Extras! Extras! : Read All About a Day in Their Lives

K, I’ll admit it: I was secretly thrilled when my editor suggested I get myself a job as an extra on “Murphy Brown” and write about the experience. She wanted to know fun stuff, like what’s actually in the wine glasses at Phil’s bar. I guess she figured I was just the sort of hard-hitting reporter that could get to the bottom, so to speak, of such questions.

Meanwhile, I harbored a latent naive fantasy-probably the same one harbored by the 25 or so extras who have been puttering anonymously in the office of “Murphy Brown’s” fictional “F.Y.I.” since the show premiered in November, 1988.

Don’t tell my editor, but part of me thought I might be discovered by “Murphy Brown’s” executive producers, Diane English and Joel Shukovsky, who would pluck me from my spottbehind Candice Bergen to star me in “Lauren!”-my very own prime-time spinoff.

I So, who wants to know what’s in those wine glasses?

Reality sets in pretty fast when you’re “nonspeaking talent,” I was soon to learn. As I made arrangements to work on an episode called “Contractions,” it took about two minutes to figure out where, as so-called “atmosphere,” I was going to fit into the Hollywood food chain.

“So, are they going to arrange parking for me?” I asked the second assistant director, who coordinates all the extras.

“You want to be treated like a real extra, right?” she asked.

“Definitely,” I said gamely.

“Find your own parking.” Such is the lonely lot of the “background artist.”

Forget what you may have assumed about oh-so-glamorous life on the set. Extras bring their own wardrobe, do their own makeup, make about 10 bucks an hour and generally do a lot of standing on drafty sound stages. Not once in the history of the universe, at least according to my peers that day, has a producer or director of any how ever said to an extra, “Hey, you, with the coffee cup in your hand: You’ve really got that part of office worker down. Good job.” It just doesn’t happen.

Anyone who fantasizes about having tea with Candice in her dressing room soon learns that to the cast of most shows, extras are human wallpaper. The stars might occasionally notice people back there, and they’d certainly notice if nobody was there-but mostly they’re too busy doing their own jobs to comment on how well you’re bustling around the set looking diligent.

But that diligent look, especially when you’ve been doing it for 10 hours, is hard to achieve. Here’s a sample of the kinds of things you do to appear busy in the office of “F.Y.I.” (on the set, everyone calls it “the bull pen”): Pretend to talk on the phone on one side of the set. Go to a file cabinet, shuffle a few papers, look up an imaginary number in the phone book. Deposit the papers you’re still holding in a file cabinet on the other side of the set. Mouth a conversation with one of the other extras. Go back to the first file cabinet and I you get the picture.

You also get a lot of time to actually read the papers you’re shuffling. Some are quite interesting. I came across dozens of 1970s LAPD theft reports, pages from old scripts and a fan letter written in what looked like Swahili.

Mostly, though, you have to keep moving. The key is to make lots of “crosses” back and forth on the set without mistakenly blocking one of the actors while he or she is speaking. This is more difficult than it looks. Once I looked up after busily placing a videotape on a desk to find myself staring straight down the barrel of a camera pointed at Joe (Frank Fontana) Regalbuto-who was standing right behind me. If they don’t edit this scene out (oh, please), you’ll catch me with a look of horror frozen on my face. Either that, or I’ll be mouthing the word yikes.

Extras also are instructed to tiptoe at all times, so the mikes won’t pick up footsteps during filming. By the way, when you hear the sounds of conversation behind the main dialogue of any show, that’s not the extras talking. The background noises you hear are added in later, during post-production. We never spoke above the faintest whisper.

Off the set, though, the extras do a lot of friendly socializing. Many on “Murphy Brown” are regulars or have worked together on other series. The discriminating viewer, in fact, will notice many of the same faces popping up everywhere. But most extras are so used to seeing themselves on television, they don’t even bother to watch.

Which doesn’t mean they wouldn’t appreciate a bit of recognition. So if you happen to tune in this week to my big debut, don’t look for me. Check out the professionals, and if you like the way one of them is sipping that glass of grape juice at Phil’s bar, write a fan letter. Or better yet, write to Diane English and Joel Shukovsky and tell them you think your favorite extra deserves his or her own spin-off.

Such is the stuff of which fantasies are made.

“Murphy Brown’s” “Contractions” episode airs Monday at 9 p.m. on CBS.