Extra-Work For Non-Actors: ‘To Fall Back On’?
Acting Work As Security?
In this period of recession, could it be that lots of people who are out of work are looking to acting, as a security? Trying to become ‘background’, or what is commonly known as ‘extra work’?
Who’d-ever-a-thunk-that?
Acting gigs, as fallback employment? Now, that’s a switch!
Reportedly, Central Casting, an agency that solely handles background work, is getting over 300 new registrants per week. And, they’re not aspiring actors…
This article appeared in the LA Times last week, written by Jodie Burke…
Background player hopefuls are flooding Central Casting and similar agencies as opportunities in other fields dry up.
Nathan Johnson has landed in one of the longest unemployment lines in Los Angeles. Just another face in the crowd, Johnson is here because he’s hoping to get a job as, yes, just another face in the crowd. But the crowd keeps getting bigger every day.
The lobby at Central Casting is so packed it seems impossible that one more person could squeeze through the door. Johnson, 30, handsome and elegant in a crisp, white shirt, has been waiting to sign up for an hour. “It feels like two hours,” he says, eyeing the registration desk. It’s only a few feet away, but it will take a lot of patience to reach it. “I’m an EMT,” he says, gazing around the congested room with the sort of dignity that Will Smith might envy. Utter cool in a crisis. “If someone goes into cardiac arrest, I’m there.”
Johnson has been out of work for two years. He injured his shoulder, which made it impossible for him to do the heavy lifting required in his medical tech job, and he’s seen the toll of the recession all around him. “All my friends who owned houses are out of them now,” he says. He grew up in Venice, but when the housing boom hit, his old beachside neighborhood became gentrified almost overnight. “The past five years was kind of a greed session, and now everybody’s got a hangover.”
Background artists, also known as “atmosphere” or extras, are the folks whose mere presence on the set makes the land of make-believe seem real. They are the entertainment industry’s most reliable temporary workers and, since 1926, Central Casting has been supplying the creators of feature films, TV shows and commercials with most of them. Three days a week, for one hour, Central registers anyone 18 or over with a spare 25 bucks (cash only) and the documentation to prove they’re legal to work in the United States to be a nonunion extra with the company.
There’s no interview to sweat. No psychological tests to take. No experience required. Nonunion extras make a humble $64 a day and must follow strict orders: Never look at the camera. Never speak to principal actors or the director. Stay out of the way. Basically, keep your head down and your mouth shut.
Clutching their identification cards as tightly as their dreams, people have always flooded into Central Casting looking for work, taking that first step to become a star…
“Whenever there’s a downturn in the economy, we see an increase in the number of people applying for background work,” says Allen Kennamer, vice president of Central Casting. “The line started getting longer right after the first of the year,” he says. “It started to double in size.” Lately Central’s been registering more and more people, about 300 a week, a total of 50,000, for noticeably fewer jobs.
This warehouse building on an industrial, dead-end street in Burbank is an interesting window into the recession in Southern California: It’s where anxious folks from all walks of life, not only the entertainment industry, come seeking a big break.
Brian Estwick, 42, is a chess teacher. Until last December, he taught at an after-school program in Pacific Palisades but lost his job when the funding was cut. Estwick has never done professional acting, but his family’s been encouraging him to try. “My brother’s been pushing me to come in because I’ve got a different look,” he says. When asked to describe it, he laughs, an earthquake rumbling through 320 pounds of muscle. “The guy from ‘The Green Mile’: an athletic, big black guy.”
If he does land background work, it seems unlikely that he’ll stay there long. Estwick hasn’t even registered and already his overall shorts, black clogs and smart-as-an-owl glasses are attracting a lot of attention. “I got lucky today,” he says. “As soon as I walked in, a casting director came out from the back, told me I had a good look and took my name.”
“Casting extras is like painting with people,” notes David Feige, co-creator and supervising producer of TNT’s legal show “Raising the Bar.” The show, which is shot in Los Angeles, is based on Feige’s real-life experience as a public defender in the Bronx, N.Y. Feige didn’t know much about Hollywood when he arrived and was fascinated by the process. “The extras casting really made an impression on me,” Feige says.
For the pilot, he helped select people to fill in the jury and crowd the hallways and courtroom. “I remember vividly sitting down and they pulled out an ocean of pictures. It was crazy,” he says. “The possibilities are so vast. You really are creating this universe, and you can populate it with almost anyone. ‘What we need is an old guy with a walker.’ ‘OK, here’s 50.’ Of course the process of choosing is oddly dehumanizing, precisely because you’ve never spoken a word to any of these people and ultimately you’re evaluating them as textures rather than individuals. Like pointillism, it’s only when you step back and your eye scans over the whole group that you get the effect of the individual choices.”
Christina Tucker, 45, is hoping to get temporary work as an extra after being laid off from a 27-year career as a postproduction audio technician. She’s worked on big hits: ” Law & Order,” “Ghost Whisperer” and “House.” “Scooby Doo,” her most recent employer, dogged her with a pink slip last April. “Warner Bros. cut the whole animation department in January 2008. They cut it [by a] third,” she says, emphasizing that fraction. “Now I’m just trying to find a chair.” That’s what the sound techies call it when you’re looking for your next big job.
Opportunity wanes
As the recession deepens across California, Hollywood’s extra casting reflects a Catch-22: The labor pool is growing at a time when film studios are shedding staff and dropping projects, independent filmmakers are finding it harder to raise financing, and television studios are making more reality TV shows that don’t require atmosphere and far fewer dramas and comedies that do.
“There’s a lot less work to go around,” says Kevin Goldson, a casting associate with Idell James Casting in Pacific Palisades, a company that competes with Central Casting but focuses strictly on advertising. That industry experienced sharp declines in 2008 when advertisers, particularly the automotive industry, which favored Los Angeles as a location for many of its car commercials, cut back on spending.
According to FilmL.A., the nonprofit organization that hands out permits for the city and keeps track of local filming, on-location commercial production days was down 17.4% in the fourth quarter of 2008, compared with the same quarter of 2007. It suffered a loss of 10.9% for the year. “It’s very slow and a lot of people are worried, because a lot of people did extra work for a living,” Goldson says. “When the budgets are cut, where they cut is the background because it’s cheaper to shoot with less people.”
The picture doesn’t get any sunnier for feature films: 2008 was the worst year for local feature production since FilmL.A. began tracking it in 1993. The major studios are making fewer movies, and they’re not shooting many of them in California anymore. Feature production in Los Angeles has been down 10 of the last 12 years. The number of production days FilmL.A. logged for 2008 is half of what it was during its most recent peak in 1996 and is a record low.
Television production, often called the bread and butter of the industry, remains the one bright spot on the local production landscape, but that is mostly because of reality programming. Production days in reality TV rose 19% in 2008. Sometimes talk shows and game shows will hire extras to fill out their audiences, but scripted television provides most of the background jobs, and those numbers tell a much different story.
iting around, to be sure that the recording was good enough for the next time-zone broadcast. 
