Murder at the Mardi Gras

My parents randomly encountered the film crew in New Orleans and ended up walking through one scene (for several takes) as extras one evening. They had a good time and have some fun stories about why it took several takes.

I was 23 living in the French Quarter selling Lucky Dogs outside Al Hurt's place on Bourbon Street when I happened upon a film shoot of Murder at the Mardi Gras so I stopped to watch. In the scene Harry Morgan was a cop delivering a line something like, "Anything can happen during Mardi Gras." I don't know why Caesar Romero was in the city but he happened to walk by and half a dozen women in the crowd simultaneously and breathlessly gasped, "Caesar Romero!!" The director's shoulders sagged as he yelled "Cut." Romero realizing he had inadvertently ruined the shot waved to the director and with a charming laugh called out "Sorry" and quickly moved on. Fun times.

Wow, my twin brother and I were extras in this movie when we were 10 years old, i remember meeting all the stars and all the fun we had. We are now 39 and I have to tell you... we searched for this movie for years and now we have found it. What a wonderful time it was... We along with about 20 other kids in school were picked for this and if I remember right, we got about 3 mins in the movie but it felt like the star role! A must see movie. Many things have changed and if we had it to do over I would do it again. We had lunch and time with all the stars and it was wonderful. It is the one thing I can say I was a star for 3 mins..

This was a made for television CBS Movie of the Week. The producers of this movie saw my band, Dixie Blue, playing in a club on Bourbon Street and hired us as extras to be Barbi Benton's band in the scene where she is playing a concert at the Superdome. We didn't actually play any music, but pretended to play our instruments while they filmed the scene. I got some face time in the movie standing next to Barbi playing my ES335. We also got to meet Harry Morgan, one of my favorite actors. I wouldn't say that it is a great movie, but we had a lot of fun filming our scene. They paid us pretty well, too, more than the extras who were just part of the crowd scenes.