The Man over MLK's Shoulder has a Name

Some internet detective work on the MLK "I have a dream" speech turned up a story about the people standing behind him. In 2010 USA Today ran a story about the background figures from the televised image, including the man who is strikingly visible over MLK's right shoulder and whom I discuss in the previous post.

Why did it take so long to to dissolve the anonymity of the people behind MLK? The newspaper article connects us to their private lives the way they were known to their families, a private history.

He turns out to be a cop, Charlie Jenkins, one of a handful of black police officers picked to guard MLK that day.

(Photo altered by USA Today)

How does this photo, with altered grayscale for Charlie Jenkins' face, change his background status? I think it transforms the extra into the star and moves our historical focus away from this monumental event and toward a man the Jenkins family remembers.

Now that this "extra" has been identified, he is given a private history and is no longer an appendage to this speech, more and less than a historical marker.

Extras on the Historical Stage

Martin Luther King delivers his "I have a dream...." speech in August, 1963 in Washington, D. C. For me the historical moment is entwined with the insistent presence of an man who looms silently on the left side of this image (taken from a televised recording of the event). Absent in the audio recordings and print versions of the speech, this figure enters the picture and transforms it. Throughout the talk he seems to respond alternatively to the crowd in attendance, the event going on around him, and the words that penetrate his distracted state. He represents what MLK would do if he didn't have to talk on the stage. But he also represents the recipient of the speech. The way he responds prompts us to think about the effects of this moment, in the moment. His changing facial expressions are a kind of seismograph registering the impact of King's rhetoric. The trio of lines formed by his eyebrows and moustache provide an expressive mechanism that processes MLK's words. At one point his features suggest meditation or a passing mood of consternation:

At other moments he shakes his head in that precise way that denies truth to anything but the words he hears. When King speaks about having his dream, the man looks up into the sky as if he had begun to visualize it or search for it. We have all been told about the importance of Martin Luther King's speech. The face of the extra over King's right shoulder registers something more elusively human than importance: impact. Where the other figures standing behind King seem to stare untransfiguredly, as if in a blinking contest with the TV camera, the man to the left shows us how King's words go through his listeners. We see how the speech repeatedly has to pull him from his state of distraction. He demonstrates how difficult it must be to listen to King's speech while up on stage with him. He shifts back and forth between being mesmerized by his proximity to King to being addressed and moved by speech. Cleaning his ear out with his index finger one moment, he utters words under breath in response to King, the silent prayer of the extra, in the next.

The face of the extra helps us plumb the historical moment by allowing us to see what King's words do to his audience, and therefore to us. The power of King's speech owes itself in part to this extra who makes MLK's speech visible.

The television camera transforms the bystander into an extra: into someone indelibly present on the historical stage. The combined distance of the camera and effect of the zoom lens abridges the distance of Dr. King from the people behind him, generating the impression that MLK is standing among, rather than in front of or before, a crowd. A photograph of the event from a different angle indicates a much greater distance exists between MLK and the man over his right shoulder:

The photograph isolates MLK, makes him into a separate figure, bearer of the decisive gesture, and in some ways already a statue. By contrast, the televised image immerses him into his human environment and in the process elevates the adjacent and peripheral figure into celebrity. The man in the white hat stands at the same level as the civil rights leader. The televisual image fulfills the message of MLK's speech.

Here's a segment of the video:

How an Extra within a film can Overtake the DVD Extras/Supplementary Features

The bonus features on a DVD give us the "making of" the film but cleansed of all the figures that intrigue me most in a movie. These featurettes show the Ferrells, the Spielbergs, the Cruise and the Cruz, but never those microscopic actors who give amoebic life to the background of every film.

Only in Todd Phillips' Hated : GG Allin and the Murder Junkies do the extras of the film overlap with the dvd extras. In another post I have mentioned how a former neighbor of mine, Michael, appears in the film slouched on the sidewalk and drinking from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. Michael inaugurates the film's decadence. He does more than the star, GG Allin, to give the flavor and smell of an Allin concert.

To my surprise, Michael reappears in the bonus features. The extra footage documents the sudden self-destruction of an Allin performance at a small club in New York. We see Allin half-singing as he slowly goes beyond half-nakedness and finally gettting out of his clothes, throwing the instruments around, punching spectators and bandmembers alike, and getting tossed from the club by an irate owner. As the police arrive, Allin and his crew walk surreptitiously away from the fracas. Michael appears with a boom box on his shoulder, suddenly at Allin's side and on an even level with the star of the movie. Forcibly ejected from his performance space, Allin encounters the extra to his own movie. Michael is persistent and won't stop following Allin. When Allin and his bandmates get into a cab, Michael gets in with them. And each time this happens the cab driver says "no...too many people." As the embodiment of Allin's crazed fandom, Michael is literally the multiple figure (the extra who represents more than just one person) who makes it seem like there are too many people inside the cab. As long as Michael walks beside Allin, Allin has to walk. As the featurette continues, we realize that Allin has slowly gathered a literal following, causing one person on screen to remark, "GG, you're like the Pied Piper." But Michael, the extra, is technically the only figure who brings the music, via that cassette tape boom box that would unfailingly announce his arrival at the apartment building. It's he, not the star, Allin, who leads the rats.

When we Don't Know we are Extras

SO...I have the creeping suspicion that I won't make any appearance mouthing words in a simulated conversation in Adam Sandler's movie,  I Hate You, Dad. I didn't get the call. While the shoot took place in Boston, Massachusetts, I was working on a book in Jefferson, Wisconsin. That's quite a distance. How far in the background of an image can someone be before being disqualified as film extra? This is the inverse of the question: how prominent do you have to be on screen in order to have your name in the credits?

There are of course endless films in which we are extras, films which we will never see, films that in fact really don't exist. In how many photo albums around the world do we lurk as incidental figures? How many times have we walked unwittingly between some public monument and a family diligently attempting to document themselves in front of it? Our anonymous status in these photographs is similar to the role of the extra film: we are the not-family, in the same way the film extra is the not-star. Our incidentality within this vast archive of tourist photos should not be confused with our dispensibility: imagine how peculiar, how irreal, it would be if the family recorded themselves before a vast monument around which was nobody but themselves. It would have the same uncanny look as do the streets of New York, empty and purged of all extras, when Tom Cruise wakes up one morning in Vanilla Sky. Without our blur, that family photo would look like a fake.

Not knowing the film we are in occured to me the other day while I was watching a documentary, Hated. The film focuses on G.G. Allin, a controversial fringe figure of punk rock who exponentially raised the transgression factor of the movement. Allin was infamous for physically attacking his audience, defecating on stage and dispersing it liberally among his followers, performing in the buff. At the very beginning of this film the director gives us the quintessential image of one of Allin's disciples: a guy, face abundantly pierced with metal, slouched on a sidewalk waiting to get into an Allin show, drinking from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. He takes a swig, screws back on the cap, and rests the container next to him. I instantly recognized this guy: he lived in the apartment building for which I was a superintendent when I was a graduate student in New Haven. Michael was one of those guys who had sentences tatooed up and down his neck. But he never made me feel comfortable enough to ask what they said, or to have him move his shirt over to make them more legible. The piercings through every visible piece of cartiledge or membrane of his face and his haircut, shaped like the top of a Roman Centurion's headpiece, endowed him a strange stegasaurian threat. It made complete sense that this guy is the emblematic extra, the one image that embodies, in shorthand, all the pain, ritual scarification, and brown bagged thirst of the typical Allin fan. He was filmed at a telling distance, through a zoom lens, like an animal at a zoo. It made me wonder if he knew if he was an extra in this film. Would he want to know? If he did know, was it an appearance of which he could be duly proud? Would he tell his mother?

I was driving up through New Haven from New York a few weeks ago and dropped by my old apartment building. Michael's mom still lived there, but Michael had moved to another city to study psychology. In my broken Spanish, I tried to explain to his mother that I had seen Michael in a film. In broken English, she asked me, "What kind of film?" And I paused, but not because of my broken Spanish.

Why are there no Extras in Adult Films?

Will you do nudity?_____ Semi?_____ Full?_____
This was one of the questions on the information card I filled out during the casting call for extras for the upcoming Adam Sandler movie, I Hate You, Daddy.
         Have I just not been paying close enough attention to notice all those nude extras in the background of Adam Sandler films? That one man or woman obscurely getting out of a bath in his remake of The Longest Yard? Or that full body wax going on behind the drama unfolding in Mr. Deeds?
         Under what circumstances could the nude figure be consigned the place of an extra? Bizarrely, only during massacres, holocausts, in asylums (see Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies), those black spots in history when dissidents are rounded up in the football stadium.
         Could Sandler be cutting into new terrain for I Hate You, Daddy?
         The question on the casting call card made me realize: there are no extras in porn films. There are no neutral bystanders in an orgy. Such negligible characters as the pizza deliverer cannot slink off scott free as they do in our everyday world. In the adult film, these figures are compelled to participate. The extras in an adult film cross this line easily because there's not much dialogue happening anyway. The extra in Ass Bandits, if he or she exists, just grunts more discreetly.
         Porn films provide us with our operative model for celebrity. Here the mucus membranes are ready for their close up: anatomy stars and the residual body of the actor becomes, in an odd twist, just extra. The adult film provides us with the perfect embodiment of the Hollywood star sytem: a cinematic world without anyone on the sidelines, without the reality quotient provided by the non professional actor. In short, a spectacle so consuming that it destroys our peripheral vision.

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.

The extras in Marx Brothers films

The Marx Brothers films Duck Soup (1933) and The Cocoanuts (1929) introduced me to the gravitational pull exerted by the extra. This may sound a little counterintuitive since our attention in these movies is clearly drawn to the antics of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo. Each brother leaves a particular sound-imprint on us: Groucho's waterfall/open sewer of puns, asides, and commentary; Chico's fabulously accented voice morphing the English language into new shapes and misunderstandings; Harpo's resolute silence, interrupted occasionally and decisively by his horn and harp. Who then are these countless people who appear in the background of every Marx brother film? What is their function?

Here are some lines from an essay I've published about the extra in films by the Marx Brothers:
On whether Zeppo, the bland fourth Marx, is in fact closer to being an extra than a brother:
Is Zeppo in fact part of the fraternity? Do we count him in? Though bearing the same name as his celebrated brethren, Zeppo seems adopted. Groucho’s cigar is more important to the Marx effect- has greater family resemblance, so to speak –than does Zeppo.

About Harpo's silence: 
Harpo is in some ways “the actor” as envisioned in the dream of the extra: silent, yet spectacularly on view; saying nothing yet having all the great lines. Harpo's silence seems to spectacularly ingest the silence of the extra, in the same way he eats buttons off the bellboy’s suit in The Cocoanuts. The bellboy, a subordinate both in the hotel and in the Hollywood system, stands staring into space as quiet as a statue, as Harpo quietly picks buttons off and munches on them one at a time. One senses the chafing of two silences here. The bellboy’s mouth, not his vest, is on the verge of becoming unbuttoned. How does he keep from screaming? Harpo’s silence is a feast, a willful opportunity to sample objects. Desire, hunger, lust are part of this now of Harpo’s silence, whereas the bellboy/extra is in a holding pattern, expectant, awaiting the sound of the bell after which he gets his name. So Harpo’s silence tests this other silence, pushing the extra to an outburst, an act of surprise, a line in the script.

On reducing your co-star to an extra:
Groucho’s approach to dialogue –if this is the word –resembles Harpo’s. Harpo’s gags, true to their name, seem aimed at choking speech out of his interrogator, leaving such figures as the lemonade vendor in a kind of breathless agitated state over the onslaught of Harpo’s physical humor.  In a similar manner, Groucho addresses his deafness to his interlocutor. His commentary on what they are telling him begins with this immunity to communication. Commentary, like Harpo’s gags, undoes the speech of the other. In short, Groucho seems determined to turn every actor on stage into an extra.

On Margaret Dumont:
Margaret Dumont offers something new in the history of cinema: the face of the acoustically bewildered witness. She neither laughs at nor dismisses what Groucho says. Instead her eyes circle and widen as if she were distracted by the insectlike nonsense of Groucho’s words (he’s called Rufus T. Firefly in Duck Soup for a good reason). Her face is a kind of eardrum. We search it out to discover if and how Groucho is understood and to detect the emotion of response in which the speech event continues. Dumont’s face is not the blank unagitated face of the extra: she in fact demonstrates endless surprise at him but without this ever becoming unseemly, without it ever sharpening into shock