Background Guy

By J. Richard Singleton

LIVE YOUR LIFE IN THE FOREGROUND!!!

Soon after high school, writer J. Richard Singleton works as a film/television extra and paid audience member. In this humorous essay, he recounts how he realized that there really are small roles in Hollywood--along the way encountering strange characters and some odd interactions with celebrities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. Richard Singleton
• Release date: Apr 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310429699

J. Richard Singleton

Novelist, screenwriter, essayist and true-crime writer, J. Richard Singleton has been crafting stories since high school, with an original screenplay that he wrote, "Thugs," became a semi-finalist in the American Accolades Screenplay Contest. At CSULA, he dual majored in political science and English, writing for both his university's newspaper and literary journal. He completed "Glyphics" right before he turned 21, then he finished it again in 2011. His literary influences include Kafka, Twain, Poe and Stephen King.

Book preview

Background Guy by J. Richard Singleton

Copyright 2013

Smashwords Edition

We are all familiar with the concept of the extra. Just about any scene in a movie or TV show would look ridiculous without people populating the background. They are the sexy people in the clubs who are not the main characters. They are the robe-wearing hospital patients walking the halls. They are the suspiciously old students in television’s high schools. They are low on the podium of importance to the production but high on the checklist to create realism. Without extras, major films would look bizarre, with the stars operating in the foreground with a background that looks like an abandoned ghost town. Take the time to imagine a scene from any of your favorites movies or TV shows—doesn’t matter which—and imagine that scene without people in the background. (Excluding sex scenes, where the logic is the exact opposite—and it is weird when there are other guys there. And if your favorite scenes are the sex scenes, then you and I have a lot in common, dear sir.) If there is a scene that you need—especially while filming in Los Angeles—there will be a surplus of appropriate extras to fill the background. Sometimes you just need to feed them, and never has there been a more appropriate demonstration of human desperation than this fact: Some actors will literally work for food.

There is a division in the film and television production community as to whether these folks are extras or background. (There is also the pretentious background artist.) The industry term seems to be background, which robs the performer of