It’s my big screen Hollywood debut!
McFarland, USA premiered in theaters this weekend! The true story of a 1980’s underdog high school track team, the movie shot on location in McFarland, California in October and November of 2013. In the film, Kevin Costner plays Coach White, a (white) outsider who sweeps into the predominantly Mexican-American farming town and starts shaking up the status quo with his track dreams.
McFarland is one of several small farming towns that surround the larger city of Bakersfield (my hometown!) in the Central Valley of California, where most of the country’s non-tropical agriculture comes from (you’re welcome for your grapes, East Coast!). Open auditions for extras were held in town right before filming started, and as a small brown person with a HEART OF GOLD, I apparently fit the bill perfectly.
Here’s what it’s like to an be extra on a small-town, BIG MOVIE set:
The casting call
I showed up to the casting call worried that I was going to have to wait hours in line, but fortunately, Bakersfield is basically the bible belt of California, and people have better things to do on a Sunday morning than stroke their own egos in front of casting directors. I filled out some basic information on my height and age and then got my picture snapped like I was posing for a glamorous mug shot; I was so sure this was the beginning of MY LONG AND PROSPEROUS MOVIE STAR FUTURE.
The dress fitting
A couple of weeks later I got a phone call telling me I was selected as an extra! I was so sure it was because I pretty much rocked that grainy polaroid mugshot the casting director took of me! How could they deny the world the wonderful treat of my beautiful, humble, brown face?
They needed me to come in for a dress fitting the next day, and I got to play Barbie for some really stylish guys with perfect hair and ferocious tribal tattoos. They took my measurements before sashaying over to the racks of hideous eighties outfits. They flipped through the clothes, pulling out different tops and skirts and shoes before rejecting most of them as too stylish for McFarland’s eighties-sensibilities. Their assumptions made me slightly offended on behalf of my 1980’s predecessors whom I knew that despite having little money, still had fierce style. Sure, my mom used to literally make her dresses out of flour sacks, but she still knew how to work that eighties look— I have the pictures of her puffy sleeved Princess Di-inspired wedding dress to prove it.
After trying on a few different outfits, we settled on a neon green velveteen crop top and high waisted jeans. It was the ugliest outfit I had ever worn in my life, and it made me feel weirdly liberated and… beautiful? The eighties were really onto something, I realized! Why couldn’t all blouses be loud and proud and gentle to the touch? Why couldn’t all jeans sit comfortably at my waistline instead of digging into my hips until I hated myself and my lunch choices??? I immediately went home and began the process of trading out all of my hiphuggers for high-waisted mom jeans. And you know what? They make my behind look fabulous.
Main Street Extra
The first day I was on set, the crew was shooting most of the scenes involving McFarland’s Main Street (which is actually really small and runs the length of about three blocks) and it was pretty exciting to see all of the cameras and crew taking over the neighborhood. Most of the time, the extras were stuffed inside the Main Street pizza parlor for safekeeping, but since most of the businesses were still open, we had a lot of freedom to walk around the set and get great views of the scenes as long as we stayed out of the way of the action.
After hours of preparation and setup, it was finally time to shoot the scene where the track team runs through the street. This delightful, chatty older woman and I were given plastic bags full of groceries and told to stroll along the sidewalk into the hardware store. How exciting! I knew I needed to come up with a compelling backstory for my character to get in the right headspace: I decided on “jilted in love young woman who goes grocery shopping with her grandmother and decides to peruse the chainsaws on her way home.”
The director called “Action!” and my fake-grandmother bolted along the sidewalk; I had to break out into a subtle jog to keep up! How could this tiny woman move so fast? In an effort to get her to slow down to a leisurely saunter, for the next few takes I asked her questions about her life story, and little by little, we started to look more like average humans walking to the store and less like desperate people running from zombies.
A few hours later, my impressive pedestrian skills were needed again. A young man and I had to walk past a Mexican restaurant that Kevin Costner and his white family were going to be walking into. The director suggested that we embrace romantically to look more natural, and we kind of pulled a Bartleby and were like, umm no thanks, we’d prefer not to. Our close proximity to Kevin Costner as he walked into the restaurant kind of demanded that he and his beautiful fake-family stare directly into our faces for minutes on end as we all waited for our cues. He joked with us and asked how we were doing, and I was pretty much like, “omg, Kevin Costner, I can’t believe you’re talking to me, but I’m totally fine, I have to text my mom now.” I should add that Kevin Costner is just the absolute coolest and that he always spoke to the extras on set with total respect and consideration.
After we finished the scene, it was approximately 6 o’clock, and it was finally time FOR LUNCH. We were all starving, but there was a big crowd of McFarland people watching the shoot and waiting for Kevin Costner, so when we broke for lunch, he went over and took a selfie with every single one of those doting grandmas BECAUSE HE IS AWESOME.
While we were filming, the real life Jim White also stopped by on set with his wife, and it was so cool to see how McFarland really respects him and the way he’s become a small town hero. A few of the extras talked about how he had been their teacher in school, and it felt a little weird to be making a movie about him as an outsider when he was obviously such an integral part of McFarland’s community.
PE Student Extra
The next week I was called in to be a PE student in Kevin Costner’s class, and the experience was so different! This time, my fellow extras were about twenty or so other “kids” around my age. I use the word “kids” because everyone on set kept calling us “the kids,” but really we were all adults who could still easily pass as high school students. We ended up turning it into kind of a game: trying to guess everyone’s ages, only to end up shocked when the sixteen year old girl sitting next us turned out to be a twenty-five year old, married, middle school teacher.
Dreary from our 5am call time, we stuffed ourselves into McFarland High School t-shirts and tiny eighties-style PE shorts and after a hearty breakfast, were sent over to sit on the high school football field’s bleachers. For the scene we were shooting, we were supposed to pretend it was 110 degrees outside in the hot Central Valley heat, but obviously, it was the crack of dawn in November, and we were all freezing in our skimpy gym clothes. So, when Kevin Costner eventually came out to rehearse and saw us all sitting there with our teeth chattering he immediately handed over his coat to a girl in the front row before demanding that someone “GET THESE KIDS SOME COATS! IT’S FREEZING!” He instantly became our hero. I felt like I was watching ‘Dances with Wolves’ play out before my eyes.
We filmed the PE scenes over a couple of days, and since the film needed the same “kids” to be in Kevin Costner’s class for continuity purposes, we all ended up having a lot of fun bonding and hanging out on set together. We dished out life advice behind the high school bleachers and spent the breaks stuffing our faces with Doritos. During film takes, we were directed where to go, but not too often told how to act, which I thought was an interesting and very natural approach for the director, Niki Caro, to take. She also, by the way, is very cool, and as the New Zealand-born director of the Oscar-nominated film, Whale Rider, it was pretty entertaining to listen to her seriously say things like, “We need to round up more cholos!” in her posh accent. Interestingly enough, quite a few of the PE student extras were recent graduates who had been a part of McFarland’s winning track team; obviously, they tended to outperform those of us who were more athletically-challenged.
Overall, being an extra on McFarland, USA was an incredibly delightful and surreal experience, and the entire cast and crew could not have been lovelier or more respectful to the McFarland community. So go watch McFarland, USA! And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to spot my awkward self jogging around in dorky, eighties-inspired basketball shorts.
