Background! (When I was an Extra)

This was the first movie I was in. I was in the background for two scenes. One, filmed at San Francisco's Cow Palace, standing in for the Houston Coliseum in 1962, was a crowd scene. I can't even pick myself out on screen. Maybe that's me at 104:53 on Side B of the latest DVD version. It's a figure in the second or third row back, wearing a dark green suit and a dark cowboy hat. (I think my hat was dark; hats were provided to the background players by the costume department, and I failed to make notes even on what color hat I took!)

We had been encouraged to bring our own lunches, but, due to labor laws, we were served Burger King because we were held until past 6 or 7 PM. There are spits with big sides of beef on screen, but those were just props. We were explicitly warned not to attempt to eat any of the prop food.

Among the stars we saw were the actors playing the seven astronauts and their wives. Dennis Quaid, Pamela Reed, Fred Ward, Veronica Cartwright, Ed Harris, Mary Jo Deschanel, Scott Glenn, Kathy Baker, Lance Henriksen, and the rest. They came out of a tunnel in seven convertibles and passed by the crowd, which formed two phalanxes on either side of their path toward the stage. Donald Moffat as Vice-president Lyndon Johnson was the scene's indefatigable master of ceremonies.

We extras saw the stage performances seen in the film, including the fan dance by Peggy Davis as Sally Rand, who originally entertained the NASA astronauts at the 1962 barbecue. The most memorable aspect of Davis' performance was that after the first take, some of the extras complained that she wasn't very good. (Hey, folks, free entertainment - in fact, you're getting paid for this!) Then one of the crew announced that they had played the wrong music, and we were about to be treated to another take with the correct music. Now the naysayers changed their tune. She had done all right considering that she was improvising to an unexpected score. The correct music was Debussy's "Clair de Lune". (I have no memory of what she danced to in the first take.) As you can see in the finished film, her performance is quite graceful.

The other shoot I was involved in was at Hamilton AFB, Novato, California, USA. The actor-to-background ratio was nearly equal; so here we all got the same fare for lunch from the caterers: salmon steak and brisket. The extras also shared a trailer. I finished reading the book the film was based on in that trailer.

My big scene, filmed on this shoot, wound up on the legendary cutting-room floor. After the first take, director Philip Kaufman told assistant director L. Dean Jones, Jr, "The guy in the orange suit was great!" (I was the only extra wearing an orange flight suit while everyone else wore khaki or some other more subdued color.) I had slipped and stumbled as I ran into view of the camera, you see. Unfortunately, I was unable - or, I should say, unwilling - to deliver the same performance on the second and third takes, so my career as an extra who could pratfall on cue ended before it began.

I can actually name three of my fellow extras in this movie: 1) John-Michael Battaglia, who is not any of the John or Michael Battaglias listed on IMDb, so far as I have been able to determine. John-Michael can be seen early in the second half of the movie. He is the balding, red-haired guy helping the Mercury Project head, played by John P. Ryan, hold back the press corps. In real life, J-M was (he died in 2016) an industrial film writer-director, TV news editor, and PR man. 2) Richard Jack, a Bay Area musician, was in a scene with Sam Shepard that was cut from the originally released version but later restored on the DVD. It's the scene where Shepard as Yeager delivers the memorable line: "You think a monkey knows he's sittin' on a rocket that might explode?" Richard is the handsome, dark-haired guy sitting at a table listening to Levon Helm, David Clennon and Shepard's characters sound off on Gus Grissom. (BTW I was seated behind the camera during this scene.) 3) Buck Rooney - he swore that was his real name - must be in the movie somewhere, but I don't know where. He was so handsome that the only reason for leaving him out might be that he looked more like the ideal test pilot from central casting than anybody else in the picture.

I am rather confident that the one-day shoot I was on for the second of the original "Star Wars" sequels must have been in early April 1982, because I remember that the Falklands War was freshly in the news. We were shuttled to a secret location near San Rafael, California that turned out to be a cavernous warehouse. High on a pedestal in the middle of the vast space, perhaps thirty or even fifty feet above the floor, was the "flying" boat seen near the beginning of the movie. It was in front of a green screen so that the image of it could be superimposed on images of the desert over which the boat was supposed to fly.

The director and cameramen were suspended in the air by cranes. I am not sure how many. The boat was between them and the green screen, but these elements could be moved around to get different angles.

Six of us - both actors and extras - climbed up a ladder to the rather small boat. (I have acrophobia, so I give myself points for this day.) My job was to stand in the stern next to Billy Dee Williams who played Lando Calrissian. He never spoke a word, so far as I was aware. Not to anyone in the boat.

Sometimes, I was standing next to Williams' stand-in, an affable college football player who later called his sister to tell her that he was standing in for Williams. She did not believe him, but he was telling the truth.

I was dressed in the same helmet, leather vest, and leather mask worn by stuntman Peter Diamond. (I am sure he wore it before me because his name was on a tag that the costume woman took off before she gave the outfit to me.) It was a bit warm in the costume, and the shoot took all day. There was a lot of down time between actual filming, but we were not allowed to climb down every time there was a short break; instead we had to stay on our marks in the boat.

Harrison Ford (as Han Solo) and Mark Hamill (as Luke Skywalker) stood in the bow. The point of this shoot seemed to be to film establishing shots of the half-dozen static figures in the boat as seen from some distance, but Ford and Hamill were full of energy. They were talking a lot, and then Ford wanted to practice his stunts. This unnerved me. I neither wanted to fall out of the boat myself nor watch anyone else fall - not even Ford.

One thing about my appearance in this movie is that I can be fairly certain that when you see the shot of the boat flying over the desert, that must be me at the stern next to Lando. Any close shots, especially involving stunts, must be of Diamond. On the downside, how can I really be sure that is me at such a distance and beneath the helmet and mask? I'll bet an analysis of the figure's bare arms might be telling. I suspect that Diamond's arms were far more developed than mine.

On the floor of the warehouse, there was an exhibit of storyboards depicting the flying motorcycle chase from the film. In light of the secrecy supposedly maintained by the production, I do not know why they put the drawings out for anyone to see.

When Mark Hamill saw me looking at the storyboards, he asked me - mainly in jest, I think - whether I was trying to get a scoop.

There was some speculation among the extras that the storyboards might be disinformation to throw off potential spies. As it turned out, though, the boards depicted an actual sequence in the movie.

Back to Hamilton AFB (also used in "The Right Stuff", see above) where the landing field next to a faux-terminal building stood in for an airport in Shanghai, China in 1935. I was part of a crowd of people in evening dress who parted the way when Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford again), Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw), and Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan) drove up in a fast touring car. They jumped out and boarded a boxy Ford airplane. (Somebody on the set told us the legend that the plane was designed by Ford engineers, deliberately excluding anyone with knowledge of aerodynamics.)

During several takes, my job was to step back from the path of the speeding car and, at the same time, throw an arm out to protect the woman next to me in the crowd. I actually bothered to worry that I might be over-acting, but, to date, I have not been able to see myself on screen in the scene, though I have not looked recently.

One thing I recall about the shoot was that Dan Akroyd was there, wearing the silly khaki shorts of his character. Akroyd had a few lines as the hero rushed to the plane. The thing I remember is a crew member (the assistant director?) encouraging us to laugh at anything Akroyd said or did. I really doubted that the veteran comic actor needed to have his ego massaged in this way.

Yvette Mimieux starred as an older woman having an affair with a younger man (Andrew Stevens). The shoot I was on happened at the San Francisco waterfront in a scene where the lovers meet at a marina. We were doing our background business maybe a hundred feet from the action. This was deep, deep background work. No chance that I can be seen on camera in this one.

We stood on a street corner waiting and waiting. Nothing happened, really. Mimieux did pass somewhat close by as she walked toward the place where her scene was to be shot. We then saw the couple in the distance coming together and embracing.

As she passed by, a middle-aged extra said, "I've never heard of her".

"She was a sex symbol in the 1960s", I said.

He looked her over and said, "She's nothing much".

I refrained from pointing out that, by far, he looked much worse for wear than she did.

I was in a crowd scene outside the Brocklebank Apartments (1000 Mason Street, San Francisco). Gene Wilder was directing us. I most remember him yelling, "Stop acting!" I guess we were making so much noise that we hadn't heard him say, "Cut!" The other thing I remember is Gilda Radner sitting just inside the wall in front of the building. She wasn't in the scene, but she was there watching Wilder. Between takes he went over and talked to her, and she smiled radiantly.