Clarenceville, Québec
A homeowner's bucolic world collides with Hollywood silliness
During my graduate student days in Montreal, I had a fling as a film extra. In the late 1980s, before Toronto and Vancouver muscled their way into the Canadian film market, Montréal was proudly heralded as "Hollywood North". My film career consisted of a nanosecond appearance in "Liberace: the Man and His Music". (Remember the dinner scene where the Young Liberace wows a ballroom full of elegantly dressed diners? I was in the blue dress at the table at the back of the room, surrounded by a hundred other diners.) My other appearance (or non-appearance) was as the wife of a Los Alamos physicist in the made-for-T.V. movie "Day One". (My scene was scrapped because thunderstorms had delayed outdoor filming for nearly two days. As continuity nitpickers probably have noticed, Los Alamos doesn't get that many summer cloudbursts.) "Day One" subsequently wrapped and won an Emmy, but that, alas, had little to do with me.
My brief enthusiasm for the film industry faded when I discovered the rigid class distinctions that permeate professional film sets. The filmmaking bourgeoisie of actors, producers, technicians and assorted bureaucrats are rigorously segregated from the proletariat of extras. Extras come from every conceivable walk of life. Some are aspiring actors, hopeful of picking up a speaking part or anxious to earn the hours necessary to get an ACTRA card. Others such as Flora, a dental hygienist during the week, quenched her undying love for all things Hollywood by working as an extra on weekend shoots. Flora told me that there were regulars to the circuit and acquaintances that bridged from film to film. Nothing deep, just a familiar face in an otherwise indifferent environment.
The starry-eyed wonder with which we newcomers viewed the filmmaking aristocracy was definitely unrequited. The extras were treated as little more than animated stuffed chairs, passing the long, idle hours socializing amongst ourselves, waiting for a few moments on camera. The final straw for me was to see that this class apartheid extended even to the most sacred of human moments, mealtime. I remember the army of extras on the "Day One" set, most of whom had not eaten since early that morning when they boarded a bus bound for the remote Ormstown set, lining up to a receive a boxed lunch consisting of a plastic-wrapped boiled ham sandwich on white bread. In a nearby area, cordoned-off but clearly visible from where I ate my rubbery sandwich was a sprawling five-star catered banquet being served to the upper echelons of filmmaking. On that hot summer day, I found myself praying to the god of food poisoning to pay a little visit to their seafood pasta. I concluded that to exist in this world, as glamorous and seductive as it may seem on the surface, required either the skin of a rhino or the thickness of a stump.
Time, of course, dulls all memory. Forward five years and my husband and I had become homeowners outside of a tiny farming village located an hour's drive due south of Montréal. We had moved to the country to escape the cancerous sprawl and cookie-cutter banality of Montréal's growing suburbs. Here, close to the Canada-U.S. border, the pancake-flat topography of the Champlain Valley assumes a gentle roll as it strikes the flanks of Vermont's Green Mountains. From the front porch of our aged, country gothic farmhouse I could gaze eastward to Mount Pinnacle and Mount Sutton or south to Vermont's towering Mount Mansfield and Jay Peak.
Yet even here in Clarenceville, where Holsteins outnumber homeowners, we were not safe from the invasion by Hollywood North. International filmmakers, lured by the low Canadian dollar, generous tax breaks and an abundance of technical talent, were still cranking out films at a fraction of the cost of filming in Europe or Los Angeles. Their location spotters fanned outward from the city and before long, discovered our village. The previous summer a Canadian film crew had arrived in Clarenceville to make a made-for-TV-movie about a unique Canadian institution, the Dionne quintuplets. The makers of "Million Dollar Babies" had caused a frenzy of excitement in this normally sedate village, employing a small army of locals as unpaid film extras. (As my neighbor recounted her experience, I hadn't the heart to dampen her enthusiasm by telling her that the more savvy urban extras were pulling down $12 an hour for the same duties.)
Shortly after the completion of the movie, I looked out the window to see two men standing at a distance. One appeared to be taking snap shots of the exterior details of our house. My husband, suspicious of anyone hanging around our house without an invitation, watched the men suspiciously from the window. I, however, suspected that they were location spotters, probably searching for locations for a future film. A few days later, the strangers appeared at our door and presented us with their business card. Would we consider a film company to use our house as a site for a feature film entitled "Rainbow"? The compensation was good: $500 a day for exterior use and $1000 per day for interior use (a sum which I suspected to be considerably less than Montréal rental rates). We agreed to think it over.
My husband, Robert, was skeptical. Stories bordering on urban legend abounded of damage done by marauding filmmakers: of antique hardwood floors scuffed and gorged, of lawns rutted by heavy equipment and sprinkled with cigarette butts left by chain-smoking crews and of panicked directors ordering crews to spray paint orange and red autumn leaves green.
© 1999 Caroline Kehne
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A Contribution to Sunnymead Village Magazine: SunnyZine
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