Double Duty : A small group of Hollywood extras use parts of their anatomies in movies and TV roles--although you’d never know it from the screen credits

Screen Extras Guild President Gene Poe has a lot of fun telling people what he does for a living.

He’s been the hands of Clint Eastwood in a shoot-’em-up cop movie and of Michael Douglas in “The War of the Roses.”

Sharon Lyn Bourne can raise eyebrows by talking about her recent job portraying Kim Basinger’s bust for a fleeting moment in the actress’s latest film, “The Marrying Man.”

And Shelley Michelle boasts that she has portrayed the bodies of such Hollywood beauties as Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” and Catherine Oxenberg in “Overexposed” when those stars chose not to bare portions of their anatomies or do nude love scenes.

Poe, Bourne and Michelle are among a small group of Hollywood extras working as body parts doubles in movies and TV shows.

Body parts doubles, or “photo doubles” as they are sometimes called, are used on many films and TV programs, said Gary Klopas, director of Disc Casting Inc., a Burbank-based extras casting service.

Unlike a stand-in--a person of the actor’s approximate height and coloring who is used to plan lighting and camera movements--a photo double is actually passed off on screen as all or part of an actor’s or actress’s body.

Body parts doubles are used for all sorts of reasons ranging from expediency to modesty.

“A lot of actors and actresses just do not want to do nude shots or have parts of their bodies exposed, so sometimes the hot scenes you see in the bedroom with the actor and actress aren’t the actor and actress at all. They’re doubles,” Poe said.

Michelle, a 25-year-old La Canada Flintridge resident, said Roberts was shy about showing her body in “Pretty Woman,” so Michelle was called in to do the erotic opening sequence in which Roberts’ character slides silky stockings and boots onto her scantily clad body.

Roberts’ publicist, Pat Kingsley, confirmed that Roberts did have a body double for her hands and in the movie’s sexy opening montage.

A spokeswoman for Walt Disney Studios, whose Touchstone Pictures released “Pretty Woman,” would not comment on whether body doubles were used in the film.

And Michelle said she had no qualms about being nude in a love scene when Oxenberg balked.

Canadian actress Fairuza Balk was 14 when she was cast as a virginal young woman who is seduced in the movie “Valmont,” released two years ago. The script, an adaptation of “ Les Liaisons Dangereuses ,” called for Valmont to kiss Balk’s naked bottom and legs. Balk’s mother called for a body double. Director Milos Forman obligingly called in a 20-year-old French actress for the seduction scene.

“She’s not ashamed of her body or anything, but it’s not something she wants to expose at this time,” said Cathryn Balk, who made sure that her daughter’s contract stipulated no nudity. “It’s a very delicate thing for teen-agers. They’re very self-conscious about their bodies and it’s very difficult emotionally for them.”

Forman, in a telephone interview from his Connecticut home, said: “It’s not really very explicit. You don’t see any naked breasts or pubic hair but still we see a naked bum of the little girl.

“You never know with such a young actress what kind of psychological or emotional impact it could have on her and it could somehow traumatize her in her performance. I would be foolish to disturb her in any way.”

Balk, now 16, said in a telephone interview that she probably would not have

done the movie had they not used a body double for the nudity. “At 14, I was too young,” she said.

Other actresses also mind showing their naked bodies. “This city is full of gorgeous bodies. It’s very easy just to pick up the phone, call casting and get other bodies,” Poe said. “There are auditions going on all the time for beautiful bodies, hands, legs and butts.”

Screen Actors Guild rules require permission by the actor or actress before a nude body double can be used, said Tom Cannan, senior administrator for SAG’s production services department. Otherwise, he said, an actress could sign up for what she believes will be a wholesome film and find herself seemingly naked on screen doing all kinds of sex acts for all to see.

Kathleen Fiveson, 42, of Pasadena said she has done body doubling with her hands, legs and nude backside “when an actress is self-conscious about her butt,” and has even done steamy love scenes that weren’t embarrassing because “you can just sort of bury your face in someone’s chest.”

But, she said, “they’re not using as many doubles as they used to because of liposuction. Sometimes you’ll see an actress has really gotten herself in good shape and is exposing herself a bit more and then later you hear through the grapevine that she just had surgery.”

It’s not just nudity or vanity, however, that prompts use of a body double.

Frequently, body doubles are used because the work is difficult and the actor doesn’t want to do it--or the film’s producers or insurance company won’t let him.

For instance, Burbank actor Doyle Irons--a dead ringer for Tom Hanks--doubled for the star, standing in churning water for a scene in “Joe vs. the Volcano.”

“The star could catch a bad cold or get scuffed up a bit,” grinding production to a halt, said Franklyn Warren, a casting director at Central Casting in Burbank. “It’s just too risky.”

Frequently, a double is used for post-production work because the producers discover that something didn’t turn out right and the star isn’t available to reshoot the scene.

Roberts, for instance, had already gone to another film project when the makers of “Pretty Woman” found that they needed a shot of Richard Gere looking over her shoulder in an opera box. So they called Central Casting and hired surrogate shoulders.

“It’s really my shoulder,” said Angela Churchill, a 24-year-old West Hills resident who is trained as a biologist but finds that she has more fun and makes more money as an extra.

Said Klopas: “I can get anybody and put them 20 feet from the camera in the actor’s clothes and as long as the hair color and size is accurate, they won’t be able to tell the difference.”

Even when the star is available, doubles are often used for close-up shots of hands, Poe said.

An extra can be hired for much less money and can do the work while the actor is being filmed elsewhere, said Jim Green, who has worked at Central Casting for more than 20 years.

Hands are the most commonly doubled body part, followed by back shots of shoulders and hair, Klopas said. But the agency has also been called upon to provide breasts, bottoms, feet, stomachs and other body parts.

Once, the agency had to recruit men with scarred kneecaps to portray football players in a shower scene, Klopas said. “That one was a piece of cake. There are a lot of guys out there with old football injuries.”

But other requests can be more difficult. Klopas was asked to find the biggest belly possible for a birth scene in the 1984 Dudley Moore movie, “Micki & Maude.”

“The pregnant woman we lined up to go to work got so excited she went into labor. We had to rush in and find another pregnant lady,” he said.

Typically, body doubling is anonymous work. Body doubles rarely receive on-screen credit for their work and, in fact, sometimes sign contracts requiring them to keep their work a secret.

“You never do see in the credits ‘Meryl Streep’s butt’ or ‘Kathleen Turner’s butt,’ ” Fiveson said. “It would sort of take away from the whole thing if you saw in the credits that the person you were admiring ended up to be four different people.”

French dancer Marine Jahan not only body-doubled for Jennifer Beals in the demanding dance sequences for the 1983 movie “Flashdance,” but also rode a bicycle over damp cobblestone streets in Pittsburgh wearing heavy boots and carrying welding equipment.

It wasn’t until Jahan saw the movie at a premiere screening in Westwood that she realized that “the dog got a credit and I didn’t. I came out in the lobby and all the celebrities were going, ‘Jennifer Beals, God, can she dance,’ ” Jahan recalled in a telephone interview from New York, “and I couldn’t say a thing.

“My big fear was that if you say anything, you are not going to work in this town again.”

But the truth leaked out a few days later. Jahan said people close to the movie were determined not to let her contribution go unheralded--and “it turned out to be the luckiest credit I never got because I got so much publicity from it,” Jahan said.

The use of body part doubles dates back to the silent film era when they were commonly used for actresses with “piano legs” or actors with ugly hands, said Craig Campbell, 46, assistant librarian at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Margaret Herrick Library.

A body double was used for a nude back view of Elizabeth Taylor climbing the stairs in the 1967 John Huston movie “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” for Anne Bancroft’s bedroom scenes in “The Graduate,” for Jane Fonda’s love scene with Jon Voight in “Coming Home” and for Angie Dickinson’s nude shower scene in “Dressed to Kill,” Campbell said.

Body parts doubles are typically recruited from the ranks of extras. Industry officials say at least 18 companies recruit and hire extras.

Poe estimated that about 50 of the Screen Extras Guild’s 3,600 members work as body parts doubles on occasion. An unknown number of Screen Actors Guild members and non-union extras also do such work, he said.

They earn anywhere from $40 a day for a non-union member to whatever the traffic will bear. Michelle, for instance, said she earned $750 a week for four weeks work on “Pretty Woman.”

The experience of working as a body double can run the gamut from boring to hair-raising.

Sherman Oaks actress and body double Crisstyn Dante had to stand for hours leaning against a slanted board wearing nothing but bathing suit bottoms as a succession of live tarantulas crawled down her naked chest for a close-up scene in “Arachnophobia.”

“Afterward when I got home, I was all clawed up,” said Dante, who simply put hydrogen peroxide on her chest, pocketed her $500 pay and went on to the next assignment. “It’s all in a day’s work,” the former artist’s model said.

Working as a double for the demon-possessed Linda Blair in “The Exorcist,” diminutive Hollywood actress Eileen Dietz wore green and yellow makeup and was “levitated” on a bed rigged with pulleys, she said.

Dietz recalled being told to “go home and pull down the shade and practice spitting” for the film’s infamous vomiting scenes, for which she said she was fitted with an apparatus similar to a horse’s bit connected to tubes through which pea soup was pumped.

Dietz went on to acting jobs of her own as a regular on “General Hospital” and other movies and TV shows.

The job was a little tamer when Marijean Gorska, 28, of Newport Beach recently worked as a photo double for actress Patricia Wettig--whom she closely resembles--on the ABC-TV drama “thirtysomething.”

Gorska simply had to lie on a white bed as Wettig appeared to rise and walk away from herself in a dream sequence.

Gorska, who works primarily as an actress in Shakespearean plays, said the body double experience “got kind of boring.”

“Basically, you’re just a puppet and they fix you up to be someone else. They stand you here and stand you there. It has nothing to do with your ability as an actress.”

Michelle, who has recently courted publicity on numerous television shows for her body doubling work, views it as a springboard for her singing, dancing and acting career. Her fervent desire: “roles that use all of me.”