The Atmosphere People

"Hi, Honey, how tall are you?"

"Five, two."

"Good. Tomorrow you're an ape."

The alarm goes off at five A.M. and by ten after, Otis Pembroke has the coffee plugged in and is standing in front of his bathroom mirror, shaving. The call is for seven o'clock on location at Hollywood Park, the race track that under normal conditions is a half-hour drive from Otis' little cracker-box house in West Hollywood. Otis, however, always allows himself enough time, and so, in 29 years of this work, he's been late or failed to show up for a job only twice, once when his car broke down on the Santa Ana Freeway and on the day his wife died. This morning he's tired and looks it. The day before, he played a reporter ("European type--neat hair--wr. own fall bus. suit--topcoat and hat--off-white shirt") on a pilot Universal was shooting and they'd started and worked late. It had been a nervous time, too, because, between takes that called for (continued on page 78)Atmosphere People(continued from page 75) him to walk briskly down the corridor of "a European hospital," he'd had to dash across the set to the pay phones and call the casting agencies for work the following day. It had cost him $1.10 in dimes and ll tries at three different offices before he'd landed this job: "25-45 yrs.--race-horse owner--smart fall suit--tie--off-white shirt." Otis thinks, as he dashes water on his face, that this morning he must look every minute of his 62 years.

By six he's out of the house and feeling a lot better. He's wearing one of his best gray suits with newly widened lapels, he has combed his full head of dyed-blond hair in a neat part and smoothed a little rouge onto his cheeks. When he practices smiling into the rearview mirror of his 1971 Mercury, his capped teeth gleam back at him and his light-blue eyes sparkle. It's a cold, drizzly day and he drives carefully, avoiding the freeway and possible delay in early-morning rush-hour traffic. He'll be, as always, a few minutes early. Otis knows that, of the 45 extras called this morning to portray members of a race-track crowd and provide background to the foreground doings of the featured players in this particular segment of Universal's Banacek series, he and a handful of others will form the nucleus of good atmosphere people (as opposed to mere bodies) who will make the director, the producer and the studio happy. Though he may never get to speak a single line, Otis Pembroke knows how important he is to the success of any picture or TV show. Unlike many of his colleagues, he doesn't mind the old term extra, which implies something not needed. Quite a few of Otis' friends in the business are even ashamed of being called background or atmosphere, but Otis isn't. "If we're not there, you miss us," he says. "We're like the furniture. You can't do without us." In his own world, Otis Pembroke is a star.

• • •

Fiona Guinness: "When I first got to Hollywood five years ago, I had no money at all. I existed on a cup of coffee a day and ate at parties. Then I worked in Vegas as a topless showgirl at The Mint, I toured as a Polynesian dancer, I made eight independent movies, including a couple of really vile ones, and I had all sorts of incredible jobs, like packing ants. I finally got into the union six months ago and I average only two or three days' work a week, but I'm so used to not having money it doesn't bother me. What's really odd is to be considered subhuman, even by the people who are kind to you. It's an experience to be treated like a lump of shit."

• • •

Otis arrives at Hollywood Park a good 20 minutes early and has no trouble finding the Banacek company, whose trailers and equipment trucks are parked beside the grandstand near the finish line. It's still drizzling and misty and the empty stands loom gloomily over the grass infield and the dirt-brown track over which a couple of dozen harness horses are working out, clip-clopping heedlessly past the box section where the Banacek crew is setting up for the day's shooting. The harness horses at Hollywood Park race at night, so the Banacek unit will be able to film until late afternoon, if necessary. Otis is among the first of the atmosphere people to show up, but Randy Henry, the pretty new assistant casting director from Central, is already there, getting ready to check the extras in and make sure they're on time. Randy was once an aspiring pop singer, has worked quite a bit as an extra herself and knows the ropes well, but her new job is not going to endear her to some of her old cronies. She has the power to send people home for not being on time or for wearing the wrong clothes and she has to listen and sometimes act on all the complaints of the assistant directors at the various studios' central casting services. "Randy, how nice to see you," Otis says as he checks in. "How do you like your new job?"

"I hope everybody's on time today," Randy says, looking worried. "I had a lot of complaints yesterday at Universal." She tells Otis what he knows all too well, that a lot of the A.D.s, who are in charge of the extras, really don't like them. An angry A.D. can make an extra's life miserable, by keeping him from the phone or, especially, by making him sit around the set all day waiting for a scene not scheduled to be shot for hours. "Still, a lot of the complaints I get are justified," she says. She tells Otis about the two guys on Kojak who were supposed to be New York City detectives in midwinter and showed up without hats or coats, about the extra on Emergency who claimed that it took special ability to push a stretcher down a corridor and hassled the A.D. all day long for a ten-dollar bump in wages, about the way some of the people hired on Ironside hid in dark corners where they could sleep or play cards unmolested and had to be repeatedly hunted up before takes. "I guess I'm going to make a lot of people mad at me," Randy says, "but this kind of thing makes everybody look bad. Why can't they even dress right?"

Otis knows exactly what Randy means. There are currently about 3000 paid-up members of the Screen Extras Guild, but only about a third of them are active and trying really hard to make a living. These are the atmosphere people who make the calls and show up not only on time but also in the right clothes. A really complete wardrobe is essential to any extra and Otis, like all the conscientious old-timers, has closets and trunks full of garments, including all kinds of tuxedos, cutaways, riding habits, ranch and ski and Palm Beach clothes, plus such accessories as topcoats, silk hats, mufflers, canes and gloves. In addition, he can dress up as a chauffeur, a waiter, a mailman, a doorman, a ranch hand and 16 kinds of policeman. Some of the younger men have motorcycle cops' uniforms and the machines to go with them and they like to go out on calls in full costume, which creates a lot of tension on the freeways. The studios pay rental for special costume items and props: Otis figures that his wardrobe is the basic tool of his trade and keeps him in demand.

• • •

Paula Crist: "Make-up and costumes are my hobbies, which is how I got to be an extra. I flipped for Planet of the Apes and I did a whole exhibit in full ape make-up at a sci-fi convention in L.A. and I was sent to see Arthur Jacobs, the producer. I'm sitting there in his office, a complete puddle of eyes, and he hires me for this last one, Battle for the Planet of the Apes. I played a human slave and ended up with two close-ups. I like being an extra, but I'd give my right arm to be a stunt double. I do high falls, fights, trampolin, tumbling, swim, drive, horseback ride. I'll do anything and I'll try anything."

• • •

Otis sees his old friend Bob Whitney and they have a cup of coffee together under the grandstand. Whitney is about Otis' age and has been in the business almost as long. Like Otis, he originally had other ambitions (he was once an agent in New York) and sort of drifted into extra work in the Forties. Otis, too, had a showbiz background; he was a song-and-dance man in vaudeville, an actor on Broadway, a bit player in movies. Then he took a number of white-collar jobs but couldn't make it in the straight world. "I tried a lot of other things," he says, "but it kept gnawing at me. Performing is in my blood and becoming atmosphere was a way to keep working."

It's already clear to both Otis and Whitney that it will be quite a while before anyone starts working today. The crew has been setting up upstairs, but no one has yet seen the director, Herschel Daugherty, and the prop truck is lost or tied up in traffic somewhere. One of the A.D.s, a young guy with a droopy mustache, has also been complaining that the call sheet and pay vouchers for atmosphere haven't arrived either, which is going to make Randy's job even tougher. "It's just like the Army," Whitney says.(continued on page 90)Atmosphere People(continued from page 78)"You hurry, hurry, hurry and wait."

"Where are the phones?" Otis asks.

Whitney indicates a bank of six pay phones in a corner. Nothing is more essential to an extra than a telephone and hustlers like Otis and Whitney will make 40 or 50 calls a day to get work, if they have to. They call the five casting agencies--Central, Hollywood, Independent, Allied and Producers--as well as the casting directors at the larger studios and any A.D.s with whom they've achieved rapport over the years. No experienced extra ever leaves his home without a pocketful of small change and the first thing he does when he arrives on a set is to locate the pay phones. "The one at the far end is out of order," Bob says. Valuable information, if you're competing to call in with dozens of other people, but then, Bob and Otis keep few secrets from each other after all these years. "We go back quite a ways," Bob says, "to when there were pictures shooting all year long and maybe twenty thousand extras working."

"The business is nothing like it was, " Otis says, "but so what? Even today, a good, hustling extra can make four times what a casual bit player earns."

Which, Otis knows, isn't saying much. There are maybe 200 atmosphere people who make between $6000 and $8000 a year and no more than 50 who earn twice that. A relative handful who work as stand-ins for big stars can make really good money, but that's hard dawn-to-dusk slogging, with never a day off and the boredom of the job itself to contend with. It's not for the likes of Otis or Bob, who enjoy the variety of what they do and the daily change of scene. "Today I'm a race-horse owner," Otis says. "Yesterday I was a reporter. The day before that I was a doctor and last week I was a stockbroker, an insurance agent, a juror, a banker and a bookie's customer. I've been everything. Two years ago, on a Woody Allen picture, I was a sperm swimming up a Fallopian tube."

• • •

Barbara Smith and Peter Eastman:

"Pete and I met on an ocean cruise. I was working as a social director and he was playing in the band. We both love this work, because you never know what's going to happen. Yesterday Pete was playing golf on Owen Marshall and I was a guest at a tony party on Barnaby Jones."

"The main reason I work extra is I got tired of sitting around, waiting for the phone to ring. It's true, I guess, that extras feel discriminated against, mainly because we never get a chance to say a line, but so what? There are no real stars anymore. And we do get to act, you know. Last week, on a Kojak, I had a silent bit where I had to come out of an elevator and bump into Telly Savalas. We like to feel we're being noticed, but if you're watching us up there on the screen, you're watching a lousy show."

• • •

The call to work finally comes at 9:25, when the A.D. with the droopy mustache suddenly bounds down the escalator and sings out, "Atmosphere, please!" They all troop upstairs and the first A.D., a cheerful middle-aged black named Rubin Watt, quickly gets everyone in place. Two men in baggy blue ushers' uniforms are told to stand at the top of the aisles; the other extras are scattered about the boxes surrounding the one to be occupied by George Peppard, the star of Banacek, and the actors playing the scene with him. Otis and a young couple are seated directly behind them.

"Hey," one of the kids says, "this is all right. We might get a silent bit."

"No way," Otis says. "Today we're strictly background."

"Ladies and gentlemen, you are watching a horse race," Watt explains through a megaphone, as two crew members pass out old pari-mutuel tickets, programs, tout sheets and racing forms. "You'll see the horses as they turn into the stretch. I am the horses. When I come running down this aisle over here, you all stand up and shout and cheer. As the horses hit the finish line, some of you are winners, some of you are losers. Talk it up, throw tickets away, consult your programs. Then some of you go up the aisles, others sit down again. Just don't get in the way of the actors. Got that?"

"What about binoculars?" Otis asks. "Whoever heard of a horse race without binoculars?"

"The prop truck didn't make it," Droopy Mustache says. "We dug up all this other stuff on the spot. Fake it."

"How? By peering through my fingers?"

Watt laughs. "You're all farsighted!" he shouts.

Otis turns to his companions. "Typical of TV," he observes. "In the old days, the prop truck would have made it. And look at this crowd--forty-five of us, including the ushers. What kind of authentic atmosphere is that? De Mille would have had thousands."

Peppard, looking gorgeous in dark slacks and a light-blue sports jacket, appears, along with Ralph Manza, a regular on the show, and two other actors. They sit down in their box and Daugherty, a gray-haired veteran who looks as if he is barely surviving the ravages of a very complicated night, leans in to give them their instructions. What he says is inaudible to Otis, who, like his colleagues, will never know either what this particular scene or the whole show is about. When Daugherty finishes, the actors nod and Watt raises his megaphone. "Let's try it now!" he shouts.

They rehearse the scene twice. Otis watches the A.D. run along the aisle toward him, becomes increasingly excited, rises to his feet, roots hard for his horse, throws his papers happily into the air, a winner, then ad-libs silent chatter with the young couple, both losers, as the actors speak and scuttle about in the box in front of them. When Peppard leaves and heads up the aisle the second time, Daugherty says, "OK, the next one's a take."

"Atmosphere, pay attention!" Watt shouts. "Now watch me, please, and let's have lots of excitement this time!"

Daugherty turns out to be a one-take director, which is a definite plus in television. "All right, atmosphere, please everybody shift over to the left!" Watt shouts. "We're shooting this way now!"

It will be another half hour at least before they set up the next scene and Otis finds time to chat in the aisles with old friends. He doesn't know a lot of the younger people anymore, but he's pleased to note that the industry is, as always, taking care of its own. There, for instance, is Kay Marx, one of Groucho's ex-wives, the blonde sitting off by herself and looking very elegant in a beige outfit with a wide-brimmed floppy hat. And two boxes away from her is Claire James, one of the beautiful dolls who married Busby Berkeley.

It's really quite wonderful, Otis thinks, that so many relatives, friends and old lovers of the famous, as well as the famous themselves, have been atmosphere, though a lot of them wouldn't want to talk about it much. Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Dennis O'Keefe, Rock Hudson, Mary Tyler Moore, John Wayne, Gene Barry, Bob Fuller, O. J. Simpson--yes, all atmosphere at one time or another in their careers. "I don't care about not being a star," Otis says. "A star can say he's been in thirty, maybe forty pictures. I've been in two thousand."

• • •

Charlene Glazer: "I stood in for Raquel Welch on Myra Breckinridge. In Airport I was a passenger on the plane. I've done everything from Ben Casey to Billy Jack. I've always been hustled a lot, but I can usually handle it. I tell the guy I'm known as the Jewish hooker and hasn't he heard about my type? Jewish hookers don't do two jobs for the price of one and we don't take Blue Chip Stamps, Green Stamps or credit cards. This usually works, but on Planet of the Apes I got a sore ass. Somebody was goosing me all day long, but I couldn't see who it was, because I was in this goddamn ape suit."

• • •

Otis has a fine nose for the lunch break and he is spry for his years. When (continued on page 148)Atmosphere People(continued from page 90) it's officially called about a quarter to one, he's already halfway down the stairs and he winds up eighth in line, right behind Bob, at the chow wagon, which he calls the roach coach. During lunch at one of the long picnic tables set up by the caterers under the grandstand, Otis, Bob and several of their friends swap anecdotes about some of the funny experiences they've had. Otis tells about a Marcus Welby episode in which he played an artist. "We were on location in Santa Monica," he says, "shooting on a walkway where the company had set up an art show. Some of us were artists and some of us were just looking at the exhibit. During the scene, some little old lady came up to me and bought one of my paintings. She gave me a fifty-dollar bill and I thought I was getting a silent bit out of it. She took the painting and wandered off, and then I found out she was just some civilian who'd wandered right into the middle of the shot."

Somebody else had worked a Marcus Welby scene at Saint John's Hospital in which some extra had fallen asleep on a gurney during the break and had waked up to find himself being wheeled into an operating room. Someone said it could have been the same guy who had once hidden in a cave on the Fox ranch in Malibu during a night shooting on one of the ape pictures, had come to at five A.M. to find the company gone and had to hitchhike home in his monkey suit.

Shooting on Banacek resumes in about an hour, but it's merely another variation of the morning's work and Watt calls it a wrap about 40 minutes later. The younger extras look around for Droopy Mustache, who, they've been told, will have their pay vouchers. Otis, however, knows better; he's moving at the pace of an Olympic sprinter toward the phone booths, where, on arrival, he finds Bob already dialing.

Otis calls Central Casting and waits patiently for one of the agency's operators to answer. It takes several minutes, but Otis is used to waiting.

"Central," the operator finally says.

"Otis Pembroke."

"Tra-lay," says the operator and hangs up.

Otis isn't worried. What the operator said was "Try later." She could have said "Nurk," which means "No work" and no hope of a job there for tomorrow. Central is by far the largest and most important of the casting agencies and Otis gets most of his work from it. He takes out more change and begins to call elsewhere, intending, however, to check back at Central within the half hour if he's still nurking out.

• • •

Karl Brindle: "I hung on a cross for three months in Spartacus. I never worked any of the clean calls, like Perk Lazelle, who's now a casting director over at Central. Perk was always sitting around in night clubs and at dinner parties with the pretty people. In any big musical there'd be a hundred, two hundred extras. Today, they'll shoot the same few people over and over from different angles and use stock footage for long shots. A lot of people figure extras are bums, like ex-cons."

• • •

The offices of Central Casting Corporation are located behind a plain cream-colored door in the middle of what looks like a hospital corridor on the ground floor of a small office building in Hollywood. Behind that door, 23 employees, including payroll people, work amid controlled frenzy. The phones ring all day long and things really heat up in midafternoon, when the atmosphere people looking for work begin calling in every 15 minutes. The calls are processed by three harassed operators who can and do handle up to 3000 an hour. If there is work, they fire the names of the callers casually into the air over a loud-speaker to where Central's three full-time casting directors sit at a long counter separated from the switchboard by a glass partition. The casting directors listen to the drone of names as they shuffle through the teletyped orders from the studios and when they hear one they think they can use, they'll shoot it down by picking up their own phone and requesting the extra they want from the switchboard. Most of the 3000 working extras are registered with Central, which means that the casting directors have to be able to identify them instantly as to age, type and specific looks simply from hearing their names. A good casting director will never say, "What do you look like?" or ask, as one man at a smaller agency did some time ago, "Hello, dear, are you still tall?" The casting men at Central--Lazelle, Bobby Taylor and Bill O'Driscoll--are the best in the business, all ex-atmosphere people themselves.

By the end of the week, though, they are exhausted. Their normal working hours are from seven or eight A.M. till six, when the switchboard closes, but they don't leave till all the casting orders are filled and it's not unusual to be called at home, as Taylor was late one night recently, when some studio got him out of bed to chase down five firemen, "capable, hardy athletic types who can handle a hose." Also, on the very day Otis has been rooting his imaginary winners home at Hollywood Park, the folks at Central, in addition to all their routine duties, have been interviewing new applicants. Anyone who wants to become atmosphere can at least get an appointment at Central, though few are chosen and fewer get past the union watchdogs.

Doug Dakin, Central's general manager, does the preliminary interviewing. He's a tall, soft-spoken, leathery-looking man who's been around the movie business, mostly in casting, since 1932. He runs the interviewees in and out of his office in three or four minutes, then turns the likelier-looking ones over to Taylor for a final screening. "We take in a handful of people every time," he says, "but few of them stick it out. Under Taft-Hartley, they can work for thirty days before they have to join the union; but even if they get in, a lot of them lose interest." This particular day, Central has accepted Steve, a good-looking young guy who labors part time as a set dresser; Gary, a sporty type whose father works in wardrobe at Universal and who comes recommended by Rock Hudson; Tony, a black night student from Cal State who is into martial arts: Teri, a petite brunette whose family has been in showbiz for five generations and who says she has a fabulous wardrobe, "backless, frontless, topless, bottomless, you name it"; Carol, a tall, sad-looking young widow who can do "a little bit of everything"; Bisquitta, a sexy Swedish cocktail waitress; and Alise, a perky blonde unemployed schoolteacher with nice legs who specializes, she says, in "everything."

"You know what I really need?" Dakin says later. "Madison Avenue types between forty-five and sixty-five and eighteen-year-olds who look younger. Go and find them."

At 5:32 P.M., Otis calls in for the fourth time. "Central," the operator says.

"Otis Pembroke."

Lazelle picks up his phone. "Otis, have you worked Emergency the last ten days?"

"No, Perk. How are you?"

"I'm fine. Otis, you're a security guard. Seven-thirty at Universal. Check in and go to wardrobe."

"Love ya," Otis says and hangs up.

• • •

Karmel Lougene: "I was Miss Seal Beach and they told me I belonged in the movies. My first job I was a hooker and I didn't understand about the camera. I looked right into it with this big smile and the director screamed. I told him I was relating to the beauty of the surroundings. I also do lots of secretaries and stewardesses and I'm in so many pools I carry my hair drier, cream rinse, shampoo and bikini in my bag. I don't mind working as a sex object, because I have my head together and it doesn't bother me."

• • •

Otis shows up nearly an hour early at Universal the following morning, parks in the back lot and stops in at the extras' casting office, which is right next to wardrobe. Karl Brindle, the studio's man in charge of atmosphere, and his assistant, Grady Rape (a fine name for a casting director), have been at work since six A.M., busily checking in the approximately 240 extras the studio will be using that day on its various TV series and features. Karl greets Otis warmly and asks him how things have been going. "Not bad," Otis says, "but I don't like the new contract. I've been working nearly every day for minimum. In the old days, I'd have hassled the A.D.s for a whammy or two. You should have seen me cheer right behind George Peppard yesterday."

Karl laughs. "But you're working for forty-five dollars a day now instead of twenty-five," he says, "and you don't have to bust the A.D.'s balls negotiating like an Arab for a few more bucks. What's wrong with that?"

Otis smiles. "Nothing, really," he says. "I enjoyed it, that's all."

Otis, Karl and Grady, all of whom remember the good-bad old days very well, also like to reminisce about them. A whammy was worth $11 and a double or triple would make for a good day. The term was borrowed from the Li'l Abner comic strip in the Fifties, when some black extras threatened to "put the whammy" on any A.D.s who wouldn't bump their basic pay up for doing what is now known as a silent bit. The term stuck, but what made one was usually up for grabs, with some extras arguing that just being recognizable in any scene with a principal entitled them to more money and the A.D.s maintaining that nothing short of an actor strangling an extra on screen constituted a true whammy or bump. Today the basic day's pay is $45, but additional money can be earned for a true silent bit (the extra being strangled) or a scene requiring special abilities (riding a motorcycle)--up to $92.50 a day. Hazardous work (driving a car through a series of explosions) can boost an extra's pay as much as $300 over contract--although the extra must haggle for it on the set before the scene is shot. "It's much more structured now," Karl says. "The old contract was a Frankenstein, but it was also more fun and those times produced a lot of characters."

Like Cap Somers, a big strong man with a bulbous nose à la W.C. Fields. He used to speck a lot of calls and sometimes he'd grab the studio casting directors around the neck and hold on until he got a pay voucher. De Mille loved him, even though Somers would practically push the stars out of the way in order to emote. Or Tiny Jones, whom Karl remembers as a thin little old woman in her 70s who'd stand in front of the studio gates and swing at the casting directors with her umbrella if they wouldn't give her work. Or Glen Walters, a huge mountain woman who stood off the cops with a shotgun when they came to bulldoze her home in Chavez Ravine to make way for Dodger Stadium.

And then, of course, there was Ok Freddie, the most famous extra of all time, who got his name because he always said Ok to anything that was offered or said to him. Ok Freddie used to walk around hunched over, whistling as he peered at the ground and occasionally squeezing a rubber ball he kept in his pocket that made a sound like a fart. He had a huge collection of junk he'd accumulated from other people's droppings, but what made him a Hollywood celebrity was the size of his penis. "The first time I ever saw him was on the set of Stalag 17," Karl recalls. "It was my first job and I was very idealistic and excited. I walked on the set and the first thing I saw was this guy beating his dong against the side of a truck." The stars used to bet on the size of this mighty organ fully extended and somebody once lined up 18 nickels and a silver dollar on it. One of OK Freddie's most celebrated exploits was the crashing of an elegant party at which he appeared in a waiter's outfit passing around a tray of hors d'oeuvres. Nestled among the salami slices, the cream dip and the little sandwiches lay Freddie's pecker. Nobody noticed anything amiss until one keen-eyed lady spotted the monstrous thing and jabbed a pickle fork into it. "I have a friend who knew him," Otis says, "who swears she was the only one in town who never saw OK Freddie's whang."

• • •

Larry Charles: "I'm a star in Brazil. Ten years ago, I made a picture down there that finally got released here as a porno flick after they spliced in a lot of outside sex scenes. I made eighteen pictures in seven years, but trying to get paid was something else. Now I go back and forth. I'm hoping I'll get a break here. I figure that being on the property is better than sitting at home waiting on your agent. It's too bad hardly anyone in the industry ever looks to the extra pool for talent. We have a lot of qualified people."

• • •

Otis Pembroke is a qualified person, but he never worries anymore about being anything but what he is. Like Bob Whitney and Arthur Tovey and Alice Teague and David Greene and Ernesto Morelli and Louise Lane and Stewart East and Evelyn Dutton and Al Bain and a couple of hundred others, he's made it, in his own world and on his own terms. Now, as he emerges from wardrobe dressed in the blue uniform of a private security guard and heads toward the main lot, where Emergency is shooting, knowing that he'll arrive, as always, at least a few minutes early, he looks up at the smoggy gray sky over the studio rooftops and sighs. "I guess this is all there is," he says. "I'm alone now, so I keep busy. I'm going to work till I drop. And after that, well, if there is a heaven, all somebody has to do up there is shout 'Firmament!' and we'll all come running."