Background Talent, Part 1
True story, or at least a story that was presented to us as true: A movie is shooting on location near where one of us lives, and a call goes out for extras to be in the crowd scenes. Except they’re not called extras nowadays; they’re “background talent.” And a guy we know, an aspiring actor, signs up. And the time comes to shoot a scene with a crowd in the background and the stars in the foreground, and our guy is there in costume, jostling with the other aspiring actors to be in the front of the crowd. The crew is setting up the cameras and lighting for the scene, using stand-ins to calibrate things, when there’s some sort of contretemps, and one of the stand-ins stops standing and walks away. The director, or whoever’s running the shoot, looks around, sees our guy, and notices he’s of about the same size and shape, and wearing about the same costume, as the stand-in. So he beckons to our guy, who winds up standing in for the stand-in, and whose reward is to be front and center in the crowd scene, in which position the camera dwells on him for, oh, half a second. And now, our guy’s forever enshrined in whatever the digital equivalent of celluloid is.
