Although it pays little or nothing, I’ve always thought it would be kind of fun to appear as an extra in a movie. Of course, I’d probably be bored standing around all day trying to blend into some background or another, making sure to cast my eyes down and keep my lips zipped whenever The Stars were around so as not to impose on their aura, or be so bedazzled that my eyeballs turned to egg whites. (That’s what happens when you look directly at an eclipse, no?)
Why just the other day, I came upon a film crew in downtown Boston, setting up a fake wedding reception in the park on Congress Street, and I thought to myself, hey, I could be a guest at that wedding.
Alas, there just aren’t as many slots for extras these days, now that blow up dolls are on the scene.
Yes, blow up dolls.
No longer just for propping up in the front seat, so that a single gal can feel safe driving around at night. No longer just for plunking in your car so you can weasel into the high occupancy lane. No longer just for – well, whatever else they do with blow up dolls.
Since Seabiscuit (2003), Inflatable Crowd has been providing, well, inflatable crowds. (And even before there were inflatable crowds, films apparently used dummies or card board cutouts to fill things out. Who knew? I always thought that those big crowd scenes were either borrowed from actual events, or cut and paste from a starter set of humanoids, so that if you looked closely you’d see that woman in the blue jacket over, and over, and over.)
Inflatable Crowd was the subject of a brief piece in a recent New Yorker, that focused on Gail Boykewich, head of East Coast ops for the company.
Gail is an artist, and she must have one of THE most interesting keep-your-day-job-jobs in the art world. She’s the one who creates the personas, making up masks that the inflatables wear so they’ll look like people. It’s actually pretty amazing, the level of detail they go to to make things look real – freckles, five-o’clock shadow. Then there’s the wigs, and the clothing – tops only: the inflatables are torsos and heads. With all this personalization it makes me kind of wonder whether it wouldn’t be just as easy to use, like, real people.
Of course, real people do have some pretty nasty habits - like taking bio-breaks, bitching up a storm, and fawning over THE STARS – none of which a member of the inflatable crowd will do.
On the other hand, real people don’t blow up when over filled, or spring leaks, or get blown over in a storm.
In any case, Inflatable is a pretty cool little business.
As mentioned, they started out life (or lifeless) during the filming of Seabiscuit. Joe Biggins – then an assistant on the film – was asked to create a crowd for the racetrack scenes:
Before then, cardboard cutouts had been the most popular way to save on extras. But a racetrack is not a stadium. The crowd, instead of wrapping around a field, sits on one side of the track; so, as the camera followed the horses around the track, the spectators would be revealed as a bunch of flat cutouts. “I saw some serious issues with the 2-D solution,” Biggins said, “so I came up with the idea for an inflatable.”
He designed a prototype, then had thousands of Depression-era track fans made.
The rest, as they say: he’s now done over 80 films, providing crowds of anywhere from two for a commercial (cheapos: couldn’t they have sprung for real humans? No wonder we have double digit unemployment) to 11,000 for Cinderella Man.
One company, of course, does not a market make, and there’s at least one rival: Crowd in a Box, which seems as if it may be a more cut-rate operation, from the looks of their web presence. (Just saying.)
A couple of years ago Crowd in a Box tried to sue Inflatable Crowd for patent infringement – and lost.
The companies do offer the crowd-purchaser a clear choice, however.Inflatable starts with a blank tableau, and adds “real clothing, individual, 3D faces, wigs, hats, etc. Box, on the other hand, provides inflatables that come with “faces, hair and clothing silk screened on. No need for hair, makeup, or wardrobe. Just inflate and shoot.”
Hmmmmm. That inflate and shoot sounds pretty good – and cheap. On the other hand, how can ready-to-go inflatables be repurposed for fight fans in “Cinderella Man,” toga’d thumbs-downers in a film like “Gladiator”, and contemporary St. Bartholomew’s churchgoers in “Salt” (which used Inflatable Crowd blow ups)?
Plus Inflatable Crowds - while it may take away (un)paid work from extras - does give at least one artist a way to make a living that’s at least related to what she wants to do in real life.
Beats pulling ventes at Starbucks.
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