USM student Sean Demers first fell in love with acting in the sixth grade and has since decided that it is all he wants to do. So, when the cast and crew for the HBO movie “Empire Falls” arrived in the small northern town of Skowhegan, Maine, Demers planned to attend what he dubs the “cattle call” – a massive audition for movie extras.
But he lucked out. “I got a phone call from the casting director, saying he wanted to see me,” Demers said. Avoiding the mass auditions, he was given a chance at a speaking role. His audition consisted of reading three or four lines from the script and lasted no more than three minutes.
“I felt pretty good about it,” he said, “but it’s one of those things that you just don’t know.” Passed over for the part of an Empire Falls policeman, he ended up in the pool of extras after all. In the movie business, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, according to Demers.
“If you go into an audition thinking, ‘I can’t get this,’ then you’ve already lost. And if you go into it thinking ‘I can get this,’ you have to realize it’s not up to you,” Demers explained, adding that you never really know what the casting director is looking for. Students shouldn’t be intimidated by casting directors, he said, because one never knows what they are really looking for. Demers chuckled, adding “If you think that they’re thinking you have crooked eyebrows, it’s a possibility.”
As an extra, Demers said he did a lot of waiting around. After being fitted for several costumes, he and the other extras were brought to a waiting area. “We were there for three hours, wondering if we were going to get into a scene.” He said when extras were needed someone would come in and randomly choose people. Demers was picked, but admits it was most likely because he was in the front of the crowd. “Basically, the way I got onto the set was through chance.”
And, after all that, he doesn’t think he even made the shot. “If I made the shot, I got lucky, because I was way off to the side.”
USM Associate Professor of Theater Wil Kilroy was also an extra on the set of Empire Falls, but he had a much different experience. He is a member of a union called the Screen Actors Guild. In Maine, where professional actors are scarce, his membership guarantees him a spot on most locally shot productions. He does not have to sit for auditions, or in the waiting room like Demers, but gets to mingle with the big shots and gets first dibs on what he calls atmosphere work. “The newer term for ‘extra’ is ‘atmosphere player.’ I think it’s an effort to make them feel more important,” he explained.
For Demers, working as an ‘atmosphere player’ was an educational experience, and while he most likely won’t try out to be an extra again, he is glad he did it once. “The more experience you have, the more comfortable you are,” he said. He said all students should audition to be movie extras to get a taste of what a production is really like.
The movie will finish filming by the end of the month, and is due to air on HBO in 2005. The big-name production includes such famous actors as Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Ed Harris, Helen Hunt and Robin Wright Penn. The movie is based on Maine author Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which exemplifies the culture, history, people and way of life in a struggling mid-century mill town in Maine.
Amy Bickford can be contacted at [email protected]