Hollywood Hits Pike Place
The Market's abuzz lately because there's a major Hollywood movie, "Traveling," that's going to be shooting some scenes at our very own Pike Place Market this Wednesday, the 12th. I hear it's some sort of (I'm guessing) romantic movie with Jennifer Aniston and Aaron Eckhart that's going to be filming that day, and Hollywood will be doing funky things with Pike Place Ave like making it a "two-way" street for a short time, and having big rain-making machines lurking around.

The bubbly actress isn't in Seattle this week, said a publicist for Universal Pictures.

After Seattlest arrived at the office today, saw all of these big white trailers across the street, and had our little "Well, this is unusual" moment of tilted equilibrium, we got curious. Is this another episode of our friendly German invasion of last August?

Not so, apparently. We asked the security guard in our lobby if he knew what was up. He said, "They're going to shoot a movie today." Then he smiled and said, "Jennifer Aniston is here."

Recalling that our security guard is a known liar, we wrinkled our face and moved on to quiz our co-workers.

"Did you hear?" one said. "Jennifer Aniston is shooting a movie at the market today." Two others confirmed the rumor. One guy said he heard it not from the lying security guard, but from the news. "Where on the news, did you hear it?" I asked. "Oh, I don't know. The radio. Or maybe it was on TV."

So there you have it Seattle. According to our security guard and three of our co-workers, the beautiful and talented Jennifer Aniston is shooting a movie at Pike Place Market today.

Can anyone confirm this? We'll do our best to stay on top of it without getting fired or breaking our restraining order. (Is it our fault that she came here?)

http://seattlest.com/2008/03/12/jennifer_anisto.php

Here's a video from the Seattle set of Traveling. Aaron is there. They talk about jennifer being busy filming in Miami and how they managed to make her look like she was in those scenes.

Click to download

Jennifer Aniston? JONIFER'S the funny one...
So, Hollywood, filming Jennifer Aniston's upcoming movie "Traveling," did indeed grace Pike Place last week and, according to the Market vendors, the whole thing was relatively uneventful. I polled a few crafters who said that foot traffic hadn't been particularly affected, and overall sales hadn't inclined or declined as their idle imagingings had unskillfully speculated.

Isn't that how it always goes?

I was surprised and pleased to hear that the production company had offered $100.00 to any vendor willing to stay until 7:00 p.m. that day, which I'm sure was helpful for those who had indeed been slow. For whatever reason. The businesses who chose to stay were lined up near each other in the northern part of the Market, and will probably function as "colorful local glimpses" in the finished movie.

The media had a ball with their footage of the afternoon's goings-on, although I noticed I'd blogged about it before the rest of the papers started sounding off.

One thing that struck me as very funny was a brief T.V. interview I'd seen of Jennifer Aniston's body double, who in this particular case was a woman from Tacoma. I didn't catch her name. We'll say it was "Jonifer Anoston." In the interview, and looking a little shell-shocked I might add, Jonifer was relating how stunned she'd been to "get the call" from the production company. It was all very exciting , she said. I laughed and inferred that there must be lots of Aniston doubles, perhaps all over the place.

LONDON -- Focus Film Intl. has continued its strong Cannes selling spree with a clutch of post-market deals.........................Focus execs have also concluded U.K. deals with up-and-coming distrib Contender for the Mendes project and "Traveling," a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Aaron Eckhart.