Making Concessions

Exactly a year ago today, I saw myself in a clip from a movie.

Not in a particularly glamorous way.

I was in the lower-left corner of the frame, partially obscured, with my blue hair and both hands covering my face. I paused the clip. Rewound it. Paused it again. Then I took a screenshot, drew a circle around myself, added an arrow, and wrote THAT'S ME.

October 9, 2025.

Screenshot of a post on Instagram.

I still hadn't seen the movie.

In October 2023, I saw a call looking for background extras for a movie filming at the Lafayette Theatre in Suffern. I sent in all the dates I could potentially do and got booked for two consecutive Fridays, October 20 and October 27.

So I took two days off from my actual job to be in a movie.

I've been going to the Lafayette since I was a kid. Over the years, there were plenty of times when it seemed like it might close. I also got married there.

So when a movie came to town and started filming at the Lafayette, of course I wanted to see what was going on.

There was just one problem.

The marquee said CLOSING.

This was set dressing. The Lafayette was not actually closing. But not everyone passing through Suffern knew that, and I remember people thinking that after all those years of worrying about whether the Lafayette would survive, this time it really was happening.

It wasn't.

The Lafayette was acting too.

For Concessions, it had become the Royal Alamo Cinema, a movie theater on its last day in business. There were fake posters, fake showtimes, fake vending machines and an entire slate of movies that did not exist.

I would absolutely have gone to this theater.

Taft! The Musical? Yes.

The Bad Bloke on Bedford Avenue? Sure.

On my first morning, I arrived early and was sent upstairs, behind the balcony, into parts of the building I'd never been in before. Offices and empty rooms had been temporarily turned into wardrobe, hair and makeup, props, staging areas and holding rooms. Pieces of printer paper taped to walls told us where everything was.

October 20, 2023.

Upstairs at the Lafayette Theatre, which had been turned into various production-related spaces.

CAST HOLDING.

This was where the glamour happened.

There were snacks. I had also brought my own snacks. I had a book. I remember spending a lot of that first day sitting by myself and reading while we waited to be needed.

When they did need us, the non-speaking background extras were brought downstairs and scattered around the auditorium.

We each got our own little jobs.

Talk to the person next to you. Eat your snacks. Get way too excited about the movie. Fall asleep.

Mine was essentially: this movie is violent and I do not want to see it.

We were supposed to be watching a violent movie, but there wasn't actually anything playing on the screen. Instead, flashes of orange and red light stood in for whatever terrible things were supposedly happening in front of us.

My acting consisted primarily of covering my face and occasionally peeking.

There were multiple takes and different camera angles. I had no idea whether I was visible in any of them.

I acted my heart out, just in case.

A week later, I came back and everyone was being placed around the theater again.

Except apparently I couldn't just sit anywhere.

Most background actors can move around a movie theater without raising too many questions. It's a little harder to get away with that when you have bright blue hair.

So for continuity, I went back to roughly the same place and wore the same outfit.

When we weren't needed, we were supposed to stay upstairs in holding. Lunch was the exception, which meant lunch was also my opportunity to wander around and investigate what production had done to the theater.

We were not supposed to take pictures.

I have a surprising number of pictures.

October 20, 2023 and October 27, 2023.

The Lafayette Theater plays The Royal Alamo.

The fake posters. The fake showtimes. The fake vending machines. The altered marquee. The auditorium full of lights and equipment.

And, from upstairs, the back of the Lafayette marquee.

I had seen that marquee from the front countless times. It had also been part of my wedding. Now I was standing behind it, inside a version of the Lafayette that was pretending to be somewhere else.

At the end of each day, I was paid in cash in an envelope. I only photographed the first one. Someone had written on the front:

Concessions Day 5 - 10/20
Christine Lawrence: Extra

October 20, 2023

Cha-ching!

Hollywood.

Then I went back to work.

The job I took those two Fridays off from is now two jobs ago.

I followed Concessions on Instagram, but there wasn't much to follow. Every once in a while I wondered whether it would ever see the light of day.

Or, more appropriately, the light of a movie projector in a dark theater.

Eventually it became one of those "huh, that was a fun thing I did once" memories.

I had been in a movie.

Maybe someday there would actually be a movie.

Nearly two years after filming, there was.

Or at least, there was a clip from one.

Concessions was preparing for a film festival premiere. I couldn't make it to the festival, but a clip was posted online announcing the premiere.

There I was.

Both hands over my face.

Still dutifully horrified by a movie that had never actually been in front of me.

THAT'S ME.

One of those takes had caught me after all.

And that was still all I'd seen.

The movie went out into the world without me. It played festivals. Other people got to watch the thing I had already spent two days inside.

Eventually, a screening was announced at the Lafayette itself, on October 8, 2026.

Nearly three years after filming, Concessions was coming back to the theater where we'd made it.

Before the screening, I found the trailer online.

There I was again, although apparently they'd moved me to a different seat for at least one shot. I'd completely forgotten about that.

Still, I'd made the trailer.

I also reached out to the Lafayette's owners on social media and offered them the pictures I'd taken during filming. Maybe they'd be useful for promoting the screening, but even if they weren't, I thought they might want them for the theater's archives.

They got permission to use them.

And there, in the promotion for the screening, was one of my pictures.

October 8, 2026.

PHOTO CREDIT: CHRISTINE LAWRENCE.

I'd like to remind everyone that we weren't supposed to take pictures. (I'm glad I did.)

There was one other thing I wanted to figure out before October 8.

I went back to that original promotional clip and watched it again. This time, I wasn't looking for myself. I was counting rows from the back of the auditorium.

The Lafayette has nearly a thousand seats.

I wanted one particular seat.

On October 8, I arrived with Jon, stopped at the concessions stand (of course), and headed straight for it.

And naturally, I had to take a picture of myself sitting there, with both hands covering my face, recreating my big movie moment.

October 8, 2026.

If only I could have found the outfit I wore during filming...

Three years earlier, I'd sat there pretending to watch a movie that wasn't playing.

Now I was sitting there to watch the movie we'd been making instead.

And this time, there was actually something on the screen.

The first time I spotted myself, it was the scene I remembered filming. Both hands covering my face, reacting to an imaginary violent movie.

I leaned over to Jon.

"That's ME!"

And then I kept showing up.

In the background of scenes I didn't remember being in. In another shot from the scene I'd seen in the trailer. Four appearances across three scenes.

Every time, I whispered to Jon:

"That's ME!"

It turned out I was in considerably more of the movie than I'd expected.

After the screening, there was a Q&A with Mas, the filmmaker, and members of the cast and crew.

He talked about what a labor of love the movie had been, and how long he'd spent editing it.

He also explained that the scenes from the fake movies we'd supposedly been watching weren't filmed until almost a year after our days at the Lafayette.

Apparently, I'd been reacting to movies that hadn't even been made yet.

I feel like this should count as some kind of acting achievement.

Mas also talked about recognizing so many of the extras in the audience. He'd spent so much time looking at all of us while editing that he said we felt like family.

October 8, 2026

Scenes from the night of the Lafayette Theatre homecoming screening. Top Left: Some of the extras who showed up for the screening, along with cast and director/writer. Top Left: Writer/Director Mas Bouzidi Bottom Left: Actors Rob Riordan (Hunter) and Jonathan Price (Lorenzo) Bottom Right: Q&A after the screening with theater owner Ari Benmoshe, Bouzidi, Riordan, Price, and actor Volkan Eryaman (Sergio)

When everyone gathered for a group photo afterward, I got to say hello.

He remembered me.

I suspect the blue hair helped.

I told him how excited I'd been to finally see the movie, and how I'd wondered whether I'd made the cut.

"You're all over it!" he said.

Apparently so.

I'd spent two Fridays in the Lafayette pretending to watch a movie that didn't exist. Nearly three years later, I finally got to see the one we'd been making.

There were nearly a thousand seats in that auditorium. I could have sat anywhere.

There's nowhere I would rather have been sitting.