Sneaky Pete

A couple of weeks ago, these neon signs appeared along our street, giving notice of no parking for film shoot would take place on Monday, March 23rd. We've seen signs like this before around Queens and Manhattan, but never on our quiet little street. It was kind of exciting, even though neither Brian nor myself has ever heard of a show or movie called Sneaky Pete. 

Brian has seen some actual filming before in Manhattan while he's been out and about for meetings, and even across the street from his office building. Once, when we were near Union Square one evening, we saw some filming on the rooftop of a shorter building that we thought was for one of the Spiderman movies. Other than that, I've only ever seen trailers for the actors and equipment parked along sidewalks. I'm always curious about what actors the trailers are for, but the trailer doors sport names like Lucy and Desi or Fred and Wilma. I guess they want to keep fans away. We figured that the actual filming for Sneaky Pete wouldn't take place on the street outside our apartment, but they would just park their trailers there.

Still, when Sunday night rolled around, we kept looking out our window to see if anything was happening. Other than a row of orange cones appearing along either side of an empty street, we saw nothing. The next morning, we were up early to start our day, and looked outside only to see a few cars parked on either side of the street. Most of the cones were gone. We figured that the filming had already taken place in the wee hours of the night/morning or it hadn't started yet.

Just a little while later, more cars appeared and we could hear people yelling outside. We looked out our window again, and down on the far corner at the end of our block, a film crew was milling around a camera. Even though it was bitterly cold outside, we opened our window and stuck our heads out to watch. 

It was kind of exciting to see actual filming that close. Someone would stand in front of the camera with the clapperboard (or film slate) and yell the name of the scene, then snap it's lever down and yell action. The extras would start walking across the street and up the sidewalk from the corner towards our apartment building. They then crossed the street nearby our apartment and started walking back down the block on the opposite sidewalk. Even without the camera crew, we would have known something was up with all the people outside. There were joggers, dog walkers, a couple pushing a stroller, and a postman, among other extras. There were all the stereotypical types of people you see around the city, but all on our street at one time.

The guy behind the camera would yell "cut" and then "reset," and all the extras would go back to their starting places. Then they'd do it all again. There were even two cars that kept circling the block and would drive down the street and pass the camera at specific times. The main focus of the scene was a guy in a grey sweatshirt that kept pacing back and forth while talking on a cell phone in front of an apartment building at the end of our block. It was kind of fun to have a bird's eye view of it all. I did feel bad for all of the extras that had to stand around out in the cold, waiting to go again... some of them weren't wearing very warm clothes.

I convinced Brian to walk down with me to get a closer look at the action. He wasn't that happy about the idea because it was freezing outside and he still wasn't quite fully awake, but he came along anyway. I wanted to see if I could get some pictures of the film crews. We didn't want to end up in the scene or ruin a take, so we walked around our block, down another, and then came back up behind the filming. We were able to stand on the street corner right across from the filming and watch the proceedings.

A second camera, set on rails, was positioned out in the middle of the intersection. They would pull the camera and it's operator backwards along the rails as the scene progressed. Between takes, they would have to wait a moment to let stopped traffic pass by.

We didn't stay outside for very long because it was so cold, and we had to get back to get ready for our day. As we were leaving they stopped filming to reposition the cameras to capture the scene at a different angle. 

I'm glad we got a chance to see the filming. It's a part of New York life that we don't get exposed to much. I'm glad that out of all the nondescript streets in Queens, they picked ours so we had a chance to see a part of the "movie business" up close.