Last night I was finally able to see the movie American Hustle. It was a wild movie where everyone in the cast is a con artist or nut case. What had me interested is that I was one of the extras in the New Jersey Casino ballroom scene. They hired 200 of us to walk into the ballroom, hang up our woman's coats, mill round the buffet table, cheer the mayor etc. We were there for 14 hours but 99% of what they shot wasn't used in the movie. 
Between hiring extras, putting them in 70s tuxedos and dresses, and feeding must have cost $500,000 at least. I think I saw the back of my head in the crowd scene. Half a dozen of my friends were used as extras in that scene. My one friend played a waitress in at the scene with Robert DeNiro and that got cut too. But of course they don't make movies to make the extras happy. That's why they call us extras. It is an entertaining movie though. The characters are all crazy. The only straight man in the movie was Louis CK who is a comedian.
One scene they filmed was after the mayor's speech Jennifer Lawrence, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, and all of us danced along with the Motown band. Why they didn't put that in the movie I can't imagine. It would have been an iconic moment in film history.
There haven't been so many hollywood luminaries in one movie scene since It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in 1963. Hopefully they will include that in the DVD outtakes.
One interesting thing happened when we got our costumes on and were told to walk onto the set. This guy came and put his hand on my shoulder and said you look great in theta suit. He called out to someone and said "Hey I have one of your friends here" Seeing his thick glasses I rallied that tis guy was David O. Russell director of the movie. He told me not to go away. Then he called over Christian Bale, introduced us, and took a picture of us together. Why? I have no idea. I thought he was the star.
American Hustle is an entertaining movie. There is one scene accompanied by a 70's song which is really hysterical. I read that the cast had a riot doing this movie. Several of them were in The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook and jumped at the chance at playing in a Russell movie again. Go see it!
