IN PICTURES : Casting Call : Visions of stardom, Oscars, big money and fancy vacations drift through your mind as you vie for extra status.

You have never really wanted to be a movie star. Then you see the newspaper story about some movie makers who need real people to work as an extras for a movie being shot in Piru. They want real firefighters, real paramedics and real journalists to play firefighters, paramedics and journalists.

You can’t act, but you’re real and you’re a journalist. You begin to daydream about Oscar night acceptance speeches.

To get one of the jobs as an extra, you have to go to a meeting with the movie people at the Piru School cafeteria. You imagine that the movie people are the sort who go to hip Hollywood parties on weekends and wear black everywhere.

You look through your closet. Your black skirt needs ironing, but your black slacks don’t. You select the slacks.

You time your departure from home so that you’ll arrive just a minute before the meeting begins. As you speed along the highway, you think about your future as an extra. You think about being picked out from a crowd to play a special role. You think about the rave reviews. You think about the money you will make. You wonder whether you should vacation in Europe or the Caribbean.

A woman greets you at the cafeteria door and hands you a pink card (men get blue ones). She is wearing black. You feel so hip. A lot of real people have already arrived. You sit in one of the child-size seats near a table and scan the room. There are many husky young men. They look more fit than most journalists you know. You decide that they must be the real firefighters.

A man is standing in the front of the room. He is in charge of casting. He is wearing black too. Your confidence is soaring. The man starts the meeting.

“The movie stars Dustin Hoffman. You may know him,” he tells the real people. It seems to you that he has just made a joke, but nobody laughs.

The movie involves a crashed airplane the movie makers have set by Lake Piru. In the story, the plane crashes on a cold, rainy night on the outskirts of Chicago.

The work of the extras, the man says, will be difficult. It will be bitter cold. There will be lots of water. Working hours will be from 4 p.m. to 7 a.m. for four consecutive nights.

“If you’re up for that now, stay,” he says. You remember that you live in California because you do not like bitter cold and rain. “If you have a problem,” he adds, “stay anyway.” You miss your chance to escape.

The man tells you, and those people you now consider your competitors, to fill out the cards you were handed at the door. He needs to hire 19 firefighters, eight paramedics, nine police and eight newspeople. “I’m looking for physical types here,” he says. The pink cards ask for bust, hip and waist sizes. You fill in one, guess at one and put a question mark next to the third. Your confidence is shaken.

There is a section on the card for divulging the contents of your personal wardrobe. There are categories for formal, business, sports, casual and Western attire, wigs and costumes. You put a zero next to everything except casual and make a mental note to go shopping sometime before the end of the century. Your confidence is sinking fast.

Finally, the man talks about pay. Somehow you miss the exact amount. You ask a woman next to you what the man said. She gives an amount. You think that she must be wrong, it sounds so low. But it’s right: $42 for a day’s work. There go your plans for a European vacation.

It is about time to leave, you think, but then the man says that he was the guy who gave Paula Abdul her first two jobs. Being an extra could be the start of something big for anyone in the cafeteria, he says.

“Anything could happen. It’s a fabulous opportunity,” he says. “You carry a sword one night, you do the lead the next.”

You think that he read your mind and decide to stay.

He calls all the firefighters and police to the front, sorts them by body type and age, then sends them to be photographed by the woman in black. He calls the paramedics and does the same. He calls the journalists.

You are one of six women among the people who call themselves journalists. He sorts the six into groups of three. In one group, the women are young, dressy and have shoulder-length hair that poofs out the way only hairdressers and people with double-jointed fingers and heavy-hold hair spray seem able to make hair poof. They look like television news reporters. The man puts you in the other group.

You try to strike up a conversation with one of the women in your group. You ask what kind of journalism she does. She looks at you quizzically. She says she’s not in the news business; she’s a professional extra. Suddenly it occurs to you that maybe the women with the poofy hair aren’t journalists either. This is Hollywood, after all, albeit in Piru.

They take your photo and you drive home without getting lost. Visions of Oscar are no longer dancing in your head. You just hope that the movie people don’t call. (They didn’t.)

* THE PREMISE

There are plenty of things you have never tried. Fun things, dangerous things, character-building things. The Reluctant Novice tries them for you and reports the results. After all, the Novice gets paid to do them--and has no choice in the matter. If you want to tell the Novice where to go, please call us at 658-5547. If we use your idea, we’ll send you a present. This week’s Reluctant Novice is free-lance writer Kathryn Phillips.