I was in Ocean's Eleven!

Believe it or not, I was in Ocean's Eleven. The one with George Clooney and Brad Pitt. How did this happen you say? Well as some of you may know, I grew up in Hollywood California. One of my childhood friends Steve Melton was the prop master on Ocean's Eleven. He had come to Sarasota with some other Ocean's Eleven producers and scouts to look at the race track here in Sarasota it was actually the dog track. They also looked at one in St. Petersburg, Florida and that's the one they ended up filming at.

So when they came to film the movie, I went to help my friend Steve with some of the props. I had bought some things that they needed ahead of time so that when he got here he would already have them. Here in this picture you can see me unloading some water from my truck, it's blue, and getting it ready for the day. You can see on that wooden box where it says Ocean's Eleven on the end.

This is my friend Steve, you can see where it says Ocean's Eleven property department on the box. it had been shipped from LA to Tampa.

Here is the inside of Steve's 18 wheeler truck he had for all the props. You can see he has everything organizing bins for each thing. As you know on this film there were many guns and weapons and he had to have a safe keep those in. If you don't know what prop master is. he is in charge of everything that an actor touches except for any wardrobe that they wear. This includes cars and things like watches glasses and any gadgets that they might have. So, I think this is one of the coolest jobs in film making. You get to play around with all kinds of cool stuff and you actually get to interact with the actors when you're picking out the things that they need.

Here's a picture of Brad Pitt getting into one of the cars and takes him back to his dressing room or trailer. I really wasn't supposed be taking pictures but I had one of those throwaway cameras that I would have in case they took it away from me. That is why these pictures are not the best.

Here I am standing outside of the dog track racing that's where they filmed the scene with Brad Pitt and Carl Reiner are watching the dog race. So during the filming of that scene they had over 800 extras sitting in the grandstands behind Brad Pitt. Some of them were starting to bother Brad Pitt so they needed to put a few people that they knew sitting near him that wouldn't bother him. So my friend Steve said Mark will do it.

So, you can see in this picture right between Brad Pitt and Carl Reiner that's me back there in the yellow shirt reading the racing form. As you can see, there's no one sitting behind them or beside them. I actually kept those betting tickets Carl has and the spoonBrad Pitt had, so I guess I have a little bit of Brad Pitts DNA on the spoon.

Here is a picture of the spoon I kept.

I also had George Clooney's business card from the movie.

This is the badge that I had to get on the set.

I also have some of the chips that were in the scene where Brad Pitt teaches the young kids to play poker. You can see the "RR" on them for Brad's character name "Rusty Ryan".

In this picture you can see Brad Pitt gets up to walk away and you can see there's no one around them except for me on the left. It was such a great experience to see myself up on the big screen, if only for a few seconds. Lots of my friends say they saw me.

Here are some of Polaroid shots that my friend Steve had taken. In the top one, the guy in the black hat is Steven Soderbergh, the director of Ocean's Eleven. You can see me back there in the yellow shirt again. The one on the bottom is with the Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. This was actually when they were filming in Las Vegas.

Here I am in the car they call it, the hero car, that Brad Pitt and George Clooney drive around in at the end of the movie. I think it might've been at the beginning also, so I had fun sitting in there checking it out.

They actually picked the dog track in St. Petersburg over the one in Sarasota because the one in St. Petersburg had a very very big parking lot that they could put the tent up for the scene where their having the circus act going on. So I got to see them filming that scene also.

One funny thing was that when they had the George and Brad come out of the tent, they wanted to have some birds fly up. My friend said he Mark you're from Florida see if you can get some birds over here. I thought how the heck am I going to do that. I saw some sea gulls way over on one side of the parking lot. I got some popcorn that we were using in the circus and I went way over to where the birds were and started dropping popcorn and I just had them follow me over to where we are filming. I actually hid behind some cars and put popcorn out for the birds. When George and Brad came out, I clapped and make the birds fly. The director seem to be very happy about this and we did about three takes.

Here is a video of the local news that did a story about Ocean's Eleven filming there. You can see me in there I have some arrows on there that show where I am.

So, I had a great time working and being in Ocean's Eleven!