"Extra! Extra! READ ALL ABOUT IT!"

The experience of filming Julie Taymor's tentatively titled "Acrosss the Universe" was amazing. I survived the bitter cold and am walking away from that night excited at the concept of doing this for a profession. The hours were long, the waiting is brutal and the conditions can be rough, but I knew all of this going in and so now, from the warm comfort of my own room, I have absolutely no complaints.
It's hard to do justice to the entire experience. I arrived at the Museo del Barrio on 105th Street at 5pm on Friday evening and checked in with a Production Assistant who told me to fill out my pay form and go directly into a huge theatre where I would be picking up the costume that I was fitted for a few weeks back. The theatre was large, rather dark and jam-packed with hundreds of extras. Groups of men in vintage police uniforms marched past. Older, tweedish professor types sat huddled together reading paperback novels or talking on their cell phones. Countless, countless young people dressed mostly in either corduroy, denim or plaid stood, sat, leaned and lay just about everywhere there was to stand, sit, lean or lie about.

After checking in with wardrobe I was told by a costumer that there was another Chris Clark working that evening and that I would be identified as the one who didn't spell his last name with an "e" at the end of it. That's how many of us there were. Soon after I was changed and on my way up to the Fifth floor of the building where I would be getting my hair and makeup done. This room was a gymnasium sized space with lights and mirrors lined up along every wall. Hairspray was flying, powder was tossed about and I even saw a few of the black actors getting afro wigs applied to their heads. One later told me he was glad to have it. "It'll keep my head warm," he said smiling. Everyone upstairs was very friendly and I was actually a little disappointed to be told that my hair was perfect and that they wouldn't be needing to cut it. Makeup was also unnecessary in my case despite the fact that I felt a little concealer would do well in covering up my razor burn.

Before long I ran into an actor named David who had actually been my Freshman mentor while we were students at the Atlantic Theatre Company. And in a surprisingly short amount of time (only an hour and a half after my 5 o'clock arrival) all of the extras were called to file outside in groups of 50 to 100 at a time. The hour had come to report to set!
On the way outside and into the bitter 30 degree cold I started to fill David in on what this whole movie was supposed to be about and we soon struck up a conversation with a guy named Kameron. Not long after, the three of us decided to become on-set allies and within no time had even made up character names for each other, mine being Theodore Johnston III, otherwise known as Teddy in High School, T Dawg now that he's a Political Science major at Columbia.
As the masses walked onto set I was pretty much blown away. Lights were everywhere, cranes lifted high into the sky, enormous pine trees had been cut down and hauled in to stand around the facade of the Museum of the City of New York which was playing the part of Avery Hall, a Columbia University Dorm Facility. All of this was taking place directly in front of a real, live New York City street where the steady stream of taxis, town cars and buses would slow as they took in the sheer size and grandeur of this big, beautiful motion picture set.

The filming was hard. We were all freezing and breaks came few and far between. In this business everything takes forever, so when they'd call for a five minute break after five to six hours of straight shooting I found myself very bitter and confused at how realistic they were truly being. Five minutes in no way meant an easy half hour the way I assumed it would, but literally five minutes. And then we were back out there. The set ups for the different shots usually took about forty five minutes to an hour with the lights, the cameras and everything in between. During filming, our job as extras was mostly to react to one of the main characters who was screaming through a megaphone atop the dorm building's balcony. Absolutely nothing was explained to any of us as far as what we were protesting about or who we were standing up for. All I could make out from the balcony speech was that we should "Stop the infiltration of the black neighborhoods!" "Stop the swine!" Stop a bunch of things I really didn't get. The one thing I knew for certain was that we were all supposed to be very, very angry.
The crowd began by chanting "Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike!" over and over again, with every actor born between January and June (that included me) giving a peace sign and with every other actor just shouting. This, they explained to us, was because if every single person was doing the exact same motion then it might begin to look rather fakey and staged. I got myself up to what I gathered was a very good location for the first shots, always knowing exactly where my camera was. At All Times.
I was right on the ledge of the main stairway leading up to the dorm and directly in the path of the invading policemen for the first shots. I was as close to the front line as was allowed for the handcuffed procession many hours later for another set of shots. And by the end, after being on location for nearly thirteen full hours, I found myself directly next to the lead actor, a very handsome and charming moptopped Englishman named Jim, for a rousing fight that involved Evan Rachel Wood screaming, him running ahead of me, then getting thrown to the ground and beaten by cops.

Out of the entire time, probably only thirty to forty full minutes was actually spent shooting these scenes. The rest of the time was all set ups or breaks and the extras were instructed to riot in many different ways for each shot. Sometimes we would be asked to give 100% movement and 100% vocals, at other times it was 100% movement and 50% vocals. For one set of shots the marching policemen mouthed along to the song "Across the Universe"'s line of "Nothing's gonna change my world. Nothing's gonna change my world." The rest of the time they just fought back with those of us in the crowd.
Extreme exhaustion and bodily discomfort aside it was all a lot of fun. Nearly everyone was a blast to talk to between takes and many of them recounted on location stories of everything from "Law and Order SVU" to the upcoming film version of "The Devil Wears Prada." David, Kameron and I befriended a stunt woman who had worked on "Titanic" and she left us all in stitches as she recounted the awful red wig she was forced to wear and the awful on screen daughter she was forced to carry. In this case the on screen daughter, supposedly an infant in a bonnet, was actually played by a 60 lb. loud mouthed midget who clung desperately to the stunt woman's chest during the drowning scenes due to the fact that the midget couldn't swim to save her life. Through tears of laughter we were told, "I could hear her poor little midget heart pounding as the water started to rise... We're actually really good friends now."
So now here I sit. My body clock is still destroyed but I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity. It's strange to walk up and see all of the trailers, the craft service tables, the PAs, ADs, stunt people and extras and to know that I'm a part of it all. The job of movie making is a strange one. Extras stand and shiver. Stars emerge from warm seclusion to film a take as the cameras roll, only to be quickly whisked back inside. Assistant directors shout instruction into bullhorns, while the director herself, in this case Tony Award winner Julie Taymor, shuffles frowning to and fro, never once speaking to any of the performers at all. If I didn't know who she was and what she looked like I'd have probably assumed that any one of the other people telling us where to stand and what to do was the one in charge.

It's a long, tough job. Jim told me that the cast and crew had been shooting for the last eight months and that they still had a month left to go on the film, hoping to wrap up in Liverpool by early next year.
I enjoyed hearing his stories of "wool jumpers" in the extreme summer heat and, now, light jackets in the extreme winter cold. I enjoyed being Theodore Johnston III and getting really worked up for a cause I didn't fully understand. I enjoyed my peace sign, the collective calls for strike and the mass booing as the cops rushed in. I enjoyed the people I met and the anti-glamourousness of it all. And hopefully my face will end up a part of the film. I sure pushed myself up to the front enough times. My goal is to end up in the theatrical trailer, for at least a split second or two. But if I don't make it there or if the entire scene gets scrapped, the crowd shots blurred out or even if the film only makes it straight to video then at least I'll know I was there, that I got the phone call in the first place and that there will be a next time.
And you never know, maybe then I'll even get a line.