Poop Shute

Background

Wednesday afternoon I had my first experience as an extra, also known as "background" in the business. I say Wednesday afternoon, but it also included a big chunk of Thursday morning as well.

This will be my last experience in such a role.

The money is pretty crappy, and the hours are worse, that part I knew and was expecting. But this gig was just plain awful. I love Ricky Gervais, but he's full of sh*t with that Extras show of his. It's not really anything like that. Extras are kept in a separate area from the principles called "holding" and we are implicitly forbidden from interacting with the leads unless we are blocked into a scene with them. Forget about entering their trailer secretly like he does with Patrick Stewart.

This particular project was the worst I have heard of from the handful of people I know who have done this type of work before.

Firstly, we were called in at 3:30 PM on Wednesday, and they kept us there for 15+ hours, which might have been okay if that didn't bleed into the next work day where most of us have dayjobs to get to in the morning. And none of the male extras for this scene were called onto set after 1 AM. They insisted on holding us their until 6:30, even though they had moved all the equipment on to a new scene they had us sit there.

For those of you who don't know, when all the equipment and crew move from say the bar of the hotel lobby to say the hotel swimming pool, they are not going back. Most likely not ever, but definitely not that night. They shoot all they need in one spot before they move on, because it takes lots of valuable man-hours to move all that stuff, and they won't want to waste time moving it all back. So for five and a half hours we men sat tired, starving and shivering knowing full well they weren't going to use us again.

Yes, I said starving. I can't remember if the union standard is a meal break every six or seven hours, but either way, they didn't feed us for the final eight and a half hours.

And yes, I also said shivering. To top all of that off they didn't turn the heat on in the building our holding area was in, so once we cleared about 2 AM it started to get really damn cold in there, and by 4 AM my feet and hands were partially numb. Around 4:30, after we complained for hours, they finally turned the heat on, but with the massive vaulted ceilings we couldn't feel the difference until right around 6:30... right when they finally let us go.

Imagine being stuck in a room with forty other guys and every single one of them is beyond exhausted, starving and shivering AND THIS IS A JOB! We're not homeless people, we are on a work site.

I will leave the title out, to avoid the google visitor happening on my bitching. But look up a Wilson brother who isn't Owen, and the guy who played Phoebe's brother on Friends, and that's the project. Lenka and I are both in it as "background." She will be in a restaurant scene, and I will be a bartendar at the awards show.

But seriously, never again. It's not good experience, it's not fun, it doesn't pay well, and it is nowhere near the networking opportunity that Gervais makes it seem. Maybe it might look good on a resume... if I planned on pursuing extra work full time.