Anna Sophia Robb as the young Carrie Bradshaw
December was starting to look pretty bleak on my background
calendar. Perhaps Hurricane Sandy had put a damper on the filming industry for a while -stalling all previously scheduled work. For me, there were no call-backs
until mid-month when I got a notice to go for a fitting at Steiner Studios for
the Carrie Diaries. I’d been submitting
to this on Central Casting for quite a while and FINALLY I got the gig. I began doing my research on IMDB to see who
the principals were. Just wanted to make
sure I’d recognize them in the event that they would actually be in my
scene. Of course, I was hoping to see
the main character of young Carrie Bradshaw: Anna Sophia Robb.
Two days later I self-reported to a college in the Riverdale
section of the Bronx in the afternoon.
It was an upscale neighborhood and parking was easy on the winter-scaped campus. Holding was in the gym and I camped out at
one of the sparse tables in the front near the PA’s station. There were about 80 extras, most of whom were
teenagers taking part in a high school dance (I wasn't slated for that scene).
They were cute but rather blasé about the whole thing -their 1985 period shoes seemed to offer only discomfort and torpor. An hour or so later, my table began to have
more life to it as five guys and a tall young woman found their places
here. Since we weren't going to be used
until dark, our dragged-out conversations got livelier and livelier.
The tall young lady at our table discussed health foods and
safety on the subway, then left for long periods of time. As expected, whenever
you have a couple of guys left alone at a table, the conversation always turns
to sex. One of the 50-ish guys began commenting
about how he generally has sex thrice a day!
That certainly made him the immediate center of frivolous commentary
from the rest of us. Another guy began
to tell about all his encounters with big-name stars like Marlon Brando. Since he didn’t look that old, we all began
to side-glance at one another with questionable looks –but listened intently
nonetheless at his anecdotes. The third
guy was a youngish actor who really preferred to work in theater on the stage
rather than in this obscure background gig.
He liked being the life of the party and told me about how he’d been
turned down for theater auditions even before he had a chance to show his
stuff. In his words, “At the Broadway
level of acting… EVERYONE’s talented!”
But only the “insiders” really land the jobs. Newbies only have a 1 in a million
chance. Still, he liked the business and
so he persisted. The guy on my left was
a writer and was trying to break into getting a publisher (other than himself)…
he found it very tough, but he continued to believed in himself. And then there was “Broadway Bob”!
Broadway Bob, as he wanted to be called, was a short
well-dressed elderly man with a snappy cigar in his jacket pocket who had just
gotten into doing extras work recently.
Comedy and tragedy exuded from his lips for the better part of our
afternoon. He began by pointedly asking
us if we could tell that he was wearing a taupe?!? He had very neat hair –but now that he called
our attention to it, we noted the flaky sides starting to curl up from his
scalp. We all played “dumb and dumber”. Other stories dealt with him crossing paths
with the mob and shyster lawyers who fleeced him during a divorce proceeding
that included an inadvertent police arrest.
It was one personal story after another –all of which had an
increasingly deeper emotional effect on him.
There was a point where his eyes welled up with tears and his voice
began to strain –but it seemed that he just had to get it off his chest. I soon realized that our little circle of men was
really acting like a group therapy session for him. He was genuinely giving us a rare moment of
reality –absorbing our attention with his natural George-Burns-like character
in the world of a Broadway Danny Rose.
A second shoot that was to take place outside had been
cancelled due to the inclement weather and we were released early. I was second on line to get my voucher signed
by the PA when Broadway Bob sat down at this table, began to fill out his form and
constantly kept peppering the PA with
questions about filling out the form (not unlike Peter Falk in the Columbo TV
series). It was another half hour before
I (and a series of other frustrated extras) got our papers processed. Nonetheless, you had to love Broadway Bob –he
was a natural!
My longstanding astute observation that “the real show takes
place backstage” was yet again validated.
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