It’s hardly news that Tech students often spend their breaks working on internships. But this summer, a few took that to the next level. The Internship, a comedy starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, filmed on campus for several weeks in August, and some Tech students—and facilities—were recruited to help out.
“I found out about the extras call from a coworker [at a School of Aerospace Engineering research lab]. The casting company was posting several requests on Facebook for people fitting certain descriptions to be extras in the movie,” said Vasu Manivannan, AE 07, MS AE 08, who’s working toward his PhD. “I responded to one, and a few days later I received an email asking me to show up the following day to be an extra.”
He looked up the movie’s details on IMDB.com beforehand, so he knew the gist: Wilson and Vaughn play laid-off 40-somethings who find themselves at the bottom of the ladder at Google.
The atrium of the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons and parts of the Klaus Computing building were transformed into Google headquarters for the shoot. At Clough, beanbag chairs and nap pods lined the walls, and fliers advertising activities for Google employees were taped onto doors; an adult-sized twisty slide was even installed on the second floor, replicating the real one Google employees zoom down at the company’s Mountain View, Calif., offices.
Bike racks outside the buildings were fully stocked with brightly-colored Google Bikes—also an actual fixture at Google HQ.
This isn’t the first time Tech’s campus has appeared in a Hollywood flick. Most recently, scenes from Trouble With the Curve, starring Clint Eastwood and Justin Timberlake, were shot at Russ Chandler Stadium.
“I’d never been on a movie set, so everything was new to me,” said Manivannan, who spent one day on the set of The Internship, filling in the background of shots with other extras, many of them fellow students. “It was cool to see how everything worked together behind the scenes.”
He said that he didn’t get to interact with either of the stars, and that the hours of waiting around between scenes got boring after a while.
“I have gained respect for people who do this for a living,” he added.
After the Clough and Klaus sets were struck, filming resumed in California at the real-life Google headquarters. You can see Tech on the big screen—and maybe even a glimpse of Manivannan—when The Internship hits theaters sometime in 2013.
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