If you need to hire a crowd

Click any image to enlarge

I found the above image at Ubersuper. It is a crowd of inflatable people that's been hired to fill the bleachers for a movie. They're also used for television shows and commercials. They'll dress them up and put different wigs and hats on them so they don't draw attention as they sit in the background.

There are two main companies that rent out crowds: The Inflatable Crowd Company and Crowd in a Box. Sadly neither site had prices shown. I wonder what a crowd costs these days? By the way, both websites have galleries of more pictures.

Reading about the fake crowds for rent brought to mind Krugman's televised speech at the latest Netroots. As you can see in the picture below (via Gateway Pundit), nobody seems to have attended it. Poor Krugman, if the Netrooters were all going skip his speech the least they could have done is chip in and rent an inflatable crowd to watch his talk.