Looking for Jesus at Home Depot: Or, How a Day Laborer Named Tino Ended Up in a Miller Duvall Music Video

It is 9 o’clock and the band members are at their fourth and final location, a huge studio with a huge white backdrop to frame the dance numbers. Tino is tired. And there is trouble with the wave: One of the backing men is apparently not on cue and, on top of that, he is not raising the rake high enough so that the wave takes shape. The director stops his camera, turns to his assistant and says, exasperated, “Really?”

When the wave shot is wrapped, the director cancels the snowflake sequence. “Is it really that late?” asks a disappointed Duvall.

“It’s not a question of time,” the director says, “but of reality.” He sends the backing band home. They are each paid $100, more or less the same amount of money that they would make in a day’s work of construction, carpentry or garden work. (SAG extras get between $125 and $310 for 8 hours; non-union players get less.)

On the drive back to MacArthur Park, the men are strangely quiet. They don’t want to talk about the music video with each other and they really don’t want to talk about the music video with anyone else. “I don’t want anyone to think that I have a lot of money,” one of the men says, and both Tino and the other man nod in agreement.

The production assistant pulls into the parking lot of the Food 4 Less in her boyfriend’s bright-red Audi, and Tino gets out of the car quickly to walk home. He needs to rest so that he can again get up at 5 a.m., pray for work, and then go to the Home Depot in search of it.