Choose your next witticism carefully, Mr Froog

Rather to my shame, I accepted that filming gig after all.   I thought I'd effectively discouraged them by asking about the script ("Script?  What script??"), and by asking for a higher fee.  For a day or two, there was a heavy silence from my contact.   But then they tried to come back to me.... late on Friday night.  I ignored them.   They rang again early on Saturday morning (which was when the shoot was supposed to have been taking place).  I had a dreadful feeling they were going to ask me to turn out immediately - and I very nearly ignored the call again.   It turned out that the shoot had been moved to a location in the CBD rather than miles out of town, and had also been put back to Sunday.   I still wasn't keen to work on the weekend.  And I was very strongly inclined to blow them off on the grounds that it was unacceptable to arrange something like this at less than 24 hours' notice.   But I really need the money....     And at least it was no longer going to be an all-day affair. No - because I'd quoted them a suggested hourly rate (not as a serious bargaining ploy; purely to illustrate to them how inadequate was the fee they'd initially offered me for a full day's work), the film-makers had a ponder, and then decided that they could probably get my scene taken care of in just a couple of hours.  Or so.   Remarkable how a little financial leverage can suddenly wake people up to the idea of, you know, planning.   Great result for me (I got paid very nearly as much as they had originally offered for an open-ended shoot).  But I did feel rather sorry for the other foreigner roped into the project - a young German guy who'd been asked to attend at the location from 7.30am (I didn't start till 9.30), and had still done absolutely nothing when I left shortly before lunchtime.  No, the 'day rate' is not a good deal.     A further consolation for me was that I found myself working with just about the prettiest girl I've ever met.  Well, the prettiest Chinese girl I've ever met, anyway.  A complete knockout.  I spent the morning in a happy daze, even though the director was - predictably - taking half an hour at a time to work out what he wanted in a 5-second shot.   I was mostly just doing noddies while a young Chinese man delivered a presentation on oil refinery equipment.  I couldn't help thinking that the CG models on his Powerpoint display looked like a typical Bond villain's hideout.  So, most of my questions and comments (there was no sound recording, so we were all able to adlib our dialogue as facetiously as we liked) were along the lines of..... "So, the secret missile silos are where?  And that'll be the death-ray installation at the bottom right, I suppose?  And I bet that's the hangar for Mr Blofeld's getaway plane."   What larks!   And I got paid a hefty sum of money to smile at an impossibly pretty girl for a couple of hours.  Maybe I could get to like this sort of work after all.