I Appeared as an Extra in the Movie The Itty Bitty Titty Committee

I did the extra gig yesterday. Oh man.

I sort of imagined that being an extra consisted of mostly sitting around munching free sandwiches and chatting with the other extras while everyone else set stuff up or argued about what they were going to do, then every once in a while someone would be like, “Okay, extras, go stand over there for a minute,” and they’d shoot a few takes, then you’d go back to lounging. I imagined that the biggest issue to contend with would be boredom. But that’s not how it turned out at all.

In the scene they were filming, a group of girls shows up at city hall, where two groups are protesting the issue of gay marriage. One of the girls gets into a shouting match with one of the anti-gay protesters, and a shoving match ensues, which escalates into a brawl between the two sides. The girl’s friends drag her out of the fray, and they all run off. Now, how long do you think it would take to film this scene? If you said eleven hours you would be — incredibly — correct.

They had wanted 75 extras to form the crowd, but due to the rain only about 20 showed up. In order to give the illusion of more people, they had all the extras walking back and forth and back and forth in the background. I can’t believe that no one in the audience is going to notice that the same twenty people keep walking back and forth for no apparent reason, but nobody on the crew seemed that concerned, so maybe there’s some magic of the movies involved. We had to keep redoing every shot because the background was too empty, and they’d give us vague hints about how we should correct this, but since none of us could see what the camera was seeing, it was basically a totally random process. So for five straight hours, without any breaks to sit down, we walked up and down a marshy hill, in the rain. It was cold enough to numb your fingers and toes. I had brought my friend Erica along. Like me, she had anticipated that we would mostly be lounging, and she’d worn very nice-looking but horrendously uncomfortable-looking high-heels. She was not a happy camper. But I felt even worse for one of the lesbian couples. They had been directed to be kissing in the background, and so they had to make out more or less continuously for five hours straight, subject to constant directions to change their position or pose. They’d been at a party the night before (where a friend had roped them into this) and hadn’t slept at all before coming.

There was a lunch break, where we were finally able to sit down. We ate pizza and talked to some of the other extras and got the lowdown on the whole extra gig. This was more what I had been envisioning, but it was over all too soon, and then we were back on our feet. Well, I was, anyway. About half the extras apparently decided that they weren’t being paid enough for this and snuck off during lunch, but some new ones had showed up, so there were still about 20. Next we had to film the sequence where the crowd starts brawling. This was a lot more fun, but was even more physically demanding. Even fake fighting, if it’s going to look at all real, involves a fair amount of inadvertent crushing, elbowing, and foot-stomping. Once, after the cut, a guy asked, “Okay, who bit me?” though I think he was joking. As a pro-gay marriage protester, I had a poster that read, “Homophobia is sooo ’80s.” Every take of the fight, the poster got a little more ripped, and we did take after take after take after take. Four hours of this. They had to keep taping the poster back together, but it was hopeless. The thing just got shredded to confetti, until the whole back of it was just a solid wall of tape. I don’t know if it’ll show up on camera, but the audience has got to wonder why my character came to a protest (in the shots before the fight breaks out) with this poster that looks like it was mauled by a bear.

After filming the fight, they went back and shot more stuff from earlier in the scene, so we went back to walking up and down the hill. It was at this point that the filming really became hard to endure. I’d gone to bed the night before at 2:00 a.m., gotten up at 5:00 a.m., and then spent almost eleven hours on my feet, most of that walking, shouting, or grappling. I had paced the same stupid route a hundred times. I wasn’t getting paid for this. I was losing my voice. I was badly sunburned. It was starting to get dark and windy, and I couldn’t feel my toes. Every muscle ached. I think it was the worst pain I’ve ever felt that didn’t involve a hospital. I said to Erica, “You know, my entire life up until this morning seems like some vague, silly dream. This hill is my only reality now.” And she said, “Can you imagine — prison camps are worse than this. Worse than this. Worse. Think about that. How can that even be possible?”

Finally, mercifully, we wrapped. I’ll be curious to see the film. There were so few extras there, it seems inevitable that I’ll have a pretty visible screen presence, though I hope they use the earlier takes and not the ones where I look sunburned, bedraggled, and am stumbling about in zombielike fashion, wearing an expression that probably screams, “Kill me now.”