Granted, I took greater pains in trying to crash the Phi Phi Leh set two months ago, but I considered that to be a certifiable postmodern variation of adventure travel. Posing as an extra in a movie about adventure travel, on the other hand, seems passively, blandly existential -- like buying end-zone seats at a televised football game in the hope that viewers will catch a glimpse of you during field goal attempts.

Still, part of the goal of travel is to experience corners of the world rarely seen by others, to see people whose real lives are so shrouded in myth and conjecture that it would seem impossible to know them as we know our neighbors. What better way to experience that than to work on a movie set?

"Bullshit!" exclaims Peter, who sloshes up to my folding chair and hands me a plate of fried rice. We're in the midst of our midnight "lunch break," and the tropical thunderstorm has soaked everything but a small area under the blue and yellow mess tent. Peter is angry because he has been moved to the second-unit shoot a few blocks away in Kata Town.

"You have to come with me," he says. "All the other second-unit extras are a bunch of knobs."

By "knobs," Peter means that the second-unit director has culled all the boorish, mustache-and-plumber's-butt soccer-hooligan types from the extra pool for a series of background shots. Peter fits seamlessly into this demographic, of course, but I don't point this out. Instead, I simply join him and the other hooligans for my next shift, figuring it will only serve to make things more interesting.

When we arrive in Kata Town, there are stirrings of mutiny among the second-unit extras -- who have just now realized that there will be no principal actors in the second-unit shoot. This concern is immediately assuaged, however, when the director arrives and tells us that we get to act like we're drunk.

The scene that we're creating will serve as background color for the sequence where Richard (the DiCaprio character) briefly leaves his island utopia for civilization, so he can buy a rice supply for the beach community he has joined. We, the second-unit extras, are supposed to represent the revolting decadence he finds there.

A hierarchy quickly forms as the second-unit director assigns specific roles: three fellows with hockey-haircuts are given Manchester United jerseys and instructed to stumble out of the bar arm-in-arm; five blond Nordic types are instructed to weave a jeep up the street; a balding older guy gets the honor of spewing cream of mushroom soup onto the sidewalk. Peter seems pleased when he gets to walk hand-in-hand with a Thai bar-girl. I am assigned the comparatively dull task of walking from a designated starting place and stopping in front of a banana pancake stand.

Between takes, Peter jogs over to offer me encouragement or give me stage direction. "You were walking too fast that time," he tells me at one point. "And from the look on your face, I could tell that you really didn't want to buy any banana pancakes."

"How can you know that?" I counter. "You should pay attention to your own part."

Peter isn't listening to me. "I'm gonna find you a paperback copy of 'The Beach' so you can pretend to read it at the pancake stand," he says. "You know, as an artistic statement."

Peter never finds me a paperback copy of "The Beach," but he does manage to score me a ridiculous white motorcycle helmet swathed in pink lightning-bolt stickers. When I walk through the ensuing take with the helmet under my arm, Peter runs over and threatens me with physical harm if I don't buckle the helmet onto my head.

"It took me a lot of effort to get that for you," he says. "Plus, when the movie comes out, you'll want to make it easy for all the hot babes to spot you."

Finally convinced, I don the motorcycle helmet and walk through the next three takes looking like I've gone AWOL from the Village People. If the second-unit director notices, he doesn't say anything.

By the time our second-unit shift nears its completion, half of the hooligans have wandered off, and the other half (who seem to have opted for the Stanislavsky method of acting drunk) are getting colicky and belligerent. The second-unit director looks relieved when we finally finish all the angles.

As I'm walking back to the extras mess tent, a woman I've never seen before approaches me. "You aren't by chance a journalist, are you?" she asks.

"No," I tell her.

"What do you do, then?"

"Well," I tell her, "right now I'm a movie extra."

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