Water for Elephants: A Rube’s-Eye View (PART 3)

The fol­low­ing was writ­ten by Cody­Wood who’s a rube on the set of Water for Ele­phants. You can read the pre­vi­ous entry he made here.
“Ladies and Gen­tle­man!” His hand stretched toward us and traced the cir­cu­lar bleach­ers. He wore a bright red jacket neatly stuffed with a crisp white hand­ker­chief. The black top hat fit snugly and in his left hand he held a long black baton. “… The most spec­tac­u­lar show on earth!!” He shot his baton toward the entrance of the tent and the crowd erupted with applause. I clapped my hands and whooped. There were no ani­mals enter­ing the tent as sug­gested. In fact, absolutely noth­ing hap­pened but we con­tin­ued to cheer. Christoph Waltz had made an announce­ment that caused our hair to stand on end and imag­i­na­tions to run wild.
By the third take some of the magic had worn off but Christoph con­tin­ued the per­for­mance like it had been his first. Once the shot was com­plete we returned to our hold­ing tent. I found an area of the tent where a steady breeze of air came through and wrote song titles inspired by the story of Water for Elephants.
The AD returned about 45 min­utes later. “Ok, I need some nim­ble peo­ple. If you think you’re nim­ble, fol­low me!” I closed my note­book and stuffed it in my open back­pack. The AD wore a bright blue shirt that was easy to fol­low to the entrance of the tent. He lifted the flap and one by one we passed into the Big Top. The AD sud­denly blocked the entrance. “Woah woah woah. I said nim­ble. Come on now.” A gen­tle­man that was prob­a­bly in his early sev­en­ties froze like he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The AD con­tin­ued, “Go back to hold­ing please. This is for nim­ble folks only.” The man turned with his head tilted toward the ground and walked away. For a sec­ond I felt bad for the man but why had he joined a group of twenty-somethings for an action shot?
Inside the tent four horses were har­nessed to a tall car­riage stuffed with men hold­ing band instru­ments. The horses were pointed toward the entrance of the tent. Our gang of “nim­ble” Rubes were placed pre­car­i­ously in the bleach­ers near the car­riage while Fran­cis Lawrence and Rodrigo Pri­eto, the cin­e­matog­ra­pher, stood close-by dis­cussing the angle of the next shot. Our instruc­tions were to look shocked. This turned out to be very easy. On “Action” the horses took off like cav­alry. As the car­riage tipped side-ways the stunt musi­cians were strate­gi­cally thrown from the cart and instru­ments went fly­ing in all direc­tions. My mouth opened and my mus­cles tight­ened. I stared at the men spread across the dusty cir­cus floor in shock – no act­ing skills necessary.
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