Heroes and Hayden

Working on NBC’s HEROES in June 2009 was the kind of experience I love. First of all, it was a big shoot. I mean a BIG SHOOT. About 250 extras on the UCLA campus and 240 of them were portraying students. Along with nine others my age or older, I played a college professor, specifically Dr. Carl Griffin, English teacher and drama coach.
(I knew it would be a fantastic day earlier when I was motoring across town on Sunset Boulevard while listening to SUNSET BOULEVARD (the musical starring Glenn Close, on the CD player.)
On campus, we parked in a huge parking garage, were vanned over to base camp and fed breakfast. The holding tent was almost “The Greatest Show On Earth” size. Our chief handler was a tall, Rastafarian-haired guy named Moose who was assisted by a compact Hispanic woman named Max. They walked us over to the beautiful mall between Royce Hall and the Powell Library.

For the next half-hour, Moose, Max and several PAs “placed” 250 background actors. 
• There were four guys assigned to toss a football back and forth.
• One young man was placed on the ground with a guitar and a pretty young girl to serenade.
• Several other guys were playing with a Frisbee.
• Here, a pair of girls sitting on the grass, talking.
• There, a gaggle of cheerleaders taking snapshots of one another.
• Four guys and one girl were handed boxes (empty, so acting was required) and told to walk to this point and turn and walk to that point.
• A number of kids were handed fake fliers for fake charities which they were told to hand out.
• Several people who’d brought bicycles were given instructions on where and when to ride by.
• Everyone had an assignment in their mission to portray real people doing real things by acting.

For the first scene we shot, I was paired with a nice woman named Ilene who was a few years younger than me. We were both portraying professors. We were assigned to walk down the stairs near the Powell Library. At the bottom of the stairs, we were to glance at the clipboard I was carrying, nod at one another and she was to walk straight toward Royce Hall, passing star Hayden Panettiere on the sidewalk. My job was to turn to the right, where a pretty young Irish girl handed me a flyer about stopping the war, smile at her and take it with me and then walk on down the sidewalk, making sure I was at least five feet behind a blond towing a suitcase on wheels.
We did the scene about ten times but it was an absolutely beautiful day with a cool breeze off the nearby Pacific Ocean so I had no complaints.

One of the funny things about working a scene so large and complicated is the weird things that can ruin a take. Naturally, there were the occasional chimes from the clock tower, a police helicopter whirling overhead or a blown line. But we were also halted by some esoteric things.

• Just as we were about to begin take one, a group of about 25 Thai students with a guide were led directly into the scene. Max conferred with the guide and the group continued down the green and out of sight.
• During Take 3, a man in his 40s with three young girls in tow, walked up to an extra nearby and asked, “What’s going on?”
• Midway through Take 9, a sister in four inch heels and inappropriate-for-daytime dress walked down the stairs texting on her iPhone. Max asked her to step aside and she said, “Kiss my a**?” Moose intervened and the girl vanished.

The tough thing is telling an extra hired to play a student from an actual student. One clue was the fact that real students might have logos or advertising on their clothing or their backpacks. Background actors are not permitted to do so. Also, the real students tend to look a bit aimless while the extras have their assignments.

My second scene on NBC’s HEROES at UCLA, involved tracks and shadows. A dolly is a cart which travels along tracks. The camera is mounted on the dolly. A dolly shot is also known as a tracking shot, which means side-to-side movement. Camera movement parallel to a moving subject permits speed without drawing attention to the camera itself. The tracks were set up at the top of some outdoor stairs. I worked alone this time, walking up the stairs and turning to the left in front of the camera which was tracking right to pick up Hayden Panettiere, who was right behind me. It was pretty simple and we nailed it in four takes.
The third scene was substantially more complicated and interesting. Starting at the beginning of a long outdoor hallway in front of Royce Hall, Ilene (the fellow professor from Scene 1) and I walked the entire length of the hall in conversation, passing students and other teachers along the way. We ended up walking past Hayden Panettiere who is talking to another woman right in front of the camera (as pictured at the far end of the hall on the right).
After each take, when the yelled “Reset!” (which is the real world alternative to “back to one”) the 23 of us who were chosen for this special featured extra sequence walked back to our starting spots. For Ilene and me, that meant the whole length of the hallway. After five takes, Max asked me to stop halfway down the hall, speak to two students, and then continue on. This sequence put me within 12 inches of Hayden Panettiere a half-dozen times.

Funny thing happened on one of those takes. Moose was stationed at the end of the hall behind camera and he would grab selected extras and send them back the other way to make the scene look more crowded. To my amazement, after he turned me around to start back, he turned Hayden around — realized what he had done — and we all laughed out loud. “Sorry,” I told him, “Stars don’t do crosses.”