Editor’s Note: For this story, Asst. Copy Editor Kristin Ross reflects on her enlightening experience on the set of indie film “Adult World.”

It all seems real enough — students fill the seats of Maxwell Auditorium, scribbling notes or feigning sleep. The teacher asks students to comment about the assigned reading. Suddenly, a voice rings out from the back of the classroom.

“Here we go again. Lock it up. Quiet please, and let’s roll sound,” shouts the director.

“Rolling!”

“Speak.”

“Scene 69, take four, mark, action!”

I am instantly aware of my every move. Sitting directly across from me in Maxwell Auditorium are Emma Roberts and John Cusack, stars of the new indie film “Adult World.”

Partly filmed at Syracuse University, the movie will screenat the Sundance Film Festival in January 2013. Cusack plays Rat Billings, a university professor specializing in poetry. He becomes a mentor to Amy Anderson (Roberts), a recent graduate with a degree in poetry. Unfortunately for her, the job market is bad, and Anderson reluctantly accepts a job as a sales associate at an erotic bookstore called Adult World.

“Just try to act natural,” I tell myself, praying my hair is camera worthy.

Three weeks before, I noticed a line of students near the Schine Box Office. Musical theater and acting majors were waiting to be interviewed as extras in the film. Intrigued, I stepped in line and soon found myself in front of a panel of casting directors despite my newspaper and online journalism major. Without previous film experience, I hoped my eight years of musical theater training would be enough to prove that I deserved to be in the film.

Then I was asked a final question: “If you could be in any movie ever made, what would it be?” I embarrassingly said the Disney movie “Mulan.” To my surprise, everyone starting singing, “Let’s get down to business to defeat the Huns!”

A week later, I received a call to be an extra in “Adult World.”

So here I am at 4:30 p.m. Feb. 18, spending my Saturday evening on a movie set and awaiting my big screen debut in an “extras holding” classroom with 60 other college-aged students. As instructed, I brought two winter outfits sans visible logos.

My costume of choice: a cotton navy shirt paired with skinny jeans and gray, paisley UGG boots. If I wasn’t going to speak any lines, I had to at least look decent, so I added a long beaded necklace.

“Do you have another shirt with you? The leads are wearing navy today,” says a woman in charge of checking the extras’ clothing. “But you can keep the necklace.”

Cue shirt change to dark gray and the waiting commences.

At 5:55 p.m., once all of the extras sit in the bottom half of Maxwell Auditorium, Roberts enters, followed by Cusack — neither wearing navy, I noted. The whispered conversations among students quickly hush as they sit. Everyone is star struck.

The scene: Professor Billings leads a lecture about poetry and asks for a volunteer to read some of Octavio Paz’s work, which Anderson quickly accepts. She reads the poem too dramatically for his taste. Irritated, he runs from the room, and Anderson chases his heels. Class dismissed.

Wearing a long black trench coat, Cusack has a serious demeanor. He plays his stereotypical, soft-spoken character, which his fans are used to seeing, with the air of a seasoned actor. Clad in a brown sweater, the 20-year-old Roberts rarely interacts with those seated around her, but she jokes openly with the director and his team.

Before the scene, the director told the extras to act as they would in a classroom. Some doze, others stare at Cusack with rapt attention and I take notes on lined paper.

Even though the camera is never directly on me, Roberts and I make eye contact three times before the director yells, “Cut!”

The short moment between Roberts and Cusack is over in four takes. Greg Boilard, a sophomore communications and rhetorical studies and marketing dual major, told me he is interested to see which interpretation of the scene the directors choose.

Boilard was seated directly behind Cusack in the poetry lecture scene and is sure to have a few seconds of face time when the film releases.

“He kept leaning back and hitting my knees, and I didn’t know if I should move,” Boilard said after the scene was filmed. “The camera was on me a lot for the first scene, and I didn’t know what to do because they didn’t give us much direction. I decided to just bite my nails and touch my face, and at one point, I decided to fall asleep a little bit.”

At 7:47 p.m., a third of the extras change clothes and stay for an additional scene. The filming begins again once Roberts has footlong extensions put in her hair. Announced with a marker as Scene 4, this scene depicts Roberts reading some of her original poetry during a creative writing class. One extra tells me she heard a rumor that halfway through the movie, Roberts becomes rebellious and chops off her hair, hence the extensions.

Roberts makes the director wait a minute to start shooting the scene so she can write down lines in a notebook from which her character reads.

Between scenes, I mingle with other extras and swap stories of previous experience on film sets. For most extras, this is their first film.

Leah Slater, a sophomore acting major, points out how different film acting differs from stage acting, specifically when Cusack, one of her favorite actors, spoke so softly that it was hard to understand him.

She adds it took her awhile to decide what to wear. She even asked for her roommate’s opinion.

“I didn’t want to look like I was trying too hard, but I wanted to still look cute,” she said.

I agree, making a mental note to tell people exactly what I wore — chances are the audience will see my shirt sleeve more than my face on the big screen.

klross01@syr.edu

Published on February 19, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Contact Kristin: klross01@syr.edu | @kriskross22