How I became an extra in an action movie and what followed

Friday, June 14, 2013.

About twenty years ago, the Hampshire Gazette, a local newspaper, had an article suggesting that local people come in and try out to be extras for a movie being shot in Northampton. Jack was little enough to still be in his stroller; Amysue Chase met us for an afternoon shopping in Northampton. We ran into a friend of hers, who thought that I was her partner and that Jack was her baby (both of them had blond hair and Amy was pushing the stroller). We went to a downtown office; they didn't ask us to fill out a card so that was the end of that.

About six years later, “The Cider House Rules” was looking for little boys to be orphans; it was also being shot locally. It was August and there was a line of about 1000 kids lining the Northampton High School parking lot. We never got interviewed and just left Jack's photo and my contact information in a box. On the night before Jack's last day of school before Christmas break, I got a telephone call, asking us to stand by in case they were going to shoot one more day. They didn't shoot, so Jack's big chance was over before it started.

A couple of more movies were filmed locally but by now, the casting agency had gone online. I posted my information but rarely clicked on the “available” button as all of the movies seriously conflicted with my full-time teaching job. I got a stand-by call once, for three days on “Here Comes the Boom,” but I never got the final call to confirm.

A few weeks ago, the casting agency sent an email, asking for extras who could use tools and who were familiar with DIY projects. I've been a tool-user since I was a little kid, painting the baseboards at age six and helping with the bottom end of wallpapering when my parents finally finished their ten room house (five kids – we NEEDED ten rooms, which included a mother-in-law apartment!).

I had started to put an addition onto my own house six years ago, with the money I won on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” I've built lit and smoking guitars, bookcases, installed tile flooring, constructed stud-walls, and I really like wood-working. And archaeologists are all tool users, so I sent a photo of myself at the hackerspace, standing in front of the drill press, along with my DIY resume. To my surprise, I got a call last week, asking if I really was a tool user, and inquiring about my availability for next week and the following Monday. I'm currently unemployed, so the calendar was bare. Of course, I said yes for tool user. Then, the agent asked if I could play softball. I was surprised at the question but I played on a co-ed team for two years. I said that I wasn't very good but I played. The caller said, “It's all CGI. OK.” All of the potential extras, including my file, would go to the director. I expected that, like every other time, this would be the end of my movie career. But it wasn't!

This morning, I got another call, to see if I was still available on Monday. I have a doctor's appointment but I can change it. Then, I got the “real” email tonight, asking me to immediately confirm my availability. I did. I've got the job, for Monday, at least. They might use me for as many as six days! I could use the money. Monday will be a long day, they say, because of all of the paperwork and costume decisions. I was asked to bring several possibilities – jeans or other pants and neutral-colored short sleeved tops in several colors. No open-toed shoes. I'll bring four pairs of pants – black jeans, blue jeans, a new pair of khaki-colored pants with zippered ankles, and gray cargos. I've got a black polo, a mauve tunic, a red tunic, and a dull purple polo set aside and I may rummage for more choices. And a new pair of black New Balance shoes, plus my air cast and all of its paraphernalia. This way, I don't need my open-toed cast and I can walk with both legs of the same length – which is a lot easier on my knees.

I have to be at the set (a decommissioned Lowes store) at 5:45AM in Haverhill, MA. It's a two hour drive. A long drive, worried about getting delayed, is not my favorite way to start a new job.

Sunday, June 16, 2012

I woke up this morning at 2:30 AM, in a bit of a panic. I started a course of oral prednisone on Friday morning to improve my breathing – I've had moderate asthma for over a month and I was worried that not breathing well might be a problem on set (I got the first call about availability on Thursday). I'd been considering starting the course of prednisone for weeks - it wasn't JUST for the movie that made me start the pills. But, sometimes steroids cause sleep problems and anxiety and I've got both in spades, today. Yuck!

It also occurred to me that I never thought that I'd really get an extra gig. I have applied for so many jobs in the last three years and only gotten a couple - all of them teaching, which I've done before, so they aren't totally out of left field - I thought that I'd never get one of these and if I did, it would be for just a single day! This seems like it's going to be different - I got another email this morning from Ashley at Boston Casting, telling me to bring a reusable water bottle as Columbia is plastic-free, and giving me the number I'll need to get on set. There appear to be 15 extras, according to the list - five who are prioritized and then ten in my group. I'm really scared. I feel like it's the day before school starts. I don't know what I'm doing but I'll fake it.

Tuesday, June 18, 2012.

I decided the prednisone was making my heart race so I stopped taking it. I only got an hour of sleep before it was time to leave for Haverhill, then I was late in leaving the house so I drove like a maniac for the whole way. Dawn broke, totally blinding me for the last fifteen miles of the drive but I made it, just in time. I filled out paperwork, was instructed to change into my black Renaissance polo shirt (I had my blue jeans on), and was given a gray apron with a button “I'm cool with tools.” A bunch of us were then sent for props; we all got work gloves to stash in our apron pockets. There were a lot more extras – my group of fifteen arrived at 5:45 but others had different arrival times. The five prioritized people in my group were SAG members. I chatted with several; I was the only total newbie. This area, at one end of the store, became the “background corral.”

The store was HUGE. A set for a house or apartment had been constructed at one end while much of the rest was set up as store, complete with a garden center with real plants. I overheard a costuming person say that the production company spent a million dollars renting the store and setting it up.

I got called with a group of other extras to be placed. I wasn't used the first time, so I stood around in an aisle, waiting. After a couple hours, another guy snagged me a chair and found some boxes for himself, but I only sat for about ten minutes. I was assigned to stand in an aisle, wait for Denzel Washington to reach a forklift, then walk down the aisle and out of the open big loading doors (which were covered with vertical plastic hanging barriers), gloves in hand. I repeated this several times. Then, they reset the camera angle, so now I had to follow the camera down the aisle and pass it before exiting. We added a bit where I encountered a couple coming the other way, turned to point at a rack from where I came, smiled and nodded to them, then turned back to exit. As I had originally held my red gloves in my left hand but was pointing with it, I swapped the gloves from hand to hand as I walked. Then, we were sent back to the corral, called back for another camera angle, then sent to the corral for lunch.

Lunch was served by pecking order; first, SAG and other union members, by the earliest call time, then just by call time. I was one of the last to get lunch as they called anyone after 5:30 all together. It was good but there wasn't much that didn't have wheat in it. I ate some salad, cut fruit, and a chunk of roast beef. it was delicious but I wasn't very hungry as I was not feeling good (but not bad enough to think I was sick). And, I was really sleepy.

After lunch, I got called out again to be set, this time on the front corner, to use a price checker and pretend to do inventory. I also straightened up the contents of the shelves. Denzel Washington was about three feet (or less) away from me at the beginning of this scene, but I was facing the shelves, not him. I repeated the same series of actions seven or eight times, then again for a different camera angle. Then, I got sent to another corner, for a “big picture” scene of the entire store, but was called back as there had been a decision to shoot the price checker scene a different way.

I went back for the “big picture” scene, but it was delayed while the “break-room scene” was done again (my price checker scene was outside of the break-room). I had been given directions to interact with a customer, so we both sat down on some lawn furniture while we waited. I dropped off to sleep for over half an hour, but eventually, all of the equipment came down to our end of the store and we got new directions to move around. Again, I interacted with customers and policed shelves for several rehearsals, then at least four takes. At the end, the director call that it was a wrap for the day. And for all of the crew to come back at 6:30.

I turned in my apron (I lost my gloves somewhere around lunchtime) found my paperwork, then finished filling it out. Then, I waited again for my turn in the pecking order. I changed into my ortho boot and wound up second to last. While I was waiting, I got a call from the casting company; I wasn't needed today. Which was just as well; I went to the doctor's and it turns out I have pneumonia! I did get a call today for tomorrow, but I told them I was sick but, if I was needed Thursday or later, to consider me again.

I stopped by my friend Skia's house on the way home; the original plan had been for me to stay with her if I was going to have several days in a row on set. She fed me some dinner - really good hamburger, eggs, and guacomole. I felt much better after I ate, so I drove home. And so, I can now say that I have spent a day on a movie set. It was a lot of running around and waiting. But it was fun. Probably not as a full-time job, but for a day – not bad!

Thursday, June 20, 2013

I got called again for Wednesday (and couldn't go), then I just got the call for another day, tomorrow, but I'm still feverish and jittery. I'm so disappointed! All I've done is lie on the sofa! With any luck, they'll call me for next week AND I'll be better!

Everything changed on Friday, June 21.

High school memories

      Yesterday, I sat down to talk to a fellow that I went to high school with. One thing that struck me was how few friends we had in common, despite a large number of common interests, now. The seeds of those interests were present in high school; how could we have been strangers? It made me think about the person I was, way back in the dark ages.

      In high school, I was a product of my childhood, and my childhood filled with fear. I was always afraid as a child and this fear still filled me, even in high school. My father, a wonderful dad to me, was also a violent drunk to my mother. I never knew which man he was going to be, when he came home. I looked forward to seeing him after work but he scared the crap out of me. And I was afraid of other people because I’ve always had a hard time recognizing anyone. In addition to mild prosopagnosia, to this day, even though my vision has been corrected with glasses for most of my life, I don’t recognize facial features unless the lighting is perfect (like on a stage). When someone approaches me, I only see the outline of their figure and how they walk, not what their face looks like. Think about how you feel when a stranger approaches you – to me, everyone approaching is a stranger. It’s human nature to be afraid of strangers; they’re scary. I was always afraid.

      Then there were the social issues of high school. I had gone to elementary school in Granby, a very small town adjacent to a military base – the kids in my school were either “townies” or “new kids.” I was a “townie.” The new kids were almost always the children of air force officers. They were interesting because of all of the other places where they had lived and our teachers encouraged us to be friendly. I had lots of friends who were either townies or military kids, but this all changed when my mother and siblings moved from the spacious house that my parents had built on a multi-acre lot to an apartment in Amherst.

      When I started junior high school, I was a “new kid” in a college town. In Amherst, literally next door to Granby, the social order was completely different. The junior and senior high school served three neighboring towns, but they didn’t serve Granby, where I had gone to elementary school. Kids in Amherst were either from “old” families or somehow associated with one of the colleges. The “new kids” were almost always the children of students or professors. The children of students were assumed to be transient and not worth becoming friends with, while the children of professors were incorporated as they would be encountered by other faculty kids at faculty family functions. And both faculty kids and “old family” kids had gone to elementary school together. I moved to Amherst because my parents had divorced and my mother started grad school, so I was assumed to be a transient (and not worth getting to know). To validate our student status, we had moved to an apartment complex that, essentially, only served students and student families. Faculty families, even visiting faculty, lived in houses, not apartments. The fact that we moved to a house the following year was irrelevant.

      Since I don’t recognize people, I had a very hard time making friends in Amherst, as I entered seventh grade. In fact, our apartment wasn’t ready until October 1, so we had commuted from Granby for that first month. My best friend from Granby had also moved to Amherst (a few months before me), so I had one friend at school but we didn't have any classes together. I made a few more friends once I joined the AV club. Eventually, I made a few more our of all of the students that I shared classes with, but I had a very small circle for the entire five and a half years. I missed the second half of my senior year because I graduated early – my mother remarried and moved to Canada between my junior and senior years and I moved in with neighbors that had had a foster child before me for the four months it took me to finish my requirements, then I had gone to Canada, too. Kids in the high school never noticed my absence.I returned to Amherst to start college.

      So, it wasn’t surprising that we had few friends in common. I had been, for the most part, invisible in high school, with my tiny circle of friends. This fellow had been a part of a more popular crowd – not the one that included the most popular kids but a “better” and larger circle than mine. My geeky friends felt like pariahs in the school and were never a part of the high school social scene, unlike Mark and his friends.

      I enjoyed our chat but noticed that I had changed a lot since high school. I’m not afraid all of the time. I can talk to people. Some of my social abilities were the result of simple maturation that hadn’t happened prior to my completing high school, while others were laboriously acquired in college and during adulthood. Some finally developed as a result of my finally accepting my ASD.  In any case, I could talk to this man who was a stranger to me but with whom I had a lot of memories in common. It was nice.

Unneighborly neighbors

Most of my neighbors are lovely people, friendly and considerate. But, just like every body has an asshole, every group has one, also.  

One of my neighbors is this group’s asshole.  He (and his wife) are very inconsiderate and seem to take pleasure in the pain of others. I was told that they used to have a habit of taking anything and every little thing to small claims court – until a dying child, playing in a neighboring yard, broke a small branch off of one of their trees to make a toy. After they sued the child’s mother for the cost of replacing the tree (with labor – a sum of about $1000!), the judge not only gave them nothing, he threatened to fine them for filing frivolous and malicious filings, if they ever made a similar claim!I don't know if it's true but it sounds like them.

The property of these obnoxious people borders mine. Every time it snows, they use their snowblower to clear snow into my yard. Their snowblower is powerful and they use it to fling snow high enough to clear their boundary fence, so it plummets with a lot of force when it finally reaches the ground.  I have a long downspout on the gutter that's closest to their property, which runs through hedge in front of my house to drain onto my lawn. The outflow is glued onto the downspout, which is, in turn, glued onto the gutter. In addiiton, the downspout is supported by a cinderblock, strategically hidden in my hedge. Several times, the heavy load from their snowblower has knocked the downspout off of my rain gutter, which allows water to collect along the edge of my foundation, occasionally flooding my basement. It really annoys me. I’ve asked their son to not do this (and he stopped) but the old man continues to do as he pleases.  The couple used to spend most winters in Florida and when they did, their son would clear their snow. For the last few years, they’ve stayed all winter in Massachusetts; I wish they’d go back to Florida and never return!

                I’ve got to confront the old man and tell him to stop flooding my basement. He’s not nice, though, and I dread confrontations with any unpleasant people, but these ones are particularly unpleasant.  Is it my discomfort in confronting him worth not having my basement flooded? Hmmm.I need to think about this a bit more, probably until the NEXT heavy snowstorm!

Before Jack was born, one of the neighbors was my obscene phone caller. He only called when I was alone, so I knew that he could see who was home by which cars were in the driveway. And he called frequently. I would hang up but he would keep calling. Usually, I would have to unplug the phone when I was alone but then I couldn’t get calls from anyone else! It really annoyed and frightened me. I had someone watching me – what if he decided to do more than just watch and call? He even called all night as I wallpapered the living room and hallway.

                I tried all kinds of things to try to get him to stop calling.  From the sheer number of time that he psycho-called, my merely hanging up seemed to turn him on, so I got a loud whistle and blew it into the phone. Sometimes he would hand up, but more often, he would just continue with his stroke fantasy. I would set the phone down on the floor, off of the hook, cover it with a towel, and walk away. Eventually, he’d hang up and it would start the “off the hook” whistle. Nothing really worked to make him stop. Then, accidentally, I found the magic response.

                I was taking summer school class – calculus II. The course met for daily for six weeks and I had homework every day. It was hard work and I needed to do my homework as soon as I got home, while the material was still fresh in my mind. John had started his car business, though, and people would call the house, asking about cars that he’d advertised.  On this day, after class, I drove home and, as I started to get out of the car, I heard the phone ringing in the house. It pulled me from my musings about how to solve that day’s integral problems. I yanked my keys out of the ignition, ran up the steps, and quickly unlocked the door. I lunged across the kitchen to catch the call before my caller gave up. It was him, breathing and murmuring the usual nasty things. I was irritated. I had too much to do to put up with this fool. I took a deep breath, moved the phone receiver from my face, looked at it quizzically, and said, out loud but to myself, “Oh, GREAT. It’s my pervert.”

                I looked around for my whistle to try to blast his eardrums but suddenly, I heard the dial tone! My obscene caller thought that I was talking to someone in the room and he hung up on me, mid-perv!

                He never called again. Apparently, he only got his thrills in calling if I was alone and frightened. Seemingly accompanied and bitterly sarcastic, I was no longer attractive to this pervert. I often wondered which house he lived in. Another neighbor told me about the fellow on the corner, who routinely stood in full view in the front window, naked and with an erection, as she drove past every morning. He moved out shortly after my last call. It might have been him, but another neighbor had been caught peeping through windows, so you just never know! 

I suspect that unneighborly neighbors are the bane of most American nieghborhoods. These unpleasant people and their victims certainly fill the schedules of a multitude of “small-claims court” television programs on daytime TV.

Thinking about Chris, just now

     I miss Chris. 

                That was originally his name, before Chris Robison the man-boy became the famous writer, Augusten Burroughs. I’ve known him since he was 12. I remember him as a cute but obnoxious pre-teen. I desperately wanted to rescue him when he was mixed up with his psychiatrist’s cult, but there was nothing  I could do, then. I rejoiced when he finally made it out and started his adult life. We talked for hours on end over the telephone when he worked in advertising in Chicago and later, in San Francisco. He would call me, drunk, and we would talk about anything and everything. He read me most of his first book, "Sellivision" over the telephone.  It was a good book – not deep, but funny. Chris was always funny. 

                When I passed my master’s thesis defense, as a surprise, he overnight-mailed me two open round-trip plane tickets to Mexico, for me to take Jack, because I wanted to go. He just did things like that. 

                He built a house on the same street as his brother. In his writing, he could be cruel. I was glad that I never appeared in any of his books, but I was also glad that they were so popular.

                Then, Jack got into trouble with his chemistry. Chris got mentioned in a news report as Jack’s uncle. Chris stopped talking to both of us. Then, Chris broke up with his long-time partner, who I really liked. I always liked Chris, too, but he never responded to any of my communications, not one in the last five years. 

                Periodically, I hear or read something, or just think about something that I think he would find amusing and I stop. I’d like to talk to him to share it but I can’t. It’s like one of us died. 

I miss Chris.

Foot and boot-cast blues

It peeled off today. At first, I thought it was an old bandaid, soaked from my shower. Then, I thought it might be a piece of plastic that somehow had become stuck to my foot. It was neither; it was a thick chunk of flesh, the complete callus that had formed at the base of my little toe, on the side of my foot. Ick!

My orthopedic boot-cast is wearing out; I’ve had to replace the rubber on the bottom twice and the padding on the inside has shifted. My foot had worn a nest, somewhat diagonally, into the padding. A ridge of metal surrounds the foot, originally it was padded with thick foam but now, the bare metal was exposed on an edge near my little toe. My foot is encased in a fabric liner, within the metal and rubber boot, but my skin reacted to the metal chafing against it by creating a thick callus. The callus had recently become painful; it was pressing on a nerve. This was not acceptable. The purpose of the boot is to protect my foot, not injure it in novel ways.

I went to a discount store and picked up some molefoam and a package of callus-removing bandaids. I added the molefoam to the boot, where the original foam had disappeared, and applied one of the special bandaids after my shower. I changed the bandaid after every shower for days. The callus became oddly discolored last week – a dead white - so I removed the bandaid and didn’t replace it.  I also added a thick layer of padding from an old brace to the inside of the boot liner, where it wrapped around my toes, and ignored the callus as it had stopped hurting. Tonight, my foot itched, so I scratched and found myself peeling off the disgusting wad of skin. 

Now, the side of my foot is graced by a crater-like feature. The edges of the callus are still present and it looks odd. I’m going to give it some time for the center to heal; I suspect that the inner area is tender, much like what happens when the top of a blister peels off. In a few days, I’ll sand the rim down with the callus file I got at the discount store. 

I’m glad I can take my boot-cast off at home. I need it in place of a shoe everywhere else because I can’t keep my ankle from rolling sideways when I’ve got a shoe on, but bare- or sock-footed, I’m fine. Except for needing my arch-supporting orthotics. Too bad I can’t glue orthotics to the bottom of my feet. I know! I should invent orthotic socks! All cotton, of course!

Not a pretty blog entry.  Sometimes, life isn't pretty. Sometimes, it's even a little disgusting. So are blogs.