Page 32 of My Unscripted Life

Subject: PARTY

Isleep only slightly better than the night before. My alarm buzzes at the criminally early hour of five a.m. for our five-thirty crew call. I don’t remember the last time I saw sunrise. I make it a point never to sign up for anything that requires me getting out of bed before seven in the morning. This is part of the reason why I never played sports (the other part being that I have the hand-eye coordination of a drunk toddler).

Today we’re on location again, this time for a really big crowd scene that’s supposed to take place at a fancy party. Production has taken over the Charlesmark House, a historic antebellum mansion right in the middle of town. The whole cast is in the scene, along with a cavalcade of extras in fancy clothes. It’s going to be an all-hands-on-deck kind of day.

I dress in a flash in cutoff denim, one of my dad’s old Harvard T-shirts, and a pair of work boots. The forecast calls for temperatures in the upper nineties today, and with late-June humidity, it’s going to be a real scorcher. I’d wear flip-flops if that kind of thing were allowed on set (which, I learned recently, definitely isnot,with all the heavy equipment and rigging, not to mention all the actors and extras stomping around in spike heels).

I pull my car into the Motor Inn parking lot that’s serving as base camp for today. There’s already a tent set up in the far corner of the lot where extras are milling about, some still in street clothes carrying garment bags, others already dressed for our scene in jewel-toned satin sheaths and crisp black suits. Most of them have big travel mugs of coffee in hand, and a few are already smoking early-morning cigarettes, whatever they can do to wake up. I open the door of the Honda just as the crew van pulls up. Rodney, our driver, rolls down the window.

“You coming to set?” he calls.

“Yep.” I grab my bag off the passenger seat and climb into the van, sitting on the first bench seat next to Carly. Eloise, Gloria, and Rob are in the van as well, all talking into their respective phones with the seriousness required to launch a NASA mission. I spot a flash of green in the back row and crane my neck to see Benny, half asleep, leaning against the window, wearing his uniform of cargo shorts, a green T-shirt, and a green bandanna tied around his head. I can’t see his feet, but if I had to guess, I’d say he’s got matching green knee socks on. As the van shudders to a start, he cracks his eyes open, takes one look at me in Dad’s Harvard shirt, mutters “Traitor,” and falls back to sleep.

Carly rolls her eyes. “God, I hate days like this,” she says. “Fingers crossed it doesn’t turn into an unholy disaster.”

“What’s wrong with days like this?” I ask.

“Are you kidding? Location shoots are hard enough, but when you add in over a hundred extras it’s enough to make you wish you’d listened to your mother and become a middle school teacher. At least middle schoolers have some sense of boundaries and propriety. Extras arethe worst.CapitalT,capitalW.”

I shrug. They’re just background. Glorified scenery, really. Sure, sometimes they sneeze or accidentally look into the camera, but really, how bad can they be? Carly sees my doubt and shakes her head.

“Just a word to the wise? Don’t feed the animals.”

I don’t even know what that means, and I kind of don’t want to know. Instead I watch the passing scenery of my town through the van windows as we make our way to the Charlesmark.

The van turns down the circular drive and pulls to a stop in front of the main steps up to the Charlesmark’s hulking front door. The house was built in 1859 by Rutherford J. Charles, our town’s richest resident at the time. He had a massive plantation, along with all that entails in the pre–Civil War South. I’ve taken the tour about six or seven times since I moved here, including two visits as part of school field trips. The place really is a beauty, thanks to Wilder’s restoration efforts, and I imagine it’ll make a perfect backdrop for a scene in which Jonas, our main character, attends a ritzy party and meets Kass. The whole thing culminates with Kass’s mother (played by Gillian) calling Jonas trash.

I climb out of the van, Carly right on my heels.

“I talked to Ruth. She’s got a fleet of PAs working props today, so you’re with me,” she says. “Adrian has point on the extras, but we’re all going to need to help corral them.” Another animal metaphor. Man, extras get no respect.

We head into the Charlesmark, dodging crew members carting camera pieces up the stairs and through the front door. Despite my many visits to the historic home, today it looks nothing like I remember. The original heart-pine floors are crisscrossed with heavy electrical cables as the lighting guys work on their setup. Mats have been laid down all over the place to protect the parquet flooring from the thumping of work boots and rolling of equipment. There are pieces of neon gaffer’s tape marking Xs all over the place, noting marks for the actors in the first scene, and props is crawling all over the set, placing half-empty champagne glasses and plates of hors d’oeuvres on every surface and setting up various fake buffet tables amid all the period antiques. Seeing the heaping tables of cheese, french bread, fruit, and various pastries makes my stomach rumble, even if that food is going to sit out all day and inevitably look seriously wilted by the end of filming.

We make our way straight through the house and out the back door, where a tent’s been set up on the expansive back lawn. A school bus has pulled up alongside it, and extras in their party finery are filing off. The men have their coats draped over their arms, while the women hold the trains of their dresses in one hand, their shoes in the other.

“Ugh,” Carly groans, then calls out, “All right, guys, off the bus and into the tent! We’d like to get things started as quickly as possible, so please save your morning cigarettes!”

The extras who’ve already lit up stub them out and flick them into the grass.

“Excuse me, could we please try to avoid setting the one-hundred-fifty-year-old house on fire?” Carly snaps, waving a finger at them. “We have a bucket over there for your butts. Use it, or we’ll send you home.”

She turns to me and makes like she’s bashing her brains out with her clipboard. “Oy with this day already,” she mutters. She nods her head toward the tent. “Can you go in there and back Adrian up?”

If I’m going to take Carly’s advice and focus on work, then I need to stay as far away from Lydia as possible. And if there’s anywhere Lydia’snot,it’s in extras holding. I wander into the tent, which is crammed full of people and rickety plastic folding chairs. The extras are already congregating, moving the chairs around, fighting over the few power strips that have been set up so they can charge their phones. There’s a group of middle-aged extras clutching enormous travel mugs, looking like they’ve been through this more than once. In the corner is a group of girls who keep giggling nervously and touching up their lipstick, looking like they can’t wait to get in front of the camera. A few people have already parked in chairs and nodded off. There are garment bags flung over the back of nearly every chair, and several of the women are perched on the ground using the chairs as vanities while they touch up hair and makeup.

Adrian hustles through the tent flap and climbs up onto one of the chairs. Despite the heat, she’s in jeans and boots, a red bandanna tied around her neck like a bandit. Her headset pushes the spiked ends of her black pixie cut in all directions. She’s barely five feet, but she has the personality of someone twice that tall. She adjusts her headset so she can cup her hands around her mouth like a megaphone, then calls out for everyone to “shut the hell up.

“All right, guys, there’s a lot of you, so I’m going to really need you to listen when someone in a headset is talking,” she says once the crowd is quiet. “And if you can’t do that, I have no problem sending you home. Just like always, no phones on set. No pictures outside of this tent. No social media-ing aboutanythingthat happens on set, unless you want to go home and also write a very big check to Rialto Productions. If you’re going to smoke, please do it at least ten feet away from the tent, and butts go in the buckets.”

After a few more instructions about bathroom locations and not touching anything and three more reminders not to take any pictures—“I mean it,” she says with an evil eye combined with the ever-present threat of being sent home—Gloria, Eloise, and a gaggle of other wardrobe folks file into the tent and start wandering through the crowd adjusting straps and ties. Alotof double-stick tape gets applied. Gloria lasts about four and a half minutes before she huffs, waves at the wardrobe assistants, and bolts toward the house. Eloise ends up in charge in the tent.

“Excuse me, are we going to get hair and makeup?” asks a girl in a hot-pink satin-and-sequin number who looks like she’s already wearing an entire Sephora on her face. Adrian rolls her eyes in response, then turns to me.

“They seriously think that with a hundred and fifty of them, we’re going to waste time spackling them up? Fat chance. Most of them won’t even get seen.”

It turns out getting this show started “as soon as possible” means it’s two hours before we even start moving extras into the house for the first scene, which requires about a third of them to dance in the background to silent music while the cast has a quick exchange in the foreground.

Adrian is instructing the extras on how to dance and to definitelynotlook into the camera or at the actors when Carly brings one more group in to join them. Trevor is moving through the crowd with a roll of sticky foam strips, applying them to the bottoms of high heels to prevent the inevitable clacking during the dancing. I’ve been put on cell phone patrol, making sure no one has brought one onto set.

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