It was a dark and stormy night.
And it was a dark and stormy morning.
After getting an email from a friend about auditions for the film Transformers 3 in Chicago, I rose early with the rain pelting down, deciding I’d better get to the audition on the Near North side of Chicago well before the 8:30 call.
I made terrific time on the expressway; I had anticipated a trek of more than an hour, but it only took me 40 minutes. I took this to be a “good omen” for my getting cast as an extra.
However, when I arrived at the location, an old school building converted into the Chicago Academy for the Arts, there was a line of people stretching from the entrance and around the block for about a quarter of a mile. However, the rain had stopped, and I took that to be a “good sign” I also decided to leave my umbrella in the car.
The line moved slowly. Most of the people seemed to be in groups of two or more and chatting among themselves about shared events. I was alone. After about an hour in line, the rain started again, slowly at first, and then in a steady downpour. A couple of friends in front of me finally turned to me and asked if I wanted to get under a portion of their umbrella. I told them I had a large one in my car around the corner, but I didn’t want to lose my place in line. They agreed to hold my spot, and I dashed back to my old car, retrieved one of the world’s largest and oldest plaid umbrellas, and dashed back. The line hadn’t moved in the 10 minutes I was gone, nor did it move very rapidly for the next 1-1/2 hours.
People were trickling out of the building, but at what seemed to be a faster rate than people were going into it.
After nearly three hours, 80 of us drowned drones were ushered inside and seated in a high-ceilinged room that looked like it might have been a basement classroom at some point in history. We sat dripping on small wooden chairs, some of us on more than one. The proctors told us to sit quietly, fill every seat, and wait for instructions. They repeated this as they passed out a pink form for women and girls and a blue form for men, along with two white tax-type forms. They cautioned us not to attach anything to the forms (I had already attached a headshot to the blue one with a paper clip that I had brought specifically for that purpose. The headshot had remained remarkably dry inside a plastic bag I had carried, in contrast to the bag itself, whose colors ran and made my hands and arms look like they had been painted.
The casting director informed us in the tone of a drill sergeant that if we thought the wait was bad, we probably didn’t belong as an extra in a movie. We could expect long, usually foodless days on the set and $66 dollars per day if we were chosen.
We were told to get in line after completing our colored forms. These requested only contact information with a small box for comments if we had any words to sell ourselves. We were told to line up at a table in the front of the room, get rid of all of our belongings on another smaller table and wait to be photographed two at a time by the casting director. I completed my form more rapidly than many in my group and stepped up to the table behind two much younger girls (I am 63, but with most of my hair and most of it still dark, I can pass for 45, really I can). I felt a little bit like I was about to take a school or an armed forces physical. The woman at the “receiving forms” desk glared at me when I handed her my fairly soggy blue form with the headshot attached, and then urged me to put down my bag, my umbrella, and anything that might be sticking out of my pockets. She then gave me a 5 x 8 card with the number 6492 on it. I didn’t check the numbers of my neighbors, but I am pretty sure that I was the six thousand four hundred and ninety second person photographed in the two-day call.
Have others had similar experiences?
