — never have been — and I do not yearn to be memorialized on film or video. Cameras of all varieties render me a trembling Chihuahua. So I opted out of being an extra in Michael Winterbottom's production of "A Mighty Heart," the biography of doomed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl that filmed in Austin for two days this week.

Monday was one of those days, and Winterbottom — perhaps best known for the Brit-rock mockumentary "24 Hour Party People" in 2002 and 2005's equally brilliant meta-comedy "Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story" — brought his small crew into the newsroom at the Austin American-Statesman to shoot a scene that takes place in, ta-da, a newsroom. Just by Winterbottom saying so, our humble work place, a cluttered mouse maze of drab cubicles and sickly fluorescent haze, became the Asia bureau of The Wall Street Journal.

And there I was, hiding.

Not so for about 40 Statesman reporters and editors, who jumped at the chance to be in a major motion picture. Angelina Jolie stars in the movie as Pearl's grieving widow, Mariane, who wrote the book on which the film is based after Pearl was beheaded in Pakistan, but she absolutely would be nowhere near the newsroom, we were assured. (Lie. She was staying at the Four Seasons, a brisk backstroke from the Statesman's riverside fortress.)

Read the rest here.

Premeire mag scan, includes snippet about A Mighty Heart:

Labels: movies, news, scans