I’m dragging this entry out from the drafts folder in large part because it’s been there since September of last year. It’s a madwriting blog entry about my being an extra in a movie called UNDONE: The Musical. The result was a pretty decent blog entry length-wise, but also incomplete and I never got around to finishing it—I ran out of steam after 30 minutes plus one paragraph. I’m not sure how many additional details I could recall after so long, so I figure I’ll just post it as is and it’ll make for some good reading. If it doesn’t make for some good reading… at least it’s out of the drafts folder.
As a side note, the producers posted the movie online so the cast and crew could see the final result a couple months ago. I downloaded it onto my computer and still haven’t watched it yet. I’ve only watched three episodes of The Big Bang Theory since a friend loaned it to me, so that might give you an idea of where the movie sits on my list of priorities. But onto the blog entry. I have no recollection of what I wrote and I’m not going to edit it 14 months later, so I imagine we’ll both be surprised at what we read when I hit the “Publish” button.
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This is one of those nights where… it’s like something’s churning just underneath the surface, saying “Hey, lemme out! It’s dark in here! And you smell funny! When’s the last time you took a shower?” And quite frankly, this isn’t the kind of blog entry for answering a question like that. Especially since you probably don’t want to know the answer.
But I’ve felt the urge to write something on here for the last couple days, but there’s been one problem: I ain’t got nothin’ to write about. Thus, Internet silence. Okay, technically, I suppose I could write about being an extra for a movie on Wednesday, but it wasn’t terribly eventful. Eh, I guess there were enough mini-events to make writing about the whole thing worthwhile.
Call time was 9:00am on a weekday. That in itself isn’t such a big deal, but given that I was running on about four hours of sleep and had a cold that started rearing its ugly head last weekend, part of me was tempted to call in sick. However, another part of me reminded myself that I made a commitment and the last time I heard from them, they were already running short. Even if I kicked the bucket on-site, they could at least flop me down on the table with a glass tipped over in my head like I passed out stinkin’ drunk.
It was a legitimate possibility, too. The scene was supposed to be a dance club—wear something formal, but something you can dance in. (I think that’s the wardrobe the e-mail was asking for.) Well, I knew what kind of clothes I’d bring to a dance club… sorta. I can count the number of times I’ve been to a dance club on a couple fingers, but if I did go to one, I knew what I could wear.
So there was a possibility of spending the whole day dancing. That would suck. Not that I mind dancing so much, though that’s not what a friend of mine would suggest. I was telling her about the shoot the night before and kept saying (technically, typing on Facebook) that I’m not automatically going to be dancing. If the director wants me to stand against the wall, I’ll do that. She insisted that I was saying that just because I didn’t want to dance, but I’m a practical extra: my job is to do what I’m told. Within reason. (Carrying a big metal door out of the building isn’t part of being an extra, but that was just being nice. The only down side was that the crew guy who asked for help said he’d buy me a drink later, but by the time “later” came around, he was gone. Shit.)
But as it turned out, “dance club” ended up being more of a bar with an acoustic guitar player in the background. At least that’s the only music that played the entire time I was there. And that was just during the last half hour. Nope, during the rest of that time, we had to create our own atmosphere of a club. With some help from a smoke machine. Did you know that breathing the fumes from a smoke machine off and on for 12 hours is bad when you have a cold? I do now.
That’s something else worth noting. The e-mail said the shoot could take up to 10 hours. The last of us left around 9:00pm, 12 hours later. One dude took off sometime around 3:30pm, which is totally uncool. He had made other plans, but here’s a note for anyone out there who wants to be a movie extra: if you’re gonna help out in a movie, expect to spend a lot of time there. If they say “It could take up to ten hours”, don’t schedule something halfway through. It pisses people off.
Anyway, I got there, then changed into a different shirt that they picked from the outfits I brought (and did it in front of everyone because I try to avoid being self-conscious if I can help it). Not to say that it’s a great view these days, but they all had plenty of time to shield their eyes and look in different directions to avoid dry heaving.
We were upstairs in a bar and the set was downstairs, so they brought us down once in a while for a scene. Honestly, it wasn’t that spectacular. It was a lot of standing, moving around, holding drinks… thankfully, we were usually allowed to whisper instead of “silent talk”—moving your lips without speaking—because I can’t read lips worth a damn. I have to stand there with the other person and flap lips… it’s doable, but it’s annoying. And if it’s necessary for the scene, I get to suck it up and deal. C’est la vie, I guess.
I think I get to do a victory dance for one thing: the director had us do something that I thought was a bad idea and he ended up changing it to what I would have done. Mwa ha ha haaaaa… The scene was that some guy and I got up from the bar to walk toward the bathroom (which was heading directly toward the camera). During the course of our stroll, he turned to look at me, then bumped into one of the main characters so that she spilled her drink. I got to hold my hands up and avoid the scene as much as I could, then cross the camera to where the bathroom was supposed to be.
Part of the fun of that scene was the actress getting bumped would pick various obscenities to blurt out when they collided. You never know when something will really resonate with the audience, so try a bunch of stuff and see what the director likes, right? But I remember the first time because as I was swinging around the actress and crossing in front of the camera, I tried to time it so that I was walking past between her sentences. I didn’t want to be between her and the camera when she was giving an important line, so… yeah, trying to time it over and over doesn’t work so well.
Eventually, the director did what I thought he should: the bathroom “moved” from the right side of the camera to the left side. Instead of crossing in front, we moved away off camera into the corner of the room. It felt a lot better for me, I know that much.
[Incidentally, this is the 30-minute mark, so I hit 1088 words during the official #madwriting surge.]
There was one downside, which was probably unrelated to the direction we walked away from the camera. The first time, the guy bumped her, she turned and yelled out, “DICK!” (He was actually a little shocked when it happened—it was the first non-generic obscenity and she yelled it at him specifically.) She was apparently satisfied with that response, because every time we ran the scene from that point on, that’s all she’d say: “DICK!” A couple different camera angles from just after the collision—the two of us were standing off to the side of the room—and it was always “DICK!” I was starting to think she was obsessing about the “DICK!”, but… okay, I think I’ve beaten the “DICK!” joke to death.
