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A throng of torsos in We are Marshall.

Next time you’re watching a movie and there’s a scene set at a sporting event or political rally, look very closely at the cheering masses. Are they human? Or just gussied up balloon manimals? The Inflatable Crowd is a Santa Monica company that supplies seas of lifelike blow-up dolls to films like Iron Man 2, The Fighter, and Contagion. Outsourcing the role of “background actors” to inanimate objects isn’t new, of course; producers have used cardboard cutouts in the past. But those two-dimensional performers severely limit usable camera angles. And adding a CG crowd can cost $50,000 per scene. Inflatables look real and are affordable, with a day rate starting at just $10 per head, roughly a tenth the typical rate for a human extra. (Plus, they guarantee a shorter lunch line at craft services.) Joe Biggins, founder of the Inflatable Crowd, has been pimping his dolls to movies since 2003. Sometimes the job is small—he used a mere 1,500 dummies in the opening scene of The King’s Speech. But to make a stadium come to life in Flags of Our Fathers, Biggins filled the seats with 5,000 inflatables, then interspersed about 750 real people to provide a little natural motion. He keeps a Gardena warehouse stocked with some 30,000 dolls, 27,000 masks, and thousands of wigs and costumes to suit any time period. Packing for a big shoot can take a week (he has to brush all the hair and iron all the clothes), and it takes a six-person crew 10 hours to get 1,000 of the airheads into their seats. “Ten grueling, horrible, repetitive hours,” Biggins laughs. “It’s the most tedious career I could have possibly picked.” Maybe he’s just not a people person.