According to an exclusive oral history on the making of “The Mask of Zorro” from /Film’s Ben Pearson, Sony’s then physical production executive Ray Zimmerman, who was a young man at the time and eager to make an impression, would wake up brutally early and hit the Angel Stadium set of “The Fan” in Anaheim at three in the morning to make sure things were running efficiently budget-wise. One element that became a minor issue involved Scott’s use of extras, who were still on set after the director had shot them out. Given that this was before filmmakers could add computer-generated extras to make the stadium appear packed, there were quite a few extras on hand. Zimmerman convinced Scott to release them, which likely saved him some grief from his superiors.
All was evidently running smoothly until a couple of weeks later, when Zimmerman got a panicked call from Sony’s head of legal. A prank had gone horribly wrong, and the studio was suddenly in hot water with the Screen Actors Guild.
As Zimmerman told /Film:
“I’m back in my office and I get this phone call and it’s the head of legal. He’s going, ‘Ray, Ray, we got to get down on the set right away.’ I went, ‘What’s going on?’ He goes, ‘I’ve got SAG calling.’ Apparently, they had the Jumbotron out and they cut for lunch and it was [first assistant director Jim Skotchdopole’s] birthday and the second AD hired a stripper to come and dress as a cop. And we had brought in all these church groups with little ladies to staff the extras.”
Zimmerman had to do some lightning-fast damage control, which wound up being quite the learning process for him.