Welp. Extra work is a little less exciting than I initially anticipated.
8 am call time.
Some less than friendly woman corals the downtrodden extras and sifts through their bags of clothes searching desperately for something passable in case we happen to make .01 second of the commercial.
From here, we sit and watch the principal extras get pampered and swooned over while we roast in the sun. I stare at them with deep seeded envy, knowing they’re making more than my rent money today, and that I’ll likely walk away with 100 dollars after taxes.
After brooding for an hour, the 50 extras and I are herded onto a bus. Here we chatter back and forth, sizing up one another and guessing which, if any, will be pulled up as a featured extra (and make an extra $200!).
At the first location they fill us in as cookout guests and we have forced conversations and laughter for the next two hours while the principals get their noses powdered and re-do their one simple line over and over. and over.
Back to the bus to sit. We aren’t needed for this scene.
Hours later and it’s lunch time. Which is an incredible gourmet feast. Really, the food is scrumptious and while laden with calories, none of us care too much at this point so we fill our plates high not once, but twice.
Back to our humble home, the bus. And it’s off to Griffith Park where we sit on the grass, waiting for the shot to be set up.. and in this case the sun to set.
Sun sets. it’s 8pm and we’re ready for our big premiere again. They chose a handful of us to walk past the camera’s wide screen. Hopefully my leg makes it in as I cross by a woods fire party filled with principle actors.
Two hours later and we’re all crammed into the frame of a concert crowd being instructed to jump up and down singing… yet there’s no music. Glow sticks, laughter, arms waving freely in the air, but the camera is focused on the one principal actress in the crowd who had an 8pm call time and hasn’t been melting away on the bus with us all day. This overpaid princess keeps making the duck face instead of smiling. So we do the shot over and over until she finally cracks a smirk.
And it’s a wrap.
Or is it.
We all stand single filed waiting for the coveted voucher that proves we suffered through a day of peasant work so we can call and demand our $100 and change check if it never shows up in our mailbox.
‘Tis the sad existence of a commercial extra.
