Head of State

July 15, 2002

The Head of State is a new Dreamworks movie that not only stars Chris Rock, but he’s also the writer and director. The basic plot of the film is that Rock plays a Washington, DC alderman who inadvertently is nominated as a third party candidate for the Presidency, and decides to go ahead and run for the heck of it. Bernie Mac plays his brother, who he talks into running for Vice-President. There was some rumor about the set that Jamie Bell is going to be in the movie but I never heard for certain. It’s filming in Baltimore and Washington from mid-July to end of September, mostly in Baltimore. Washington is very expensive for filming, and for security and traffic reasons it’s hard to get permission to use the streets and buildings, so they will be filming in Baltimore as much as possible.

There are a lot of scenes in the movie that require crowds, or are set in public places that would have a lot of people milling about, so a lot of extras are being hired for the film. Since they needed so many people, the local casting company asked the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post to run articles requesting extras and telling them where and when to sign up. I saw the Sun article and went to one of the sign up sessions. There were three ‘casting calls’ in Baltimore and suburban DC – essentially, you showed up, filled out a form with your vitals, availability and transportation info, gave them a head shot, and they told you they’d call you. That was it. None of these are speaking roles or otherwise of significance, so availability is the primary consideration. (All speaking roles or anything that required anything vaguely resembling a stunt went to professionals or folks who auditioned). Sometimes you will get called a week ahead of time, sometimes the day before if they need you. The local casting company finds out when the shoot will be and what the production company needs, then goes through all the people who signed up looking for appropriate people, calls them, if you are available they mark you down and tell you to call back later for more info, because the production company often doesn’t fork over the details until right before the shoot. While I had 10 days notice of this shoot, I didn’t find out until 4:30 the day before that I would be a train passenger, had to dress ‘business casual’ for late November (long sleeves, jackets), and had to be there at 6:30 am latest (Ack!) and I didn’t find out until around 10pm that the shoot was at Penn Station, a commuter train station in Baltimore. I was sufficiently nervous that I didn’t fall asleep until after 2am, and I had to get up at 4:30am in order to take care of the dogs and get cleaned up, then drive the half hour to Penn Station.

Extras are paid; we get $60 for ten hours’ work, plus $6 an hour for each hour after that. Lunch and munchies are given to us as well, and at least this time parking was provided. I would rather have parked at work (The Maryland Institute College of Art), especially since it turned out that makeup, extras holding, lunch, etc. were at the Lyric Opera House, about 100 yards from my parking lot at work. Instead we were given spots at a Penn Station lot and vanned over to the Lyric. We were told we had to eat breakfast first, but it turned out they provided it anyway and I had plenty of coffee. Once we were at the Lyric, we were taken upstairs to extras holding, a room where we waited to find out what to do next. Hair, makeup and wardrobe also worked out of this room. We confirmed that we were there with the casting agency and were given pay sheets to fill out. Then an Assistant Director looked us over. Some people were chosen in advance to be military (we had Marines and ‘sailor boys’) or to be reporters; some people were picked by the AD to become construction workers, train conductors and ‘red caps’, and those people were then appropriately outfitted by wardrobe for those roles. The rest of us were vetted for appropriateness of our clothes; besides having to dress for November, we weren’t to wear anything solid white, black or red, or anything bright, and if anything was wrong wardrobe pulled you aside to fix it. One guy showed up in bright blue pants and a rainbow tie, he was immediately redressed in a navy suit by wardrobe. The people who were supposedly Amtrak workers were given Amtrak passes, and every single pass was for ‘Robert Spencer’, despite that many of the passes had photos of women on them. Once cleared by the AD and wardrobe, we were presented to the hair and makeup folks for their approval. Some people were approved, some were pulled to one spot or the other, some needed both. I was pulled by makeup – she took one look at me and announced that something would have to be done ‘about that cute little red nose.’ (I went to a baseball game the night before and forgot sunscreen. While I wasn’t outside long enough to burn, my nose turned pink.) She then bathed me in 45 spf sunblock, followed by foundation, lipstick and eyeliner. I haven’t had that much makeup on in 15 years. Once the extras were cleared, we went downstairs and had coffee with each other. There were about 50 of us to start, and more extras trickled in as the day went on, the final count was about 100. I sat with the guys who were chosen to be construction workers, they were kinda cute, single, and unfortunately not from Baltimore or I might have asked the one guy out, he lives over 4 hours away so, never mind. Turned out less than half the extras were actually Baltimore residents, the others came from all over the mid-Atlantic just to be in a movie. Finally they decided enough people were ready that they could go ahead with the ‘safety meeting’, which meant herding the lot of us the 3 blocks to Penn Station. (It’s important to note that on this particular day in Baltimore, the temperature reached 97 degrees, the humidity was nearly 100%, persons with respiratory problems weren’t supposed to leave their homes and in fact some people died that day from heat illnesses. And we were wearing winter clothing…I’m just glad I didn’t wear heels, a lot of the women took ‘business class’ to mean dress shoes with 3 inch heels and they weren’t having much fun walking back and forth all day!)

The ‘safety meeting’ took forever to get set up because it was in the train station itself and every time the safety coordinator started to talk the PA system would announce a train was boarding. Eventually he was able to explain to us that if you touch a live electrical wire you die and if you step in front of a moving train you die. Well, duh. Then they sent us back to extras holding – for five minutes, during which time they told us we were to do everything the AD or PA told us to do and we were not to approach Chris or Bernie at all for any reason, do not speak to them unless they speak to you, etc. - then they called us right back to the set and started picking people to do this or that. I was chosen to be a passenger on the platform. The idea was that Bernie Mac’s character had just gotten off the train and was heading for the stairs, and they needed people to be getting on and off the train and go up and down the stairs while Bernie walked down the platform. Easy, right? Wrong. We all had to carry at least one piece of luggage, and we’re dressed warmly, and it was well over 100 degrees down on the platform, not to mention humid to the point of steamy. And because of my starting position, I had to climb the stairs, and I usually made it to the top before they yelled cut and told us to go back to the bottom. I went up and down the stairs at least 15 times, and I think I lost 10 pounds of fluids in the process (the drink stand was in the station and we weren’t given enough time between takes to go get some water). I’m amazed no one got sick, but a lot of us came pretty darn close. At one point Chris Rock walked right past me, maybe three feet away, and he looked at me and said ‘Hey how ya doing?’ and I said ‘hi, OK, you?’ and he said fine and kept going. That is the extent of my contact with Chris Rock, but I can tell you, he’s about Billy’s size. I had no idea he was such a little guy, but he is. Chris spent a lot of time clowning around with Bernie, and he welcomed him to the set by hollering, “Ladies and Gentlemen, he’s got an Emmy nomination, Mr. Bernie Mac!” The Emmy nominations had been announced about an hour earlier. A couple of times they sent us onto the stairs so they could hose down the platform – like it wasn’t steamy enough down there. So we spent close to three hours doing that scene, and finally Chris was happy with it and we were sent upstairs to blessed air conditioning and ice water. We sat down, nursed water and Gatorade and talked amongst ourselves while the set was moved upstairs into the station.

This time Bernie Mac was supposed to walk through the station with a red cap pushing an amazingly loaded cart following him and asking him if those were his bags, and Bernie would give him incredibly rude responses. Oh, Bernie was wearing, ready for this? Bright sea green pants with a matching jacket and vest, bright yellow shirt with matching tie, a Panama hat with a green band around it and green shoes. It wasn’t hard to find him in a crowd. Bernie spent a lot of his between take time singing out loud or teasing the extras, when he wasn’t being toweled off because he was sweating so much. There were people flitting about the set all day with tissues wiping down actors and extras, one of the most popular questions of the day was ‘I don’t have tissue on my face, do I?’ One guy unknowingly did two takes with three chunks of tissue on his face before I told him there was tissue there. The extras were to walk back and forth, talk, or in one case make out behind them so it looked like an active train station. (One of the ‘sailor boys’ was there with his girlfriend, and they were supposed to be kissing from the time they called ‘rolling’ until ‘cut’. After a while it was more entertaining for the rest of us than it was for them.) By the time they had the shot set up though, they decided it was lunch time and everyone went back to the Lyric. The extras were divided into SAG (Screen Actor’s Guild) and non-SAG; the SAGs went through the same lunch line as the cast and crew and had first dibs on the limited seating. Non-SAGs went through a different line with almost zero food options (iceberg lettuce with salad dressing or tortillas, with either warm water or warm lemonade and a chocolate chip cookie – the munchie selection was infinitely better than the meal choices!) and no places left to sit. Earlier we had discovered that the SAG members could use the crew’s snack area, which had coffee and sodas; the regular extras had no coffee or soda options available until I pointed out to one of the catering people that the rest of us might need caffeine too, at which point they quickly rolled out a coffee cart to the extras table much to the relief of all. Personally I’d think caffeine would be the most vital thing on a set, but…so then we went back to the station and started filming the scene. I was to the right of the cameras; the three construction guys were to walk out from the right and walk towards the back of the station, then myself and another guy were to walk out from the right and go straight across behind Bernie and the red cap to the ticket desk. There were extras coming from every direction and converging in one spot, so there was a lot of ducking and dodging and excuse me’s which was exactly what they had in mind, it looked like a train station at rush hour. The problem was that Bernie kept flubbing his lines or cracking up, or the PA would come on and be picked up by the mikes, so it took over 20 takes to do that shot. Then they set up a shot in the next part of the station where Chris Rock would meet Bernie while being set upon by a bunch of reporters and photographers and they would walk out of the station trailed by media. That also took a gazillion takes, but I wasn’t needed for that one so I got some reading done (seven chapters of Master and Commander, to be specific). The whole getting up at 4:30am and running on two hours sleep without much coffee and too much heat and standing were all catching up to me by then so sitting down was fine by me. Then they wanted to redo the previous shot, but from a distance, so we did that a few more times. By then it was almost 5pm and the regular commuters were back in the station and interfering with every take. (Personally I always thought yellow police tape meant ‘don’t go there’ but these folks seemed to think it meant ‘walk right through it and you’ll win the lottery’) So they called it a wrap for the station and sent most of the extras back to the Lyric, where we retrieved our belongings, returned wardrobe, and lined up to have our pay sheets processed. SAG folks went first there too, and by this time my feet were a mass of blisters and were just generally killing me so I sat down and waited an hour before I even tried getting in the line. I wound up getting paid for the hour I spent waiting for the line to get shorter! I thought the time would be cut off at the wrap call, but they cut it off when you turned in the sheet. On the other hand, they were out of parking vouchers by then so the other extras who rode back to the parking lot with me had to vouch for me being an extra. (I also had to wait a long time for the van, so I really would have been better off parking at work.) I got home around 7pm and was in bed by 8pm, I was so tired.

So when all was said and done I made $66, read a lot of Master and Commander, talked to some cute guys, appeared in two scenes and I should be quite visible in the movie, destroyed my feet and knees and didn’t do my back and shoulders much good either, and wound up going home and straight to bed. The life of an extra. Yippee.

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