To bring things back to the beginning of this thread, I was one of the thousands of little gray speks running up the hill during Pickett's charge in the "Gettysburg" movie. That part of it was filmed in one week using volunteer re-enactors working for free. Money was donated by Ted Turner for battlefield preservation and such. We were fed well by Mr. Turner and we all lived in our tents, just like in a authentic encampment, in the style we would have done at a weekend re-enactment. Our unit actually did a two day march into town over the original route for authenticity's sake, sleeping in a barn overnight.

It was a lot of endless hurry-up-and-wait and standing in formation for long hours at a time (an authentic Army practice if there ever was one) until people in charge re-shot scenes countless times.

For the charge itself, all the Cornfed-Irate soldiers picked papers out of a hat with a number from one to ten that indicated how far up the hill you got and a scenario like "Die" or "Fall back in retreat" or "Get over the stone wall and be captured". Mine said to get halfway up the hill, suffer a head wound and stagger back toward the medics in the rear.

I was only there there for the volunteer week, but a few of my friends were up there for some of the rest of the time, for which they got fed and paid, tax free, I think, and since the construction trade was in a pronounced slump that summer, that was the main source of income for a couple of them at the time. They, out of all the 9th VA boys that were up there, appeared in close ups, rather than a mass charge.

The original working title for the movie was "THE KILLER ANGELS", like the novel it was taken from, and that's what it says on the free T-shirts they gave us, but they must have thought it sounded too much like a Roger Corman biker flick or something, and they changed it.