Gilley's Night Club in Pasadena, Texas, on the outskirts of Houston, was the setting for many scenes. This is where I got my chance to be in the movie. I say chance because I feel lucky that my part didn't end up on the cutting room floor. That's what happened to my friend who took two weeks of vacation. She showed up there daily and went through the motions as an extra but was not shown in the movie.
She told me about what she had been doing and suggested that I go. I didn't have much time available to take off work but my boss gave me a day. When we arrived at Gilley's, she got me pointed in the right direction to get signed in. Since she had been there previously, she needed to go to her assigned spot and I was on my own.
At registration, I was assigned an area to go sit and wait until I was needed. I have no idea as to their methods for this, but suppose it was a way of sorting people for different scenes . At 19 years old and knowing that John Travolta was in the room, I had a nervous giggly girl feeling. I made friends with a woman sitting next to me who talked like she knew what she was doing, so I listened to her advice. When they called us to get in position, she said "stick with me kid, I'll make you a star". Sure enough, I later saw her in several different scenes in the movie.
I was part of a group, along with the main characters, who was lined up by the bar and briefed on what to do. Simple, just fall with the group and walk along with them heading toward the mechanical bull area and don't look at the camera. Oooooops, I could't help the grin. We practiced that walk a couple of times until they were ready to film it. Since it was a bar scene, the crew came through with fog machines to make it look smokey. I believe we repeated the filming at least two times.
