It was the fall of 1984, and I was working for a computer manufacturing company in Colorado. Business had been great and the company was growing quickly.
Then one of our products started experiencing failures. The returned parts were piling up. Morale was glum. On Halloween, the shoe dropped. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Typically the plant shut down for Christmas break, and what a difficult holiday it was. The uncertainty of our futures dampened every celebration. Turned out, our fears were justified. After the plant reopened, there was a massive layoff; 5,000 people lost their jobs and I was one of them.
A job search in the mid-1980s was very different from today. Job openings were primarily posted in the newspaper. I worked tirelessly to find a job, and I did get a lot of interviews, but there were thousands of other folks looking for the same jobs. I applied to a wide variety of companies, even one making cameras specifically for nuclear bomb testing. I can’t imagine there would be many returned cameras from that.
It was getting dire. Summertime came and I still couldn’t find a job. My unemployment insurance was going to run out soon and I was contemplating any job at all, just to bring in much-needed money until I could get back into my own field.
Then serendipity struck. A company was looking for extras for a movie to be shot in downtown Denver: a made-for-TV Perry Mason movie. I applied and was hired.
In the end it was only for one day, but I got paid $50 and a free lunch from the catering truck — and I got to experience what it took to make a movie.
Shooting was in a seedy part of town that day, and we were the street people in the background. We had a wrangler who would position us for each shot. (I would have to stand next to the TV screen to point out myself background.)
Raymond Burr wasn’t on the set that day. Another actor was: William Katt, who played Perry Mason’s private detective. One scene we shot was just him running down the sidewalk. We did that several times, and then cut. At one point the shooting moved indoors and we weren’t needed so a lot of us just milled around on the corner reading or playing cards.
That is when a cop pulled up and started yelling at us. To him we were just a bunch of bums and we couldn’t be hanging around, we had to move along.
“We’re here as extras for the Perry Mason movie!”
You could see the light go on in his eyes. He must have missed that meeting. Now he got the memo.
Somehow that movie changed my luck. I had three job offers the following week! Now I had the difficult job of choosing who I was going to work for, which after seven months of pounding the pavement was a pleasure. A very sweet situation after all. As they say in the movies, “They lived happily ever after.”
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