Hi. I'm Lauren. If you have seen a cop show in the last two years, you may have seen me walk across the back of a shot carrying a manila folder. You did not notice me. That is the whole point. I am what the call sheet calls "background," what the paycheck calls "non-union extra," and what my mother calls "still not a real job, honey."

I moved out here in the fall of 1996 with a theater degree and a Honda with a bad clutch. I started doing extra work in the spring of 1997 because it was the only thing in the business you can get hired for with no credits, no agent and no headshots that cost more than the rent. Two and a half years later, I have been a courtroom spectator, a nurse, a nightclub patron (three times), a 1940s secretary, a corpse under a sheet, and a "pedestrian, upscale." I have never had a line. I have had a lot of coffee.

People ask me what it's actually like, so here it is, the whole unglamorous thing. I don't name the shows or the movies I've worked on. We're not supposed to, and honestly, once you've stood in a parking lot for eleven hours they all sort of blur together anyway.

An extra is a person who fills the frame so the world looks like it has people in it. Restaurants have diners. Streets have walkers. Hospitals have people sitting sadly in chairs. Somebody has to be those people, and that somebody is paid a day rate and told where to stand.

An extra is not an actor, at least not on that day. You don't have lines. If you get a line, congratulations, you have been "bumped" and you are now a different, better-paid kind of person, and this happens about as often as rain in August. Mostly you are furniture that walks.

The polite word now is "background artist." I use it on my taxes. Everyone on set says "background." As in, "Background, reset!" which means go back to where you started and do the exact same thing again, only this time with feeling. Or without feeling. Depends on the director.

Here is how it works for a non-union person like me. You register with an extras casting company (there are a few big ones in town and a bunch of small ones). They take your picture against a wall, write down your sizes, your car (make, model, year, color, because sometimes they need cars), and whether you own anything unusual, like a tuxedo, scrubs, a police uniform or a 1950s dress. I own scrubs. It has gotten me work.

Then you either call in every day to a recorded hotline that lists what they need ("Tuesday: need 40 upscale pedestrians, 25 to 45, bring three changes of business attire"), or you pay a "calling service" a monthly fee to do the calling for you and book you. I've done both. The service costs money but it gets you more days. That's the trade.

When you get booked, you get a call time, a location, and a wardrobe note. The call time will be early. Not "set the alarm" early. Five in the morning, in a parking structure in Burbank, early. Bring your own hangers.

Wardrobe: Unless it's a period picture, you dress yourself. You bring two or three "changes" in a garment bag and the wardrobe people pick one, or combine two, or send you back to your car for the fourth thing you didn't bring. No logos, no pure white, no small stripes (they shimmer on camera). My whole closet is now beige, navy and "pedestrian." On a period picture they dress you head to toe in something from a warehouse that smells like other people's 1940s, and it is the most fun you will have all year.

Craft service ("crafty") is the snack table. It is not lunch; it is the all-day table of coffee, bagels, fruit, little cheese cubes, red licorice, peanut M&M's in a bowl, and on a rich show, a person making quesadillas to order. Craft service is the best predictor of how a day will go. A show that puts out hot breakfast burritos and real cream is a show that respects you. A show that puts out a box of donuts at 5 a.m. and nothing else until lunch is a show where you will also be standing in the rain.

The unwritten rule: background may take from crafty, but background does not hover at crafty. Take your bagel and go back to holding. The grips need that table more than you do.

1. Do not look at the camera. Ever. Not even a little glance to see where it is. If you look at the lens, the take is ruined, forty people have to do it again, and everyone knows it was you.
2. Do not talk to the stars. Don't ask for an autograph, don't tell them you loved that thing they did, don't ask what they're like in real life. If they talk to you, be normal. Some of them are lovely. Some of them are looked after by a person whose entire job is keeping you from doing this.
3. Do not actually talk in the scene. Background "conversations" are mimed. You mouth nonsense at your partner and nod a lot. The sound guy will thank you. The old-timers say "peas and carrots, peas and carrots." I say "I cannot believe it's only Tuesday."
4. No cameras of your own. No autograph books. They will send you home and you won't get booked again.
5. Don't sit in a chair with a name on it. Any chair with a name on it. Even if the name is "Video Village." Especially if it's that one.
6. Hit your mark, do your action, do it the same way every take. If you sipped your coffee on "action" in the wide shot, you sip your coffee on "action" in the close-up, or the editor will hate you, personally, forever.
7. Be nice to the 2nd AD. The 2nd AD decides whether you're the person walking through the front of the shot or the person sitting in holding for ten hours. Also they're doing a hard job at 5 a.m. Be nice to them because you're a person.

Let's be honest, because nobody was honest with me. As a non-union extra in Los Angeles right now you're looking at somewhere around $50 to $100 for a day depending on the production and how long the day runs. That "day" is eight hours, and then overtime kicks in, which is why an extra secretly loves a fourteen-hour day and hates a "short day," which sounds like a gift and pays like a coupon. There are little bumps: a few bucks more if you use your car in the shot, or if they get you wet, or if you brought the tuxedo.

The checks come by mail, weeks later, from a payroll company, and they are smaller than the number in your head because taxes are real. Union extras make considerably more and get the better positions and the sit-down lunch, and every non-union extra is quietly counting up the union "vouchers" that would let them join. I'm at two. You need three. I've been at two since March.

Can you live on it? Not in this town, not alone. I temp on days I'm not booked. Most of the people in holding do something else too: waiter, substitute teacher, retired, student, or the guy with the tuxedo who I honestly think just does this for the sandwiches.

The corpse day. I was booked as a body in a morgue scene on a cop show. I lay on a steel table under a sheet for six hours with a toe tag on. The heat was off, for realism, I guess. Every time they called "cut," the prop guy would lift the sheet and go, "You alive?" and I'd go, "Barely." Highest praise I ever got on a set: "Great stillness." It's on my résumé. (It's not.)

The period picture. Two weeks on a 1940s picture, which is heaven if you like being laced into a girdle at dawn. They set our hair with pin curls and sent us to holding, where 200 women in victory rolls and seamed stockings sat in a high school gym eating fruit cups and reading paperbacks. A crew guy walked in and said it looked like a USO dance had been hit by a very polite bomb. Best two weeks of my life. I got to wear a hat.

The nightclub, three times. Every show has a nightclub scene. You dance to no music (they add it later) while a guy on a ladder tells you to "dance bigger." You have never felt so foolish and you have never wanted the shot to be good so badly. Then they play the music back once for reference and it turns out you've all been dancing to something with an entirely different beat.

The rain. Rain towers are enormous sprinklers on cranes. Movie rain is colder than real rain and it comes down in the exact spot you're standing. They gave us plastic ponchos, took the ponchos away for the take, gave them back for the reset, took them away. Eleven takes. A woman next to me said, "I have a master's degree," to no one in particular. We all did, a little.

The best day. A director I won't name walked past holding, stopped, looked at the twelve of us, pointed at me and said, "Her, in the front, at the counter." I got to be the person the star orders coffee from. I said nothing. I poured coffee. My hands were in a close-up for two seconds. My mother taped it and made everyone at Thanksgiving watch my hands.

Have you met anyone famous? Stood near. Not met. See Rule 2.

Will this get you discovered? No. It gets you a day rate, a union voucher if you're lucky, and an education in how sets work, which is genuinely worth something if you want to do anything in this business. But nobody is "discovered" in holding. Holding is where dreams eat fruit cups.

Is it fun? Yes. About one day in four. The other three you're in a folding chair reading a novel for money, and there are worse things.

Would you do it again? I have a call tomorrow. 5:45 a.m. Upscale pedestrian. Three changes. I'm ironing.