Eating Extras: The Guy one Booth over in Goodfellas

A diner scene in Martin Scorcese's Goodfellas encapsulates the potentially disruptive presence of the extra. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) meets Jim Conway (Robert De Niro) for lunch. Liotta's character gathers that he is about to be "whacked" because he is given a solitary task: to kill someone else in Florida. (This is the brutal adage of mob existence: to be alone ensures one's death.) As Henry takes the assignment he looks not only at Jim but at the rather corpulent extra over Jim's shoulder:

                                  
Henry says Jimmy wants to sit near a window to keep watch over whoever might be coming into the Diner parking lot. It's interesting that Jimmy doesn't bother to look over his own shoulder. For in this scene the internecine war is not between rival gangs but between extra and star. Here the leaders are "tailed" by the extra in the next booth over.

What tensions or struggles result from the strange proximity of this chomping extra? He listens and at the same time seems not to listen. He isn't tailing our two heroes but he does seem bored, like any person alone at a diner, and casually overhearing the conversation at the next table. His active jaws express all the anxiety that goes unarticulated by the main characters, who keep cool exteriors even as they assign executions and think about death. "He was jumpy. He hadn't touched a thing," observes Henry. The mobsters come to a diner but neither eat nor talk frankly. The extra behind De Niro does both at once: he eats frankly.

The extra eats, and in doing so gives this scene its real bite. When we get a freeze-frame of Jimmy's face, the blurry jowls of the man over his shoulder give the picture its ominous and unsettling quality.The extra embodies that thing about Jimmy that Henry cannot bring into focus, cannot pinpoint. As Jimmy conveys the details about the task, the extra chews as if he too were dispensing something rather than digesting something. The matter-of-factness of the extra is what De Niro (and his character, Jimmy) can only aspire to.

At the very beginning of the scene, Scorcese's signature tracking shot cuts through the crowd of the diner as if it were Moses parting the sea. In the clip above, a man at the counter gets up as if to leave but then quickly scoots forward in order to make room for Scorcese's dolly (the shot impedes his exit). Scorcese  habitually demonstrates his tracking shot "mastery" by moving the camera through the busy back rooms crammed with people not in the limelight (the kitchen area of the fancy club in Goodfellas, for example). In the conversation at the booth, however, Scorcese's camera stops cutting through the extras and gets assaulted by one. This extra doesn't pretend to eat (like an actor) and doesn't pretend not to eat (the way De Niro does), he just eats. His eyes wearily search the room as if he were looking for a way to put his finger on the joy imparted by this presumably greasy food. The solipsism of the happy eater is well known. It says: this plate I look into is the center of my world; I couldn't care less about the acting going on the booth next to mine; I will even look into Scorcese's camera as I sit here and digest, thank you very much.

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My First Casting Call !

Yesterday I went to my first casting call in Barnstable, MA. I applied to be an extra in the upcoming film I Hate You, Dad, starring Adam Sandler, Leighton Meester, and Andy Samburg. The crowd outside Barnstable High School was an incredible sight. It showed how democratic our notion of the extra is: ANYBODY can do NOTHING in a movie. All heights, weights, genders, some in wheelchairs, some not, all hairstyles and degrees of hair absence, every race, creed and color, every sort of human welcomed on the plaque posted on the Statue of Liberty, were on hand. It had a nice representative quality to it, somewhere between the United Nations and Noah's Ark.

I chatted with some people in line. They all said they wanted to be an extra in the film in order to get a closer look at Adam Sandler, whose films they really loved. I thought this was interesting: is the extra really closer to the star than the camera (ie a front row seat in the theater)? I told them I was welcoming the possibility of a perfectly obstructed view of Sandler, and that part of me wanted to be an extra so that I had no choice but to not see him, or see only the back of Happy Gilmore's head.

Men got blue cards to fill out, women pink, to which they stapled our photographs. The questions pertained to height, weight, shoe, coat, dress jacket, and hat sizes: the same questions valued by morticians and undertakers. In addition, there was a box to check if I would be ok with "partial" or "complete" nudity. (more thoughts on this in another post). The card asked about "special talents": thinking that it would help me get on screen, I wrote that I was a good walker. During this process, it was announced that our chances of being selected would dramatically improve if we happened to own a car from the 80's. (This is consistent with an interesting fact of Hollywood history: many of the extras in films from the 30's and 40's were wealthy socialites because they were able to supply their own fancy wardrobes, ie without assistance from the production). I immediately rued my recent decision to trash my K car.

What is a casting call for extras? Imagine an American Idol try out but without the need to exhibit talent. Let's call it American Idle.

Inside we filled out our cards on folding tables stretching all the way down the hall in which the Barnstable High School sports trophies and team ribbons of the past 50 years are displayed. I felt an ominous resemblance between the dusty victory cups behind the glass and my own aspiration to be an extra. I anticipate that becoming an extra is similar to getting the blue ribbon in the 5 kilometer....not now, but in 1957. Being an extra would immediately cast me onto an obscure trophy, an internal and private memory baffling to anyone other than myself. To identify my image for another person would be a little like the octogenerian who sidles up to you in front of the case in which hang the medallions from the 1945 golf tourney: he points to one of the names and says with glee, "That's ME."

I learn next week about whether I have been chosen to be an Extra to the Sandler!
Tune in to find out.