It’s just not every day that someone stops you on your way to breakfast and says, “Hey, you should be in a movie.”

Except, of course, if you are in the capital of India’s film scene, Mumbai.

On those streets, scraggly tourists freshly sun-kissed from their beach vacation in southern India get asked — practically begged — to work as extras in the largest film industry in the world, Bollywood.

Foreigners are in regular demand to walk in the background of the roughly 800 Bollywood blockbusters churned out each year. Hollywood punches in around 200.

Tourists passing through Mumbai often have fame-as-extras thrust upon them unsuspectingly, and with only a vague notion of the world they are about to enter.

While living in New Delhi, however, some Indian friends had indoctrinated me in all things Bolly. These friends — intelligent, hard working and seemingly non-frivolous adults — turn into adolescent teenyboppers every time a new film opens. They gab about the songs, the wardrobes and start practicing the dance moves. And that’s just the men.

Needless to say, I quickly became consumed by the epic-like, three-hour flicks. I am not entirely sure if I’m laughing with the movies and the outrageous plot lines or at them, but the entertainment value of the perfectly orchestrated fantasy can’t be denied. The fact that I can’t understand the language, I think, helps in this case.

So three friends and I set out on a weekend quest to uncover the one religion in India that encourages its followers to indulge in fantasy. We decided to go get famous as Bollywood extras.

*

When we arrive in Mumbai Friday night, we realize that compared to the rest of India, Mumbai is a fantasy world in and of itself. Sure it’s a city where about half its 12 million residents live in slums, and it’s easier to smell the burning trash along the coast on Marine Drive than the salty ocean air of the water, but the modern, clean domestic airport where we land is enough to give us a “Dorothy in Munchkin Land” sensation.

“Lauren, we’re not in India anymore,” my friend Valerie tells me.

On the drive to our hotel we take in the palm trees lining the wide and well paved avenues, and our jaws drop as we pass rows of hip restaurants and nightclubs that could be in New York, London or Paris. It’s a metropolis with a vibe all it’s own and the poshly dressed residents strutting down the street know it.

Rural Indians, some who’ve never seen a computer before, come here with hopes of making a better living; starlets come with hopes of fame; businessmen and women with hopes of profit. Like my own New York, Mumbai is a city of dreamers and go-getters. It’s crowded, rough, dirty and simply fantastic.

*

Saturday morning we wake and decide our plans to go get discovered can wait until after breakfast. We needed fuel, we thought, before we could begin our plan to hit up the big movie companies. Apparently, our star power was too strong. Barely ten paces from our hotel, a Mumbai man sporting a tracksuit stops us.

“Hi girls, I’m from Bollywood. Do you want to be in a movie?” he asks.

I love this city.

This is the first time someone on the street in India actually offers me something I want, and frankly, I’m confused by the sensation. My gut tells me to go into haggle mode and we feign mild interest as he gives us the pitch.

Imran, “the agent,” tells us he needs 50 foreigners for a film shoot tomorrow at 7 a.m. We will get free transportation, breakfast, lunch and a chance to hang out in one of Mumbai’s nicest five star hotels. Then he throws in what he thinks will be the major selling point. Imran tells us that the studly Jesse Metcalfe from the TV series Desperate Housewives will be there. He will play the male lead in the Bollywood-Hollywood production they are shooting called The Other End of The Line. It’s a romantic comedy based around a call center scenario — something American and Indian audiences can relate to. The film is set to open in the USA this year (2008).

Valerie, Cecily and I all give blank stares. None of us watch Desperate Housewives.

Jesse who?

No Shahrukh Khan? (A 40-year-old male lead with the goofiest face and yet perfect six pack abs.) No Aishwarya Rai? (A former Miss World who consistently pulls in large audiences.) While Jesse may be a nice piece of eye candy, Bollywood stars are Gods. They are adored on levels beyond healthy perhaps, but idolized nonetheless for the fairytale they live on — and off — screen.

Aishwarya is the beautiful Bolly-princess who married the handsome Bolly-prince Abhishek Bachan, son of Bolly-king Amitabh Bachan. Much like Robert Redford, Amitabh became famous for his movies around the 1970’s; he is still considered quite the looker for a man his age. Shahrukh is the Bolly-lord who, with the success of several major movies this year, is being groomed to replace Amitabh as king one day.

Now in the movies, they play roles that bring viewers into a world where women move in their saris with seamless grace, men dance and lip-sync just as much as women, and where the only traffic in the streets are the backup dancers. Don’t forget the perfectly timed sunset. In the end, good always triumphs and the guy always gets the girl in the last dance. There’s rarely a kiss, but always something for every audience member — literate, or illiterate, rural or worldly.

Excessive escapism has always been at the heart of Bollywood flicks, which debuted in the 1930’s against the back drop of World War II — a war many Indian soldiers served in on behalf of the British Raj — and a global economic depression. The films grew exponentially more popular during the violence of the country’s partition in the late 1940’s and remain so today. The family-centric romantic musicals pulled in about$1.5 billion in 2006.

Indian audiences may be increasingly exposed to Western culture and receptive to Bolly-Holly productions, but for the most part of the one billion population, Hollywood fantasy and the loose morals those films portray, are just ridiculous, if not scandalous in the eyes of Indian moviegoers. The Other End of the Line will likely be more popular in the USA and Great Britain, than in India.

With two thirds of the Indian population living on $2 a day or less, Bollywood movies are a chance to revel in a perfect India where daily tensions between tradition, diversity and modernity cease for a moment. Like Indian celebrations, use of spices in food, and interior decorating, Bollywood films are over the top on purpose and it’s not just schoolgirls who swoon and flock to the movies in droves.

A middle-aged rickshaw driver who matched my broken Hindi with his broken English told me once he thought Bollywood was better than cricket. A relatively bold comment considering cricket is the sport of national pride. The Indian national team won the World Championship in 1983 and has been a competitive opponent ever since.

“I don’t like cricket,” he said. “Cricket, too much tension. Bollywood, no tension.”

*

I am, just this once, a little disappointed by this Hollywood development and ask Imran if there will be any Bolly-dancing . He laughs nervously and tells me no. He adds quickly that the female lead will be played by the famous Shreya Saran, from Tollywood, the film industry in the south Indian state Tamil Nadu.

Now this we can get excited about. We think it over and after no other options to get on a set that weekend emerge, we tell Imran we’re in.

Sunday morning we join a bus full of 20-somethings. Most of them are tourists dressed in their newly acquired hippie gear from Goa and other hot spot, south Indian destinations. Unkempt hair is de rigueur, and slouchy bags that hang past their butts are a dime a dozen.

There are two from the Ukraine, several Australians, a couple of Canadians, French, Israelis, British, and a handful of Americans.

About one hour later we are dropped off in a ritzy, north Mumbai neighborhood. It could’ve been any neighborhood in California. Turns out, that was the point. On this day, for this film, the neighborhood was serving as the background for several scenes set in San Francisco.

A crowd of Indian fans had gathered outside the set when we are asked to step off the bus. They are likely rickshaw drivers, housekeepers, cooks, and others working in the area who stopped hoping to get a glance of the filming and a famous star. They are interested by our presence — fair skinned foreigners generally get a lot of attention around the sub-continent — but this group seems more curious to know who is in the movie. A little girl keeps shouting Shahrukh Khan’s name when I walk pass. I tell her “Nahi Sharukh.” No Sharukh . She shrugs in resignation and looks over my shoulder to watch the action anyway.

We, the extras, are shuttled into the back of the high-rise complex where more than a dozen trunks of clothes sit. Stagehands begin flinging “costumes” at us and the traveling hippies transform before my eyes.

I practically do a double take when the petite Israeli girl who had perfected the art of mismatching outrageous colors puts on a prim, baby blue dress and becomes a proper young lady. Same goes for the French guy who puts on a suit and becomes a bellboy. The image is perfect except that upon further inspection the name tag on his jacket says “Barbie”.

“I think it adds a personal touch,” he says with a smile.

My friends Cecily and Josh get grabbed for their not-so-close-up roles immediately. They are directed to walk past the beautiful Shreya in a scene where her heel breaks as she walks into a hotel. Apparently she’s having a hard time trying to find the American guy (Metcalfe) who’s she’s fallen in love with over many a phone conversation while working at a call center in India.

Valerie and I wait around with the rest of the extras while the assistant directors try to figure out where they need us. There is awkwardness reminiscent of grade school gym class where you just hope you’re not the last one picked. Ultimately, we are all brought to the set to serve as moving background outside the hotel.

Several takes later the scene is shot and Shreya disappears into her dressing room. Next is an office scene with Jesse Metcalfe. Cecily and I are dressed as office employees – wearing the exact same shirt. We are plopped behind the actors who stage an argument, but we are right in front of the camera’s line of sight. We’re supposed to be deep in conversation, but if you see two girls laughing uncontrollably in the background during such a scene, that would be us. Clearly we have careers in show biz.

All in all, three scenes are shot in one 12-hour day producing perhaps 10 minutes of film time. Our careers in Bollywood had ended, and so had the fantasy.

I am not sure I came any closer to understanding the undeniable pull these movies have on nearly four billion people worldwide, but a casting director tells me I may never understand.

“Bollywood is a very demanding lover,” she says. “ How can you explain why you love something? You just do.”