The award I want to see at tonight's Oscars is "Best Extra." Which noname figure grabbed the attention of the academy with his or her understated nothingness or perhaps a flash of personality in screen time amounting to no more than a handful of seconds? Which extra caught the eye of the judges when they grew bored with The Help? There could even be separate categories of Extra Oscars: Best Supporting-supporting-supporting-supporting actor and actress (a support at twelve removes from the actor he or she supports); Best Animated Extra, for that cartoon figure composed of nothing more than a few brush strokes and hidden in the deep background of Rango; Least Visible Extra, for the one who works most creatively with his or her obscurity; Best Impossible Extra, for that background actor who somehow makes her way onto films where the leading actor is alone for most of the film (Castaway comes to mind); Best Dressed Extra (how far away can someone be and still look good?).
What would these awards reveal? First, it would show us that the academy actually cared about film, the literal surface of the film. Nominating a handful of people who get no more than a few seconds of fame would tell us that the academy judges had studied every entry as if they were the FBI studying the Zapruder film, slowing the movie down to its image basis in search of that decisive background clue, the acting equivalent of the second gunman. This award would pay tribute not to the docility of the consuming stare but to the momentary and subtle power of the glimpse.
I envision the Oscar award as a regular Oscar, but with a smaller figure standing behind it. The announcement of the winner would result in an astonishingly precious moment never seen on Oscar night: the extra would approach the stage and stand uncomforably in front of the presenter. This situation of the bodies would be the first outrageous inversion of the way things are on the Hollywood screen. It would initiate a sense of extraordinary celebration. The winning extra would accept the trophy, approach the microphone, and say, "Hi, Mom."
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Thursday, February 23, 2012
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Extras on the Historical Stage
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:
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, July 1, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, May 30, 2011
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.
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.
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