Thoughts on extras

Saturday during the dinner hour, I was going through the channels to tune to The Rifleman, since it's what Dad and I watch during Saturday dinner. One of the channels in between, GetTV, was running a show I hadn't heard of called Cimarron City. (There's a good reason I hadn't heard of it, which is that it only ran one year.) Anyhow, as I was flipping through, I had to stop because I looked at the screen and thought, "That looks like Carleton Carpenter."

Sure enough, the closing credits revealed that it was Carleton Carpenter. For those who don't remember him, he's the one singing "Abba Dabba Honeymoon" with Debbie Reynolds in Two Weeks With Love. He also has a small role in Father of the Bride getting a bottle of Coke at the wedding reception and showing Spencer Tracy the proper way to open a Coke bottle. Actually, that scene is the subject of a "Word of Mouth" piece that TCM shows often enough. Carpenter says Spencer Tracy told him he takes direction well.

Anyhow, looking at the IMDb cast list for Cimarron City, I was surprised to see how many names I recognized as having appeared in one episode. It got me to thinking about the scene in the 1937 A Star Is Born in which Esther Blodgett goes to the casting office, and the secretary shows her a sign about the ridiculously high number of people trying to become stars. But of course, all of that was before TV. Once TV came along, and then especially with the advent of cable producing their own original scripted series, there's a much higher number of people you'd need just to produce the sheer amount of broadcasting.

On the other hand, I suppose that's why so much of the programming is cheap to produce and of a type (a zillion court shows in broadcast syndication, and multiple cable channels showing pro wrestling come to mind). It's still hard to become a star without sleeping with the right people.