All Their Profit Is on Paper

Jeff Hamilton tried every which way to break into the movie business--as a make-up artist, Internet entrepreneur, actor, producer, even helicopter mechanic.

But it wasn’t until last year, when the production studio where he worked as a low-level manager was about to shut down, that Hamilton stumbled into the niche he was cut out for: cardboard extras.

As a studio manager, Hamilton had seen producers use life-sized cardboard cutouts to stand in for actors during crowd shots. Yet there was never a reliable supplier of the cutouts--known in the biz as “flat people”--and it always seemed a scramble to find enough of them, especially for big sporting-event scenes.

So Hamilton jumped into the void. And now, from a musty Hollywood garage where more than 4,000 flat people wait in boxes, Hamilton and partner Robert Platts are trying to build a market for cardboard extras, which can be hired for a fraction of the cost of real ones.

“There’s a lot less headaches too,” Hamilton said. “With cutouts, there’s no meals, no hassles, no wardrobe, no complaints.”

Hamilton and Platts, who have incorporated as Gonzo Bros., are the only people in Hollywood specializing exclusively in cardboard cutouts, say several prop makers and producers. Still, they face competition. Some of the major studios have a supply of cutouts, including Sony Pictures, which has 5,000 flat people. Set decorators can custom-build backdrops of people. And special-effects companies routinely generate virtual crowds on computer.

But Gonzo Bros. is off to a heady start. In the last year, the company has supplied cutouts for everything from Tostitos commercials and feature films to the “David Letterman Show,” where they were used for a gag shot at Yankee stadium.

“The beauty of these things is that with a long lens you can’t tell what they are,” Platts said. “And a lot of times when you see a crowd of real people, they’re just sitting there anyway, real still, you know, just like a group of cutouts.”

Hamilton, 31, and Platts, 29, fit the stereotype of Gen-X businessmen--slang-speaking, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing guys who run their business off a Gateway PC and troll backyard barbecues for investors. They met two years ago in San Diego. Hamilton was a makeup artist and a former sergeant in the Army, where he fixed helicopter engines. Platts was a transplant from Wyoming with a knack for bookkeeping.

The duo’s first venture was Actornet.net, an Internet database for casting agents. When that went belly-up, the two moved to Burbank to work as managers for independent Front Street studios.

The studio was bought out in December 1997 and shut down, but not before Hamilton and Platts discovered a hidden cache of 10,000 cutouts in one of the studio’s storage sheds. The cutouts were in horrible shape--water-damaged, torn, crumpled and, even worse, dressed in hideous ‘70s styles.

But Hamilton and Platts realized they were on to something when a producer from HSI Productions called them, desperate for 2,000 cutouts for a PGA commercial.They quickly struck a deal to use the old cutouts and hatched a plan to make 4,000 new ones.

“I guess you could say that the HSI deal was the enlightenment of the cutout business,” Platts said.

With a $30,000 loan from actress Caroline Leedom, whom they met at an entertainment trade show, Hamilton and Platts in June 1998 began production of the first wave of Stand-Ins, their trademarked name for life-sized cutouts.

They asked an uncle, two friends and their landlord to pose for portraits, which provided a good multicultural mix. Then they found a small effects company in Austin, Texas, to make a thousand cutouts of each of their four models. They made the models sign a waiver, relinquishing all rights to their likeness.

They couldn’t afford much advertising, so they turned to the fax machine and blitzed every commercial, TV and film producer in the Hollywood 411 directory. It wasn’t long before the phone started ringing.

“People would get ahold of us and say, ‘Oh, my God, we finally found you,’ ” Platts said.

Dan Kaplow, a producer of the HBO show “Arliss,” a comedy about a sports agent that features a lot of stadium scenes, said he turned to Gonzo for purely financial reasons. Gonzo Bros. cutouts cost $5 a day, compared with $90 for a union extra, which doesn’t include food, costumes or overtime.

“If I could do it the way I wanted, I’d hire 2,000 real extras,” he said. “But if you want to fill seats cheaply, you need a bunch of cutouts and maybe a few real people to add some movement. If you do it right, there’s no way to tell.”

Stadium shots are the lifeblood of Gonzo Bros. This March, the company landed its biggest job, a movie of the week for Walt Disney Television, which needed 3,000 cutouts for a hockey arena in Canada. Because cutouts are easy to ship, Hamilton and Platts plan to take their business nationwide. Since starting, they’ve landed nearly 50 jobs from New York to Madison, Wis. Producers usually hire between 200 and 500 cutouts for five to 10 days.

It’s not clear what effect the emergence of 4,000-plus Gonzo Bros. extras has had on real extras, many of whom are aspiring actors trying to build careers in Hollywood. A spokesman for the Screen Actors Guild, which represents extras, said he hadn’t heard any complaints.

Tony Hobbs, a director at Central Casting in Burbank, which books 2,000 real extras a day, doesn’t see Stand-Ins as direct competition.

“We know a lot of producers don’t have the money for real extras,” Hobbs said. “You have to feed bodies; you don’t have to feed cardboard.”

Sometimes, though, real extras’ tensions about their cardboard brethren flare up.

Mike Dunn, a salesman at Sony Pictures’ property warehouse, said some of his flat people have returned from a job with magic-marker beards scribbled on their faces and eyes poked out. A few, he said, even had their heads ripped off.

“The real extras hate them,” Dunn said. “They think the cardboard guys are taking their jobs.”

Sony Pictures’ warehouse stumbled into the cutout business four years ago when Sony made a baseball movie called “The Fan” and commissioned the construction of 10,000 cutouts to fill the stands. After production, many of the cutouts were ruined during a flash flood on the set of another movie. Today, Sony hires out the remaining cutouts for practically nothing--$2 a head. But Sony is not trying to price the Gonzo Bros. out of business, Dunn said.

“Our main focus is furniture and other big props, not cutouts,” Dunn said. “So if I can help out the Gonzo Bros., I will. Their cutouts are in much better shape than ours, and that’s their main business.”

Hamilton and Platts are most worried about computer effects companies.

For example, Digital Domain, the Venice visual effects studio that helped make “Titanic,” recently finished a General Motors commercial where computer artists filled the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with digital people. Using a relatively simple process called tiling, artists cloned video images of a small crowd and then superimposed the crowd onto a background of an empty Coliseum.

Stand-Ins will probably be obsolete one day, Hamilton and Platts acknowledged. But for two guys so bent on making it in Hollywood that they’ll try anything, the cutout business is just part of a grander scheme.

“This business may last only another five to seven years. But by that point,” Hamilton said, “we hope we’ll be making our own movies.”