Will do, Meg.
I can tell you some past "Apes" stories if you want to hear some.
My best USMC bud was Jack Tyree who was one of the very first apes in the original and he called me from the studio because he had been sitting in a make up chair for many hours getting made up to look like an ape and they allowed him to make phone calls during that long a boring process. He invited me to take some leave and be an ape in that movie but I was overseas at that time and turned it down.
Jack was very well respected within the Hollywood movie making industry and was often called upon to attend to problems that some of the studio heads wanted 'fixed' quietly.
And I often went along for the ride (so to speak). Back then those 'problems' were usually drug related among working, top billed stars with a current movie in production, or with the son or daughter of some important person, or merely to settle domestic disputes that were causing problems on the set.
Jack would settle the problem quietly and the studio hot shots were very grateful, so Jack worked constantly on and out of the studio environment.
And any friend of Jack's was always treated like a major star himself, so I always had free reign to roam around the studio lots when I visited Jack while was doing crazy stuff making movies. And I myself met some major stars in the process and was invited to partake as an extra in a few movie scenes of movies I never saw.
Dr. Chimps may recall this one - the title of which I have long forgotten. It was a best selling book and an eventual movie about a bear and her cub who were disfigured in a forest fire and were believed to be monsters killing campers (or something like that).
It was filmed in the high Sierras and the script called for a number of long distant shot bear scenes so Jack invited me to be one of those bears for a couple of weeks during the shoot.
At first I thought .... Academy Award nomination on it's way! .... but then reality set in and I declined once again.
Those next few years Jack appeared in many movies along with the likes of Goldie Hawn, Anthony Quinn, Burt Rynolds, Jack Elam, Bill Smith, and many others who knew Jack personally and invited him to participate in their next production.
And on those occasionally rare weekends, Jack and his stunt-guy pals would "barrow" the studio's movie making gear and make motorcycle movies of their own in the Hollywood hills which would eventually be seen on your local drive-in movie screens and throughout the Orient.
I played the part of a dead guy once in one of those.
Got lots of these kind of movie making stories but I don't want to put you on dreamland's Level #3 where it's sometimes impossible to come back!
Movies teach us the damdest things!
