TAFT-HARTLEY [MADE ME DO IT] byRolandWise

When I first arrived in Southern California, I ignored the rigidity of State law urging that I register my automobile and get new license plates; instead, I opted to revive an old dream I had put aside and registered with a casting agency. To my surprise it was relatively easy to become cast as background, so that’s what I did. The pay sucked, but so did the pay at my local coffee house, so I thought what the hell, at the very least this might be a way to get noticed or discovered. As a result of my efforts, I was cast as an Extra for three major films, an HBO television series, and a beer commercial.

The first of such projects was War Of The Worlds staring Tom Cruise. It was a hoot at first, and I must reluctantly admit to the dork excitement of being near such stardom; especially after having several takes with Tom, where I was asked to beat on his car window and yell for him to let me in the car, he yelling back ‘NO’ of course. But this only egged me on more. And being an aspiring filmmaker, I also admit to purposefully placing myself under the direction of Steven Spielberg. The joy, however, was short lived; perhaps fifteen minutes or so, and then there was rain. I watched from the sidelines, take after take, as Tom Cruise was whisked away to his [dry] holding area. Meanwhile myself along with 1700 strangers, were left standing beneath the inhumane drippings of a rain machine. With each take we all got wetter and wetter and I began laughing to myself because there was not one drop of glamour left in this casting, only manmade drops of rain. As I looked around at my alien extra experience, I found myself wandering amidst the war torn township (set) of Hudson, NJ, dragging a suitcase with a bum wheel provided by the props department. I was really beginning to get into character with my feelings of migrating for my life and dryness, when I began to unlock how my style of relating always delivered me to the backdrop of someone else’s drama. It had forever seemed that I was the extra person in the group, or the third wheel, the squeaky wheel even; or the one in need, or the last to be picked for a team or relationship. I was curious if any of the other extras allowed these feelings to arrive and permeate their lives, or was I making something out of nothing, further alienating myself from that which is just life?

Months later, when I actually watched the film in the movie theater, I could see my part come and go within a fraction of a split second. It was then that I got the full scope of plot. I realized that I was cast as one of the many poor bastards to be eaten by aliens and sprayed out as fertilizer all over the fictional New Jersey hill and dale. I was fast to conclude being an extra was entering an agreement to become ordinary and average, and so not in line with where I thought I was headed in this life. I was now forced to ask myself if being an extra in life, or on the set, was as ill-fated an agreement as any other I had made. Was there a casting agency central to human beings earliest dreams that I had failed to sign with? Or was my plot to take on these shitty earthly jobs only to remain barely seen and not heard, liken to the days of childhood in relation to sleeping fathers and reruns of Gunsmoke? These employments were becoming the chores of my yesteryear, providing only child’s pay and the mere allowances of hush money.

Being a writer however, I do get the point within a story where, more often than not, the plot requires the dashing of some sap’s hope in order to prove the hope of another; and in life, so is true in filming; but what happens when the have-nots of this genre known as Hollywood becomes restless in their wanting? What are we extra’s to do with the feeling of powerlessness cropping up? Where is the hope in continuing to be cast if the plight is showing up for a second to be lost again in the next? I wondered if Hollywood was just another snotty hoity-toity gated community, or was there a way into her land of dreams that I had not yet considered?

My second job as an extra was a Genuine Draft Beer commercial shooting at the Rose Bowl. After several crowd shots, which included a thousand inflatable manikins, the Director pointed to a group of us to come down front and portray a bunch of brutish-sports-fans yelling for the team. Here we go I thought, my close up. What ended up happening during ‘my close up’ was the question of whether the director gave me a line to say (or not). ‘He did give you a line’, said the guy beside me at lunch, and although I was more concerned with the terrible sunburn I was getting than this guys concern for whether or not I had a line, I was sort listening to him, smiling and nodding as if he were a Jehovah Witness at my door trying to sell a religion. The more he spoke however; I began to pick up on some brand of union verses non-union language that I had not understood prior. From what my new friend was saying, there was some guy named Taft Hartley who seemed to be our advocate.

So when I got home that evening, I Googled Taft-Hartley and discovered that he was not a person, but two persons, but not really, more of an ACT; that in 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act reversing the earlier National Labor Relations Act (NRLA) passed in 1935. The NRLA opened the door to labor practices that harmed not only management, but labor as well. Senators Taft and Hartley drafted legislation that affirms the right of employees not to join a labor union [if they so choose] in states that enact "right-to-work" laws. In a right-to-work state, such as California, the purpose of "Taft-Hartleying" an actor or an extra, is to notify he or she they are eligible to join the union, which in turn meant more pay and protection.

From the language I picked up that day and the research later that same night, I felt as if I discovered the religiosity of the extra experience. I was tapping into the credence of my newfound faith and how strongly rooted I had to be in my performance and subsequent desire for notoriety. It all boiled down to grooming my impending hope of being called into matrimony with SAGG via the union voucher. It only took three of them, along with appropriate dues and ceremony, and this lowly paid background would perhaps become a not so lowly paid background. Fictionally speaking, my career as an extra had gone through a gambit of stages, from the rainy backdrops of the War of the Worlds, to the sun drenched decks of the rose bowl and the ironic portrayal of a jock; and now to the quietness of my own bed after a long day in the sun. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray Taft-Hartley my soul to keep.

My next assignment was to assist HBO in her wake season of Six Feet Under. And although I have never followed the show, all my friends do and when asked to be a coffee shop patron for the next to last episode ‘Singing For Our Lives’, I thought how cool is that, and agreed. Shooting was mathematical and mundane to me by then, I was a pro and used to how it all worked. On that day however, I was having a difficult time turning off my Southern nature, which in short emerged via me helping Claire (one of the show’s main character’s) with the door as we simultaneously exited the coffee house take after take. The scene required Claire to barely make it out of the coffee shop with a tray full of coffees. She is working at a job she hates to the point of becoming the office coffee girl, and she is naturally frustrated. In the scene, I was asked to exit the coffee shop just behind her and NOT to help with the door. So when the director yelled action, I set out from my mark and every time (for 10 takes) I ended up at the door just in time to help Claire open it, and I did, and the Director would yell cut. When she was sent over to scold me, I told the assistant Director that I am from the South, and I naturally help the ladies with the door. After a few more takes, the Director was over my Southern chivalry, so he pulled me back to a start mark so far from the front door it was impossible for me to arrive in time to help Claire. For a split second I had the urge to run from the distant mark and arrive just in time to be Southern, but I decided to obey and be a good extra.

Overall, I do agree with the Director’s desire; for they wanted you to feel (when you watched Claire exit the coffee shop) that she was in Hell and that she was carrying all these other folks desire for coffee; not really living out her own dreams. She was indeed playing the role of background, and it was upon this realization that my desire seemed less and less Southern, and perhaps brotherly in an extra sort of way. I did leave the set that day somewhat discouraged fearing that my scene would be cut because of all the missed takes. And although this extra business seemed very close to what I wanted; I wondered why I felt as far away from my mark as a writer as I ever had been before?

Deepak Chopra seems to think my issue is procrastination. He explains it as our primary means of controlling the speed of our lives, not unlike a governor designed to pace things, like the governed Greyhound bus I rode from New York City to Boston last week, which took forever. It seems to me Deepak is right; that my own procrastinating is used like the foot peddles in my car. I push one to go, I push one to slow and stop, and I push one to change gears, and I push them all at the same time as a way to poke along in my fear. I suppose this is as terrible for humans as it is for automobiles. Or is it the way we maneuver the unknown, slowly and carefully?

Recently a friend and I were addicted to watching Sex and The City episodes. Our attraction to the fiction provided in Sex and the City reruns is well known and understood by those who partake. Lately I have been leaning specifically toward the Carrie Bradshaw character for obvious reasons. I once declared our marathon watching of all these great episodes in sequence as a writers awakening, a revival culminating in my very own Carrie-Brad-Shaw-Shank-Redemption. When I look back, I wanted Carrie (and the gals) to somehow Taft-Hartley me into a writers union deep within myself, even though it was my own responsibility to chase my own dreams in my own timing.

As a boy, maybe it was the most gracious and honorable thing I could have done, to sit with my father and be forced without proxy into to watching reruns of Gunsmoke. Thinking back, I wonder if my father’s love for reruns was his affair with the momentary escape of fatherhood. I try and imagine what dreams he realized as lost forever once his type cast as provider and breadwinner had set firmly like a concrete lane? Perhaps it was comforting for him to be a cowboy on the Western frontier, and maybe in some strange way he wanted me, his only son, along for the ride. I have never asked him any of this, although I am doing so now.

Are dreams and desires to become more than the mere backdrop common to everyone, or are their some destined to be extras? Perhaps reruns and extra work are the way in which we edit and rethink our directions in life, a stop on the road where we settle into our newly adjusted path? Maybe we are syndicating scenes from the past in order to shift our futures, and the proof cannot be in the many takes it takes, for the real transformation happens in the cutting room during the putting together of the clips into the whole that tells the eventual story.

Oddly enough, my last film project was called ‘Unknown’ starring Bridget Moynahan. During the shoot, I had no idea who she was, although I knew she looked awfully familiar to me. From what I understood, the plot was for Bridget to carry a duffle bag containing a bomb through the San Bernardino train station and put it in a locker. I was placed on the pay phone just behind her, and from all the different angles of the takes, I was there in her shadows. I was sure this meant a fair amount of screen time, unlike the disastrous takes from Six Feet Under.

Last week my friend Daniel drove me to the San Bernardino train station. While waiting for the train to LA I wandered around in what was once the set of Unknown. I was pulling my own baggage this time, and not the props from my days as an extra. I was thinking about Taft-Hartley, and how my feelings about being in the background had shifted since being here on the set of ‘Unknown’ as an unknown. I guess if the irony wasn’t enough, then it hit me, Bridget Moynahan was Big’s wife on Sex and the City. I felt perhaps I was in some parallel universe with the rerunning shows I have come to enjoy. I felt Taft-Hartleyed by my own ability to beckon synchronicity and as the train pulled away, heading for Los Angeles Union Station, I pondered the union happening within and how the non-union bouts in life have helped to define such territory as lovely.

When you really think about it, Taft-Hartley is an ACT of courage. No matter what union we desire, we are first required to become people with a sense of wholeness. I felt this experience had culminated into the laying of track just beyond the rerunning fictions in life; in turn I had a very different ride into Los Angeles than I would have otherwise. It wasn’t so depressing anymore, nor was it all that hopeful, it just seemed balanced somehow, perhaps like the train as she rolled into the curves of track on her way westward. The balance was perfect in that it was just enough to carry something large (like the train of ones life) forward, while at the same time delivering many from here to there.

So, on July 24th, 2005, my 40th birthday, the Southern chivalry I feared dead and buried Six Feet Under the HBO cutting room floor, was resurrected. The episode aired, and although I missed it, the next day many friends and family from all over the country began calling to let me know they saw me on Television. They reported that I was helping Claire with the door, and that I looked so natural like they imagined my life to be; like a writer and a gentleman, out and about from coffee shop to coffee shop with my backpack over shoulder. I wondered if it can get any better than this, to be captured doing what you love, to feel Taft-Hartleyed, to realize the union dormant within the non-union while wandering around the backdrop of life.

Originally Published in BottomLine Magazine, ISSUE 24:24 Copyright 2005 Roland Wise


SIDE BAR:
I encourage BLOGGERS out there to write in with your own thoughts on gay marriage? I want to hear war stories about civil rights in relation to the union of two human beings who have been denied holy matrimony. SEND BLOGS TO roland@rolandwise.com