The experience of being expendable: a true Hollywood story, in all its stagnant glory
By Jason Feifer
The Gardner News

PAULSBORO, N.J. — We were a likely bunch, the background and I.

We were the perfect reflection of an average crowd, a smattering of races and body types, like a heap of pieces from different puzzles.

We each had our fantasies of being immortalized in celluloid, but were modest enough to settle for less: to be that person in the background, the one that nobody notices, but to be able to point and smile and make our friends say, “Oh yeah, that IS you!”

It was a slice of the proverbial Hollywood pie we were looking for, although we all knew it would be too small to even nibble on.

What was perhaps most stunning is that we, the excruciatingly ordinary crowd, were all hand-picked by casting agents. We were deliberately plucked from the masses by some mysterious formula, gathered together in the Paulsboro High School gymnasium, and given instructions to blend in.

We were, in every way, someone’s vision of diversity. Waiting for us on the other side of the school, however, was nearly everyone’s vision of beauty: Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Liv Tyler, and more.

The movie we were prepared to become an immediately forgettable part of is Jersey Girl, the new project of writer/director Kevin Smith, who had made waves with prodding and irreverent comedies such as Clerks and Chasing Amy.

None of us were told what we were doing or how long it would take, so we waited patiently in the gym, eating the type of mass-produced breakfast many of us have not seen since our own days in high school.

Discouraged and hungry, I wandered away from the masses and found a table with comparatively gourmet food. As I buttered my bagel and tossed a waffle in the toaster, a well-dressed man trotted up to me.

“No, no, no, this is the cast and crew’s food,” he said while flipping his hand at me, as if trying to shoo away a fly. Then he pointed back to the table of slop, and told me that was “the extras’ food.”

Indeed, it looked like extra food — scraped-together leftovers that the cast and crew would not dare touch.

Working on a movie set clearly was not going to pass the time, so instead we made friends. The beauty of a premeditated crowd such as ours is that nobody was left without someone similar, although we reveled in our differences.

There are two types of people that apply to be extras — those who are interested to see the other side of movie-making magic, and those who desperately, pathetically, and very obviously want to be a major part of it.

Those people stuck out like the movie stars they are not. Sitting on the outskirts of us common folk, they sat upright and bright-eyed on the bleachers, just waiting to be discovered. They kept to themselves, too conscious of their self-perceived beauty, and perhaps too stiff under the dried film of make-up and hair spray to sacrifice their pose.

But for the rest of us, who showed up this past Tuesday out of curiosity or a crazy devotion to a member of the cast, the day was an exercise in killing time with random people.

Near me, there was Meredith, a medical student who was chasing a dream as an actor before her doctoral interests took over; James, a urban 20-something who works odd jobs and dreams of publishing a book of poetry; Stacey, a recent college graduate and actor in New York City; and Sue, a former private investigator who now spends her time tracking down shooting locations for HBO’s The Sopranos.

We exchanged jokes and biographies. Meredith, who was the only one to have been an extra before, told us that extras are generally instructed to continue mouthing the words “peas and carrots,” because it looks like a realistic conversation.

We all tried it. Peas and carrots!!! Our faces searched for visual meaning, overcompensating for the loss of emotion that comes from silent gibberish. Peas and carrots???

Then, finally, something happened. A production assistant picked up a microphone and told us that we should expect to be there for at least — at LEAST — 12 hours. Most people turned to each other and mouthed something, and it probably was not “peas and carrots.”

Then we all had to get our “wardrobes” — that is, the clothes on our back — approved. We all stood in a line, at the front of which was two women who looked us up and down and said either, “That’s fine” or “Do you have anything else to wear?”

Everything they say about the “Hollywood hurry-up-and-wait” is true. When we were finally ushered into an auditorium, we sat and waited while the actors’ stand-ins idly chatted on stage. Smith sometimes wandered on stage to talk to crew members, and to give us our collective motivation — clap, don’t clap, be stunned, be not stunned, and so on.

Occasionally, our wait was interrupted by bursts of action, during which actors performed short, unexplained scenes from a movie we knew little about. Then, the actors would disappear, the stand-ins would come back, and the cryptic cycle of movie magic continued to turn.

At one point, Smith introduced the actors, and it was immediately clear who the crowd was there for. Most actors were greeted with a warm round of applause, Ben Affleck received a cheer like the crowd’s team just won a big game, and when Jennifer Lopez came out, it was like everyone won the Superbowl.

Lopez, like all the rest, smiled and waved, and then walked off-stage. The actors would sometimes joke with the crowd between scenes, and we were all thrilled by it. Liv Tyler even apologized for the wig she was wearing, as if to say, “I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more beautiful for you.”

Just being on the set felt like a privilege, though. There were wires and cameras everywhere, and the crew was usually happy to answer our questions about the industry.

Photographs and autographs were strictly prohibited. It hardly mattered, because the only cast member we ever got close to was a little girl, who often ran around the auditorium when she got bored of being on stage.

Some of my new friends from the gym and I were placed in the back of the auditorium, where the glow from glaring stage lights barely reached. At best, we knew we were shadows for a scene that could end up on the cutting room floor, and so our desires shifted.

We may have come to compete for camera space, but now we were competing for laughs.

Nobody would hear or see us, not behind the camera or in the actual movie, so we let loose. When we instructed to clap, we slapped our hands wildly, letting out whoops and irrelevant, ridiculous cheers. We tossed a water bottle in the air, staged little fights, and completely enjoyed being forgotten within a sea of people who were meant to be forgettable.

Around dinnertime, though, we were losing steam. The gym, which once contained neatly-aligned tables and a bustling crowd, now looked like a early morning hurricane shelter. People slumped over chairs and slowly gnawed on the set’s bounty of cheap snacks. Even the moviestar-hopefuls had grown tired, and their once-pristine looks had slowly faded.

At 6:30, we were all milling about in the gym, and the production assistant told us that our next scene had to be postponed an hour. They needed to film something with a child actor whose time on set would soon legally expire.

The crew seriously discouraged us from leaving, and the small group of people I met may not have thought to if we were closer to the cameras. But by then, the appeal of being a speck on the big screen had waned, reality had set in, and all we had left was each other.

We were tired, the group was getting quiet, and so we left.

It is difficult to be disappointed with an experience in which the express purpose is to be neglected, and so we were quite pleased. Watching a movie being filmed is like watching 100 people stutter, and I imagine it gets boring while taking an active role in it. Being in the background is like, well, being in the background.

The people who came with dreams of instant fame should have known better, we said.

In our little group, we made our own spotlight. It may not get us on the silver screen, but it was surely more flattering than the ones in front of the camera.

In a nutshell, it was all devoted to shooting the audience from the stage: entering, reading our programs, applauding, reacting, etc. Unlike Monday, they kept us busy most of the day, not too much sitting around. It was the longest day, too, from 10 in the morning until midnight.

Certainly more of an event than any of the other days, with Kevin directly addressing the audience a number of times and introducing the cast. Especially liked his intro for Affleck: “He was the bomb in ‘Phantoms,’ yo.”

Some didn’t care to wait through the day. In fact, the woman sitting next to me in the front row disappeared before the evening’s work, so there was a small mini-crisis as they looked for a replacement, which they found in a woman in the balcony. They had her bring her hair down, redressed her, and she was a pretty fair match. I didn’t even catch on to the switch until she looked me in the face!

At the end, they asked the first two rows for their names and said they might be needed on Friday for some shots. Tonight I was told it’ll probably be a 5 pm call (I have to call them tomorrow for the final decision) and they said it might last all night. I’ll let you know what happens.