I wasn't in a film myself, but I was caricatured in one.

Back in the late 1970's I worked as a National Park Ranger at Ellis Island. It hadn't been restored yet, it hadn't been much of anything yet except they shoveled the worst of the debris from the collapsing buildings out of the way and constructed barriers and covered walkways to keep people along specific corridors that we were to lead tours through. Lots of stairs, uneven pavement, cracks, and slick spots, but it was facinating in its decrepitude. Keeping visitors safe in there was a challenge.

Meredith Monk conceived and directed a film called Ellis Island in which actors were dressed in period costumes, placed in a tableau and filmed, and then they began to move. I think it would go from sepia tone to color when they began to move. Anyway, it was an interesting project, and they got permission to film at locations around the island, but tours went on as normal. Monk was to accomodate our tours, but he kept running heavy camera and electrical cables through the tour area, moving barriers, and making a lot of noise. I was the supervisor of the interpretive staff, so I was the unlucky individual to ride herd on his group. After a while we were not hitting it off well at all. I finally called my boss (located in an office on nearby Liberty Island, inside the statue) to come talk to him, and the stinker quick had all of his stuff up and out of the way by the time Mike got there. My boss could see what was happening, though, and was pretty good about it. I think in the end he had some of the maintenance or protection guys hang out more with them and keep the tour route clear. But Monk decided to add me into his movie. There were "modern" sequences edited into the story line, and he introduced a woman character, not exactly in uniform, but with a distinctive almost-stetson hat who grimmaced through her scenes, always leading a handful of people around. It really was very funny, it certainly cracked me up, anyway, but I'm probably one of very few who got that joke.

SRS