The Human Cost of Inflation
According to American film producer John David Stanley Stanier, ‘handling extras is like herding cats’. Well, it would seem that the days of these lowly creatures – extras, not cats – are numbered, no matter how conscientious they are about casting their eyes down and keeping their mouths shut whenever Stars are around, so as not to distract them from their ‘journey’.
Background artists, as extras prefer to be called, have always been unpopular with the money men, who begrudge the expense of hiring them in the first place and then having to ensure that they are suitably rigged out, fed, watered and supplied with minders, transport, shelter and sanitation. A substantial part of the budget for the 1959 version of Ben Hur went on employing 4 000 of them for the chariot race alone. In order to film different angles, they were moved around the stadium with military precision for five weeks. I hope they were treated with less contempt than their predecessors in the silent film of the same name, made in Italy in 1926. When some men, in heavy armour and unable to swim, leapt into the sea from a burning Roman flagship, an assistant volunteered to row out with enough chains to sink permanently any bodies that might bob up. All survived but must have been dismayed to find that fear of a diplomatic incident and the loss of their costumes had been of more concern than their welfare.
The exasperated J.D.S. Stanier finally came up with a revolutionary approach to the problem and built himself a highly successful business into the bargain. His company, Crowd in a Box, rents out inflatable humanoids to the studios for between sixty to ninety per cent less than the cost of employing real people. The dummies come in all skin tones and can be supplied with wigs, face masks, suitable clothing and accessories. It takes only thirty seconds to inflate each one and throw it out of the back of a vehicle to await placement. Deflated, it crumples into a package smaller than a loaf of bread, so a crowd 10 000 strong can fit into just one large lorry. A small team with air compressors can deploy a multitude in minutes and an inflatable extra can have a long and varied career until it simply falls apart. A Hollywood producer who preferred to remain anonymous said that Stanier’s invention would allow him to make ‘an Epic on a Shoestring’.
When rival company Inflatable Crowd started up, Crowd in a Box made an unsuccessful attempt to sue for patent infringement. Joe Biggins, an assistant on the 2003 film Sea Biscuit, had been asked to create a crowd for the racetrack scenes. Cardboard spectators were not an option, because the camera following the horses around the track would have revealed them to be only flat cut outs. Biggins designed a prototype and then had thousands of Depression era racing fans made. His creations have since been used in over eighty productions, including 11 000 of them ordered in 2005 for the boxing film Cinderella Man. The level of detail is amazing, with freckles, five o’clock shadow and so on adding verisimilitude. However, unlike the inflatable dolls produced for the sex industry and others, they are generally legless – a design feature, not a failing. A lone motorist could prop one up on the passenger seat at night or, less commendably, on the way to work in order to sneak into a multi-occupancy lane. Why waste money on lower limbs when only the head and torso will be visible?
Whatever happens across the Atlantic is copied over here sooner or later and we now have the Inflatable Crowd Company UK. Based in Bingley, WestYorkshire and headed by Danny Burraway, it supplied mannequins for the recently released film The King’s Speech. The story centres around George VI’s struggle to overcome the stammer that badly affected his speaking at mass public events. Only 300 of the 1 500 spectators listening to his closing remarks at the British Empire exhibition at Wembley Stadium (actually filmed at Leeds United’s Elland Road ground) were played by real people.
At the last count, the US and UK companies owned 30 000 dolls between them and it is small wonder that directors previously reluctant to include crowd scenes in their films are hiring them. Apart from the financial savings to be made – a real live extra can cost as much as £150 to hire and kit out - the dummies will always arrive on time and without mobile phones switched on in their pockets. They will neither baulk at an eighteen hour day in inclement weather nor expect overtime payments. They will make no complaints about the quality of the catering and no attempts to fawn over the stars or, even worse, to hawk embarrassing photographs of them to the popular press.
Although the ranks of human extras have been greatly reduced by the use of inflatable people, there is still a need for some real men and women. This is not because they can be relied upon not to blow up when over filled, keel over in a storm or spring leaks. (On reflection, the last occurrence is not unknown.) On a ratio of one to five, they are interspersed between their pneumatic colleagues to move, cheer and create the optical illusion that the whole crowd is responding to the action in front of them. There have been bizarre tales, though, of bored American extras, already notorious for messing around with the cardboard cut outs, being caught placing them in compromising positions, stealing their accessories or setting about them with pliers or staple guns. (By the way, each plastic person comes with a free patch kit.) On the other hand, a few lonely souls have been known to form emotional attachments to a dummy and resist all efforts to deflate it at the end of the day.
I began by stating that the days of the human extra are probably numbered. It seems likely that computer graphics will one day remove the need for any of them. The same may soon be true for the stars, of course, who have as yet been largely unaffected by changes at the bottom of the food chain. It is ironic that, while the earliest films featured actors with no voices, some of the latest, such as the 2009 hit Avatar, use their voices throughout but allow them only limited, if any, screen presence.
Equity had its teeth drawn long ago when Margaret Thatcher abolished the closed shop, but there are already rumblings from the powerful American Screen Actors’ Guild. Unless the spirit of the Luddites is well and truly dead, there will be an almighty blow up one of these days!