Shout-Out to the Extra: Jurassic Park Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care.

“Jurassic Park”, 1993’s blockbuster box office champ, was notable for its dinosaur special effects, obviously, as well as Jeff Goldblum’s scene-stealing, kooky supporting performance. Yet there was another performance just as memorable as Goldblum’s. No, not Sam Neill, though he was efficiently taciturn, and not Samuel L. Jackson, who chainsmoked with fine verve, but Laura Dern as Dr. Ellie Satler, an underwritten part compared to her male brethren that Dern nonetheless gave so many little bits of actorly flourish, both in scenes and moments where she is featured and on the edge of frames where if you watch close you see she is never not up to something.

I think of when we are introduced to both her and Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant on a paleontological dig in the Badlands of Wyoming, which allows space for us to simultaneously see Grant’s expertise and his dislike for kids when he lectures a particularly precocious young boy on the attack methods of velociraptors. As Neill’s character is about to launch into his soliloquy, Dern, standing at his side, busts out this incredulous grin and says, mostly to herself, “Uh oh, here we go.” Perhaps I’m wrong, but it strikes me as a moment Dern improvised given how its dialed back a little bit on the audio and sort of off to the side of the principal action. And yet it speaks volumes, evoking how this forthcoming lecture is typical for Dr. Grant, and something Dr. Sattler has learned to live with.

Though Dern is a principal cast member, this moment also speaks to the extra’s plight, forced to populate scenes where they are never ever the focal point and yet round them out anyway by always appearing to be engaged with what’s happening in front of them. Like, say, this extra…

She is simply there to provide an audience for Dr. Grant, of course, a homo sapien filling in the frame. And given that this scene was filmed at Red Rock Canyon in the Mojave Desert, which could have been the comfiest day of shooting, it would be easy to forgive an extra for just coasting. This extra does not coast. She is listening to Dr. Grant, by God, even if it might be the 29th take in a row for Neill, hanging on every word and then reacting to whatever those words, like these...

Here in the wake of Dr. Grant explaining just how easily a velociraptor can spill your intestines, the extra exudes less horror than “Golly gee willikers”, a choice I admire. Just like Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler cannot undertake an excavation without a few trusted underlings, a director like Steven Spielberg cannot film a scene of an excavation without a few trusted extras to make it all seem real. When the actual velociraptors show up later they are predominantly at the mercy of animatronics, but this extra is at the mercy of no one’s decisions but her own. Respect.

Pour one out for the extra...

5 Favorite Jurassic Park Characters/Performances

The fourth installment of “Jurassic Park” opens this weekend twenty-two years after the first, proving no Hollywood well is ever dry and that mankind’s hubris is unstoppable. It’s fashionable, of course, to crack jokes about how the people in the “Jurassic Park” movies don’t learn their lessons and just keep on setting themselves up to be eaten by more dinosaurs, and, frankly, this is all nonsense. Do these people not exist in the world? This world? The one we’re all existing in right now? Once they figure out how to clone dinosaur DNA there’ll be a real Jurassic World setting up shop right next door to Sea World in fifteen minutes. Parents will take their kids to see velociraptors through plexiglass while simultaneously warning them about nitrates in hotdogs. You know it. I know it. We all know it. 

Anyway, despite their obvious focus on dinosaurs, what intrigued me most about the “Jurassic” films were their characters. Or, perhaps I should say, their performances. Or, perhaps I should say, the characters and performances working in harmony. Because for all their effects, it’s the distinct little bits of characterization filtered through actorly tics that intrigue me the most. You can have the ripple in the water glass, I’ll have the…well, you’ll see.

Honorable Mentions: Laura Dern as Ellie Sattler in “Jurassic Park”: not a great character, but a performance the typically quirky Dern still outfits with interesting bits of body language and reactions. Sam Neill in “Jurassic Park III”, a performance that nicely exuded the same weary professionalism of the movie itself.

5 Favorite Jurassic Park Characters/Performances

5. Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, The Lost World

I might like THE LOST WORLD slightly better than JURASSIC PARK because of Goldblum's performance, a running commentary on how dumb it is.

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) May 2, 2015

4. Pete Postlethwaite as Roland Tembo, The Lost World

A big game hunter who lends out his services solely for the once-in-ten-thousand lifetimes chance to bag a T-Rex, Tembo easily could have starred in his own “Jurassic Park” spinoff, a psychological “White Hunter/Black Heart” with dinosaurs. Indeed, among all the scientific, or thereabouts, characters parading through “Jurassic Park” premises, he’s apparently the only one raised with a philosophical background. We know this because he recites speeches about the “chap” that climbed Everest, and so forth. He’s also the only one who seems to genuinely grasp the actual situation. If Goldblum plays as if it's all dumb, the late great Postlethwaite plays as if it's all real, and that's just a little bit harder of an achievement.

3. Samuel L. Jackson as Ray Arnold, Jurassic Park

Jackson would, only a year later, begin his rise to acting’s foremost foul-mouthed yeller, a man who chewed up monologues and spit them out, an entertaining over-actor with outside voice to spare. Yet as Jurassic Park’s chain-smoking chief engineer, he’s merely an over-worked, stressed-out employee who mostly just grumbles and mumbles, turning lines like “We have all the problems of a major theme park and a major zoo and the computer's not even on its feet yet” into exhausted art. He’s the one “Jurassic Park” character that could have fit right into “Office Space.”

2. Bob Peck as Robert Muldoon, Jurassic Park

The first time I saw this movie as a precocious teen, I think the park’s game warden barely made an impression. Years later, soured by age, my idealism extinguished, I adored the dude. “They were testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically,” he says of the dinos in an early sequence. “They remember.” And the spin Peck puts on those words, man oh man, you know that he knows they’re all gonna get it. He’s not Jurassic Park’s resident game warden; he’s its resident fatalist. 

1. Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

It’s so nice to know that such an idiosyncratic performance could exist in a movie that roped in so much bank. In some ways, his chaotician, cracking wise while simultaneously pointing out mankind’s hubristic folly all while being “on the lookout for a future ex-Mrs. Malcolm” in the midst of taking swigs from his flask, was a Jurassic-era precursor to Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark. The dinosaurs are rad, man, but years-later re-watches of Spielberg’s blockbuster reveal that once Goldblum’s character is moved aside, the movie stops being as interesting. He’s not just there to call these men playing god on the carpet; he’s there to M.C. between rounds of exposition and action set pieces. In 1993, my favorite moment was the glass of water. In 2015, my favorite moment is Ian Malcolm sitting by himself talking to himself. “That’s chaos theory.”