My first experience with professional filmmaking was being in a scene with Meryl Streep. I mean, if you’re going to be a bear, be a grizzly, right? 

    Okay, okay – I was just an extra behind Meryl Streep and Sam Neill, but still. The film was Fred Schepisi’s 1988 A Cry in the Dark (or Evil Angels, depending where you were located) and it was based on the 1980 disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain from the Ayer’s Rock Campground at the base of Uluru in Central Australia. Azaria’s parents, Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, reported that their infant had been taken by a dingo from their tent. Despite extensive searches, the child was never found. Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of Azaria’s murder in 1982 and sent to prison but was later released after additional evidence mysteriously surfaced in 1986 supporting the idea Azaria had been taken by a dingo. 

      This sensational story had consumed Alice Springs and the Australian media for the better part of the 1980s. Bizarrely, as a child I had actually been at the original inquest for a day in 1981, brought along to the Alice Springs Courthouse by a curious American neighbor who wanted to witness the circus. I can remember seeing Lindy Chamberlain and her distinctive dark bangs, as she and her barristers bolted out of the court room. Schepisi’s Hollywood adaptation of the story is pretty ‘meh’ and reads more like a made-for-tv docudrama and did poorly at the box office. It did garner one of Streep’s 21 (!) Oscar nominations to date and made for an interesting experience for the town. 

      Back in 1980, there had been a school bus full of teenage campers at the Ayer’s Rock Campground who quickly joined the initial search for Azaria and the filmmakers were keen to re-enact that for the movie. A casting notice was sent to our high school and a couple dozen of us signed up to be extras, me and my girlfriend included. Uluru is a solid five-hour drive from Alice Springs, so the production mocked up the campground in some scrubland about a half-hour outside of Alice. It was a night shoot, so all of us boarded a bus in the late afternoon and we were driven to set. In the typical “hurry up and wait fashion” of the film business, all the extras sat around for hours, our only distraction being repeated trips to the catering van. Somewhere around midnight, I fell asleep sitting up in the cold, red sand. Embarrassingly, it was the director himself, Fred Schepisi, who gently shook me awake and sent me to set. 

        The main scene being filmed that night was Michael and Lindy Chamberlain (i.e. Sam Neill & Meryl Streep) emotionally thanking all the people who had spent the night searching the bush for their daughter.  My girlfriend and I were positioned by the door of the bus and we were fairly close to Meryl. Obviously, both Sam & Meryl are world-class professional actors and I don’t recall them needing too many takes. Schepisi wanted to cover the scene thoroughly, so they did change camera positions a number of times, including reverse angles of the crowd and their reactions. There was at least one shot of just those of us by the door of the bus, but we would end up on the cutting room floor. 

        After that scene was finished, we were handed flashlights and headed off with the film’s second unit. For the remainder of the night, we slalomed around clumps of sharp spinifex grass, throwing our beams back and forth as if looking for the missing child, directions occasionally being shouted at us from the darkness. It was a long, tiring and chilling night but, thankfully, I was out there with a bunch of my classmates and my girlfriend and generally having a good time of it. Once the sun came up, they loaded us back into the buses, drove back into Alice Springs and I was home by breakfast. For better or worse, the experience did nothing to dissuade me from going into the entertainment industry. 

       I was not the only member of the family to be an extra. My dad took a couple of days off work and he too did a day in the bush and a day at the courthouse. Unlike me, my dad didn’t end up on the cutting room floor and is recognizable as one of the men behind the Chamberlains as they enter the Alice Springs Courtroom. My dad also did a night out at the campground. He and one of his friends occupied themselves by observing various misadventures by the art department. In one shot, they wanted to make it look like the baby had been dropped in the sand, however they couldn’t get the depression in the sand to show up on camera, so they gamed it by throwing a sandbag down and stomping on it over and over again. Later, rather than give the aboriginal tracker a flashlight to scan the bush, Schepisi thought it would be more “dramatic” by giving the old man a handful of burning brush to use as a torch instead. This resulted in the poor man being repeatedly burned and having to be attended to. 

       The experience apparently did nothing to dissuade me from entering the film business in 1993. Almost twenty years after the filming of A Cry in the Dark, I saw Meryl again at my West Village local. I was tempted to wander over and say something about our shared scene, but she was having a glass of wine and a convo with a friend, so I thought better of it.

Ah well, Meryl. We’ll always have Alice.