My wife wants to sleep with a TV star.
Me.
Last week Gilda saw an article about an open casting call for extras for two television shows to be filmed in Westchester in the fall. After not acting like a stage mother with our daughter when Ellie was a teenager, despite Ellie clearly having more talent and stage presence than I, Gilda encouraged me to strut my stuff at the “auditions” that would be held August 26 at Manhattanville College in Purchase.
Now, I am very comfortable delivering speeches even to an audience of a thousand or more. But the last time I performed on stage was 1962, when I was 13 and cast as Rusty Charlie in a summer camp production of Guys and Dolls. I was one of a trio singing the opening "Fugue for Tinhorns." I didn’t have a single piece of spoken dialogue. But this open casting call was for extras, and extras rarely have speaking parts, so the idea of being on TV intrigued me.
The casting call was scheduled for 1 to 4 pm. As I had to be in Manhattan to pick up Gilda at work at 4, I arrived at the college around 12:15 to be part of the first wave of wannabes. The guard at the entrance gave me a sardonic smile when I asked where the auditions were being held. It was a smile you see in all those old Dick Powell-Ruby Keeler 1930s movies about stage door hopefuls trying to bluster their way past the guard onto a Broadway stage.
If my time at the auditions was typical, hundreds, make that thousands, of would-be stars showed up, most of them not yet possessed of a college degree. Which was okay, since the casting agents described not two but three shows they were seeking to populate.
For CBS’s Members Only, they needed extras to play the staff and members of a private country club. HBO had them looking for background actors to be “working and middle class types of all ethnicities” in Show Me a Hero, a six-hour mini-series about the court-ordered construction of low income housing in Yonkers in the late 1980s. The cast includes Oscar Isaac, Winona Ryder, Alfred Molina and Catherine Keener. The third project is an Amazon pilot, Mozart in the Jungle, based on a memoir of the same name by Blair Tindall.
In groups of around 200, we were ushered into and seated in a large hall where we were told about the three shows, asked to fill out a one-page questionnaire, and had two digital pictures taken. They did not interview anyone.
The form included some basic questions such as height and weight. Asked for my age within a five year range, I did what many actors do. I lied. I opted to shave three years off my 65.
They wanted to know what type of car we drove and if we had any skills, such as playing golf and tennis. I wrote I was a slightly above average tennis player (which only my winter tennis buddies may dispute). They also wanted to know about our wardrobe at home, especially if we had any clothing typical of the 1980s. As most of the candidates were barely in their twenties it was doubtful any of them had such outfits, but I still have some suits from that era hanging in my closet.
Most everyone in my group of 200 came dressed casually. It was, after all, in the mid 80s Tuesday. But one twenty-something girl stood out. Above her high heels, she wore a short, tight fitting, plunging neckline black dress enhanced by a severe push-up bra that revealed, depending on your point of view, either healthy genes or great plastic surgery. Either way, two middle-aged women sitting behind me couldn’t stop talking about her as she posed for her pictures.
“Oh, she’s bending over and they’re popping out,” said one, to which the other replied, “She’s actually pushing them out.”
To hear veteran extras talk about the work, it’s a day-long drag waiting around hours for a few minutes of being background scenery. We were told it’s a full day’s work, usually about 11 hours. And you won’t know if you’re needed until the day before shooting.
I left the “audition” at 1:35, time enough to easily get back to my temporary day job chauffering Gilda to and from work.
