Walla Be Good

"I'm in a loop group," actress Jessica Pennington told me, with the ebullient satisfaction of someone who'd just been accepted into a very exclusive club -- and that's not too far off the mark. "It's one of the hardest gigs to get," Pennington said, "because people hire their friends."

What's a loop group, you ask? No, it's not a term for a carpool in Chicago. Essentially a loop group does voiceover extra work: Pennington and around five other actors stand in a recording booth watching scenes with crowds or groups of passersby (on-camera extras are usually either silent or at least not recorded on a film set) and improvising appropriate conversations that match the setting. Pennington's group, headed by industry veteran Erin Donovan, works a trio of one-hour dramas, giving "ER" its medical chatter, "West Wing" its aura of backroom buzz, "Third Watch" a streetwise ambience. The industry term for this background talk is "walla." (No word on the term's origin -- Bollywood, perchance?)

Perhaps because it involves performing on mike, it garners the full SAG day rate rather than the relatively paltry extra day rate. And when I joked that Jessica and co. make a good living standing around murmuring and mumbling, she pointed out that a loop group's improvised dialogue is in fact performed and recorded at full conversational volume. It's the sound mixer's job to create the proper balance.

It makes me wish I could hear a walla-heavy mix of scenes from "ER" -- although, come to think of it, it would probably be as full of "stat" and "cc's" as the show's main dialogue.