The extra series 1, p.4
The Extra Series, #1, page 4
I think I prefer my Mom’s old Halloween candy tactic. Regardless, I have no intentions of trying to upstage any of the actual actors, so I smile and nod. Clint smooths his mustache and points me toward Group A, my comrades in my first scene.
A tall black woman about my mother’s age approaches me. “Your first time?” she asks.
I nod, and she lets out a little relieved sigh.
“Me too. I was afraid I’d be the only one,” she says. “Ian McKellen over there”—she points her chin at an older, white-haired gentleman who does somewhat resemble the actor, if at least in being old and white—”has been doing this for two months. And be careful about talking to him. He’s all full of himself because he once played Hamlet on London’s East End.”
“Well, I played a lost boy in my fourth-grade production of Peter Pan,” I say. “And I was told by my teacher that I was more convincing as a boy than a girl. So just let him try to intimidate me.”
The woman blinks at me as if unsure what to make of me. Then, with a suddenness that makes me jump, she barks a loud laugh. “Just let him try!” She grins, and her whole face lights up with the energy of it. “I’m Karen,” she says.
“Gabby,” I return.
Before I can say anything else, though, Clint returns and the attention of all the extras snaps back to him. With him is another crew member, a girl about my size and age and overall aspect of plainness. Clint eyes us briefly for a moment. “You, you, and you three,” he says, pointing to the once-Hamlet, an attractive Asian man, and a young Hispanic woman with two kids who appeared to be about twelve, “are patients. Lisa here will get you some street clothes.”
I’m curious as to why the street clothes they’re currently wearing won’t work, but before I can think much on it, I feel Clint’s dark eyes weighing me. I stand up straighter and suck in my stomach automatically.
“You and you.” He points to me and Karen. “You’ll be receptionists. You other two, nurses. Lisa will put you in some scrubs. And Lisa, remember, the light blue not the dark blue. B—, uh, Sarah says the dark blue scrubs draw the eye, and I’d rather not have my balls in a sling.”
Lisa grimaces, whether at the lovely image or the thought of disappointing Sarah I’m not sure, and nods. “Sure thing. Come on, everyone.”
Karen grips my arm enthusiastically. “Receptionists. We won the background jackpot.” She says this quietly, but I notice envious glares from some of the others in Group A.
“The jackpot? What do you mean?”
Even though she looks absolutely nothing like Anna-Marie, I can practically see my friend mirrored in that incredulous look at my stupidity. “The actors almost always stand near the reception desk when they’re filming a hospital waiting room scene. We’ll be in practically every shot!”
“Oh. Yeah, cool.” I try to put some excitement into my voice, because one of the “nurses” looks like she might shank me with a pen if I don’t appreciate the honor I’ve been given. Mostly, though, I am suddenly nervous, and not about my fellow extras.
Practically every shot? On camera? I imagined the camera might catch a shot of my elbow, or at the most me walking briskly past. This whole plan seems bound to backfire horribly. Why did I let Anna-Marie talk me into this?
“Paycheck, paycheck,” I murmur to myself, and ignore Karen’s odd look.
Lisa takes us to the back of the wardrobe room Anna-Marie glowingly showed me earlier. I half-hope to see some of the other show’s stars there (Hot Doctor, maybe?) but all I see are fellow crew members like Lisa scurrying around carrying outfits and purses and pulling racks. Of course. The stars themselves would never need to come to wardrobe. Wardrobe comes to them.
She eyes both Karen and me up and down. Karen’s a little broader in the hips, but I’m bustier up top. Lisa opens a drawer marked “Scrubs – M” and fishes out two sets in a pale blue. We are directed behind a curtain to change, where we are soon joined by the nurses. I am reminded of my days in high school gym lockers as I face the wall and hurriedly disrobe. My sister Dana never had a problem waltzing around the locker room naked, but then again she’d been a size four through the better part of her life and popular to boot. Whereas I was neither and had a bad case of bacne that is only now in my twenties beginning to fade.
The scrubs fit loose around my hips and tight across my chest, which I suppose is not a bad thing. At least Anna-Marie would probably say so. Karen’s scrubs are the other way around and she eyes my boobs a bit warily, as if afraid they’ll steal her spotlight at the reception desk.
Then we are ushered to makeup and hair, where a man with a bored cast to his mouth mutters to himself while dabbing powder on my face. He then squirts some gel into his hand and runs it through my hair before pulling it into a ponytail.
“Next,” he announces with all the joy of a DMV worker.
I pat my hair slightly, my fingers coming away sticky. Apparently extras don’t warrant the full hair and makeup treatment, which I remind myself is fine. I’m not supposed to stand out. And looking in the mirror, at my neutral eyeshadow over brown eyes, my short, stubby (even with mascara) eyelashes, and my slicked-back hair, the shade of which is most colorfully (and accurately) described as “dishwater blond,” I see what I see when I look in the mirror pretty much every day. Someone who won’t draw attention.
And thus, someone who may just be perfect at this job.
Five
We are directed to the hospital waiting room set and shown our places. It looks pretty accurate to most hospital waiting rooms I’ve been in, if you can ignore the gaping black maw where the fourth wall should be. Within that maw, Sarah Paltrow stands talking with a rotund, bearded man with round John Lennon-style glasses. He is sitting, pointing at things while he speaks to her, and by the way she briskly nods at everything he says I guess that he is the director, Bernard Penn. Anna-Marie told me he used to direct sitcoms, but got caught sleeping with the husband of a producer. And then later the son of the same producer. So it sounds like Passion Medical is where Bernard belongs, after all.
The patients are placed in the various plastic seats lined up along the waiting room. Some are given a magazine to flip through. The others are to just sit there and stare at the pictures on the wall showing how to most effectively wash one’s hands, I suppose. The nurses are given stethoscopes and held off to the side (they are the ones who will be walking by in the background), and Karen and I are situated behind the reception desk, which I am pleased to see is high enough to cover the taut fabric across my chest.
Clint hops up onto the set with us, surprisingly light on his feet for such a bulky man.
“Bridget Messler and June Blair—better known as Dame Sondra Hart and Lucy St. James—will be arriving on set shortly. These ladies are pros, so this should be a one take. Provided none of you screw it up.” His words are belied by a friendly smile that seems genuine enough.
He hands Karen the phone receiver from the desk. “You’ll be taking a call during the scene. Hang up partway through, press some buttons and make another call.”
He pulls an orange folder from an inbox and pushes it across the desk to me. “You’ll be typing notes from this file into a computer. When she,” he points to the nurse extra who looked ready to kill me earlier, “walks over to you with a clipboard, you hand her the file. Got it?”
Seems simple enough. My nerves have turned into a kind of fluttery excitement, buoyed by the palpable energy around me.
“I type, I hand over the file. I think I’ve got it.”
“Good girl.”
He hurries off to deliver more last-minute directions, and with each one I expect him to reach into a treat bag and toss out little bits of lunch meat for good performances.
While we wait for the stars, and crew members scurry around adjusting boom mics and props, I survey our desk. A computer monitor with Microsoft Excel pulled up on it faces me. At first I am surprised the computer works at all, but I suppose they want to cover all their bases for shots. Which I guess means I won’t be playing Spider Solitaire on this thing until I know for sure which directions the cameras will be pointing.
Also on the desk is a cup holder filled with pens bearing the hospital logo and a stack of orange files like the one Clint handed me. I flip open the one on top and find sheets of old scripts inside. At least they recycle. Next to the phone that Karen is practicing punching numbers into (has the woman never used a phone?), post-it notes are stuck to the desk with tic tac toe games drawn on them, along with one very obscene-looking stick-figure. Before I can determine exactly what action is being depicted on the note, a cheer raises from all around me, Karen among the loudest. Bridget Messler has stepped onto the set.
The woman who is one of the most beloved icons in soaps for the last thirty years accepts the praise graciously, with a chuckle and beauty-queen-ready wave. Her short silver hair curls around her ears and the age lines on her face are etched just enough to indicate the maturity and wisdom of older years. She wears a glittery royal blue sequined gown (her character having come to the hospital from some gala or another, I guess) with a modest short matching jacket. (Though, seriously, even at seventy-something, this woman could probably pull off going sleeveless.)
The awe at her arrival is palpable among the extras. Karen lets out a tiny shriek and gives me a wide-eyed “OMG” expression that she drops when she sees how mine doesn’t quite match her excitement. I mean, it’s definitely cool to be within fifteen feet of Bridget Messler, but really. She’s a soap star. We expected this, right? It’s not like the pope just walked in ready to run lines.
I don’t think I’m doing a great job of staying on Karen’s good side.
The second actress in the scene receives far less open fawning. She’s been on the show for a while, but hasn’t reached the legendary status of the matriarch of Passion Medical. Lucy St. James—June Blair, I think Clint said her real name is—is a short dark-haired woman with overly thick eyebrows and a too-sharp nose, beautiful but in a rare, striking way not often seen in Hollywood. She, too, is wearing a gown, a red mermaid-style number so tight that wardrobe might need to use the jaws of life to get her out of it.
While Sarah talks quietly to June—who, I can’t help but notice, shoots a glare at Bridget while she’s shaking the hand of one of the fawning “waiting room patient” extras—I lean over to Karen.
“So whatever happened to Sam?” I ask.
Karen’s eyes briefly flick over to me, then back to Bridget. “Who?”
“Or, um, Simon. You know, Sondra Hart’s husband? Is it Stedman?” I frown. “No, wait, that’s Oprah’s guy.”
Now Karen fully turns to me, her eyebrow raised. “You mean Cedric? Cedric Hart, Sondra Hart’s five-time husband and true love? Of the 1987 fairytale Cedric and Sondra wedding that the Franklin Mint made commemorative plates of?”
Okay, so I was a little off on the name. “Yeah, him. Wow, five times?”
Karen shrugs. “Well, it is soaps. They can’t just stay married.”
I imagine she’s got a point there. “So is he still on the show?” I pause. “And please tell me you own the commemorative plates.”
She eyes me dubiously, like she’s trying to size up whether I’m mocking her. Or maybe just having a hard time believing there’s someone who doesn’t know the entire history of Cedric and Sondra Hart’s epic love story. “Frank Shale, the actor who played Cedric, died six years ago.”
“Really? How did he die?” I’m picturing something tragically mysterious, involving a boating accident in the Caribbean.
“Liver disease.”
“Huh.” I guess playing a major soap opera star doesn’t guarantee you a soap opera-dramatic death. Anna-Marie will probably be disappointed by this revelation, if she hasn’t had it already.
Karen considers me a moment, and seems to decide I’m taking this seriously enough to keep talking about it. “Frank and Bridget were actually married in real life, too. At least until—”
She cuts off when Sarah calls out to be ready on the set, so I don’t find out what happened to Bridget’s real-life marriage. And honestly, I care a whole lot less about celebrity gossip now that the cameras are about to roll and my nerves are back on high alert. And I’m not the only one—Karen puts the phone to her ear and affects a look so full of concentration I wonder if she pictures the person on the other end needing her to help defuse a bomb.
I take a pen and open the orange folder in front of me, my heart beating a quick rhythm against my ribs.
All I have to do is stay in the background. Type, hand over file.
Not get fired.
“Take one. Action!” a voice shouts from the gaping maw of blackness, and suddenly we’re being filmed.
Sondra Hart (Bridget) and Lucy St. James begin speaking in dramatic tones about a car accident, and how they worry that someone named Oliver (Sondra’s grandnephew, I think?) won’t pull through. I, however, am far less concerned for Oliver than I am about appearing appropriately studious at checking my file.
Then I remember I’m supposed to be typing something into the computer, and have a brief moment of panic that I have no idea what to type into this random Excel spreadsheet, and that I haven’t actually used Excel since high school and even then never really got it.
Just type something, idiot, thinks the practical part of me that is sick of having to look for new employment. And I do, typing the exact same words written in the old script in front of me.
I start to get in the zone, typing and checking and typing some more, satisfied that I am managing to actually look like someone who is adept at data entry.
And then I hear a tiny clearing of a throat. The angry nurse extra is glaring at me over the top of the reception desk, clipboard in hand.
I have no idea how long she’s been standing there waiting for me to hand her the orange file. I summon the dispassion of every medical receptionist I’ve ever been forced to wait for while checking in and slowly close the file and hand it over like I have all the time in the world.
She swipes it out of my hand and walks out through the “hallway” in the back of the set. I hold my breath, hoping against hope not to hear the director yell at me for ruining the scene like Peter Dryden did so many times.
He doesn’t. The scene goes on.
I feel strangely victorious until I realize that the scene going on means that they are still filming, and Clint didn’t give me any further directions. Karen is on at least her third phone call by now, mouthing silently and nodding occasionally.
I decide to jot a note down on a post-it. You’re very convincing. Do you talk to yourself often? I add a smiley face to soften the tone and slide it over to Karen. Her eyes dart down and then back up again, and I notice only the slightest quirk upwards of her lips before she continues her pretend conversation.
“And cut!” yells the same male voice as before, deep and booming. “Well done ladies. No need for a second one.” The tension of the scene that I totally missed while typing away on my ridiculous Excel spreadsheet dissolves. The other extras and off-set crew members chatter lightly.
Karen smacks my shoulder in a friendly way, like Anna-Marie often does. “You nearly had me laughing out loud! You better watch yourself in our next scene. I’ve got your number now.” She brandishes the phone at me, and I grin, glad to see we really will be able to get along, despite my lack of basic soap opera knowledge. After all, we might be working together quite a bit, unless I still manage to get fired after my slip with the file hand-off today.
Clint cues us back up for two more hospital waiting room scenes, and we shoot them in quick order. One involves Lucy St. James and an attractive young man playing her son, which they also get through in one take. The next scene involves three other actors, one of which is Anna-Marie, dressed in a slim purple sheath dress. She smiles and waves at me before the scene plays out. A few of the other extras look at me with a kind of respect, while others appear wary, like my personally knowing one of the stars makes me a threat somehow.
Angry nurse still looks angry.
I try to disregard them all as the scene starts. I’m in this for the paycheck, not the bizarre social politics of soap opera stardom. By this point, I’m pretty confident in my file checking and typing routine, and am able to pay attention to what the actors are actually saying. Anna-Marie has summoned tears that she appears to be bravely holding back. I’m impressed. It wasn’t so long ago that I walked past her room one night to see her staring into a mirror saying “Cry, dammit. Come on, Anna. Dead puppies. Dead damn puppies!”
The thought of dead puppies may not have worked, but she’d apparently found something that did. She wipes an escaped tear from her cheek, as she speaks of the terror she’d felt when the car crashed, of how she realized in that moment that her life, which was almost cut tragically short, was being wasted in her petty schemes.
She probably has a point, since all her character appears to have done since returning from boarding school is to sleep her way around the hospital and frame some poor kid for murder. But now that I can actually pay attention to the lines, I’m surprised (and somewhat impressed) to realize it isn’t a run-of-the-mill car accident that everyone’s been talking about. The car crashed into the gala itself, taking out not only Sondra Hart’s grandnephew but half the brass section of the band as well.
I really need to start watching this show.
While Anna-Marie monologues to a hot blond guy in a tuxedo, one of the car crash survivors is wheeled by on a gurney by some nurses in the background. I can’t help but notice the excellent makeup work on the patient’s bloodied face—which leads me to wonder what other wounds he sustained, before I remember that he’s an extra just like me and they aren’t likely to bother creating wounds that won’t actually appear on camera. Still, it would be cool if they showed a bloody stump or something. I try to pay more attention to my file than nonexistent car crash wounds, and soon enough the scene is over, ending with Anna-Marie’s character apparently already getting over her regret of a wasted life by flirting outrageously with blond tux guy.
