Woman: Feb 1980

A star is born...

... well, nearly. When John Sandilands got his big chance to appear in a Hollywood movie he felt sure that fame and a beach house at Malibu were but a film clip away. All he had to do was get himself noticed. He did-but not in the way he planned

I got my start in Hollywood in. the same way as David Niven. He began as an extra, too, and I thought I'd been spotted in much the same fashion as soon as I walked on to the set. "Who," said the producer, loudly enough for me to hear, "is that?" I realised later that if I had really been booked for instant- stardom he'd have said it in a different tone: "Who is that?".

At the time, though, I was still too starstruck to notice. Village People were sharing my scene with me - well, the other way round if you like -and I'd already been close enough to the one who wears the Red Indian set to get one of his feathers up my nostril. I'd actually had to chat with the one who wears a cowboy hat and looks like Clark Gable "Here," I said, since the likeness was so remarkable, "you don't half look like Clark Gable." "Yeah," he said, "you're right."

As a matter of fact, everybody I'd seen so far on the set of Can't Stop the Music looked like somebody else: the goddess Venus if they were girls and Adonis if they were blokes. Everyone was totally astonishing beautiful or handsome or striking or all three at once, regardless of gender. I spotted a mole beneath the shoulder-blade of a girl who looked like the Mona Lisa; the only flaw I saw all day, and even that looked terrific.

It turned out that they'd interviewed more than two thousand of the best-looking people in California, which is a world-source for that sort of person, to come up with a crowd of 50 or 60 for the disco scene. They wanted a sequence that would make the dancing in Grease look paraplegic because Can't Stop the Music was. being made by the same producer. It was Grease which had given him his start in Hollywood and he was clearly an ambitious young chap.

He had big, goggle glasses which swept the set like searchlights looking for anything that wasn't just right and they fell on the new David Niven (me) very sharpish. "Has that one been to Wardrobe?" he said. A couple of his assistants were already lifting me by the elbows and rushing me towards the exit so I had no chance to tell him that I'd been in Wardrobe for so long already that I was beginning to get seriously worried about being attacked by moths.

Down there, you lined up until a dresser came along and stood in front of you, squinting shrewdly and with a mouthful of pins, trying to decide what would suit you best. They were turning out some amazing spectacles. A girl in front of us ended up with what looked like a lace doily and a pair of boots, another came off with a skirt that looked like a Kleenex studded with rhinestones and a bra no bigger than an Elastoplast.

The guys didn't fare much better.

Lots of them were handed shorts so little and tight that they walked away as if flights of arrows were striking them in the buttocks.

I got up to the front of the queue several times but the dresser would say, "Just a minute," and then, "Next". I was the only one left when all the dressers came and squinted shrewdly at me in a little group. "There's not a lot we can do," one of them said, after a long pause. "I guess he'll just have to be one of the out-of-town people."

It wasn't much better in Make-up, where more astounding things were going on. There were people having their faces painted like Pocahontas, there were false eyelashes fluttering around like wounded bats, there were bags of glitter, like cement sacks, being up-ended and poured all over people, and half of them were blokes.

When it was my turn to sit in a chair, though, there was another long pause while the make-up lady stared hard at me in the mirror with all the little lights round it. "I suppose," she said, "I could remove the shaving soap from your ear." I watched her reflection roll its eyes towards the lady at the next make-up chair. "Do people still use shaving soap?" she asked. Everybody in movies seemed to talk like that.

That was how I came to make my Hollywood debut in pretty much the same state as I'd first arrived early that morning, before I'd even got into the movie business. It was just as well that it rarely rains in Hollywood or I'd have had to join the disco crowd wearing a crumpled mac like Lieutenant Colombo, although the producer would have been bound to spot something like that. He was shirty enough as it was and the folk in Wardrobe were pretty grumpy when I . was brought back and dumped down in front of them with orders to turn me into a trendy disco person and make it fast.

"We're spending fourteen million dollars on this movie," one of the assistants grated. "You must have something in there." The dressers chewed their pins worriedly and even squinted at each other before sending for a sort of Head Dresser, a large, commanding lady who was carrying a huge pair of dressmaker's shears as if they were a badge of office.

I thought she was going to adapt me briskly for a pair of those little shorts but she uttered just one word, very loudly: "Punk!" At once the lesser dressers were galvanised. I was bundled into a T-shirt and shoe-horned into a tighter pair of trousers, a heavy metal dog-lead was pinned to my shoulder and a long leather boot lace was tied to my belt. I thought the transformation was remarkable when I got a glimpse of myself in a mirror but the Head Dresser wasn't satisfied.

She advanced with her shears and cut about four big chunks out of the T-shirt, narrowly missing one of my nipples, which had now made its first coy appearance in public. She stood back with her head on one side while her assistants fastened the incisions together with safety-pins. "Where's your navel?" she suddenly asked and when I indicated the little indentation in my T-shirt shyly with my finger, she took her shears and cut a big chunk out of there as well. As I was leaving she stuck a pair of sunglasses on my nose, which were so dark and trendy that I fell down the steps.

Back on the set they'd been getting on with the movie, arranging the first shot of the disco scene so that all the boys and girls had already paired-up and I had to wander round the edges looking for a partner, like a spotty punk at his first dance.

I also got my first indication of what I'd let myself in for by starting my movie career in a musical instead of, say, a nice sedate costume drama, because it turned out that all the other beautiful people were expert dancers as well. I'd been much too busy to notice that that mind-blowingly elastic English dance group, Hot Gossip, had been hired for the picture, too, and were dotted about, casually limbering up by doing the splits with one leg wrapped round their necks.

It was the producer himself who finally fixed me up with a girlfriend, dragging her reluctantly away from a tall, blond young man, lithe as a panther, who was clearly lovely enough to be allowed to dance all by himself. They'd decided to have a dress rehearsal before doing the shot and when the music started, it was red- hot and at about the decibel level of an artillery barrage. I thought at first that my partner was throwing a sort of terminal tantrum at being separated from someone who was clearly destined to be the new Fred Astaire and being paired up with a Sid Vomit, whose pants were so tight that he walked with a limp.

All the dancers were going totally berserk but my lass seemed to have found a fine edge of lunacy, hurling herself about with such incredible energy that I wouldn't have been a bit surprised if, when the music stopped, she'd fallen to bits. I'd previously decided that about all I had to offer the movie was a warmed up version of the Twist, but it quickly became apparent that this was totally inadequate. By comparison with my partner it looked as if I hadn't started yet, or had actually quit.

Also, from the comer of my eye, I caught a warning gleam from the producer's specs so, breathing heavily, I stepped up the pace, chucking in some shoulder shrugging and waggling my head as if having a fit. The problems now were that my bootlace untied and my dog chain rose and fell with such regularity that I could see that, with a couple more rehearsals, I'd probably flog myself to death.

Luckily, when the music stopped, they decided that they were going to do the shot a bit differently. They were going to have a smaller group of dancers and, not entirely to my amazement, they made the split just about where I was standing. The rejects were made to go and sit with the out-of-town people who were decorating the edge of the dance floor. I was delighted, but my partner shot me a look that practically cracked my sunglasses. "That's showbusiness, eh?" I said philosophically. "Yuk," she said.

I was very grateful because they spent the rest of the morning on the dance sequence, doing it over and over again, until even the fittest started to wilt. Also, because pictures are made in such a peculiar way, there was a point where everybody had to go on dancing just as frantically without any music at all while a couple of actors did some dialogue .

. Later on, while they shot the scene from yet another angle, the dancers got their music back and the actors talked to each other without uttering a sound that anyone could hear.

During the lunch break I talked to some of my fellow players because I wondered how anybody could actually volunteer for a job like this. I was under the impression that everybody who did little bits in Hollywood movies was also hoping to get on like David Niven and only came along in the hope of being spotted for something really big and ending up with a place on Malibu Beach.

This wasn't exactly the case. All the ones I spoke to were very happy picking up around £50 a day, usually for five days a week steady. A lot of them had little radio phones so they could keep in touch with what was going on in the film business . The girl in the lace doily, for example, had called up on hers only that morning and got a job in a Space movie at the end of the week.

I lunched fairly lightly in case they wanted me to dance again after the break. I didn't want to spoil another scene by having a heart attack. As it happened I could have filled myself with steamed pudding if I'd felt like it. They were doing a sequence in another part of the disco and they needed some people to sit at the bar.

None of the dancers fancied that much, but I thought it a terrific role, especially as a batch of barmen had been sent up from Wardrobe and were already rehearsing like mad at pouring drinks. Unfortunately, there was a continuity girl with a very sharp eye wandering about, making sure everything matched from one shot to another, and she insisted my disco partner should be sitting next to me in this sequence, too. That made her even more upset.

She sat with her back to me but still radiating so much animosity that when the picture comes out I think the audience will believe it's the start of a sub-plot about a vendetta between two of the clients at the disco, a kind of reverse of Love Story.

They may also think that the punk at the bar with his navel showing is drinking vodka and tonic. Also misleading. As soon as I rehearsed having a drink it turned out they were serving neat Lemonade.

It was surprisingly nerve-racking just pretending to have a drink at the bar. A bit of dialogue was going to go on between the Red Indian from Village People and Valerie Perrine, the female lead in the picture, which is the story of how Village People got their start in showbusiness.

The camera moved on little wheels, along the length of the bar to halt where they were speaking. Each time I felt its baleful eye getting nearer I found my movements becoming strangely jerky so that there seemed a fair chance of pouring my lemonade into my ear. The effect was rather like trying to eat spaghetti in a nonchalant way with someone watching you closely.

Just to add to the difficulties there was a bit more filmic hokery-pokery to get through. You had to pretend the red-hot music was blasting through from the back of the disco, although actually it wasn't, and keep your feet and so forth tapping to a rhythm you could no longer remember. Don't forget this movie was meant to make Grease look as if it had been shot on lantern-slides, so everybody had to be grooving all the time. If it had been a Dr. Kildare picture they could have used the same scenes for a sequence in a ward for nervous complaints.

They went on re-doing the bar scene for so long that I got through about four pints of lemonade. My navel was beginning to protrude through its little window from the pressure within, and by the final take I was twitching more rhythmically than anyone else because I was dying to go to the lavatory. It may have been this that finally got me my big break in movies, the moment every kid with nothing but good looks and talent dreams of in the celluloid jungle of Hollywood.

For the shot that was to end the sequence, two guys from the bar had to get up and walk into the interior of the disco and, with a combination of terror and pride, I found that one of them was to be me. It was only later it struck me that maybe it wasn't because of my looks and talent, but just a neat way of getting me out of the picture.

At the time I was merely conscious that you get maybe one great chance in the crazy rat-race of Hollywood and you have to seize it. I checked my safety-pins over and over again, tied and re-tied my bootlace, shifted my dog-lead to show a little more of my cleavage. I even made myself more panicky by trying to decide on a walk-the John Wayne, the Jimmy Cagney?

I needn't have bothered. When the moment came I was so frozen with nerves that I remained stuck on my little seat like a cement gnome on a toadstool in the garden until the guy next door gave me a swift kick on the ankle. I carne off the stool in one convulsive movement, bent double with pain, and set off with the only alternative left to me - the Hopalong Cassidy.

What I'd also forgotten were my sunglasses. I seemed to have been walking for about 20 minutes when, with a thunderous crash, I hit an obstruction. It was the wall just by the door. "CUT!" a great voice boomed, the kind they use in Biblical pictures. It was in that instant I knew I would never now have a beach house at Malibu.