A Planes, Trains and Automobiles Extra made $131,000 for one line just to cut it

Entertainment

That’s a lot of cheese.

In late 2022, the classic film Planes, Trains and Automobiles celebrated its 35th anniversary, and the title still manages to hold its own as one of the greatest films of all time. To commemorate this, a piece was written by Vanity Fair detailing the full story and backstory of the film, talking all about actors John Candy and Steven Martin.

Interestingly, the background information on the film’s stars wasn’t even the most intriguing thing to come out of this piece. Instead, this title belongs to a story about an extra named Troy Evans who was hired as a truck driver in the film.

“I left home without $300 in rent. And when I returned home after writing my one line in the film, we bought our first house.”

The scene in question refers to a moment near the end of the film when the characters of Steve Martin and John Candy are caught in a snow storm and are about to be taken away by a truck driver. The constraint is that they have to sit in the back of the refrigerated trailer because the driver doesn’t like people in his cab.

The fun part is that when the movie came out, Evan’s lines weren’t even in the movie since you just see a door being slammed by his character with no exchanged lines of dialogue. What’s even crazier is that the extra was on standby for 50 days before filming this scene just to edit it.

According to the article, Evans was hired to film a line as a truck driver in LA and was paid $1,000 for walking in and saying a line. Eventually it was decided to shoot the scene in New York to preserve the authenticity of a real snowstorm.

Instead of getting another actor, Evans was flown to New York. When he arrived there was no snow. Eventually, after the blizzard never reached the city, the company moved from Buffalo to Ohio to St. Louis to Illinois, taking him for the ride to each new location.

The craziest part is that they paid him the $1,000 fee to keep him on standby until they finally found snow somewhere, only to have his sequence cut entirely from the film. So in total he made $50,000 for next to no work. Today, that figure equates to around $131,000.