Extra Boring

In 1999 I was an extra in the film "High Crimes," with Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman. I just watched it again tonight on my computer and took some snaps with my digicam of my Hollywood debut. The lady in the picture is Ashley; I'm to the right of the "handsome" anchorman, wearing headphones, my face cut in two by the boom-mike I was holding.

The scene was one in which Ashley's character, Claire Kubick, is leaving a military brig where she is defending her husband in a murder trial. She's telling a cluster of reporter/extras that her beau is innocent. We did about 40 takes of this scene, which lasts for about ten seconds in the final film, on a cold day at decommissioned Alameda Air Force in Alameda, CA, just south of Oakland. This took all day - from 6 AM to 7PM. Behind the crowd of reporters, in the direction Ashley is facing, was an unbelievable battalion of camera, sound and lighting equipment, attended by a giant crew.

I was one of hundreds of extras that day, most of whom were dressed in fatigues, making the base look full of activity in the background (I don't believe any of them were visible in the final cut of this scene). The drill for each shot, all forty of them: back all the cars in the background to their starting positions. Move all the milling-around-in-the-background extras to their positions. Place all the reporters. Get Ashley back in her place if she had been busy asking a flunky for warm bottled water or spelling her assistant whose job it was to take care of her mini-poodles all day. Then, get the people and cars moving. Then a few more steps I forget, ending when the real sound man (who held a boom like mine and was in this shot as a reporter, except his mike was live) yelled, "sound rolling" and that meant it was time for drama.

Which meant that most of the extras were supposed to start saying "walla walla" over and over again, and the extras who happened to have equity cards got to (Mr Handsome among them) asked her reporter-style questions. They all shouted over each other variations on, "Mrs. Kubick, Mrs. Kubick, what do you think of the allegations that your husband ..." etc. At which point Ashley would hold up her hand and delivery her line: "I think that all of you know that my husband is innocent of the charges ..." etc.

In the script the whole scene was about 2 inches long on the page. One reason there were so many takes was that many of them were not completed. An endless number were cut (I can't remember if they yelled "cut") before any lines were spoken, evidently due to some problem with camera, sound, lighting, the background actors, the cars, etc. In fact it was quite late in the day before we started moving into takes in which lines were spoken.

Ashley spent most of the day completely ignoring the extras, which was strange because you can see how close she was; and she often remained there between takes, staring blankly at the ground. It was funny because all the extras - young and old - were gazing at her with almost scary adulation - wide, wet, appealing, admiring eyes. When she finally spoke to us, her ice-breaker was, "So has everyone been watching all the specials?" (It was around Christmas time.)

The reporter-extras were organized into teams. Each team had an anchor, a cameraman with a prop camera, and a sound man with a prop boom, prop sound recorder (very heavy) and prop earphones. Eyebrows was my anchor and he took it upon himself throughout the day to maintain a tight ship, telling the cameraman and me to move and behave this way and that, though his maneuverings were primarily aimed at assuring that he would be closer to Ashley than us, and more visible to the camera.

Through every step of the day, even before we had been "cast" and positioned for our scene, there was ugly competition and gossip-mongering among the extras. They are cutting people, some would say. It's better to be a soldier, others said. It's better to be a reporter. Everyone was an authority. The wardrobe truck, an 18-wheeler open at the back, filled with racks of clothing, was like a cross between a UN relief truck and a hot Manhattan nightclub. Fashionable-looking wardrobists stood on the lift, picking and choosing amongst the utterly average crowd thronging them, rewarding the lucky few with an outfit of street clothes that was almost, but not exactly, the same as the clothes you showed up in. (I got a pair of jeans and a denim jacket with corduroy lapels, which I got to change into in a real personal dressing room, closet-sized but equipped with bathroom, sink, mirror and couch. These rooms were about a dozen to a trailer).

At one point during the shooting there was a long break as the entire phalanx of shooting gear was moved to the other side of the scene, behind ashley's back, to get several shots of her POV of the reporters (which weren't used).

Among the crew were staff tasked with managing and controlling the extras. Assistant Directors, I guessed, moved us back and forth with no apparent rhyme or reason. One would tell us all to move one step to the right, and when we had, get distracted by something else, at which point another might come along and tell us querelously to move one step to the left. Others, I guess they would have been called PA's, were the sergeants, keeping us in line.

Eventually I started to have to piss really bad and I got the gumption to ask one of the PA's if I could take a bathroom break. A curt "No," was the only response. Feeling rebellious and having a sense by then of the minimum length of time between takes, I sauntered off at one point and peed into the bay which was just on the other side of the parking lot we were shooting in. For a few semi-blissful moments I contemplated the gentle surf moving in and out of tidepools; a wild, natural place totally out of the control of the harried slavedrivers on the set.

During the entire morning not a word was communicated to any of us of the meaning of what we were doing. What the scene was, what we were supposed to be or do beyond the narrow confines of blocking, wardrobe and props. The AD's and PA's treated us like cattle, and everyone else completely ignored us. Only once in the entire day did anyone speak to us like human beings. Without prelude one of the crew wearing a fleece jacket and a baseball cap - a laid-back looking black man in his fifties who was parlaying with other crew members nearby, turned to us and spoke a few words to us with respect, trust and familiarity. He explained very briefly, though with a kind of sly, generous humor, what kind of scene it was, who Ashley's character was and what we were to do. He used general, off-hand language and held our rapt attention for the few moments he spoke. He walked away leaving each of us feeling that we had an important role to play and that we knew what that role was. After awhile I realized that this had been the director, Carl Franklin. A good director, I even found out later - he had made an indie noir I liked, "One False Move," and had also directed "Devil In a Blue Dress." He was a big-time Hollywood director who made a point of telling stories that included strong, real black characters in lead roles.

We broke for lunch, served cafeteria-style in the base commisary. I talked more openly with a few of the extras. Some of them were aspiring actors, many of them were professional extras who made enough to live on doing nothing but extra work. A blue-collar crowd, but a hopeful, optimistic one.

(this was originally published in my photoblog: http://www.psychoastronomy.org/photoblog)