You Oughta Be in Pictures

It is often said that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people. Well, clearly Hollywood's standards have slipped, because I've (potentially) made my way into two movies in the past six months.

Admittedly, only one of them was a Hollywood picture. The other was filmed in Paris. (The French would likely say that Hollywood is Paris for ugly people...)

What I learned in both cases is that being an extra is a lot like jury duty, except that you actually WANT to be be called. You sit in a room with all the other “average joes,” sharing war stories, bragging about past successes (one guy I sat with in the US was still bragging about serving as the “stand in” for Tom Skerritt in “Picket Fences” in the early 1990s), and waiting for your name to be called. But unlike in jury duty, where you hope your neighbor will get picked, at a casting call, you convince yourself that “Everthing Could Change!” if you get called.

MY FRENCH FILM DEBUT
In the waning days of our time in Paris, I saw in an ad in FUSAC (France USA Contacts, a print equivalent of Craigslist for Anglophone Parisians) that a casting company was seeking thirtysomething Anglophone men (English accent preferred) for a film. I e-mailed to indicate my interest, then...nothing. Weeks later, I got a call asking if I could be on site for filming at 6AM the next day! Now I am not a man who takes the concept of 6AM lightly, but who can say “no” to the limelight?

I showed up in a suit, my required “wardrobe,” at the site of the filming, the Institute for Human Paleontology, which it turned out was just a ten-minute walk from our apartment. The building itself was fantastic, with excellent, crazy, but borderline offensive bas-relief sculptures of the transition from apes to early man.

After checking in with make-up (“You don't need any”) and wardrobe (“The suit you brought is fine”), I finally found out more about the film. It would be filmed half in English and half in French, and the director would be Nicolas Saada, a well-known French film critic and screenwriter, making his directorial debut. The plot would involve a luggage handler (and thief) at Charles DeGaulle Airport who gets caught red-handed, and is then drafted by the French secret services into working with them. The film will either be called “The Spy” or “A Simple Spy.” (Check out its Internet Movie Database web page here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149592/)

[CAPTION: No pictures were allowed on set, so this picture was taken on the sly. Sorry it's so dark. Guillaume Canet is the guy at the far right of the picture.]

The film stars:
- Guillaume Canet (a very big star of French cinema, he also won “best director” at the French Oscars last year)
- Stephen Rea (the guy who gets the big surprise at the end of “The Crying Game,” for which he was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar)
- Archie Panjabi (who played the star's sister in “Bend It Like Beckham”)

[CAPTION: The guy with the bushy hair, with his profile towards us, on the right is the director, Nicolas Saada. This is the room where we filmed, with a big London map on the wall.]

It turns out I would be playing an agent (or maybe just a bureaucrat) with MI5, the rough British equivalent to the FBI. Both scenes I was in took place in an office at the Paleontology building, tricked out to resemble an MI5 headquarters “war room.” In one scene, Rea (my boss) would be talking to Canet, and in another, Panjabi would be talking to an arrested suspect. This was great news for me and my half-dozen fellow “agents,” since we would actually be in scenes with the movie's stars.

Over the three days of filming, time was split up three ways. About 80% of the time, we were sitting around in a basement room that was set up as a “holding cell” for us, waiting to be called for filming (eight ex-pat male Brits, one very popular attractive young blond woman, and I, sharing war stories about past brushes with near-fame). About 18% of the time, we waited on the set for filming to start. The final 2% of the time was spent filming the same scenes over and over again from slightly different angles. It was the opposite of glamorous and exciting.

Perhaps the best part of the whole experience (in addition to the roughly $450 we earned over the 2.5 days) was...lunch. Each day, the entire cast and crew would adjourn for a two-hour lunch that was served in a large wedding-style tent a few blocks away. This being France, the meal included four courses and two wines, all served family style. Everyone, from the stars to the director to the extras and the crew, ate together. The food was hot, gourmet, and very tasty, and the company was excellent. The whole meal experience was extremely French.

There was not much Hollywood-style gossip that came from the shooting. Stephen Rea informed us that an entire tree goes into making a box of tissues. And it was interesting to watching the interaction between Canet and Saada. Since this was Saada's directorial debut, and since he had spent his life in the world of cinema, he was very deliberative, shooting every scene multiple times, and engaging in ongoing conversation with the crew and all the actors (including the extras!) about our motivations. Canet, a huge young star who had won the “best director” award at the French Oscars just months before, clearly did not relish being a guinea pig for Saada. He frequently announced that “that's good, let's move on,” and in general acted like the worst stereotype of a sulky French artiste.

POSTSCRIPT: MY US FILM DEBUT
Months later, back in the US, awaiting the supposed Fall 2008 release of my film debut, I assumed my film career was over. But lo and behold, I saw an ad on a local neighborhood listserv that extras were needed for a big Hollywood film. I showed up to the casting call, more of a cattle call, with probably 1,000 people in a long line at a downtown Hyatt. The line moved quickly, I had my photo taken, filled out a form, and assumed I would never hear from them again.

I was surprised when, a month later, I got a call telling me that I was needed to play a commuter, and that I should show up at the Rosslyn Metro the next day. Perhaps not surprisingly, the US film shoot was less interesting than the Paris shoot. Basically, we sat around in the holding room at what DC folks will recognize as the “Our Lady of Exxon” church (a church located over a gas station), waiting to be called for filming. Then, when filming, we just kept walking into the Rosslyn station and taking the escalator down, over and over and over again.

[CAPTION: Again, we weren't supposed to be taking pictures, so excuse the odd framing of my surreptitious shot. I believe this is Katy Mixon, a minor star in the movie.]

Admittedly, the work was on what will be a bigger film (“State of Play,” starring Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Helen Mirren, Jeff Daniels, etc.; see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0473705/), but the experience was a let-down. Even lunch was disappointing: an Asian buffet served over Sterno heaters. And only $60 for a day's “work.” Toto, we're not in Paris any more...

Josh