RogerEbert News

I don't mean to brag, but I am in a Sundance-conquering, Cannes-rocking, Roger Ebert-impressing, frisson-inducing film.

I think I show up as a blue-and-white blur.

I am definitely dressed as a man and running through a swamp-ish wooded chunk of Montegut at night, screaming and waving a beer bottle — which is exactly how I would like to appear in a Sundance Award-winning film.

"Beasts of the Southern Wild," an independent feature film directed by Benh Zeitlin and starring 8-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis of Houma is now blowing minds worldwide.

The film was shot largely in Terrebonne Parish, which means Zeitlin and crew were stationed down here for months, operating out of a defunct gas station in Montegut.

During those months, I got to know the group, dubbed "the movie people" by many of us, as I wrote about their movie-making time on the bayou.

And that is how I wound up in Montegut one muggy spring night, getting outfitted to join a bunch of movie crew members and extras in racing through the trees with beer bottles and firecrackers.

From what I remember — it's been two years — the scene was some sort of more innocent rural take on a Southern Decadence Fest with everyone cross-dressing very unfashionably and playing with sparklers.

One of the film's producers had called me that afternoon and told me they needed extras for the scene and that I should get in on it because it would be really fun.

He was right.

I'd never been an extra before, or played any other role in anything except for my appearance as a munchkin in my third-grade spinoff production of "The Wizard of Oz," but I'd long dreamed of stardom as an extra.