Dawn over the set

From Madrid to Shanghai. It was still dark as we converged on the lot, but it was not cold, not by a long way. The day before, no, all the week before, I had seen 45º on street thermometers: this was August, and everyone in their right minds leaves Madrid during August. But not us. We were a different breed - film extras, some professionals, though most first-timers or the merely curious like myself, there to take part in the latest Fernando Trueba film. Those of us who had been there in previous days for a wardrobe call had an idea of the way through the huge maze of decrepit buildings that was the old neomudejár-style Arganzuela slaughterhouse in Madrid. It was not a place you would want to be alone in the dark: shadowy, spooky and ruined, and inexplicably crunchy under foot.

"Hair"
The result

Day was barely dawning as we headed down the street, probably originally designed for mass movement of cattle, now converted into an imagined or imaginary replica of a Chinese high street, c. nineteen forty-something. Nothing seemed to have been left out - street stalls, a bank, a butcher's (with live animals) a tavern, an acupuncturist's, more bars, a lamp shop, bookshops... A number of carpenters and other technicians milled around, still putting things together. High, streaming banners with Chinese-looking lettering hung all over the place - I found out later that they did not actually mean anything. The enormous set put me in mind of a Kung-Fu film and until well past lunch-time I was half-expecting and looking forward to some kind of mass street fight.

	Yours truly

The reason most of us were novice extras was that the film, "El Embrujo de Shanghai" (Shanghai Gesture), required a large number (no-one seemed to be sure, but I have read 500) of Oriental-looking figurantes, as extras are called in Spanish. Advertisements had run a few months before, announcing that they were looking for hundreds of Orientals to "recreate China in Madrid." And they came, mostly as whole families: Mum, Dad, kids of all sizes and grandparents, not to mention uncles, aunts and cousins.

Strutting our stuff. The preliminaries to filming take a good while with so many hundreds of extras. One of the old buildings of the slaughterhouse had been adapted for wardrobe and "hair," and after these processes we Europeans, male and female, were obviously pleased with our costumes. In these generally hatless times, there is something about donning a Fedora or a Panama which brings out the ham in everyone. Before changing, we were an anonymous lot - with our white or cream suits, co-respondent's shoes and, especially, broad-brimmed headgear, we men swaggered, Bogart-like, while the women posed smoulderingly in their tapered skirts and high heels. The Chinese fared less well, many being given coolie hats and coarse, peasant rags to wear, although most of the girls and women were given those silk pyjama-type dresses with the slits up the side, or western-style dresses. It seems that some of these costumes were originally used in the Samuel Bronston epic, 55 Days at Peking, 1963, also filmed in Madrid. While the Europeans were more or less homogeneously kitted out, with a few exceptions such as a group of American sailors, no Oriental stereotype was left unrepresented: long-white-bearded elders, coolies, young men with kung-fu style scarves around their heads, head-shaven Buddhist monks...

It was a cosmopolitan day. As well as the hundreds of Chinese and the Spaniards, there was at least one Scot (myself) and it soon became clear that among the "Orientals" there were also Japanese, Phillipinos, Koreans, Burmese... while among the "Europeans" I met a Finn, a German, a Frenchman, an American and a very homesick Bulgarian girl. The German young man asked me, "How do you hold your cigarette?"
"Like everyone else, between my index and middle fingers."
"And wearing these clothes, do you not want to hold it like this?" he said, showing his cigarette the other way round, cupped in the palm of his hand, as you would expect from Cagney or Bogart. It made me laugh hugely.

Setting up a shot

Talking shop. Among the Europeans, there was a good deal of hearty greetings between the few professional extras. One mistook me for a colleague and, when I had disillusioned him, we chatted a while about the business. I learned that you can make a living at this in Madrid, and probably in Barcelona. The good work is said to be not in films but in television and, above all, advertising. (It seems that income is inversely proportional to the professionalism of the medium. Films are tightly planned and controlled and rewards for minions are low, whereas advertisements are said to be sloppily made, but the pay is good.) Others I spoke to told me more or less the same, and I was promised a list of agencies, though I never got it. But many of the experienced extras, especially the older ones, saw it as little more than a hobby, a way of getting out and about and meeting people. A very few were aspiring actors, acting school graduates, building their portfolios while looking for an opportunity.