HOLLYWOOD, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- Few show-business types are as full of hot air as the 7,000 extras who jammed the grandstands during the making of "Seabiscuit."
These background players are actually pneumatic dolls -- several thousand plastic people manufactured to mimic huge crowds.
Even if you look for these inflatable extras, odds are you won't spot one.
"If you notice them, I haven't done my job," Joe Biggins of DreamWorks' development department, which created the dolls, told the Los Angeles Times Thursday.
In theory, the inflatable extras could deflate the already measly livelihoods of thousands of real background performers -- the non-speaking actors who occupy one of the bottom rungs on the show-business ladder.
But because the inflatable dummies must be interspersed with hundreds of living and breathing extras, these plastic players might actually increase employment within the Screen Actors Guild because filmmakers would be more likely to use real crowds rather than computer simulations.
