Bollywood Movie Stars

Like many people, we (mostly rusty) have always considered ourselves movie star material, but could never break into the industry. Some of you may know about Rusty's failed attempt in the Philadelphia American Idol tryouts in Sept. 2007, where, as Kelsi put it "he froze up like a scared little bunny rabbit." (Rusty disagrees and claims he was trying to show his "strong, quiet side").

In any case, we were walking down the street and minding our own business in Bombay when a man approached us with a business card from a modeling agency and offered to pay us each 500 Rupees to be in a Bollywood movie the next day. Although we were initially skeptical and thought it may be a scam, as you can see from these pictures, he wasn't joking (or was he?). We are now Bollywood stars!

Bollywood is India's primary movie industry and the second largest movie producing group in the world, next to our own Hollywood. Like Hollywood, the films aren't always timeless classics, but we have learned to appreciate them for what they are. One universal rule in Bollywood movies is that ALL movies MUST have several musical numbers, whether the movie is comedy, action, or drama. To convey what this means, imagine Bruce Willis in the movie "Die Hard." Got it in mind? Okay, now imagine the exact same movie with all the action, but titled "Die Hard the Musical" with Bruce Willis performing in multiple dancing and singing musical numbers. That is the essence of Bollywood.

Needless to say, the movie that we played in was a musical. It had the tried and true plot where the ballet dancer falls in love with the bad boy dancer, played by India's six-fingered wonder dancer, Hrithik Roshan. Hrithik can get away with saying "I'm all thumbs" in the literal sense, as he has two thumbs on his right hand. The nice thing is that this quirk is supposed to be very good luck in Indian culture, and the guy is quite a pretty boy and decent dancer to boot... a genuine triple threat... or is that quadruple threat if you count his extra thumb?

After costuming and make-up, we were ushered into a studio set up to look like a dance club. We had the modest hopes of getting a little screen time for our Bollywood resumes, but were completely overwhelmed when Kelsi was chosen as the first lead extra. In this role, she was assigned to be the main person in the background behind the dancers. Rusty was asked to sit on the floor at Kelsi's feet, and claims that this position should be titled "Assistant lead extra," although Kelsi isn't sure if he'll make it into some of the shots. She thinks it might be more appropriate to call him "assistant to the lead extra." You can see his picture up top and make the call as to whether you would want to see much of him if it was your movie.
In the end, we spent all day as extras in a super cool club scene, cheering for the dancers and doing something which the directors termed "dissing," "talking trash," and "being haters." We did our best, although Rusty kept trying to stand up (he felt it was a much deserved promotion). We also had a hard time knowing what trash to talk, so we just stood there saying "hub, hub, hub" with really animated expressions. Definitely Oscar material!