Special Agent and Samurai Supreme, KAGEMUSHA, infiltrated the DreamWorks SKG set of DEEP IMPACT. Kagemusha was there to witness some very SPOILER mayhem. If you do not wish to know something about the last 30 minutes of DEEP IMPACT then go away now. You won't want to continue. Precede at your own risk!!!
Using my Shadow Warrior skills, I crept unnoticed into the Los Angeles location for Monday, October 13th on DEEP IMPACT, the Dreamworks SKG spectacle about cometary chunks on collision course with the Earth. A garage under the Unocal Building on Third St. (downtown, only a few blocks from the oft-shot Westin Bonaventure Hotel) had been converted--at great expense, I have no doubt--into a makeshift shelter for hundreds of imperiled Cenex and Central Casting extras.
It was announced that this footage would be matched with footage already shot in Arlington, VA, and that the extras were playing denizens of Arlington. Denise Crosby was on hand in Los Angeles as one of the city's soon-to-be running residents. Just as soon as the "Arlingtonites" got their sleeping bags laid out in the garage shelter, Morgan Freeman (as the President of these United States) came on a number of TV monitors in the garage with some very bad news indeed. (Freeman's image actually appeared on the TVs, so the extras were able to respond to a pre-recorded performance in real time.) The TVs were "tuned" to MSNBC.
"The Ariana missiles have failed," Freeman announced. (I'm guessing on spellings throughout this paragraph, as I only heard the dialogue out loud.) An inbound comet was still mostly intact, and two large chunks would impact on the Earth with terribly disastrous consequences. The first would crash in the ocean off Cape Hatteras, causing a tidal wave a thousand feet high to sweep across the East Coast at one and a half times the speed of sound. New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, the District of Columbia--all would be utterly destroyed by the ravages of the cometary tsunami. The second, larger chunk would impact in western Canada, causing a dust cloud that would obscure the Sun and make life aboveground impossible for two years.
A national lottery has chosen a million citizens to live safely in an underground bunker complex built by the federal government. All remaining U.S. citizens, including our intrepid background actor heroes in "Arlington," would be required to fend for themselves as best they could. Given that the extras were shot running in abject panic, the situation does not look promising. Incidentally, one extra was nearly removed from the set for getting overly "into character" and shoving people bodily out of his way.
We, of course, can look forward to an incredible special effects spectacular next summer, and I am particularly happy to report that DEEP IMPACT will NOT have an "ID4"-type deus ex machina conclusion. The comet WILL hit the Earth, at least twice, much like the feces of the cosmos impacting with the fan. See you in line next summer!
