Musing on Murray, and other things blurry

Oh fuck. Just got engaged by a rambling boob who would not shut up. I'm here on the set of the Dana Grant movie I mentioned getting fitted for earlier. It's a cattle call, huge legions of Backies to play the extras on a Boat. We don't end up as dead as on the Titanic, but it's a "thrill ride" (I use quotes for phrases that are dangerously close to cultural extinction -- we've over fished them).

Anywho, a Backie was on the edge of a conversation several of us were having, and he decided to make me his sounding board. I tried to be pleasant, really I did. But when he said that gay marriage was "like the Shakers, a religious group who practiced Celibacy, and were therefore a cult, and went against God's plan to make "beautiful things, the English are to blame for America's slavery, not us" -- well I asked him to stop talking to me.

"It's cool," I said, I just want to write, we all have different opinions. Then I proceeded to furrow my brow and concentrate on writing. He wouldn't stop, so I scribbled as furiously as I could, broad strokes like the background artist I am. But a vein in this nut was split open, and out came every bit of warped history he had garnered on right wing revisionist history sites. I had to move and leave his blathering mid-sentence. I've found the furthest place in this school we're being held at, and I notice he's still lurking. I'm finishing a phrase to someone commiserating about the recent election with "right wing" and I see the freak-a-zoid spin around. Oh god, he's heard me, he's gonna debate me, shit, shit, shit! We actually lock eyes, and then he shuffles away. Shew, that was close. After this guy, I'm not going to complain about the Backies who latch on to you to complain about not getting a meal allowance. This guy ticked like a time-bomb who's works had been triggered.

We're in the auditorium of a Catholic School down in Carson. There's a painting on the wall of some priest. The painting looks botched, I'm guessing this was a local guy, not a famous priest. They can paint your picture and put it on a wall, but your still dead, and no one knows who the fuck you are eventually. Our A.D. is nice enuff to read us the entirety of the scripted scene we are hear to shoot. It's the final seen in the movie, where Dana Grant leaves a holding area for tweaked passengers from the Cruise Ship. Our expectations gets flipped here, the bad guy is actually a blonde white girl! The good guy is actually a Moorocian in a turban! ZZZZZZ.

Anyway, it feels like the restless Backies are being read a nap-time story by our kintergarten teacher, I'm looking for my mat to lie down at the conclusion of the scene. Queenie Backie I worked with on the Car shoot the other day out in Bontana gets a Birthday cake. Queenie is about a subtle a gay guy as Harvey Fierstein. He cracks bitchy jokes, will start singing "Streisand" given a chance, he's managed to charm a lot of Backies. I don't know if he brings out my self-loathing gay stuff or what.

The Backies on this shoot have been here for a month, as the passengers, so they've all gotten quite chummy. The second group of passengers, of whom I'm amongst, are for steerage. We're new to the set today. We'll be the one's dancing the merry jig while the waters start seeping in and the swells take all the lifeboats. It makes for one giant fuckstick today: the legions of backies used as passengers (new like me, and previous like I mentioned), and then all the FBI, Bomb Squad, Cops, etc., who have come in to find out how are boat ride got outta hand. Peeps walks around in Swat uniforms with riot vests that weigh 20 pounds. They have real guns with the guts removed.

My pal from Nepal is here. He complained to me on a previous set that he always gets stuck with being cast as a terrorist, but I tease him that in the land of the free, today he's playing FBI. I wonder if he'll play a Sherpa someday? Nah, they'll prolly use a peruvian.

Between the small space and buzzing background mob, this sort of paramilitary garb is sending out bad vodoo. When you get to be in a more elaborate costume, it plays to my worse traits. Ham. Ham it up. I'm in a costume, I'm in a movie. I'm making up a character arc for myself (remember, I'm the Amusement Park Engineer from Antwerp). I give myself a name, "Walker Evans," which is a passenger name written on a chalk board on set. Ansel Adams was on this flight too, as well as most of the 1997 Indians baseball team, leading me to believe the Art Departement person who created this prop was from Cleveland.

I like the fact that I didn't have to audition, I get called up, fitted, put on set, and then I get to act with very little consequence. No one is really watching me closely, there's no penalty for a bad take. It's like singing in the shower. I'm doing it for pure joy, zero performance anxiety. Why can't I just have a service get my speaking roles like this. One phone call telling me where to report, I show up and start playing the buddy role opposite Tom Hanks?

"Josh, we've got you on set with Tom Hanks today at 7AM in Pomona. You'll be playing his best buddy, Marvin. Marvin works as a Carpet Shampooer. We'll fit you for your costume, you can make up your lines to the ones Tom has scripted, and they'll just let the cameras roll. But you still have to eat with the non-union extras. I don't want to see you trying to nick a teabag from craft services."

I had an audition yesterday for a short film. Aside from being outta practice in doing scenes, I got so nervous, I felt I was actually playing the scene as a bad actor. Like, okay, I'm gonna overact how a bad actor would act this. Wink, wink. Get it, I'm overacting here. That's how little control I had over my body. I was supposed to be an evangalist, but in the end I just raised my voice to a phoney AM radio broadcast level. Experiences like this make me really long for the world I describe above, just bring me to be in your movie, this auditioning is not nice and a terrible burden to me.

I got a cell call from my dad today on the set. The amount of waiting allows extras quality reach-out-and-touch somebody minutes. My dad told me a good story about his first job in the North. He had been raised primarily in the South, but had gotten a job at a Drug Store/Soda Shop. Black dude came in wanting a milkshake and my dad looked around frantically for a paper cup. He goes back to Abe-the-owner asking if they have any paper cups.

"Why?" sez Abe.

Dad: "Because there's a black guy up front who wants a milkshake."

Abe: "He wants it to go?"

Dad: "I didn't ask."

Abe: "Then why do you want to give him a paper cup?"

Dad: "Well, he can't stay in here obviously!"

That's when my dad learned that black folks in the North could actually buy a milkshake and sit down and drink it. My dad was happy for it, he said he always hated the way blacks basically had to scrape and bow when they walked down the streets of his little southern town. Good stories like this make the background experience palatable.

In some ways, the extra bullpen, the waiting area, is like a bar without booze. People are all telling you their tales, their woes, their big fat lies, etc. It's great when the stories are great, but tedious when you hear for the 15th time how someone can't wait to be in the union, I wonder if we'll get off early ... I'm hearing another good story now from a Backie about Bill Murray. Apparently the Backie was in a Murray film where Murray was playing a motivational speaker. Murray gets all the folks in the audience to form a real pyramid of bodies, and at the top, there's a cute lil' girl. She's an extra, but Bill decides to start talking to her, positioning his mic (remember he's miced for sound for the movie, but you can see his mic cuz he's a motivational speaker, so they don't have to have a boom mic) so that she can respond and be heard. The little girl gets an automatic bump in the union to "day player" status.

I don't know that this means, but it has such a nice ring to it. Maybe at the next party I'm at, when it comes time for the "what-do-you" portion, I'll say Day Player. Murray, tries to make a day player the next day, when he's talking to an overweight woman. Again, she's background, but Murray starts talking to her about her weight problem. Again, he positions the mic so she can respond. She doesn't.

He prods, even going so far as to say "You can speak, right?"

She would not. Speech had been bred outta of her as a Backie. Being a Backie is really more hobby than job. If you work five daze a week, 52 weeks a year: maybe you'd have $14,000. As a non-union background artist. The Math is not promising. Union, you can certainly make more, but you ain't gonna get rich. You've also got a have someone in your corner as a union dude who will make sure you get booked. The union side is a much smaller portal to crawl through, between the quantity of union people, and the tiny number of jobs. God forbid you get a parking ticket, you've just lost a day's pay if you're non-union. Finally, the big fat clown Blake-the-Bozo is back today. I first encountered him on the Fuckstop/Diner set. (http://no-biz.blogspot.com/2004/10/fuckstop-hotel.html) He of the Vespa Scooter, lord, I can't believe he rode his scooter all the way down to Carson today?

The sun is streaming in the windows and it's illuminating his fright wig, making his frizz look on fire. I've decided these character I see need to end up in a movie. A movie where the Foreground will be played by non-speaking background, and the extras will all be actors. I'll cast myself as a foreground person, just so I won't have to audition. I've also decided that Bill Murray will play one of the background dudes. The kind of Backie who sits down next to you and gives you his well-rehearsed life story speech. Bill tells me he's a retired, a manufacturing parts rep for the Vacuum Cleaner industry. Does this to keep from being too sad about his wife recently dying. Lying. Bill was lying. I find out from another extra that he always tells the new extras an elaborate backstory. Each as believable as the last one. The guy who informs me of the ruse, sez Bill pawned himself to him as the director's malcontent brother, made background as a punishment, and was the only employment Bill seemed able to keep. Bill has been an extra for 40 years. The longest of the long-timers. The word is, he came out here to act, but he couldn't audution. In the daze before beta blockers, he couldn't keep it together at auditions. So he settled into the background life. All the old-time directors use him, because's usually better than the principals. He gets tons of face time in movies, and you can actually see a sad montage of how he ages, trapped in the background, like a little boy trapped in a painting by a witch. Every now and then a new director will use Bill, and not get who he is, disrepecting him. Bill will actually chew the guy out and then oh-so-dramatically say "I'm tearing up my voucher." Of course, this act is predicated on the old-timers throwing him work, but it's getting harder, directing is a young man's game, so he doesn't pull this as often. Suffers the slings and arrows now more. The Backie goes on to tell me that he's seen Gary Marshall walk right up to Bill on the set, and whisper to him, "help." "what's wrong with this seen." Bill whispers back concisely for a bit, as Marshall goes back, gives some new direction, and the dream plays like a scene. Bill sees that I'm talking to this other guy, and comes over and sez "did he blow my cover?" We laff, become good friends, and eventually on another movie, Bill confides in me "I'm not long for this world. I've got AIDs" I'm not sure if he's up to trix again, but after conferring with the other Backies, we decide to do the unspeakable. We enter the director's lunch tent, who on this movie happens to be Mr. Gary Marshall, and ask if he would do something wonderful. He denies Bill's helpful genious at first, but after shaming him for never helping Bill out, despite knowing his gifts (what, it's only family you help Gary? did he have the wrong last name?), Marshall agrees to our plan. The next day on the set, Marshall asks Bill to ad-lib some with the principal. Bill does not do so well. He freezes, while the principal tries to make the best of it. Then the director tells Bill, don't worry, it won't be on mic, so you can do whatever, even "walla-walla-walla" (this is indy-slang for the background making the background noises at a party, a courtroom, a horserace). Given this freedom, Bill improvs beautiful, better than the principal who happens to be Robin Williams. They keep this up, and Marshall, who's been directing this movie like comedy hack, starts to see a whole new movie opening up. Marshall starts calling for reshoots, and at his point in his career, reshoots are not too cool, but intrigued and invigorated for the first time in a long time, Marshall puts what could be his final job on the line to keep following Bill Murray's particular genius. Finally, after lots of elaborate ruses to keep Murray from knowing he's being miced, Murray finds out. Three emotions wash over his face. Shame. Sadness. Gratitude. He's ashamed that he could not act without being given the permission to not make it count, sad to have spent his life in the background up until this moment, and yet touched that all his pals helped to get his star to shine. Great moment. Of course, Bill doesn't have AIDs. Of course, the film is a big hit as an indie, although not the blockbuster the studio hoped for (the studio pulls the funding, the director uses his own personal fortune to fund the end, and thus keeps mucho more of the profits). It wins Canne, and Murray becomes an arthouse staple, and the movie ends with two incredibly young film students watching a later Murray film. Murray is terrible in the film, hammy and wooden. "He's a freaking bad actor."

"You're right said the teacher," whom you only see from the back. He made 8 films as a principal and in 7 of them he totally sucked. Couldn't be natural. But did you ever see "Flambe?"

Kids: "That's the arty one that the hack Gary Marshall directed?"

"Yeah," laffs the teacher, turning around. Of course it's me with age make-up on.

The kid: "Oh that's right, that's him. Sheez he's freaking awesome in that, I forgot!"

And I say: "So was I kid, so was I." And you see me get out the Flambe DVD from a box, and continue talking as the sound dims, telling them my background stories. Fade to Black & Blue.