In honor of the day, here's a rerun of a post I did here on October 9, 2012. It's the story of my mother's career as a TV star, which did not last long. A lot of careers as TV stars have lasted even less time than hers did…
One day in 1992, completely out of nowhere, my mother made the oddest request. She asked, "Do you think you could get me a job as an extra on a TV show?"
I wouldn't have been more surprised if she'd asked me, "Do you think you could arrange for me to be shot out of a cannon?" She was 70 years old, widowed and retired, and she seemed well adjusted to that life. At no point had she ever expressed the slightest interest in show business or working again, nor did she need money. She had my father's pension and if that had been insufficient — which it never was; not with a good health insurance plan as well — she had me. This was more like a whim. When she'd worked at the grocery store, she'd worked with a couple of folks who'd done extra work and it sounded…well, maybe not so much fun as interesting.
I warned her. There were extra jobs and there were extra jobs. Some required walking back and forth hundreds of times in shots or running or moving about. She could walk then but being 70, she had her limits. She said, "I was thinking…maybe in the jury in a courtroom scene. There are a lot of shows on these days that do scenes in courtrooms and they need older people because older people sit on juries." That made a fair amount of sense. Not a lot of walking for extras who play jurors. I asked her if she had a show in mind. She said, "Well, the one I really love is L.A. Law."
She couldn't have picked an easier show for me. One of my best friends, Alan Brennert, was one of the Supervising Producers on L.A. Law. I phoned him up and twenty minutes later, my mother had a job. I told her I'd take the customary 10%.
It was also a good pick for geographic reasons. L.A. Law shot at the Twentieth-Century Fox Studio which was about five blocks from where she lived. When I resided in that house and had meetings at Fox, I sometimes walked to them. That is, by the way, a really good way to upset the guards at the gate. They always had a drive-on pass ready for me but there were no walk-on passes and they didn't know what the heck to do.
She was quite excited about her job. One of the things she said to me was "I wish I'd thought of this a few years ago before Jimmy Smits left the series. I love him. I'd love to have watched him work." I avoided telling her something Alan had told me; that the Special Guest Star on this particular episode was, as luck would have it, Jimmy Smits.
The day before the gig, she got her first inkling that maybe extra work wasn't something she would love. An assistant phoned and gave her a call time of 6 AM. She briefly considered retiring then and there but decided to soldier on. She was to bring several changes of clothes and report to a certain gate at that ungodliest of hours. Which she did. She drove over that morning and they told her where to park. It was on the opposite end of the lot from where L.A. Law filmed and getting from her car to the stage, she got quite lost. By the time she found where she was supposed to go, she was exhausted from hiking the length and breadth of a pretty big studio.
She was put in a room with the other extras, all of whom were seasoned veterans at this kind of work. They were cordial to her but not particularly welcoming, especially when they found out she hadn't gone through the usual extra casting process. Extras take great pride in their art or craft — whichever they see it as. The notion that someone could just waltz in and do it via an "in" seemed to annoy some of them. It was like, "Hey, we had to work to get here." But no one was rude to her. Not openly, that is.
An hour or so later, the director came into the Extras Room and looked them over. He made a few suggestions about wardrobe and makeup…and designated my mother to be the foreperson.
Now, understand: That just meant she'd be in a certain chair on the set. Other than that, nothing about her participation on the show had changed. But many of the other extras quietly (and later, audibly) objected. It is the dream of almost every extra in almost every job to be upgraded; to have the director or producer suddenly decide to give them a line or two to utter. It makes the money they're being paid go way up and it magically transforms them from Warm Bodies into Actors. They tell tales of it happening, just to reassure each other that it can — "Didja hear? Last week on that Clint Eastwood movie, Jody was upgraded to an Under Five." That is a very big deal.
My mother didn't want an upgrade. She never thought she was an actress. She was a little old lady who could look like a juror sitting there. That was the extent of her ability and she knew it and if they'd tried to give her a line, she would have said, "I can't do that. Give it to someone else."
Still, the other extras were worried. Picking her to be foreperson increased the chance she'd be given a line from…oh, about one chance in ten thousand to one chance in five thousand. Maybe not quite that much. But she heard one of the other extras go up to the Associate Director soon after and tell him, "Listen, that woman is not a professional. If they decide they need a juror to speak, it really should go to one of us." As it turned out, they never needed a juror to speak.
An hour or so later, they were herded onto the set. My mother just sat there in the jury box, delighted to be watching Jimmy Smits addressing the jury. They filmed for about an hour, then the extras were told to return to the Extras Room for a while. Mr. Smits had to rehearse his big, six-page scene before filming would resume.
They all settled back in for a while and my mother listened in on the conversation. It had turned to the topic of Recent Jobs From Hell. One extra told about having to work all night in a scene where rain was being simulated so they were hosed down every two minutes. Another told of a director making them run back and forth for hours in 100° weather, inhaling smoke from smoldering smudgepots. Yet another had a tale of bad food and no toilets on location. As my mother listened, extra work began to sound less and less appealing.
Just then, the Associate Director came in and said, "Mr. Smits would like you in the jury box while he's rehearsing." All the extras started to get up but the A.D. said, "No, just the foreperson," meaning my mother. Smits just wanted her there. As she made her way out to the set, she heard one of the extras muttering, "They'd better not give her a line."
She sat in the jury box for about 40 minutes as Jimmy Smits practiced his long, long speech, pleading his case to her. In the finished show, it wouldn't look that way at all. In fact, you'd never even know she was the foreperson. But on the set that day, Smits argued his view of the matter on hand as if his life depended on convincing Dorothy Evanier. She later told me, "If it had been up to me, he would have won the minute he opened his mouth."
When he was properly rehearsed, the rest of the extras were brought in and the cameras moved into position. Unnoticed by my mother, Mr. Smits went and changed his footwear.
The floor on the set was wood and in the earlier scene, his shoes had made a bit too much noise for the microphones. For just such an occasion, they had special socks that looked like dress shoes and the actors would often wear them to cut down on footstep sounds. Smits was wearing a pair of these as he launched into his big, impassioned, just-rehearsed scene with the cameras rolling. There was a shot of him approaching the jury box and my mother. It never got into the finished show but no one knew at the time it wouldn't. It would have been a shot of Jimmy Smits and my mother with him unburdening his soul to her. Imagine that if you will.
Just as he was reaching his emotional peak, my mother suddenly looked down and made a face as if to say, "What the hell is that on his feet?"
Someone screamed, "Cut!"
Someone else scurried over and told my mother she should be looking at Jimmy Smits, not at his feet. She was embarrassed. A few of the other extras grinned a bit and my mother later reported she could hear them thinking, "See what happens when they hire a non-professional?" But Smits himself told her it was fine; that they were shooting the scene a couple different ways and would be cutting from one take to another. She hadn't ruined anything…or so he assured her.
The rest of the shooting went without incident. They were in and out of the Extras Room a few times, sometimes waiting in there for hours unsure if they'd be needed again at all. But there was good food available and my mother had brought along a few books…so all in all, not a horrible day.
Around 6:30 PM, more than twelve hours after she'd reported for duty, the A.D. came in and released the extras, meaning it was time to go home. My mother was gathering up her things when Jimmy Smits walked in, handed her a rose and thanked her for helping his performance. I have never met Jimmy Smits but as far as I'm concerned, he is the most wonderful human being ever in show business…and that includes me. My mother called his gesture the best moment of her acting career.
It was also the last moment of that career. It was dark when she got out and she was exhausted and it took forever to make it back to the car. The next day, she told me, "If a nice man hadn't come by in a golf cart and taken pity on me and given me a lift, I'd still be there."
All the time, she recalled something one of the friendlier extras had said to her at one point. He'd said, "This show treats us better than any other show in town." Taken in concert with the horror stories she'd heard, that seemed to be true. When I asked her when she wanted me to get her her next job, she said, "Never. I figure if that's as good as it can be, I'm going to quit while I'm ahead."
When the show aired, she got a call from a friend back east who recognized her. That was probably the second-best moment of her time trodding the boards. She also liked a VHS tape I made for her of the episode. I don't think she ever watched it because she kept forgetting how to use her VCR but she really liked the special label I printed up for it. It said, "L.A. Law starring Jimmy Smits and Dorothy Evanier." She looked at that often and occasionally would complain to me about the order of the names. I found that cassette the other day when I was cleaning out a shelf at her house and I thought I ought to tell this story here.