If Anyone Makes Eye Contact With Madonna You’ll Never Work In This Town Again

My brief career as a Hollywood extra

The low rung in showbiz

Getting paid 180 bucks a day to stand around eating catering sounds great on paper, and sometimes it was.

I never auditioned and didn’t go through an agency. For me, breaking into extra work was being in the right place at the right time.

The year was 1995. I was attending the Batman Forever (The Clooney one with bat nips) Soundtrack release party at a weekly rave club called Magic Wednesdays in Hollywood on Hollywood Blvd.

Clubs that played rave music were rare. Most clubs back then were playing hip-hop. Magic Wednesdays was the place to be in the mid 1990’s if you wanted to hear techno.

I went with a couple of friends to watch Rabbit in the Moon perform. Afterwards we found each other and left the venue. Outside the door we walked past the promoters handing out flyers for other events and an attractive woman stepped in front of us.

“Would you like to be in a Crystal Method video?”

We were all frying balls on mescaline, so it took a moment to process what she had said. I think it was Gunny who managed to get a yes out eventually. She took Polaroids of us individually and we wrote our numbers on them.

Two days later she called and asked, “Can you be at this building downtown at 1:30 PM?” I said yes and rode with my friends to the set.

Crystal Method — Keep Hope Alive

First they chose the most outrageous and cool looking among us to be featured extras. They made triple the pay regular extras did and were much more likely to make it in the video.

They picked a short haired girl wearing a cowboy hat (seen in the beginning of the video) to be a featured extra. I was standing next to a different short haired girl who said, “Fuck! I knew I should have worn my cowboy hat!”

We all stood around for six hours eating catering. Then went in some decrepit Downtown Los Angles building to shoot for 45 minutes. I’m still not sure if the Crystal Method was actually there.

Madonna- Ray of Light

They had three sets of extras dancing in shifts for this video. It was an exhausting fourteen hour shoot for ten seconds of footage that made it into the video.

That’s the way it goes sometimes. It would have been cool to have been able to say, “That’s me!” in a Madonna video, but the pay is the same if you can see your face in the video or not.

What was Madonna like?

A bodyguard comes out and says. “Don’t touch Madonna, don’t look at Madonna, don’t say anything to Madonna. If you think Madonna said something to you, you’re wrong.”

The director comes out and yells, “If anyone makes eye contact with Madonna you’ll never work in this town again!”

Minutes before Madonna was scheduled to step out of her trailer, a production assistant tells us Madonna will have anyone who she thinks is looking at her kicked off the set.

I stayed as far away from Madonna as I could. A lot of people were fired the first hour.

As a result, the morale of the set was poor. Nobody was smiling or having anything resembling a good time. Anyone who was caught laughing for any reason was fired. It’s the reason why you see the scene for all of ten seconds in the final video.

The Smashing Pumpkins — Bullet with Butterfly Wings

The video is a visual masterpiece. I’m proud to have been in this, but shooting it was hell.

The day started off with around two thousand extras. Fourteen hours later (!) we were down to three hundred.

Everyone in this video looks completely miserable. It’s not acting, we were miserable. We were instructed to take off our shirts and roll around in the dirt. So we did. It was around 50 degrees that day.

The all male cast of extras remained shirtless while climbing up and falling down hills for hours. The trash bags you see the people holding in the video had their jackets in them for between scenes.

We stuck it out because they said they weren’t going to pay us if we didn’t.

At 1am they decided to shoot the scene where they shoot us with a fire hose. The temperature had dropped down to 40 and the wind had picked up.

They had broken us. At that point it seemed a logical conclusion for a shitty day of filming.

I was paid around 140 dollars for the gig after taxes. And they mailed the check as opposed to getting it when we wrapped like every other shoot I’ve done. Double that would not have been enough.

Starship Troopers

This was my favorite shoot. I spent six days running around Vasquez rocks outside of Los Angeles with 300 other young, attractive adults carrying giant guns pretending to shoot bugs that weren’t there while screaming.

The weather was nice, they had cold beer in the catering tent, and the pay was good.

I stood behind Casper Van Dien for so many shots I was sure my face would be clearly shown on screen. When the DVD came out I spent six hours combing through it.

I know one of those grey plastic helmets running to fight CGI bugs is mine, but I don’t know which one.

Limp Bizkit — Break Stuff

This happened a few years after Starship Troopers and came from a different source. My friend Michelle told me about it and we drove down to Paramount Studios for the filming. I was told to bring a red baseball cap. Preferably fitted.

Michelle was picked as a featured extra and made three times what I did. Plus she was immortalized in the YouTube thumbnail for the video.

At the end of the video there’s a part where the extras were directed to rush stage the band was playing on from a hundred yards away. Almost everyone took off in a sprint when directed. Me and another guy did a leisurely jog while saying in deadpan:

“Limp Bizkit. Yay.”

“Oh boy, Limp Bizkit.”

Marilyn Manson — The Dope Show

I was dating a professional dancer who told me about a closed audition for a fast-food commercial boyband.

I tried out, but not chosen to be a member of the Meaty Cheesy Boys.

But I was called a few weeks later and asked to be a dancer in a Marilyn Manson video.

I figured being a Marilyn Manson video they would have me doing weird stuff and I was not disappointed.

I wasn’t an extra for this video, I was a dancer. Meaning I had make-up and wardrobe and shared a trailer with the other Sexy Cops. The script referred to us as Sexy Cops. I was Sexy Cop 6.

We shot for hours doing all kinds of homoerotic acts. We had access to the indoor catering area that was reserved for the members of Marilyn Manson and Sexy Cops that had a plate of cocaine and pre-cut straws.

It was really good cocaine.

This is the only video where I can say, “That’s me!” It would be cool if other people could see it was me. With all the recent assault charges against Marilyn Manson a 4k re-release of the video is looking unlikely.

If you are trying to break into extra work or thinking about it, good luck. The other extras I talked to on set were all discovered like me or had family or friends in the industry.

NEVER SAY NO!!! If you are asked to appear in something, take the gig even if you’re not feeling it. I was asked to drive out to San Bernadino on a Friday for a Banda video. I said no. I never heard from them again after getting the first four gigs one after the other.

From what I’ve seen it’s the weird and unique looking people that have a much better shot at making it than a traditional attractive person. It’s being the right person with the right look at the right place at the right time. A SAG card may help, but might hurt.

Hollywood is strange place. People come here determined and full of optimism and leave a few years later with shattered dreams. Without trying I made it father than most.

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