I'd Like to Thank the Academy

The Oscars took place on Sunday night, an event that hardly registers a blip on my radar anymore. Not since they moved the ceremony show to February and doubled the number of nominations from five movies to ten. Do I really need five more movies I've never heard of or plop down good money to see? No

 

Although we did catch "True Grit" over the weekend (loved it). And one of these days I’d like to check out "The Social Network". But Hollywood's yearly narcissistic extravaganza has become a little too laborious and pretentious to sit through anymore. However, that's not to say, if awarded one of those little statuettes, I wouldn't show up to accept it.

 

Which brings me to my one and only venture into show business.

 

It was September 1979 and I was between jobs or, to use a nice euphemism, ‘recently canned’. In July I’d been given a permanent vacation from KZUN AM & FM in Spokane and now had a lot of free time; and living on unemployment. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I’d put out feelers at other radio stations, with no luck, and had even resigned myself to thinking I might have to get a real job someplace, like flipping burgers at McDonald’s. I’d dropped off a resume, anyway.

 

However one morning, while listening to someone in radio who still had a job, Rick Shannon on KJRB teased a ‘blockbuster’ special announcement for anyone wanting to ‘break into show business’. He said it was coming up after the next break, so stay tuned. I naively hoped it might be something about radio, like they were looking for a new d.j. or something, so I waited through the next 300 commercials to find out.

 

But when he came back on, Rick read an urgent appeal from an unnamed employer looking to hire 100 people to act as extras in a feature length movie that was being shot in town. The announcement went on to say that no experience or prior acting ability was needed. Just show up. First come, first served. Damn, KJRB didn’t need me.

 

And news of a movie being shot in Spokane wasn’t really news. I’d read about it in the paper, it’d been talked about on TV- and a couple radio stations, and the production company had been in the area for several weeks, thought I’d never seen them set up anywhere.  However, being out of work for 6 weeks and, evidently, having little talent to do anything else (judging by the lack of perspective new employers banging down my door), this opportunity to ‘become a movie star’ sounded right up my alley.

 

And lucky me; the location shoot was conveniently taking place just down the road from my East Magnesium Road apartment, on the R.A.Hanson Company property. So with nothing else pressing on my “to-do” list that day, I hopped in the car and quickly drove the two and a half miles down to the plant. The radio appeal had come on about 8:30 and I was "on location" ten minutes later. But there were about 50 vehicles already ahead of me. And who knew how many people were in each car? I was afraid I might have been too late. Dang. A cop was directing all actor wanna-bees off the pavement and into a make-shift parking area and fortunately, about a minute after I arrived, he stopped letting people through. He'd been counting heads and hit the 100 mark two cars behind me. So I just barely made it.

 

The production company’s assistant’s assistant to the directors’ assistant (or some such 'official' person) rounded everybody up and herded us out to a wide vacant area of the Hanson property where the day’s filming would take place. There, we were introduced to the director, Larry Peerce. He'd directed a few commercially successful projects, like “2 Minute Warning” with Charlton Heston, and “The Other Side of the Mountain”, as well as some “Batman”, "Green Hornet" and “Wild Wild West “ TV episodes in the 1960's. After Peerce took over from the assistant, we were introduced to Treat Williams, the film's main character and person we’d be “acting” with.

 

The movie was something called “Why Would I Lie?” based on a book called “The Fabricator”. It was a story about a pathological liar who gets hired to be a social worker and assigned to find the birth mother of an orphan, who he soon finds he adores. Eventually the guy locates the kid’s mother, they fall in love and the now reformed fibber, the girl and the little boy live happily ever after. Very much formulaic. And very much chick flick material. Bleh.

 

So it was a dopey plot line. I didn’t care. They were paying me to be there.

The scene I was going to be in required all the “extras” to stand in the huge open empty field with Treat Williams and act like protesters outside a nuclear power plant. Never mind that there wasn't a nuclear plant- or even a structure of any kind- on this patch of ground; there was nothing out there but acres of weeds, scrub brush and thistle. Oh, but not to worry; Director Peerce said they’d draw the reactors in later. Ahh, the magic of special effects.

 

Some of the extras were given signs to hold, others were assigned to throw rocks (or pretend to). I was one of the ones with a sign. (Moviegoers wouldn’t know but the sign was blank because the camera was positioned behind us and wouldn't see it anyway). Joining us in this vast expanse of badlands were roaming bands of bees and mosquitoes.  However, Mr. Peerce went to great lengths to instruct us not to move or shoo it off, if a bug landed on us while the cameras were rolling. It’d wreck the “take".

 

The production began about 9:30 in the morning and, with a 45 minute break for lunch, we didn’t "wrap" till after sundown, or around 7 in the evening. So it was a full day. Nevertheless, except for the bug element, the work- the stuff they wanted us to do- was pretty easy. But it was laborious. It was w-o-r-k. They kept shooting and stopping, repositioning people and shooting again; then stopping, discussing, repositioning people back to where they’d been before, but shooting from a different angle. Then more stopping. And more discussing.

 

Let’s try shrinking people in close together and shooting.

Nope, spread them out farther.

 

Shooting. Stopping. Discussing some more. Adding people in, subtracting people out. Shoot, shoot again, and shoot some more. Action, cut, action, cut, action, cut. When I left home, it was still a little chilly so I'd worn a sweatshirt. In the middle of the day, though, it got really hot. But nobody could change their clothes or appearance; for continuity purposes in the film editing, how we appeared in the first shoot of the morning was how we'd have to appear all day. I wished they'd have given us a heads up. By 2:00, it was about 85 degrees and I was soaked through with sweat.

 

If nothing else, at least I looked like a dirty, smelly protester who’d put in a hard day's work.

 

A year later, I went to the “world premiere” of "Why Would I Lie?", when it opened in Spokane. The Fox downtown was packed, but was probably the only theater where the movie made any money. “Why Would I Lie?” was a B movie at best. At worst, a 90 minute waste of some perfectly good celluloid. The film ran in general release for maybe 2 weeks and then was pulled, never to see the light of day again.

And the scene I was in? In just under 9 hours of shooting, only about 7 seconds made it into the film. They kept moving us all around on the day we shot it so I couldn't identify exactly where I was in the frame, even watching it on the big screen. I know I had on a red sweatshirt and the film was shot in color. But our scene was tinted black and white to look like older news footage and in black and white, red is just another shade of black. And in such a short span of time, isolating one guy in dark shaded shirt in a sea of other dark shaded shirts and figures with their backs all turned isn't such an easy trick.

 

So I don't know where the hell I was in the shot.

 

And the drawn in reactors? They were astonishingly bad and didn’t look genuine at all. With all the creative talent in Hollywood, it’s hard to believe what they let show up in the film was their final cut. It was very amateurish. ‘Star Wars’ special effects, it wasn’t, and probably should've been left on the cutting room floor. Of course, my entire scene would’ve been left on the cutting room floor too. So I’m glad they left it in.

 

Besides, I wasn’t their creative consultant; I just got paid to act.

 

Since seeing the movie when it came out in Spokane, I don’t recall ever seeing it run on a movie channel or even as late night filler. And if it ever made it to cassette or DVD for purchase, it isn’t any more. Apparently it's no longer in print. So, I can't prove I was in this production or prove the movie was ever shot or still exists.

 

But I can vouch for the catered lunch the production company served us that day. The extras feast included a hot roast beef sandwich- that had started to cool- a bag of potato chips, a lukewarm 7-up and a rock-like chocolate brownie. The actors and directors did not eat with the extras, and we assumed their meal was a superior to ours. And my day’s pay for working on the silver screen? 25 dollars in cash. I didn’t get it though, until I signed a waiver granting the production company permission to use my likeness without seeking any further compensation. Ah, the things we one-day actors do for ‘our public’.

 

I’m not complaining, though, It was a unique experience; a long day of hurry up and wait and do nothing, but late that summer there were worse ways to kill off a Wednesday. And I did make 25 dollars. Plus, if I ever wanted to fabricate and embellish my resume, I really can list "actor" as part of my work background. And that’s no lie. 

 

Now, pass me my Oscar.