Dancing Fool
Spent the morning as an extra on Le Negotiateur. Didn't take it very seriously, because it was just filming down the street where I live, and I left the house at 6:40 am, just five minutes to when I was supposed to show up.
Wish I'd been a bit more inspired, drawing-wise, but aside from the very tall hairdoes on the women, nothing too outrageous in the way of costumes. Below are my graphic impressions, not great art. It should really have been in colour to do justice to the patterns on the dress.
On the guys, the hairdresser at top glued fake sideburns, constructed with spirit gum, and individual hairs glued on, which he had with him in the different colours he would need, ready in ziploc bags.
There was also an airbrush effects man to put tattoos on the bikers. The film was a police TV show set in Quebec in the early 1970s. Our job was to populate a disco where some scenes would take place.
I didn't get a lot of makeup or hair. My wardrobe was simple: bell-bottom jeans and a loud polyester shirt. They parted my hair on the side, but I got to keep my beard.
Extra (or "background performer") work is actually pretty demeaning. You get ordered around a lot ("human furniture," some call it). I'm really bad at remembering and following instructions, so I'm not that great an extra, but it's an easy way to make casual money, if your schedule is flexible. Most of the time you're just walking from point A to point B in the background. Here I stood around and bopped to the music in the fictional club. Strange how my movie life paralleled my real life when I went around in clubs. I was often the guy by myself, watching others have fun. The couple beside me was having a great time, flirting and teasing. At least the waitresses paid me a lot of attention, giving me shooters which were water, and piling up bottles of beer (old-fashioned Molson "Stubbies"), even though I already had a glass full, which was .5 percent and pretty nasty, especially after the stage smoke has had time to settle on it.
They would play a bit of music, so that we could start dancing, or tapping our hands, or whatever we were doing, and then bring it down for the "take" when the real dialogue was happening. The heroine, who was a biker chick, was complaining she had been brought the wrong drink. Guys, who I think were plainclothes policemen were buying her the drinks.
Then we did a lot of frantic dancing on the dance floor (this set was in a storefront on Ontario street in Montreal East which I think had been a real tavern, not too long ago). We did a conga line, which was fun, especially since there was a girl in a white dress I had more or less paired up with, and then we did some more dancing. I made a fool of myself by trying some move that worked when I was a teenager, and ended up on my butt on the dancefloor, having committed my "social suicide," in the words of Frank Zappa.
Left around noon, smelling of hairspray, and sixty dollars to the good.
Wish I'd been a bit more inspired, drawing-wise, but aside from the very tall hairdoes on the women, nothing too outrageous in the way of costumes. Below are my graphic impressions, not great art. It should really have been in colour to do justice to the patterns on the dress.
On the guys, the hairdresser at top glued fake sideburns, constructed with spirit gum, and individual hairs glued on, which he had with him in the different colours he would need, ready in ziploc bags.
There was also an airbrush effects man to put tattoos on the bikers. The film was a police TV show set in Quebec in the early 1970s. Our job was to populate a disco where some scenes would take place.
I didn't get a lot of makeup or hair. My wardrobe was simple: bell-bottom jeans and a loud polyester shirt. They parted my hair on the side, but I got to keep my beard.
Extra (or "background performer") work is actually pretty demeaning. You get ordered around a lot ("human furniture," some call it). I'm really bad at remembering and following instructions, so I'm not that great an extra, but it's an easy way to make casual money, if your schedule is flexible. Most of the time you're just walking from point A to point B in the background. Here I stood around and bopped to the music in the fictional club. Strange how my movie life paralleled my real life when I went around in clubs. I was often the guy by myself, watching others have fun. The couple beside me was having a great time, flirting and teasing. At least the waitresses paid me a lot of attention, giving me shooters which were water, and piling up bottles of beer (old-fashioned Molson "Stubbies"), even though I already had a glass full, which was .5 percent and pretty nasty, especially after the stage smoke has had time to settle on it.
They would play a bit of music, so that we could start dancing, or tapping our hands, or whatever we were doing, and then bring it down for the "take" when the real dialogue was happening. The heroine, who was a biker chick, was complaining she had been brought the wrong drink. Guys, who I think were plainclothes policemen were buying her the drinks.
Then we did a lot of frantic dancing on the dance floor (this set was in a storefront on Ontario street in Montreal East which I think had been a real tavern, not too long ago). We did a conga line, which was fun, especially since there was a girl in a white dress I had more or less paired up with, and then we did some more dancing. I made a fool of myself by trying some move that worked when I was a teenager, and ended up on my butt on the dancefloor, having committed my "social suicide," in the words of Frank Zappa.
Left around noon, smelling of hairspray, and sixty dollars to the good.
posted by Jack Ruttan at 4:14 PM
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