My 15 minutes of fame was several hours too long
By David Sennema dsennema@sc.rr.com

I spent last Thursday as an extra in a film being made here in Columbia. The scene being shot had to do with an evil senator who had died by choking on a cookie. A bizarre funeral scene was shot in Ebenezer Lutheran Church in downtown Columbia.

I got there at 10 am and got in line with 400 to 500 extras who had answered the call. We filled out some payroll papers, then sat around in the church gymnasium waiting for instructions.

Eventually, we were told to report to the sanctuary and take seats in the pews. I ended up in the fifth pew from the back, and that's where I spent the remainder of the day.

We shot two scenes from the funeral all day long…over and over and over again. We were the congregation, and there were moments of applause as Jessica Biel, the girl with the nail in her head called on the congregation to honor the late, great senator with an ovation.

I suppose you could call what I witnessed all day as organized confusion. There must have been 20 film company people up in the front of the church. They all talked and pointed and moved around and sometimes yelled at each other. We had no clue as to what was going on. The scene appeared to me to be so corny as to be unimaginable for a professional film. But that's an observation from 20 rows back.

We had been given a ticket for a lunch to be provided, and at 4:30 pm in the afternoon we broke for that "lunch." It was a catered buffet, outdoors in a tent, and then we carried the food into the gymnasium to eat. Then back to the sanctuary for more shooting of the same scene, over and over and over.

It got up into the 80s so it got hotter and hotter inside the sanctuary with all those people and all those lights. They had a machine that would shoot cold air into the room periodically. It fogged up the space and make it look like a scene from Brigadoon. That would help briefly, and then it would get hot again. We men were in funeral garb, jackets and white shirts and ties, so it became downright uncomfortable.

The most frustrating part of the experience was the film company staff gave us virtually no information. When I reported for duty that morning I assumed I'd be there until 5 pm and then go home. I was planning to go back again Friday morning and spend another seven or eight hours. Yesterday, we hit the eight- hour mark at 6 pm, and no one would, or could, tell us how much longer we would be there.

For the first several hours of the day it had been fascinating, everything was new, but the repetition and the extended hours gradually turned into boredom. People around me began to grumble and complain about not getting information. Every time they would finish filming one of the scenes we would expect someone to say, "That's it folks, you're excused, see you tomorrow," but it never happened.

At 10:30 pm, I realized that when they finally did excuse everyone there was going to be this long line of people getting their pay papers signed, and then there would be this very long line of people getting their cars out of the parking garage. By that time I was overheated, under- informed, exhausted, disillusioned, and had decided not to return for a second day.

I slipped out of what had begun to feel like my personal pew, got my papers signed, and told them not to count on me for Friday. I walked a couple of blocks to the parking garage where I retrieved my car in blissful isolation.

On the positive side I certainly learned something about what's involved in making a movie, which is why I went…and within ten days I'm supposed to get a check for about $68. I met some nice people. The lunch wasn't bad (although anything would have tasted pretty good at 4:30 pm). Mainly I had that experience… and don't need to have it again.