Over six seasons, Better Call Saul informed the story of Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) and the circumstances and private decisions that led him to develop into Saul Goodman, the ornery trickster of a lawyer who helped Breaking Bad’s Walter White (Bryan Cranston) commit his crimes. Odenkirk performed Jimmy as a full and sophisticated character surrounded by different equally multidimensional characters like Rhea Seehorn’s Kim Wexler. But Rome wasn’t inbuilt a day, and it wasn’t constructed by only one man. In Jimmy’s case, his climbing to the highest concerned many scams chronicled over the course of the present, all phantasm play and trickery fueled by movies and digital camera tips. And Jimmy had the proper workforce to assist him — a trio of wily faculty movie college students.
Played by Josh Fadem, Julian Bonfiglio, and Hayley Holmes, the trio appears to only drop every little thing and are available to assist Jimmy every time he asks them to, presumably as a result of he pays them. One can think about they’re not precisely swimming in money as they slog via movie faculty courses. Fadem is credited simply as Camera Guy, Bonfiglio as Sound Guy, and Holmes as Makeup Girl, most likely comparable to their jobs on set. There’s by no means an introduction to those characters — you by no means see Jimmy assembly them or any clarification of their association. They don’t even have names that the viewers ever hears within the present (though they later appeared in a 6-episode “Filmmaker Training” promotional miniseries for Better Call Saul Season 6, the place they’re named Marshall, Phil, and Cheri, respectively). They’re simply “there,” showing as if from the aether. It’s actually all of the present wants by way of a narrative for them, and is funnier that we by no means see any origins for them. There’s no have to ever increase the universe to elucidate these characters because the creators did for Saul.
Who Are the Members of the Camera Crew in ‘Better Call Saul’?
All three crew members in Better Call Saul appear to have a level of ethical flexibility to them. The first time we see them, it’s simply the 2 guys serving to Jimmy movie in entrance of the rip-off parody billboard he made to try to get again at rival Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) for attempting to get him, Jimmy, to cease practising legislation below his personal identify. It seems to be like only a common video shoot at first — then the man taking the billboard “falls down” and Jimmy has to “save” him. It’s all staged. If the digital camera crew has any caveats, we don’t hear them.
Marshall (Camera Guy) is a sardonic downer, at all times prepared with a sarcastic little bit of snark. He takes satisfaction in what he does. He’s an egotist, and he has cause to be — he runs a category on how one can function a video digital camera at a local people faculty, in any case. As Jimmy says in Season 5’s “Wexler v. Goodman” episode, he thinks of the digital camera as “an extension of his body.” Cheri (Makeup Girl) is a candy soul, beneficiant — she received’t even take the cash for her work that day when Jimmy is struggling financially in Season 3. She’s a member of a “college production of The Dark Crystal” within the closing season, displaying up in full elf costume, full with pointed ears and orange-dyed pores and skin. These particulars add humor and levity to Better Call Saul particularly because it will get darker. Phil (Sound Guy) doesn’t make a fuss. He does his factor and that’s it. Keeps his head down. A very good collaborator sort.
What have been they pondering when Jimmy paid them to take a seat in a room all day with the handfuls of disposable flip telephones to fake to be a Louisiana church to get his good friend Huell (Lavell Crawford) off some assault costs within the Season 4 episode “Coushatta”? When they reduce and edited collectively the intense slander-job Jimmy cooked up for financial institution CEO Kevin Wachtell (Rex Linn) in “Wexler v. Goodman,” they needed to know this wasn’t a traditional work day. But these paychecks from Jimmy have been possible going to pay for his or her tacos and beer nights.
Jimmy’s Camera Crew Is Another Example of Hard Work in ‘Better Call Saul’
Better Call Saul usually is a present about work, and for the digital camera crew, that’s all these items gave the impression to be — a paycheck. Where Breaking Bad was all about characters shirking the legislation utterly, Better Call Saul reveals us characters who at the least type of nonetheless function on the earth of our personal humdrum workdays. They are all simply attempting to make it. They’re hustling and getting paid. And typically this leads them to do amoral issues or skirt the sides of decency and what most of us would take into account above-board work. Jimmy spends the entire present coloring outdoors the traces by way of work, slicing corners and mendacity with no regret. The digital camera crew is a smaller-scale model of that as they merely go together with his large scams with out query.
Better Call Saul makes nice leisure out of merely displaying folks doing their jobs. It informs their characters. Jimmy’s hustling to promote drop telephones in Season 4, and his numerous sly lawyerly schematics all all through the present’s run depict his nature and persona. When Kim Wexler places in additional hours in Season 2, calling potential shoppers on lunch breaks or within the stairwells at work to try to rating a win for Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, that reveals who she is — her fortitude, her dedication. There are many scenes of hapless fellow legal professional Bill Oakley (Peter Diseth), together with tough-as-nails DA Suzanne Ericsen (Julie Pearl) doing their jobs. The scenes make the world richer and the present extra entertaining to observe. These characters care about what they’re doing, so Better Call Saul turns into a factor of fiery ardour to observe.
Likewise, the digital camera crew is seemingly at all times prepared to leap right into a last-second manufacturing for Jimmy’s rip-off of the day, with recent ordered pizza and digital camera shot lists and make-up kits and all.
Where Is Jimmy’s Camera Crew Now?
Maybe that is nothing for them. Maybe it’s all simply tales from faculty they’ll inform their spouses in mattress some night time. Hushed tales of irreverence. “Remember that guy who we used to do those crazy videos for? Yeah. He became an international money laundering drug criminal. Crazy times.”
There is one thing of a flip to the frivolity of those characters of their closing look in Season 6’s “Plan & Execution,” which sees the tragic demise of Howard Hamlin. The digital camera crew helps Jimmy and Kim run a con on Howard to humiliate him and, as a bonus, settle the lengthy slog of the Sandpiper Crossing case that can make Jimmy a millionaire as soon as it is accomplished with. Their plan entails faking pictures of Jimmy bribing a decide, and lacing these pictures with medicine to make Howard appear like an insane drug addict after he touches them. Watching Jimmy with the attention dropper full of medication, Camera Guy asks Jimmy with some uncommon concern what he is doing. Jimmy responds that Camera Guy would not have to know. It’s the one time within the present any of those digital camera crew characters actually query a lot past the logistics of the shoot. This in a approach symbolizes the top of the comparative innocence of the remainder of the present. From right here on out, Saul will pursue darker avenues of crime and get entangled in additional severe bother. The enjoyable is over.
The viewer doesn’t see them once more after “Plan & Execution,” so there’s no phrase on what they thought, if something, about Saul’s flip right into a full-fledged prison through the Breaking Bad years. As they weren’t central characters to the story, the viewer will not be aware about what occurs to them in a while. One can think about, although. The three of them possible stored engaged on numerous movie initiatives round Albuquerque. Documentaries about outdated blues musicians, low-budget dramas about infidelity and small-town malaise and coming-of-age tales, possibly some Shakespeare variations on native theater phases. Probably some commercials for native companies to assist pay the lease. Probably, they’re nonetheless not making some huge cash, however that’s the way it goes within the arts, even for many who hung out round Jimmy McGill.
‘Better Call Saul’ Was About the World It Created for the Viewers
These characters are comparatively small elements of the tapestry of Better Call Saul, however like many different good, underrated characters within the Breaking Bad universe, they actually add rather a lot within the method of seasoning on a meals dish. They have their distinct personalities and the writers work them in for an episode or two each season, with the precision and timing of comedy sketch. One cause each Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul work is as a result of the writers and administrators crafted this complete world filled with very simply identifiable signifiers that give the present a definite persona. An enormous a part of it’s how the actors put in such meticulous, concerned performances, serving to to make the Breaking Bad-verse such a large storytelling feat.
The present is stuffed with characters like this — actors committing 110% to their elements, regardless of how small. Dennis Boutsikaris as Rich Schweikart and Ed Begley Jr. as Clifford Main, each high- powered attorneys in Albuquerque, are doing critically proficient work. These two might’ve simply been one be aware characters fading into the background, however they match into a colourful and three-dimensional world and have definitive tics and persona traits. Schweikart is just a little fussy, very neat, a cordial man with a quiet voice — a boss who is perhaps stern however principally has a delicate contact. Main is staunch and old-school however a decent form of man who performs his guitar to chill out. He is a straight-shooter with whom the place you stand. They are absolutely fleshed out characters. As actual as anybody, apart from the truth that they’re fictional.
The digital camera crew is identical approach and is probably much more integral as they assist steer Jimmy into his later life as an expert con man and cash launderer. Those garish, iconic commercials from Breaking Bad didn’t come from nowhere — he bought his begin by palling round with the digital camera crew. While they’re simply bit elements within the bigger scheme of the story, their roles are among the many causes Better Call Saul is so nice.