My Day as a High-End Call Girl
An Actor Prepares
I want to start off by saying that I did willingly submit for the part.
I’ve worked background on The Playboy Club, 90210, The Mindy Project, and have been submitting in NYC for over a year, searching for that sweet taxable actor income. I booked the role because the show needed Eastern-European looking women in their 20s which is not insulting. The fact that the show also needed me to provide my own High End Call Girl wardrobe …a little insulting. Also listed on the call sheet were Well-Heeled Johns and Mafia Members which conjured up images of dashing young investment bankers with platinum band watches. I was looking forward to work.
The night before, I packed my nude heels, my only bearable shoes for 12-hours of standing. I pawed through my closet looking for sexy cocktail dresses, of which I have very few, due to my two-year romper binge. I tucked a few rompers in my bag just in case the costume designers were feeling nice.
The morning of the shoot, I took an hour-plus for hair and makeup so I could arrive on- set “camera ready” as instructed.
When I entered the extras holding room, my dreams of handsome investment bankers were dashed. Well-Heeled John was apparently synonymous for Gray-Haired Man Over 50 In Rumpled Suit.
I checked in with a PA and “high end call girls” were told to grab their clothes to show the costumers. They narrowed their eyes at my rompers and Doc Martens. “This scene is a cocktail party?”
I wear rompers and Doc Martens to cocktail parties - but I was not dressing myself! I was dressing my Russian Hooker Counterpart, who I later named Oxanna ‘Scrappy’ Abromavich. And Oxanna was fated to wear my bright blue dress with black nylon stomach and long sleeves with nude heels.
Yoga pants replaced with jewel-toned dresses, winter boots replaced with black heels, the High End Call Girls teetered back into the holding room. I tugged my dress down and didn’t make eye contact with the curious old men as I made my way to my seat. “It’s a job! It’s an acting job.” I reminded myself.
One of the ladies next to me, model-thin, with shiny brown hair, stunning in a small black dress, worked in an MCAT practice book. She chewed on the end of her pencil, wrote things, scratched things out. It made me giddy to watch.
Once More Unto the Set
“Okay. So here’s the point of the scene.” After an hour and a half of sitting around, the PA was welcome structure. “We’re at a very classy brothel. Women - you are selling yourselves to the men - but in a classy way! Men, you are buying the women but also…in a classy way! Got it? Great. Selling selves. Buying people. Classy. Okay! Let’s all stand up, and head downstairs, and the ladies and gentlemen, why don’t you start pairing yourselves up?”
The entire room of extras came to the same realization in a single moment—to pair ourselves up would be to suggest an actual High End Call Girl and Well-Heeled John pairing. The older gentleman actor would be suggesting to the younger lady actress “You are the kind of girl I would pick to pay to have sex with.” And the younger lady actress would be suggesting to the old gentleman actor “If I was a Russian lady who had to sleep with someone thirty years older than me to pay the bills, I would feel least depressed about having to sleep with you.”
So instead of pairing ourselves up, we repelled each other like pre-teens at a junior high dance. We stood in two single file lines down the entire staircase and hallway.
At the other end of the hall, grips opened the door to a three-minute blast of January air.
The women shivered in their cocktail dresses, and the men offered up their coats, each braving the gender divide with his own line
“Hey! Who says chivalry is dead, huh?”
“Hey, beautiful, you want a coat?”
“Take it, please, my mother would kill me!”
All but one or two women refused.
No one offered me a coat because in my search for warmth I had discovered a small broom closet and was hiding in it. (This is where the “Scrappy” comes from in Oxanna “Scrappy” Abromavich.) I watched the chivalry from behind a thin brown curtain and wondered why we were opting to stay cold. If we had been background actors as father/daughters in a post-college graduation reception party, we probably would have been ripping the coats off their shoulders. But in this context, it felt a little too much like being a not-so-well-off scantily-clad High End Call Girl accepting a present from a Well-Heeled John.
Heeeeere's Quentin!
Quentin Tarantino on writing and them filming Django Unchained:
It’s one thing to write ‘Exterior: Greenville where the slave auction town was. One hundred slaves walk through this deep shit mud, being moved along, wearing masks and metal collars. And this whole town built over this like…. black Auschwitz’ It’s one thing to write that. It’s another thing to get a hundred black folks, put them in chains, and march them through the mud.
It’s one thing to write about call girls selling themselves to older men, it’s another thing to actually film it. Because as soon as you walk on set the line between acting and being blurs instantaneously.
Am I an actress or a high end call girl when the director yells “ACTION!” and I whisper something into my Well-Heeled Johns’ ear and fix his tie and he pulls me off to some other corner of the bar?
And are the men acting or Well-Heeled Johning when, in between takes, leaning their elbows on bars, swirling drinks in their hands, chat us up, ask to be friends on Facebook, or for our numbers?
When the men lean next to each other on the wall, nudge each other and say “Hey! Not such a bad day on set, huh Paul?” “No, sir. Not a bad day at all.”
When I’m standing next to Old Man A and Old Man B comes up to to A and says “Well, you just picked the most beautiful one in the room, didn’t you?”
How many times did that sentence get said in a 12-hour day on set? And how many times would it get said in a real High End Brothel?
It’s the cycle of cinema: a writer perceives a truth in the world: there are places where young women sell themselves to old men, classily. This perception wriggles its way into the script. A massive team of people spend hours bringing the perception to life, decorating it, lighting it, filling it with old men and young women. And watching from your couch, the perception becomes truth again: look at that, I’m seeing a place in the world where young women sell themselves to old men, classily. And then you can write your own television script where young women sell themselves to old men, classily. Or if you’re lucky enough, you can be an extra on a television show where women are selling themselves to you, and look! Your day looks just like those places you saw on T.V. where women sell themselves to man, classily.
What gets written and produced is not just reflecting on what society is, but reimagining and reinforcing it with every single Call Girl and Mammy and Drug Lord. And the messages are reinforced all the way from the stars to those of us in the background.
Because the line is blurry back here, away from the camera’s focus. Back here, I’m trying to get Sean, a particularly awkward extra, to stop looking at me. To stop following me, and other women, to stop asking for every single girl’s number, miming calling us on the phone during takes. I turn my back to him enough times that at one point he says, “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
“I’m not afraid,” I say. “I’m angry.”
Before Sean can respond, the A.D. calls for quiet on set. I grab my Well-Heeled John’s arm, and when I hear “ACTION,” lean in to him, laughing.
