Michigan Alumni take on hollywood

James Garay, ‘16

Rowing is not a sport that does one many favors. It takes your time, energy, and money, and, often, the time, energy, and money of your friends and family. Rowers put a lot into their craft, and the value they extract is meaningful, but that value comes at the end of a road of ups and downs, of victories and defeats. That's why we love the sport-you get out what you put in, sometimes. The sport owes you nothing, and gives you nothing. This is what makes the good times so sweet.

Rarely, rowing can surprise you. Something magical will just happen-no struggle, no great efforts. And, for all our talk about the value we realize in the struggle, the joy we feel from a hard-earned success, we adore the victories we got for free. The ones handed to us on a silver platter, without conflict or strife, where we just happened to be in the right place at the right time. For six MRA alumni, this alignment of the rowing stars took place in November when they were cast as talent extras in Hollywood's latest rowing flick, Swing. Their journey is chronicled below.

In mid-October, MRA leadership received an email from someone claiming to be working on a feature film about collegiate rowing. A mix of Friday Night Lights and Dead Poets Society, the movie would tell the story of the 1999 Columbia University men's rowing team, whose lives were changed when a Vietnam veteran takes over as their head coach and whips them into shape. The emailer was on the hunt for rowers to be in the movie-6 eights of rowers, to be exact-and would pay the rowers a daily stipend in addition to covering their travel, lodging, and food. The filming was to take place in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in November, just a few weeks from the time of the message. And, importantly, the movie would be starring Michael Shannon as the coach.

When this message eventually made it's way to my inbox, all I could hear in my head was Brad Pitt in Inglorious Basterds - "we hear a story too good to be true, it ain't." No way was this for real. Even if the movie was happening, which I doubted, it wasn't to the scale or funding indicated in the email, or they wouldn't actually be paying us or covering our flights, or something wasn't as it seemed. Long story short, it was all true. After a few more emails, Alex Brown, Bert Rebertus, Gage Smith, Mitch Tyson, and I were slated to make our way to Baton Rouge for our film debuts.

We started scheming right away. What background stories should we give our characters? How could we maximize our screen time? Before we got far, Gage and Tys were pre-selected to be rowers in the "hero" boat. They might be body doubles for the main cast, or rowing with them in some capacity, we didn't know. The message also indicated that alongside the hero boat would be the "villain" boat, which would contain the mean, snobby nemeses of the heroes. This raised the stakes. It was sad that we couldn't all be in the same boat, but the non-heroes among us set our sights on the villain boat and were determined to be the most evil, most troublesome crew on the water, even if we weren't officially cast as the adversaries.

Once most of the 60 or so rowers had arrived in Baton Rouge, we met as a group with the film crew, which included several of the producers as well as the movie's rowing consultant, rowing icon Linda Muri. They gave us basic background on the story, talked through the logistics of the scenes, and, finally, released the initial lineups. Bert, Brown, and I were relieved to be boated together. We immediately sought our boat-mates to plan our ascent to villain-hood.

We found three of our boat-mates, who all rowed at Cal in college, and quickly discovered that we were on the same page. One of them had even come to Michigan for an official visit while in high school. We were going to try and win every piece, regardless of the script, and we were going to be as loud and villainous as possible. Whether it was planned in advance or the film crew noticed our immediate camaraderie and spirit, they asked to meet with our boat separately. Knowing what this must mean, we were elated to discover that we had been chosen to play the Harvard boat, the villains of the film.

The producer told us to be brash, cocky, and irreverent. Say no more! They wanted to do a scene where the main characters gave us their shirts after we had beaten them in a race, and we respond by rudely belittling their efforts. They wanted trash talk on the start line, they wanted over-the-top celebrations, they wanted loud, mean, sports-drama movie villains, and they we wanted us to do it for rowing. They wanted Ivan Drago, the Monstars, and the Globo Gym Purple Cobras all wrapped up into one. Talk about a dream scenario. In college, we were always joking about funny things we could do on the start line, or when we got shirts, or when we gave shirts, all under the guise of being cocky. Obviously, we never did any of those things because they were hilarious to joke about, but wouldn't have been funny in real life. But on the set, it was all harmless. No one's actual feelings were at stake, we were just acting! Even better, the producer was asking us to let loose with all creative control. The ideas were flowing.

At some point that day during this process, one of the rowing extras in our boat cancelled and decided not to make the trip. Scrambling to find a suitable fill-in at the final hour, and thinking with the open wallets of Hollywood, the film administration contacted our very own Wes Vear of Craftsbury, Vermont to see if he could be on a plane out of Burlington in 90 minutes. Defying the laws of physics, Wes made the 80-minute trip in time to catch his plane, and arrived at False River, Louisiana's Best Western at 2:30 AM, just a few hours before our call to set. Of course, in the chaos of getting Wes down there, they forgot to set him up with a room, so Bert and I woke up early that day to Wes' meat hooks pounding on our door.

Eventually, we made it through costume with our various uniforms and got to the set on Louisiana's False River. The first few hours of the day were spent in the biggest rigging chotch session I've ever seen. There were so many people doing so few things, and the film crew were getting more and more overwhelmed by how far behind schedule we were already.

The scene was chaotic in every way. One of the producers was unhappy with the stubble of a few extras, which led to a lengthy process of acquiring a bunch of single use razors and having 20 people cram into one of the bathrooms to shave. The leader of the camera crew was trying to get boats to launch even though the shells weren't rigged. The boatman couldn't find any of the hardware or tools. And, it was about 35 degrees, much colder than we were prepared for. It was awesome.

We finally made it onto the water for shooting. They had put in a 6-lane, 1000m course with stake boats, and the river, which isn't used at all for rowing, was perfect. We spent a lot of hours on the water those two days, filming all manner of racing sequences, but it wasn't like your normal rowing practice. The chaos only grew on the water. We'd do a piece, snag the coxswain's walkie-talkie and send the crew searching for a 'skeg wrench' or 'oarlock key' or some other fictitious tool that we swore we needed. The support boats would bring us all kinds of snacks and sunscreen. We'd shout "that's a wrap!" across the set, which is apparently very taboo on a film set. We played top nut 50 times a day, much to the chagrin of our coxswain and the crew. It was constant laughter and joking between all the boats, only referring to each other as "the talent," and pandemonium continued as the film crew tried to figure out how to do their movie magic on water with a sport they didn't know much about.

A couple weeks later, the Harvard stern pair (Alex Brown and me) were invited back to BR for a day of shooting in their indoor stage. The film crew built a 70 ft.-diameter pool inside a big warehouse, and rigged a green screen on a railing on the ceiling that ran around the entire pool. They put the boat in the pool and bungeed it at its ends so that it could be rowed while they took closer shots with a little more control. This wasn't the chotch-fest of several weeks prior, as the whole gang wasn't there, but it was fun in other ways. We had a trailer and went through the whole hair/makeup thing, and we got to work more closely with the director and cinematographer. It was cool.

The director said they are hoping to release the movie next fall. The cinematographer said it will be at least two years before they're finished with it. Who can you trust in this industry? Either way, you can find updates at the movie's Instagram account @swingmovie. They threw together a small preview here, for anyone that's interested. As you'll notice, the stroke of the main boat does not row very well. Funnily enough, we caught him on his second time EVER rowing, which was seemingly a tough situation to hop into, and led to the aforementioned temper tantrums.

More pictures below. If you want hilarious video footage, get in touch with Wes and he can hook you up with the behind the scenes glimpse into Hollywood. 

Row Blue.

James Garay '16