I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 (7 page)

I spot one of the mothers from my son’s school among the background matrons. She and I have worked on PTA events together, and from her obvious mortification at being recognized, I know that she must have her own long and winding road that’s brought her to this evening. I invite her to come and hang out in my trailer, but that’s before I learn that my own accommodations aren’t much of an improvement over the background holding area.

When you’re the star, you get a big trailer to yourself. It is often tricked out with several seating areas, an eat-in kitchen, and a bathroom with a shower. I’ve enjoyed those trappings. It can make it very easy to show up on set and do your best work when you’ve been comfortably preparing in your plush digs. For a big honking star, the sky’s the limit. I accidentally wandered into Eddie Murphy’s encampment when I worked with him on
Daddy Day Care
. There were several trailers, an outdoor lounge
complete with artificial grass, private gym and basketball hoop. If you’re playing a supporting role, you might be housed in a “double banger”: this is essentially half the size of a star’s trailer, but comfortable nonetheless. For commercials or smaller roles, you can find yourself ensconced in a trailer that’s been divided into a row of narrow airless cubicles called a “honey wagon.” These rooms are typically as luxurious as a prison cell. This particular trailer appears to have last been updated in the late 1980s; the only amenity is a transistor radio with a cassette player. It’s actually little more than a bathroom stall. A padded cushion covers the toilet located at the far end of the five-by-ten-foot compartment. The sickly sweet smell of air freshener hangs in the air.

There are eight of us principals, and the producers have assigned two of us to each of these pens, which are a tight fit for even one person. None of us has ever been asked to share such a small space as all of us are experienced and accomplished professionals. Basically, it’s like you’d held a position that came with a title and a corner office and are now back in the mailroom. On a trial basis.

As I stash my belongings inside our cramped cubbyhole, I’m thinking about how common it is now for people in their fifties and sixties to spend months fruitlessly searching for work, facing rejection and reinventing themselves with Plans C and D. Only that morning I’d read about an American woman who aged out of her career in business management. After several years of seeking employment, she’d been able to secure a position with a company located in Pakistan. She had to dress modestly, couldn’t walk the streets alone, lived in a rooming house—and this was a
success
story! With my credentials, I couldn’t even get a job in Peshawar. I’ve got to make this work.

Both the background and principals are hustled through hair and makeup together and I’m convinced the scowling makeup person is mistaking me for a background performer. She rubs dirt on my face and flattens my hair to my head with the heel of her hand. “You.” She points to me as I exit the trailer.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Go wash your face. You’ve got some mascara on, it looks too modern. You should never show up for work with makeup on.”

“Okay.” I nod sheepishly, mentally noting that the actress who has gone in before me is wearing iridescent blue eye shadow.

“I’ve got my eye on you.”

We wait for the sky to darken so our nighttime shoot can begin. We villagers take photographs together. We’re giddy. We can’t believe how terrible we look, plus we’re all sure we’re going to go into overtime. We’re going to make some scratch. The sky darkens and the assistant director assembles our group where the first shot of the night is being set up. He gives us the scoop.

“There’s a giant green troll chasing you through the streets. The troll will be CGIed in postproduction later, so for now, you’ll see a prop guy carrying a long stick with lights on the top of it. But you’re actors, right? You can all pretend to see the troll.”

One of the villagers portrayed the grandmother in
Napoleon Dynamite
. Another is a recognizable comedian who once starred in his own Showtime comedy special. “I think we can manage,” we murmur amid chuckles.

There appears to be an army of prop guys readying the area. They hose down the cobblestones with water. My period boots have only a thin leather sole and are soaked through to my tights, but I’m not going to be the first to complain. Horses will run past us, we’re told. The magical words “hazard pay” spread through the group in an excited whisper.

“Hazard pay for the horses and the water.”

“How much extra do we get?”

“I don’t know, but it’s a lot!” one of the villagers exclaims.

We are instructed to assemble in front of the director, who makes his selection. “You, you, and you.” Including me. These are the only words he will address directly to us during the entire twelve hours we will spend together. The assistant director places we few, we happy few, we band of villagers on the street and the other principals head back to the honey wagon. Grasshopper and Ole Toothless aren’t principals, but they get prime spots in the front of the pack. I’m not surprised. These guys look fossilized. I would feature them.

“Who wants to carry a torch?” the prop master barks.

“A lit torch?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, on fire?”

“Yeah.”

“Me, I want to do that!”

I think of myself as someone who is up for adventure. I’ve performed roles where I’ve had explosive charges attached to my person, fired machine guns, learned to sing opera, kissed Rodney
Dangerfield. And just like that, a prop guy dips a heavy wooden club wrapped in gauze into a bucket of kerosene, hands it to me and ignites it with a blowtorch. No one has asked,
Are you someone who should be carrying a torch? Have any suicidal ideation? How well do you balance running on wet cobblestones? Have any anger management issues?
How about wondering what kind of person jumps at the chance to run through the streets with a lit torch? Nope.

“Is there anything we should know about these torches?” I ask casually.

“Oh, we’ll do fire training.” But as he steps back into the shadows, the shot is called.

“Action. Villagers with torches run toward the troll,” I hear the director say from behind a video monitor, where he’s viewing a live feed of the footage being shot.

A mob of two dozen peasants rushes forward, jostling for position. Each one of us principals knows that if you aren’t recognizable on camera, you will not earn residuals. Each one of the background people knows if they are recognizable, they have a shot at being upgraded to principal. It’s clear that no one in charge cares about which of us are seen.

It’s been almost thirty years since I worked as background, and that’s what this feels like. I was always sure that my talent would catch the eye of the director. Now I’m just trying not to slip and fall.

“Bait the troll with your torches!”

Villagers are thrusting their torches at the imaginary menace.

“Now turn and run.”

As I pivot, something hot brushes the back of my neck.

“Uh, you.” He points to the bonneted female extra whose torch is dangerously close to my hair. It’s my PTA buddy. “I love your enthusiasm, lady, but we don’t carry that much insurance. Hold your torch a little higher.” And that’s the extent of our fire training. “I can’t sell cupcakes at Jazz band B’s concert on Friday night if my head goes up in flames,” I say, trying to remain friendly, but I catch a glint in her eye that tells me she’s vying for a good position. It’s every serf for herself, and I’ll have to watch my back. We repeat this several times. Each time the director adds and subtracts extras from a seemingly endless supply that emerges from the background tent.

“Did you put mascara back on?” the makeup person shouts over the chaos. She has singled me out between shots. PTA mom is wearing frosted coral lip gloss, another gal has visibly feathered bangs, but something about me just irks her. I actually have put mascara back on.

“No, I didn’t.”

She swabs more dirt on my face and then pulls out a wimple and pushes it over my hair and low down onto my forehead and retreats to the sidelines. I ask one of the assistant directors if he thinks it will be a continuity problem that I now am wearing a wimple, as I’ve been established without it. He explodes into peals of laughter. “All of you peasants are, like, this big in the frame,” he says, pinching his thumb and forefinger into an inch. Yes, my mascara must certainly be distracting in the infinitesimally
miniature pixel it is taking up in the frame of the commercial. I am basically a lumpy sack topped with a doily. On the other hand, it’s surprisingly freeing to have any burden of beauty lifted.

After the shot, the production team begins setting up on another part of the street and the principals are dismissed. No one comes to check in on us for the next three hours. It’s forty degrees and the sewer smell is so strong that we can’t close the door to the honey wagon, so we’re shivering. We abandon ship, head into the background tent to warm up, then set off in search of information. We run into a crew guy who is handing out army blankets. We wrap them around ourselves and wander over to an area we can see lit from several hundred feet away. They are shooting another vignette. Only background actors are in the shot. PTA mom is pushing a rusty wheelbarrow piled high with dirt through a cobblestoned alleyway. I make a mental note to let her do all heavy lifting at school functions in the future—she’s an ox. We inquire if we are needed and the assistant director stares at us like we’ve asked him to explain string theory. “We’ll call you when we need you.”

By one a.m., we’re still waiting to hear when we’ll be called to the set. One of the villagers tells us that she’s done another spot with this director.

She was one of two actresses cast in the same role for that job.

“I like your face, but I like her body better,” he told her.

During the shoot, each actress alternately performed the same action, which consisted of loading paper into a copier. They shared a dressing room and were called to set as “Body” and
“Face.” Face is incredibly beautiful. She is French, and even though her flawless complexion is stained with dirt, she’s fetchingly gamine. Dressed as she is in a low-cut bodice, I can’t even imagine how the other actress could have a better body. Months later, she found out that Body had won out. French Face’s version never made it out of the can.

“But he casts me a lot. He likes to see my face.”

Uh-oh. This makes all of us worried. There are a lot of us villagers. It also hits me that the women villagers basically fit into two categories: maidens and crones. There is nothing in between. In fact, as the median life span of a female serf during the Middle Ages was forty-three, I am actually too old for this job, and I feel very grateful indeed to be here.

At least in a modern setting an actress can hope for age-appropriate roles spanning from girls (with variations on a scale of sluttiness) to mother, MILF, professional, cougar, and then death. If you age with enough gravitas and can carry off serious eyewear, you might fit in a role as a society doyenne or judge somewhere between cougar and death, but like most professions in America, show business has become an all-or-nothing business. Many roles that might have gone to someone like me are regularly offered to and accepted by current and former stars.

Yet there are always a slew of supporting roles for men of a certain age. These craggy gentlemen play anonymous communicators of exposition, relaying forgettable lines of dialogue like
Sir,
you’re needed in the war room
, or sit stony-faced through tension-filled scenes portraying senior members of the armed forces. With the ban on women serving in armed combat now
lifted, an unintended positive consequence will be that future generations of actresses should see more unremarkable but remunerative employment opportunities. Perhaps the real sign that women have found equal footing in the world will be when we get to see a collection of scowling female Army generals
leaning in
around a conference table in
Iron Man 7.

By two a.m., we four female villagers have bonded. It’s so late there’s simply no doing anything productive with our time, like reading or studying for a real estate license, so we’re talking to stay awake. Face tells us about her Brigitte Bardot tribute band, her first marriage and how she hopes to have children within the next two years; she’s thirty-six, after all. We promise to come and see her perform and even though my son sent me a text earlier in the day putting me on notice that “we don’t know each other in cyberspace,” I tell her it’s worth it to have kids. She should try to get pregnant soon—tonight, if possible. Another actress works in historic preservation and has just been offered an administrative position at a prestigious university in Richmond, Virginia. I look at her dirt-smeared face peering out from under a dull gray wool snood. “You have to take that job,” I say. “You have to get out of this town—tonight, if possible,” I implore her with an urgency that suggests she’s plotting a prison break and I’m going to help her dig the tunnel with spoons. We’re each listing our favorite meals like we’re kids at summer camp or cellmates on death row. On a typical shoot, you will be given a heads-up on when you’ll be needed so you can gauge your energy, but we’re in an information void. Every hour or so, we check in with one of the assistant directors, who just shrugs dismissively. We trudge back to our new
digs, the background tent. We principals are the only ones there; the extras are all on the set. We’re starting to lose our connection to the production. We’re adrift, grazing at the craft services table on salty chips and nuts out of boredom. One of the villagers begins sipping liquid from a flask he’s hidden in his gunnysack, and that’s the last we see of him for the rest of the night.

“Screw it,” Napoleon Dynamite’s grandmother announces. “I’m not gonna force my way into a shot.” Snatching the wimple off her head, she heads into one of the compartments to sleep the whole thing off.

By four a.m., our newly appointed chair of the historic preservation department (she emailed her acceptance at three a.m.) is fast asleep, and the remaining male villagers are napping as well. There’s only one hour left before sunrise, and French Face and I are the only ones still motivated enough by the prospect of residuals and insurance benefits to keep our eyes open, but even we are fading. I decide it’s time to take things into our own hands. I grab my new BFF, Best French Face, and rouse us into action.