“There are three rules to being an extra in a movie,” my brother, an experienced extra, told me. “Overact in the background, look directly at the camera and get between the camera and the main action as often as possible.”
I was on my way to
Wilmington, N.C., where my daughter Anja, an Eleanor
Roosevelt High School graduate, is working on the feature-length documentary, Hope of Escape. Its website announces that the movie tells “the story of Diana Williams, her daughter Cornelia and her daughter’s sweetheart William, as they plan their emancipation from slavery.” While that is a concise summary, it can’t convey the richness of the film and the story that it tells. I have been hearing some of these stories for over a year, as Anja is the production coordinator and sound assistant for the film. The filmmaker, Amy Gerber-Stroh, was Anja’s thesis director for her undergraduate degree in film from Hollins University and is a direct descendant of Diana and Cornelia. The resilience and the power of Amy’s ancestors were extraordinary and when I heard they needed extras for the film I morphed instantly into the kid in the front of the class, arm raised, “Ooh, pick me, pick me.”
My call time for the film was 11 a.m. on Sunday. I woke up early to look for alligators. I walked around Archie Blue Community Park and paused for a while on a bridge, when what should appear in the water below me but an alligator. Giddy with delight, I took pictures and texted everyone I knew. In general, the conversations went like this:
Me: I saw an alligator.
My boss: Do not pet it.
My boss: Do not get in the water with it.
My boss: YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO BRING IT HOME.
I have never felt so seen.
High off my encounter with an alligator in the wild, I arrived at the Poplar Plantation in Wilmington where that day’s shooting was taking place. Anja operated the boom-mic and was running sound for the day, and I hung out with the other extras and took pictures behind the scenes. I got to be an extra in two different scenes, and after the first one I decided to change the entire course of my life.
“Do you think there are many roles out there for fat, middle-aged, white women?” I asked some crew members over lunch. “I can hold still. Like, I could definitely play dead.”
Said crew member number one, “That’s hard to do well.”
“No, I can definitely do that,” I said, and I closed my eyes and stuck out my tongue to prove my point.
“Wow,” said crew member number two. “That is pretty good. I am going to another film shoot tomorrow and I will ask them if they need a dead body.”
“That’d be fantastic!”
“It’s a Hallmark movie.”
“They’ll definitely need a dead body.”
To be an extra is to wait around for five hours to do a five-minute shoot and that was in some ways my experience. Except it was much richer than that. I got to know the tremendously skilled Mizan Kirby-Nunes, who plays Diana in the film. I saw how hard Anja and the other crew members worked on set – managing scenes, managing equipment and managing people. The female-led film brings together top talent from New York, Virginia, Maryland, California and points between with Director Gerber-Stroh and her daughter, First Assistant Director Pippa Gerber-Stroh, setting the tone not only of the entire film but of the work experience – patient, encouraging and unflappable.
I recently talked to author Ken Woodley about his book The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparations Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia. He said, “The founding fathers of 1776 …they didn’t get the job done, they didn’t believe the words they wrote …. We all need to recognize that all of us are founding mothers and fathers, the founding of this nation truly continues.”
Hope of Escape tells the story of two of the founding mothers of this nation, their work and the founding of the nation that continues with the lives and efforts of the filmmakers.
Maybe I forgot the acting lessons my brother gave me as I drove to North Carolina. What he forgot was to tell me how invested I would become, how a little bit in love with everyone and everything on the set I would feel and how riveted I was by the story. Like so many, I eagerly anticipate Hope of Escape’s release, when I can see Diana and Cornelia and their stories come to life and have this critical part of our collective history told more fully by these powerful, world-changing voices.
Learn more about the movie at hopeofescape.com or search for it on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook: @hopeofescapemov.
