The photoplay or the pickaxe: extras, gender, and labour in early Hollywood
Author(s): Denise McKenna
Source: Film History, Vol. 23, No. 1, Art, Industry, Technology (January 2011), pp. 5-19
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/filmhistory.23.1.5 .
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Film History, Volume 23, pp. 5–19, 2011. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing
ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America
The photoplay or the
pickaxe: extras, gender,
and labour in early
Hollywood
The photoplay or the pickaxe: extras, gender, and labour in early Hollywood
Denise McKenna
W
hen he published his history of the unionization of Hollywood in 1941, Murray Ross
was struck by the “general belief that extra
work is a feminine occupation”, despite the
greater number of men working as extras.1 The identification of women with extra work traces back to the
early years of the film industry, with the “extra girl”
emerging as a distinct type in the 1910s. Public
fascination with the young women who sought fame
and fortune in motion pictures resonated with the
studio system’s growing reputation as a fantastical
space that transformed dreams into reality. At the
same time, the intense interest in the extra girl could
raise awkward questions about studio culture and
screen labour: What happened to these young
women in their quixotic quest for fame? How were
they treated in the studios? And what happened if
they failed? A powerful combination of prurient speculation and social anxiety greeted the apparent onslaught of movie-struck girls who descended on Los
Angeles in ever-increasing numbers.
But the lure of motion picture work was never
limited to women. Extra work’s appeal to men and
women from all walks of life was often celebrated in
early accounts of the film industry in Los Angeles,
and by the 1920s many more men worked as extras
than women. Citing data from the Central Casting
Bureau, Ross notes that between 1926 and 1941 the
number of men employed as extras was nearly double the number of women.2 While there is no corresponding source of data for the 1910s, a snippet of
information from Mack Sennett’s payroll sheet shows
that twice as many men as women were employed
by Keystone over a three month period in 1917.3
Despite evidence that film work attracted men in
great numbers, the male extra has been overshadowed by the image of young women thronging the
studio gates for a chance to break into the movies.
The ascendance of the extra girl was made
possible by several factors: the developing connection between the motion picture and its female audience; public interest in the plight of working women;
gendered associations with non-skilled labour; and
recurring scandals that situated the female extra at
the heart of decadent studio practices. Shelley
Stamp suggests that the intense focus on the wouldbe actresses arriving in Los Angeles revealed deep
anxieties about women’s economic and sexual independence during the 1910s, and at the same time
obscured the substantive contributions that women
made to the film industry in many different areas.4
The fantasy of a process by which anyone
could break into the hierarchy of silent screen acting
was fostered by the necessary anonymity of the
on-screen extra, whose main purpose was to provide
background for a scene. The promise of fame underscored the success stories of famous film stars who
began their careers as extras, undermining the cautionary tales that warned of the perils of motion
Denise McKenna received her doctorate from the
Cinema Studies Department at New York University
and currently teaches at the University of California,
San Diego. Her dissertation is called The City That
Made the Pictures Move: Gender, Labor, and the Film
Industry in Los Angeles, 1908–1917.
Email: [email protected]
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 5
6 FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011)
Denise McKenna
picture work.5 These tales were most often directed
at women, and were often couched as warnings to
the movie-struck girl that the on-screen fantasy did
not necessarily translate to real life. Yet these warnings about the film industry existed in tension with a
wealth of material that celebrated the growing film
world.6 As Stamp has argued, appealing to women
was central to the film industry’s drive for cultural
legitimacy during this period – although expanding
female patronage posed certain challenges and exposed a contradictory understanding of femininity.
For instance, attempts to lure the movie-struck girl
into the theater in order to bolster cinema’s social and
economic standing often had less to do with moral
uplift then with the appeal of adventure serials, “white
slave” films, and other subject matter not considered
traditionally “ladylike”.7 In addition to courting a female audience in the theater, women were often the
primary focus of attention in stories about the film
industry, which ranged from the latest scandals and
behind-the-scenes exposés to more sedate topics
such as skin-care and fashion advice. This rich and
wide-ranging discursive field consistently reinforced
the association of women with the motion picture.
Like the movie-struck girl, the extra girl literalized the
association between the motion pictures and an
expanding female fan base, but the extra girl narrative takes her to the studio gates. Both “girls” were
bound up with an emerging mythology of moviemaking’s powerful appeal to women; but while the moviestruck girl was a national phenomenon, the extra girl
was a character produced in and by the emerging
studio system in Los Angeles.
Movie madness and the popularity
of extra work
By the mid-teens, the extra girl was already established as a type – a character inspired by her love of
movies, her confidence that she is as pretty as Mary
Pickford, or the desire for an easy life – who travels
to Los Angeles to break into motion pictures. After
her arrival, however, the extra girl narrative moved in
a more sinister direction. Local newspapers detailed
charges against directors and managers who took
advantage of screen hopefuls, recasting the extra girl
as the latest incarnation of the fallen woman.8
At the end of the decade, Grace Kingsley,
entertainment staff writer for the Los Angeles Times
and early observer of the film industry in Los Angeles,
offered an antidote to the negative associations between women and extra work in a series of articles
that followed the behind-the-scenes adventures of
“Ella, the Extra Girl”.9 Reportedly based on real interviews, Kingsley’s series offered a glimpse into the
everyday life of the studio – on the one hand deflating
the spectacle of studio life with Ella’s homespun
wisdom and on the other reinforcing the variety and
glamour of film work. As a character, Ella plays
against the extra girl type; she is respectably married
and down-to-earth, enjoys her work as an extra, and
is successful because she is realistic about studio
life. Most importantly, she consistently downplays
any desire to be “discovered”, one of the central
tropes of the contemporary extra girl narrative. Although she moves up through the ranks of extras,
Ella’s sense of achievement is more profoundly tied
to her husband’s successful transition from deliveryman to working actor.
These “interviews” with Ella reinforce the connection between extra work and women’s work. At
the same time, they rewrite the image of the delusional and transient extra girl into a character who
reconciles domestic responsibilities with a satisfying
work life. However, the salacious association between women and screen work was dramatically
highlighted in the early 1920s, most famously in the
scandal surrounding “Fatty” Arbuckle’s trial for the
death of Virginia Rappe, an actress and model
whose fate became a cautionary tale for the moral
hazards of working in Hollywood. Heidi Kenaga
traces the impact the Arbuckle scandal had on the
treatment of female extras through the expansion of
the Hollywood Studio Club and the organization of
the Central Casting Bureau, established to alleviate
the exploitation of extras. Earlier efforts to address
the problems associated with female extras had
been more haphazard. The Hollywood Studio Club
opened in 1916 as a resource for women arriving in
Los Angeles looking to break into the movies. But as
Kenaga argues, expanding the Hollywood Studio
Club in the mid 1920s provided more than just a
“redemptive space” for the women it housed; it was
another attempt to transform the image of the exploited extra girl into a respectable “studio girl”. More
importantly, updating the Studio Club helped the
industry retool its own image into that of a “benevolent” employer.10
The shift of the motion picture industry to Los
Angeles in the early 1910s, and the growth of permanent studios in the area, coincided with the public’s
increasing fascination with all things film-related, giving the city and the film industry a joint interest in
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 6
The photoplay or the pickaxe: extras, gender, and labour in early Hollywood
FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011) 7
Fig. 1.
Lasky Studio
“Engagement
Dept” registration
card for “Adrian
Hope”,
supposedly used
by an undercover
reporter
researching a
series of articles
on Hollywood
extra work.
From H.
Sheridan-Bickers,
“Extra Ladies and
Gentlemen”,
Motion Picture
Magazine
(August 1917):
92.
making studio life appear respectable and transparent. The public’s understanding of the film extra
consolidated around the figure of a hopeful young
woman, with attention focusing primarily on the sexual economy of the growing studio system. The stars,
the directors, and even the films themselves may
have gained social standing as the decade progressed, but the extra girl eluded respectability.
Local newspapers and magazines provide
some insight into the way that film work was characterized and how attitudes towards such work
changed during the 1910s. For instance, in 1911 per
diem film work was seen as a benefit to actors who
were tired of stage life and wanted to settle down
permanently to live healthier and easier lives in California. Aside from the physical benefits, these performers were reportedly very well paid at a rate of $3
a day (plus lunch), with the possibility of $5 if they
received a minor role.11 Such generous pay could be
seen as a deliberate lure to entice actors to leave the
relative security of the theatrical hub of New York and
risk the trip to Los Angeles. The growing presence of
actors and extras in Los Angeles proved to be both
a source of concern and celebration in a city caught
between maintaining its association with its romanticized Hispanic past and cultivating a more modern
identity. Actors and extras became part of the city’s
colorful backdrop in booster newspapers and jour-
nals, such as the Los Angeles Times and Sunset
Magazine, which boasted about the film industry as
another tourist attraction in Southern California.12
Amazed by the sweeping appeal of motion
pictures, Grace Kingsley observed in 1914 that
“movie madness” drew extra applicants from the
“very air and earth”, and not just the pool of resting
stage veterans. Even more remarkable to Kingsley
than the numbers of people looking for extra work
were the types of people applying to the studios:
There is one wealthy old man who insists he
could be the greatest moving picture character
man in the business if they’d give him a
chance; wealthy society women come in their
limousines and leave their names, and sometimes they are hired for the sake of their
clothes; bank clerks, law students, stenographers, doctors, ‘everybody’s doin’ it.” Then
there are the freaks, dwarfs, hunchbacks,
every sort of deformed person, willing to trade
on their misfortunes this way. There are a great
many professional people of the stage who
come from the East for their health [and] a
minister and a teacher, both of whom have
worked in the Lasky pictures because of their
truth to type.13
Kingsley’s somewhat bemused attitude to-
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 7
8 FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011)
Denise McKenna
ward movie applicants reveals a certain discomfort
with cinema’s democratic appeal, although it is still
more generous than other accounts of film’s phenomenal appeal. Indeed, Kingsley produced her list
of “unbelievable” applicants to counter the prevailing
assumption that only “bums” and “lazy people” were
drawn to the film industry. The idea that extra work
paid $3 a day, which had circulated in early reports
designed to appeal to theater actors as well as foster
the economic respectability of film work in Los Angeles, had been established in relation to stock players
with theatrical training. However, it was common
practice from the earliest days of production in Los
Angeles to pull “types” off the street for use as
background characters. Lining up at the studio gates
for a position, although slightly more systematic, still
affirmed the happenstance nature of the selection
process based on appearance, and no doubt
shaped the perception that extra work was not only
a side-job for actors but also a legitimate entry point
for aspiring novices.
Extra work’s appeal to the masses inspired
occasional quasi-anthropological explorations into
Los Angeles’s ever-expanding film factories. In 1913,
an article in the Los Angeles Times described the
mixed crowd of day workers that appeared every day
outside the studio gates. The applicants were sorted
into categories that ranged from ambitious, careerminded young men to working class refugees, and
from failed chorus girls to the down-and-out. While
acknowledging that different “types” had a certain
screen use-value and intimating that extra work drew
numerous applicants from the working classes, the
article also suggests that the qualities of the applicants can be more subtly defined by gender. Serious
young men who are humble enough to start at the
bottom as “Roman soldiers” are characterized as
professional and allowed a reasonable chance for
success. Former “chorus girls” with only a few weeks
experience, however, who “think they should be able
to step into motion pictures and play leads from the
start”, are criticized for over-inflated ambition.14 Singling out former chorus girls also marks female applicants in a sexualized way. As the cultural prototype
of the “gold digger”, chorus girls were associated
with avaricious licentiousness and hedonism. Even
more damning to the chorus girl’s reputation were
the prostitutes who worked the streets around the
theater district in New York and who often claimed to
be unemployed chorus girls. Already morally suspect for trading on their youth and beauty, their
association with sexual display on stage and the
imagined excesses of their lives offstage combined
to create a figure that was both an erotic object and
social problem.15 The notion that former chorus girls
were lining up at the studio gates aligned other
female applicants with the most socially disreputable
members of the theatrical world. By way of contrast,
those young men who found positions in the studio
as “Roman soldiers” were not only classified as more
than mere “spear bearers” (theatrical nomenclature
for extras) but also aligned with more dignified historical traditions than those associated with the chorus girl.
At the same time that local newspapers were
making sense out of studio culture and the growing
ranks of film workers in Los Angeles, “How to Make
It” articles emerged as a distinct genre in entertainment reporting.16 The Motion Picture Story Magazine
ran a regular interview column called “Chats with
Players” in the mid-teens, and later added the regular
feature “How I Became a Photoplayer.” Not only
satisfying the public’s interest in the stars’ personalities and lifestyles, but also mapping various trajectories for success, suggestions for “how to make it”
were as varied as the publications that printed them.
While the focus tended to be on women, male stars
and their success stories were popular subjects as
well. In such interviews actors often emphasized their
training and commitment to hard work, and being an
extra often figured as a direct path from anonymity to
fame for men and women alike. Although most of
these interviews stressed the players’ professional
stage background, occasionally they related the
happenstance manner of their start in motion pictures. In these cases the actor’s “discovery” often
depended on how well their appearance conformed
to a type, or to the possession of a certain skill, like
the ability to ride a horse. Wallace Reid, for instance,
credited his career to “curiosity and an ability to
swim”.17
Numerous cartoons poked fun at what was
really required of Photoplayers – not talent, but a
fearless disregard for personal safety. In an article
with the promising title, “How Famous Film Stars
Have Been Discovered”, Grace Kingsley claimed
that such popular players as Mae Marsh, Mary Pickford, Arthur Johnson, Henry Walthall, Owen Moore,
Florence Lawrence, Barry O’Neil and the Gish sisters
all first appeared as extras.18 Details about how individual stars started may have been somewhat idiosyncratic, but one theme that emerged in the “how
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 8
The photoplay or the pickaxe: extras, gender, and labour in early Hollywood
FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011) 9
to make it” articles was the importance of working
under a director who is able to “discover” the extra’s
“undreamed of talents”.
This discovery narrative, while not excluding
male aspirants, connected more profoundly with the
extra girl because it echoed the already popular myth
of Pygmalion and Galatea, retold in numerous forms
throughout the nineteenth century.19 Although the
Pygmalion myth’s narrative structure was reworked
and reformulated, what remained constant was the
trope of discovery in which a man with vision transforms a young woman into something more beautiful, more talented, or more desirable than she was
before.20 One of the last nineteenth century incarnations of this narrative was George du Maurier’s wildly
popular 1894 novel Trilby, in which artist’s model
Trilby O’Farrell is discovered by the evil mesmerist
Svengali, and under his spell becomes a theatrical
sensation.21 As a precursor to the extra girl phenomenon, Trilby established the narrative parameters for
the public’s understanding of female performers
whose success was the product of their manager’s
(or director’s) talent and vision.22 By the teens, the
discovery narrative invoked in both Pygmalion and
Trilby was an already gendered trope, one that was
reanimated in the stories of extras who became
motion picture stars. Beyond offering a cultural
touchstone for describing the artistic process, the
discovery narrative also provided a framework for
understanding the phenomenon of young women
leaving home to look for work in motion pictures.23
Like Galatea molded out of stone or the pliant Trilby,
the extra girl was a character defined by her relationship to the creative forces that were forging the film
industry, and emerged as a seductive reminder of
the power of motion pictures to pull talent out of an
anonymous crowd and give it a name.
Wages, women, and the working
class
Waiting – to get a job, to begin a scene, or simply to
be discovered – was one of the defining characteristics of extra work and fueled the popular impression that extra work was easy. This ease was
confirmed by the very name “extra”, which replaced
the theatrical terminology of “supernumerary” or
“spear bearer”, and which associated extra work with
the superfluous or unnecessary. Anecdotal evidence
based on the types of stories that circulated in newspapers and magazines suggests that young women
sensed the possibility of an easier life working in
motion pictures; however, there is evidence that men
also preferred screen work to manual labour. In 1915,
Los Angeles’s Municipal Employment Bureau reported that out of 700 men who applied for a job, only
thirty-two stated a preference for steady work while
the rest preferred the occasional spot with a motion
picture company.24 The Employment Bureau had
been established at the end of 1913 to help the city
cope with a rising unemployment crisis brought on
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 9
Fig. 2. “How to
Become a
Photoplayer”,
Motion Picture
Story Magazine
(May 1913): 116.
10 FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011)
Fig. 3. Dressing
rooms for extras
at the Fox studio.
From H.
Sheridan-Bickers,
“Extra Ladies and
Gentlemen”,
Motion Picture
Magazine
(August 1917):
96.
Denise McKenna
by a nationwide recession.25 The Employment Bureau was also supposed to help with recurring peaks
in seasonal unemployment, a feature of California’s
economy where agricultural and fishing industries
usually laid off employees over the winter months.
Displaced workers would often migrate to cities looking for temporary employment, but over the winter of
1913–14 California was hit unusually hard. In Los
Angeles, estimates as to how many people were
unemployed varied widely, depending on the
source: the labour friendly Citizen claimed that unemployment was at 15,000 in August, while the more
sensational Record suggested that 20,000 men and
10,000 women were seeking work. By the end of
1914, the Central Labor Council (CLC) asserted that
35,000 were unemployed, although the perennially
conservative Los Angeles Times maintained that only
about 3000 men with families were in difficulty and
that another 2,000 were the usual winter unemployed.26
As part of their free job placement service, in
1915 the Employment Bureau took orders from local
motion picture managers for “mobs”. Each man was
paid $1 a day, plus dinner and transport expenses.27
Some of these men may have been supplied from
one of the work camps established throughout the
city to cope with the influx of unemployed men.
Seasonal transients in particular may have been attracted by the benefits of wages rather than the barter
system of labour for goods offered by the city. Compared to city beautification projects, which required
planting trees or breaking rocks for road work – jobs
routinely assigned to unemployed men – the appeal
of working as a film extra was understandable even
at only $1 a day. Such a wage, however, did not meet
subsistence standards according to the CLC, which
had been established by the City Council in 1913 to
investigate labour conditions in Los Angeles. Based
on their own research, the CLC set the subsistence
wage at $2 a day; $4 a day for a “breadwinner” with
one dependent. The CLC found that the lowest
wages were earned in canneries, laundries, department stores, clothing factories, dry goods stores,
and restaurants, although jobs identified with women
were the poorest paying. The CLC reported that 70%
of laundry workers and 64% of department store
employees made less than $2 a day.28 Experienced
sales women could expect to make $8 a week (for a
6 day/8 hour a day work week), while clerks made as
little as $5 a week.29 There were male dominated
occupations that were also as poorly paid. In 1910,
drivers for local breweries made only $3 a week, while
the many Mexicans who worked on street railways
could expect to make only $1 a day. Upholsterers
and carpenters were amongst the poorest paid
skilled labourers and made around $3.50 a day,
although this was still a better wage than found in dry
goods and department stores.30 For many workers
already living precariously at or below subsistence
standards, work as a film extra may have appeared
as a reasonable option, a legitimate alternative to
much more physically demanding occupations.
Even a dollar per day could make the difference for
many workers who needed to supplement their
wages between regular periods of employment.
There were, however, strings attached to find-
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 10
The photoplay or the pickaxe: extras, gender, and labour in early Hollywood
ing film extra work through the Employment Bureau.
If the applicant stated his preference for motion picture work over “steady jobs, which include real labour”, he was kept on the rolls for only that kind of
employment.31 The Employment Bureau’s punitive
reduction in options was designed to dissuade “able
bodied men [from] rejecting legitimate labour”, relegating film work to the margins of acceptable work
for men. This attempt to direct the applicant’s options
did not seem to have any effect, and movie work was
so popular that no jobs were cancelled in 1916.32 If
some commentators were uncomfortable with “extra
girls” who fantasized about becoming stars, they
were equally flummoxed by working-class men who
preferred extra work to more “legitimate” occupations. Ambivalence toward extra work can be traced
in responses to extra work’s appeal to the working
classes, and between 1911 and 1916 extra work’s
reputation shifted considerably. Compared to the
young men whose desire to work as Roman soldiers
was an acceptable start to a career, the men from
the Employment Bureau were seen as “idle”, and so
anxious and unruly that they “crowd and jostle” for
only a day or two of work.33 These working-class men
are not characterized as looking for a career but for
an easy break from “legitimate” or real work, suggesting how class-based bias shaped attitudes toward extras, and film work in general. Their interest
in extra work was disdainfully attributed to a “histrionic” streak, effectively feminizing these men
through an association with hysteria, while mocking
references to their desire to be “stars” equates men
from the Employment Bureau with the delusional
aspirations of extra girls who dreamed of an easier
life.34
Extra work, because of its heterogeneous appeal and the practical need to cast both men and
women, effectively collapsed the gendered division
of labour that most often clearly defined other occupations. Despite the numbers of men who worked as
extras, as a type of labour it was more evocatively
linked with women through the movie-struck girl who
dreamed of being discovered, but also because of
the nature of extra work, which required no special
training and was most often temporary. The notion
that women only worked on a temporary basis until
they got married and had children had long informed
the way women’s work was perceived, profoundly
impacting workplace attitudes towards “female” occupations that justified relegating women to positions that were temporary or easily replaceable.35 The
FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011) 11
transience of extra work for men and women alike
was already linked to the impermanence that characterized women’s labour in general.
The connection between extra work and
women was further reinforced by the material practicalities of dealing with the unaccustomed influx of
single women in Los Angeles looking for work at the
studios. Unlike other major cities, Los Angeles had
not historically appealed to female job seekers and
only in the 1910s did women newcomers finally outnumber men.36 Shifting demographics heightened
local tensions over the problem of single women in
the city, which often focused on the rapidly expanding film studios where women were employed in
great numbers and in many different capacities. Concern over the treatment of women working in the
studios spiked in the wake of a scandal over immoral
hiring practices, and local clergy called for an investigation into the treatment of female employees. In
response, film studio representatives such as Jesse
Lasky, David Horsley and D.W. Griffith reached out
to local officials and business groups, and also publicized their efforts to protect women working as
extras.37 Griffith’s studio was opened up to local
investigators who praised the “morally perfect” conditions they found under Griffith’s leadership and the
motherly supervision of a house chaperon.38 But
filmmakers did not rely on snippets of good publicity;
the industry and the city forged an alliance through
the Los Angeles Police Department when women
working in various studios were appointed as City
Mothers.39 As representatives of the City Mother’s
Bureau, women were tasked with supervising female
extras working in the studios, intercepting missing
girls, and with interviewing prospective employees to
make sure they had adequate funds and resources
to live in Los Angeles. Like the Studio Club, which
was founded around the same time to provide housing and services to women working in the studios,
the film industry’s affiliation with the City Mother’s
Bureau was rationalized as an attempt to prevent
delinquency and to guide young women through the
perils of urban life.40
A former extra, Lucile Brown, who had become
a casting agent or “type expert”, was appointed as a
City Mother in early 1916, complete with an official
badge and blue uniform. Dubbed the “monarchette”
of the Reliance lot, Brown was put in charge of all
things “feminine” in the studio, including sixty
“steady” girls and four hundred extras.41 The studios
quickly found a more effective way to publicize their
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 11
12 FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011)
Denise McKenna
Fig. 4. Mrs.
Lucile Brown,
“through whom
applications are
made for film
assignments at
Reliance studio.”
Los Angeles
Tribune (30
January 1916).
same time it situated working women at the center of
debates over the studios’ employment practices.44
Such connections materially reinforced the notion
that women working in the studios were a problem to
be solved and regulated, and further bolstered the
associations between extra work and female applicants.
The extra underclass
good citizenship, however, and a few months later
Paramount star Anita King was appointed as a City
Mother. Professionally, King had already demonstrated her abilities as an emissary for the industry
on her well-publicized adventures, driving crosscountry alone to promote Paramount Pictures.42 King
was assigned to work in a special capacity under the
director of the City Mother’s program, Aletha Gilbert,
and made numerous official appearances offering
cautionary tales about the hardships of film work.43
King’s new-found moral authority and her high-profile appointment glamorized the alignment of the film
industry, civic leaders, and local reformers at the
Studio scandal and the use of stars as City Mothers
spectacularized the “femininity” of extra work, but the
extra also assumed a female face during the 1910s
through associations with unskilled labour, transience, and low wages, all of which were historical
hallmarks of women’s labour. Although extra work
was humorously lauded for remunerating “colorful
types”, or those with disabilities and distinctive appearances, for the working-class aspirant – either
male or female – extra work was often described as
an escape from real work. In these instances, extra
work appeared as an illicit refuge from the type of
physically demanding labour that otherwise defined
the working-classes. In addition to being understood
in relation to extra work’s logic of impermanence,
male and female extras were increasingly bound
together by a common discourse that linked extra
work with idleness and disrepute. As Lawrence Glickman points out, the ideology of working class manhood depended on the “related virtues of physical
strength and moral responsibility”, particularly the
ability to function as a provider.45 Offering wages
below subsistence level, extra work could not be
considered adequate for a responsible family man.
Wage labour posed different problems for workingclass women. The fact that extra women were paid
for their labour set them on a parallel trajectory with
the prostitute, a link that was reaffirmed in stories that
exposed the suspect sexual economy of studio life.46
Indeed, the perception that extra work was a morally
questionable occupation for women only strengthened the gendered associations that defined extra
labour as “feminine” and increasingly obscured the
presence and participation of male extras. And as an
occupation, the passivity and ease of extra work
contradicted the expression of physicality and responsibility that defined working class masculinity,
explaining the contemptuous suspicion toward unemployed men who preferred the photoplay to the
pickaxe.
Despite the industry’s assiduous attempts to
court middle-class respectability during the teens,
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 12
The photoplay or the pickaxe: extras, gender, and labour in early Hollywood
filmmakers had a lot to gain from extra work’s wide
appeal and its accessibility to working-class applicants.47 When Los Angeles began block-booking
extras for mob scenes through the Municipal Employment Bureau, it effectively turned the city into a
middle-man for the film industry at the same time it
provided some economic relief to both the unemployed and the city itself. In sending men out for
“snaps” (off-season theater work), the Employment
Bureau institutionalized extra work as a form of unemployment relief and further fostered a relationship
between film companies and the city. The Bureau
may also have contributed to keeping studio wages
in check. Trade Unionists in Los Angeles complained
that the Bureau sent men into jobs without notifying
them that they were replacing striking workers, a
practice which may have had serious ramifications
for extras attempting to organize.48 Labour leaders
also argued that local boosters assiduously courted
new industries, residents, and workers not just to
improve the economy but as a means to control the
local workforce.49 Drawing a constant surplus of
workers to the city kept costs down by depressing
wages, which made Los Angeles a desirable location
for employers, and was a business practice that also
benefited the film industry.
Reports in Variety suggest that the overall labour condition in California had a negative impact on
stock players who came to Los Angeles looking for
employment during the theatrical off-season. In early
1915, it reported that there were “too many extras” in
Los Angeles, and that there were more “picture supernumeraries” looking for work than at any other
time.50 Anyone considering a move West was warned
to “stay away from the Coast” as there were more
applicants than positions and “hundreds of picture
people” were already out of work.51 The $3 day once
promised to theater actors willing to travel to Los
Angeles was no longer guaranteed, undermined by
the availability of cheap labour in Los Angeles. For
theater actors looking for snaps over the winter of
1915 and 1916, two problems converged: the Municipal Employment Bureau using extra work to take
the unemployed off its roles, and the increasing
acceptance, even desirability, of movie work. While
problems for regular stock players looking for extra
work were compounded by the larger unemployment
problems in Los Angeles, the influx of applicants for
film work benefitted the film industry during a period
of rapid growth and institutional upheaval.52
As movie making became big business, differ-
FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011) 13
ent strategies emerged for coping with both production costs and the burgeoning number of people
involved in making feature length films. Organizing
and controlling the crew, cast, writers, and directors
rationalized film production and created areas of
specialization and institutional hierarchies that impacted hiring practices and wages as well as how
movies were filmed. As Janet Staiger observes, one
of the first means of controlling the variables in industrial production was through the regulation of employment.53 This need for control was dramatized by
Mary Pickford’s contract negotiations with Famous
Players in 1915, which gave her $2,000 a week for
ten pictures a year and half the profits from her
productions. The following year, after a season of
increasing salaries for stage stars lured to the film
world, Pickford renegotiated her contract and her
weekly rate was raised to $7,000.54 While stars were
demonstrating their importance to the film industry
with demands for ever-increasing salaries, the studio
system became rationalized according to gendered
hierarchies of skill and salary. Those at the bottom,
the stock players and extras, were plentiful and replaceable. So while producers were fighting a battle
with stars and their salaries in the 1910s, the constant
influx of excess labour and the absence of strong
union organizations in Los Angeles put film companies in a position to dictate the terms of pay for just
about every other position within the studio.
Although film studios had rapidly expanded
control over their workforce, there were moments of
protest from the studio’s underclass. Sporadic attempts to organize resulted in occasional work stoppages but had little long-term impact. For extras,
whose very status was defined by their anonymity
and interchangeability, the ability to negotiate was
almost non-existent.55 Reports in the Los Angeles
Times linked extra agitation with the disruptive influence of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a
particularly feared labour organization. The IWW had
been blamed for the Wheatland Hop Riot near Sacramento in 1913 and its members were often portrayed as violent and destructive agitators.56 The
IWW’s connection with the film industry began as
early as 1914, when members of the IWW tried to
organize extras at Universal, demanding a pay raise
from $1 to $2 or $3 a day.57 It is clear, however, that
such demands had little impact. A year later, extras
working on D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance made $1.25 a
day, plus transportation and lunch; a meal that could
mean a great deal to those who were living close to
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 13
14 FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011)
Denise McKenna
Fig. 5.
Disappointed
extras at the Fox
studio. Sign
reads, “All Casts
Are Filled/No
More People
[illegible]/To-Day.”
From H.
Sheridan-Bickers,
“Extra Ladies and
Gentlemen”,
Motion Picture
Magazine
(September
1917): 83.
breadline subsistence.58 Yet pay was not guaranteed
at even $1 a day and abuse of the powerless and
easily replaceable extra sometimes led to even lower
wages. After receiving only fifty cents for two days of
work, ninety-three men appeared at the State Labor
Bureau in 1916 and demanded that the L-Ko Film
Company pay them an additional $2.50 a day in back
pay. Half of the men reported that they had accepted
the film work from an agency in Los Angeles with the
“distinct understanding” that they would be paid $3
a day.59
In addition to poor pay, extras complained of
poor working conditions. In 1916, extras attempted
to organize a new union in order to improve conditions that were described as “chaotic”, “abominable”, and “appalling”.60 The newly organized
International Union of Photoplayers of America compiled a list of demands that touched on unpredictable
hiring practices, poor working conditions, and the
lack of employee rights. Overall, the new union demanded that extra labour be systematically reformed
for all extras, both men and women. Recognizing that
extras alone lacked the ability to seriously impact
production, Union organizers called for “all wage
earners” in motion picture production, distribution
and exhibition to unite. Two strikes were declared –
one at Universal and another at Griffith – protesting
conditions for the “poor slaves who are seeking
temporary employment”.61 Despite this attempt at a
cohesive strike, the new union’s efforts were thwarted
by the fractured nature of production, which kept
extras constantly moving amongst different companies. They were further undermined by increasingly
rationalized production practices that stratified workers and studio design that housed extras separately
in their own building.62 Industry leaders also consistently denied that there were any labour problems in
the studios. They painted a harmonious picture of
studio life, aided by the utopian optimism of film trade
journals and the Los Angeles Times, which either
minimized or demonized local strikes.63 Denying the
significance of these strikes erased the appearance
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 14
The photoplay or the pickaxe: extras, gender, and labour in early Hollywood
of discord between management and labour at a
time when industry leaders were trying to impress city
officials and local business leaders with their economic importance. At the same time, effacing conflict
also effectively silenced strikers by denying them any
opportunity to debate or negotiate.64
Despite the public fascination with the extra girl
and studio culture, the brief rash of strikes called for
by the new union had actually been sparked by the
treatment of male extras who refused to pose nude.65
If the preference for “easy” extra work overturned
assumptions about working class masculinity, it is
clear that appearing naked contradicted what working men accepted as appropriate labour. For extras,
calling a strike was one way of asserting control over
their everyday lives, but it also marked a moment in
which extra work could have been identified with a
more radical and politicized identity. As Alan Trachtenburg points out, Nineteenth Century collective action was linked with working-class identity when the
strike emerged as a defining aspect of working class
life, both strategically as a weapon of political agency
and symbolically as a public challenge to the employer’s authority.66 Unionization in any form challenged the film studio’s economic autonomy in Los
Angeles, but also posed an equally dangerous threat
to the film industry’s image. Union agitation aligned
the studios with working-class identity and radical
politics at a time when the film industry was still
working to establish itself as a respectable cultural
institution and attempting to expand its appeal to a
middle-class audience. In addition to the benefits of
sunny weather and multifaceted topography, anti-labour business practices in Los Angeles provided the
film industry a relatively safe haven from union dominated cities in the East and also provided the political
and economic support necessary to control labour
unrest. The strikers’ inability to attract attention outside the local labour paper contained the threat that
a striking studio underclass posed to the industry,
although it did not distance extra labour entirely from
the working-class associations. However, these
strikes are significant because they highlight how
effectively early Hollywood’s underclass was disenfranchised. Furthermore, the strikes signal how the
ascendancy of the extra girl worked to the film industry’s advantage. The extra girl offered the industry a
much more manageable image of early Hollywood’s
underclass than its male population. Her disruptive
potential was muted by the quest for fame, which
defined the extra girl’s image in relation to a dream
FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011) 15
deferred and aligned extra work with a fantasy of
success, not with a radicalized underclass of working-class agitators.
Hollywood’s industrial infrastructure was built
upon the inability of workers to unite, which had a
long term impact on motion picture production. As
labour historian Danae Clark observes about the
studio system in the 1930s, “studios were more
concerned with promoting star images than with
acknowledging or improving the working conditions
of actors”.67 Clark argues that film studios encouraged a fetishistic attachment to the star’s body by
erasing any evidence of its production, effectively
distancing screen work from the individual performer. However, this process was not seamless.
Disputes over how to define acting as labour were
the core conflicts between actors and management
during the studio era.68 These conflicts usually
played out between the individual star and studio
management, but how was management supposed
to deal with the unruly body of film extras? During the
1910s, the conflict over screen labour also played out
between the extras and the studios, as each side
attempted to demarcate the boundaries that defined
the film extra. Film companies needed both men and
women extras, and as filmmaking expanded in Los
Angeles it underwent the same kind of scrutiny as did
other industries: how did one become a star, how did
one get a start, what kind of work was it, and to whom
did it appeal? The emerging understanding of extra
work as women’s work was fostered by the public’s
fascination with working women and the culture of
motion picture production, while the de-professionalization of extra work, from off-season snap for
trained actors to starting point for would-be stars,
cleared the way for the extra girl’s dominance. As a
labour structure was being organized during the
teens, the film industry learned the importance of
controlling its workforce and also the importance of
controlling its workforce’s image.
As the extra girl came to stand in for a largely
anonymous workforce, she became a star of a different order: abstracted from individual identity, she
became a modern allegory for screen labour. With
the extra girl, the studios could manage a persona
that had the potential to impact production and profits. To the industry’s advantage, the extra girl represented a sublimation of labour through her
association with the discovery narrative that cast her
in a passive role – she was waiting to be discovered
– not working, and certainly not striking, to improve
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 15
16 FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011)
Denise McKenna
her life. Though tainted by concerns about working
women and the dangers of studio life, the “extra girl”
effectively alienates the extra from screen labour by
reducing a heterogeneous and disruptive body to a
“star image.” The sad stories of appalling conditions
were mitigated by the fabulous success stories of the
fortunate few who survived the system. As an allegorical figure, the extra girl represents the most potent dream the industry offered: the dream of
succeeding in Hollywood. Only after this dream was
exploded by the public’s outrage over the Arbuckle
scandal in the early 1920s, and the extra girl became
associated with an abusive system, did the film industry begin to systematically address concerns
about extras.69
The problems associated with the extra girl,
primarily the sexual economy of the casting couch,
defined extra labour to such an extent that it obscured the difficulties that all extras dealt with, such
as unregulated working conditions and irregular or
inadequate wages. Despite these difficulties, studios
could depend on the popularity of motion pictures to
draw screen aspirants to their gates. The industry
also greatly benefitted from Los Angeles labour practices that maintained a surplus of workers, helping to
control wages and undercut the threat of strikes.
Although labour control through surplus was not a
management strategy that could contain Mary Pickford’s ever-increasing salary, it was eminently applicable to the unruly extras who were defined by their
superfluity, not their willingness to work. Effacing
labour from the extra’s screen performance effectively neutralized the extras’ claims to compensation,
or demands for a living wage. During a period in
which film studios were crafting their institutional
structure and also their public image, the extra girl
emerged as both the representative of and rationale
for a type of labour whose worth could be discounted. Though such “serious” young men as the
promising Roman soldier might still respectably look
for a career in Hollywood, the gender and class
politics of film labour concerned not only the extra’s
body on the screen but also the management of
working bodies behind the scenes, impacting labour
and management relations at a critical moment in the
industrial formation of early Hollywood.
Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank
Richard Allen, Mark Lynn Anderson, Mark Garrett
Cooper, Eric Hoyt and Shelley Stamp for comments on
earlier versions of this essay.
Notes
1.
Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1941), 75.
2.
Ibid. The Central Casting Bureau opened in 1926.
3.
Mack Sennett Collection, Folio 1154, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Despite the popularity
of Sennett’s Bathing Beauties, the number of men
needed to make Keystone Cop comedies helps
explain such numbers.
7.
Shelly Stamp, Movie Stuck Girls, 9.
8.
Denise McKenna, The City That Made the Pictures
Move: Gender, Labor, and the Film Industry in Los
Angeles, 1908–1917 (Ph.D. Dissertation: NYU,
2008), 124. See also Stamp, “It’s a Long Way to
Filmland”, 344.
4.
Shelley Stamp, “It’s a Long Way to Filmland”, in
Charles Keil and Shelly Stamp (eds), American
Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audience, Institutions,
Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004). While drawing on Stamp’s pioneering scholarship, my related argument engages the same
period with a slightly different focus.
9.
5.
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History
of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1994):
74–77. See also Stamp, “It’s a Long Way to Filmland”,
340–345.
See Grace Kingsley, “Ella, the Extra Girl: She Tells
Her Chum About a Regular Sparklers Among the
Star. Extra Girl and Her Views”, Los Angeles Times
(16 February 1919): III, 1. The series continued
through the end of the year. In 1923, Mack Sennett
offered another wholesome version of the moviestruck girl’s trip to Los Angeles in The Extra Girl, which
follows the humorous misadventures of Sue (Mabel
Normand), who wants to take Hollywood by storm
but gets diverted to the prop room and ends up
happily married.
6.
Shelley Stamp, Movie Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); see also
10.
Heidi Kenaga, “Making the ‘Studio Girl’: The Hollywood Studio Club and Industry Regulation of Female
Labour”, Film History 18.2 (2006): 120–139.
Adrienne L. McLean “‘New Films in Story Form’:
Movie Story Magazines and Spectatorship”, Cinema
Journal 42.3 (Spring 2003): 3–26.
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 16
The photoplay or the pickaxe: extras, gender, and labour in early Hollywood
11.
“Film Batteries Wink and Things Do Move”, Los
Angeles Times (12 March 1911): II, 1.
12.
See, for instance, Al G. Waddell’s “With the Photoplayers”, Los Angeles Times (12 March 1913): III, 4.
Also, “Making the World’s Greatest Film Here”, Los
Angeles Times (15 May 1911): II, 1; “Los Angeles,
Great Backdrop for the World”, Los Angeles Times
(14 January 1912): V, 19; Rufus Steele, “In the Sun
Spot”, Sunset Magazine 34 (April 1915): 690–699;
Grace Kingsley, “Movie Stars who Scintillate in Los
Angeles”, Los Angeles Times (1 January 1916): III,
71; “On the New Rialto”, Sunset Magazine 36.1
(January 1916): 42–47.
This connection was reinforced by theatrical management practices and contract law, particularly
legal disputes between female performers and their
male managers. See Lea S. VanderVelde, “The Gendered Origins of the Lumley Doctrine: Binding Men’s
Consciences and Women’s Fidelity”, The Yale Law
Journal 101.4 (January 1992): 775–852. VanderVelde also discusses the importance of the “Svengali
paradigm”, which associated female talent with a
visionary male and further emphasized the proprietary bond between female talent and management.
23.
The phenomenon of working women who lived apart
from their families at a time when women were
primarily defined in relation to domestic life was a
nationwide concern and inspired numerous civic
programs and initiatives. See Joanne Meyerowitz,
Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988).
24.
“On the Screen: Unemployed Prefer Snaps”, Los
Angeles Times (3 March 1915): II, 12.
25.
Louis B. Perry and Richard S. Perry, A History of Los
the Angeles Labor Movement, 1911–1941 (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1963), 12.
26.
Ibid., 8–9.
27.
“On the Screen”, Los Angeles Times (3 March 1915):
II, 12.
28.
Perry and Perry, A History of the Los Angeles Labor
Movement, 117.
The classical story of the sculptor, Pygmalion, who
fell in love with the statue of a woman he carved out
of ivory, appeared in many forms in poetry, painting,
theater, and the novel. It proved popular on film as
well, first appearing on the screen in 1898 and
allowing Georges Méliès to take advantage of film’s
malleability to explore the fantastical aspect of a
statue coming to life. English language versions
appeared again in 1911 and 1938, the last directed
by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, and famously
based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 stage play
Pygmalion.
29.
Ibid., 46.
30.
Grace Heilman Stimson, Rise of the Labor Movement
in Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1955), 304–310. These are wage
scales for 1910–1911.
31.
“On the Screen”, Los Angeles Times (3 March 1915):
II, 12. Unemployed women also used the Bureau,
but there were far fewer women than men, and their
applications were handled in a separate office.
32.
“Public Bureaus Find Places for Thousands”, Los
Angeles Times (27 August 1916): II, 14.
Gail Marshall also examines the various manifestations of the “Galatea-aesthetic”, from poetry to the
music hall, and specifically links Victorian actresses
with the Galatea myth. See Actresses on the Victorian
Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth
(Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998).
33.
Ibid.
34.
For more on the relationship between women and
hysteria, see Elaine Showalter, “Hysteria, Feminism,
and Gender”, in Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy
Porter, G.S. Rousseau and Elaine Showalter (eds),
Hysteria Beyond Freud, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Tania Modleski also provides a
succinct summation of the relationship between hys-
Grace Kingsley, “How Famous Film Stars Have Been
Discovered”, Los Angeles Times (18 October 1914):
III, 2.
14.
Waddell, “With the Photoplayers.” See also Roy
Sommerville, “Breaking Into Motion Pictures”, Picture
Progress 1.7 (July 1915): 6–7. Other articles are more
direct, simply warning young women, “don’t come.”
For example, William Allen Johnston, “In the Motion
Picture Land”, Everybody’s Magazine 33.4 (October
1915): 445.
15.
Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical
Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 188–200.
16.
See Richard de Cordova, Picture Personality: The
Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1990); see also Stamp,
“It’s a Long Way to Filmland”, 336–340.
17.
“How I Became a Photoplayer”, Motion Picture Magazine (January 1915): 76
19.
20.
21.
Beginning of the Best Seller System”, Journal of
Popular Culture 11.1 (Summer 1977): 71–74. See
also Avis Berman, “George Du Maurier’s Trilby
Whipped Up a Worldwide Storm”, Smithsonian 24.9
(December 1993): 110–117.
22.
13.
18.
FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011) 17
Kingsley, “How Famous Film Stars Have Been Discovered”, Los Angeles Times (18 October 1914): III,
2.
See L. Edward Purcell “Trilby and Trilby-mania, The
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 17
18 FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011)
Denise McKenna
teria, theatricality and femininity in The Women Who
Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory
(London: Routledge, 1988): 35.
35.
Alice Kessler Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage
Earning Women in the United States (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982), 153. See also Angel
Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and
Women in the Corporate Office, 1870–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) and
Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern Office Work
1900–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1992).
Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1997), 35–45.
46.
Ibid. For more on the discourse about sexual exploitation, female extras and film work see Stamp, “It’s
a Long Way to Filmland”, 343–345 and Sklar, Movie
Made America, 76.
47.
Developing a middle-class audience was part of the
film industry’s strategy to create a new mass audience for film. See Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the
Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at
Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991),
87–90. See also Eileen Bowser, History of American
Cinema, 1907–1915 (New York: Scribner, 1990); Lary
May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass
Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980); Nan Enstad, Ladies
of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular
Culture, and Labor Politics and the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999).
36.
Barbara Laslett, “Women’s Work in Late-Nineteenth
Century Los Angeles: Class, Gender, and the Culture
of New Womanhood”, Continuity and Change 5.3
(1900): 417–441; Frank L. Beach, “The Effects of the
Westward Movement on California’s Growth and
Development, 1900–1920”, International Migration
Review 3.3 (Summer 1969): 20–35.
37.
For more on the film industry’s campaign to improve
its image in Los Angeles, see McKenna, The City
That Made the Pictures Move, 106–145.
48.
Perry and Perry, 12–13.
49.
Ibid, 11.
38.
“They’re Not All Bad”, Los Angeles Record (1 January
1916): 3.
50.
“Too Many Extras”, Variety 37.13 (27 February 1915):
22.
39.
Margaret Saunders, A Study of the Work of the City
Mother’s Bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department. Masters Thesis, University of Southern California, 1939.
51.
“Coast Bad for Film Players; Little Regular Work
There”, Variety 39.9 (30 July 1915): 14.
52.
Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (New
York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University,
1968), 159–170 [originally published 1939]. See also
Benjamin B. Hampton, A History of the Movies (New
York: Covici, Friede Publishers, 1931), 159–196; and
Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The
Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),
64–94.
53.
Janet Staiger, “Dividing Labor for Production Control”, Cinema Journal 18.2 (Spring 1979): 16–25.
54.
Benjamin Hampton, A History of the Movies, 148
55.
Ann Chisholm examines the anonymous nature of
extra work as a necessary absence in film production
in “Missing Persons and Bodies of Evidence”, Camera Obscura 15.1 (2000): 122–161.
56.
George Mowry, The California Progressives (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963): 195–198.
57.
Steven J. Ross, Working Class Hollywood: Silent Film
and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 62.
58.
Sean P. Holmes, “The Hollywood Star System and
the Regulation of Actor’s Labor, 1916–1934”, Film
History 12.1 (2000): 100. Holmes relates a story from
Griffith’s assistant director, Joseph Henabery, who
remembered seeing an old man sitting beside the
canvas fence that surrounded the set; every day he
40.
For more on the founding of the Studio Club, see
Kenaga, “Making the ‘Studio Girl’”.
41.
“Lured by Hope of Fame and Fortune Girls Storm
Studio”, Los Angeles Tribune (30 January 1916): I,
3.
42.
Curt McConnell devotes a chapter to Anita King’s
cross-country drive in “A Reliable Car and a Woman
Who Knows It”: The First Coast-to-Coast Trips by
Women, 1899–1916 (Jefferson, NC; London:
McFarland & Company, Inc., 2000): 100–131.
43.
44.
45.
“New Play in Waiting”, Los Angeles Times (26 April
1916): III, 4. Her cautionary tales may have been
undermined by her account of her travels across the
country, which demonstrated the privileges film work
provided, such as travel, financial independence,
and fame.
“Screen Actor a Social Worker”, Los Angeles Record
(29 March 1916): 3. Gilbert was Los Angeles’s first
city mother. King herself acknowledged that her
position was created because of recent concern over
“movie morals.” It does not seem to have been a
merely nominal appointment, although it is not clear
how long her official appointment lasted. See also,
“Judge Plans to Protect Screen-Struck Girls”, Exhibitor’s Herald (15 April 1916): 29.
Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 18
The photoplay or the pickaxe: extras, gender, and labour in early Hollywood
would share the lunch with his wife by passing food
under the fence.
59.
“93 Men Seek $2.50 Each for Film Work”, Los Angeles
Tribune (14 January 1916): 11.
60.
“Men Who Refuse to Work Before the Camera in
Nude, For One Dollar Per Day in Hot Sun, Meet,
Organize and Pass Resolutions”, The Citizen (24
March 1916): II, 1. See also Shelley Stamp, “It’s a
Long Way to Filmland”, 341.
61.
“Movie Meeting”, The Citizen (30 March 1916): I7.
62.
Mark Garrett Cooper, “Work Space: Universal City”,
paper presented at the Women and Silent Screen
Conference, Guadalajara, June 2006. See also Mark
Garrett Cooper, Universal Women: Filmmaking and
Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), chapter 3.
63.
64.
“Motion Picture Actors Strike Over Company Paydays.” Los Angeles Times (3 June 1916): I, 7. See
also “Unionites’ Plan to Shackle Film Workers Flat
Failure”, Los Angeles Times (20 August 1916): II, 1;
Robert Gottlieb, Thinking Big: The Story of the Los
Angeles Times, Its Publishers, and Their Influence on
Southern California (New York: G. P. Putnams’s Sons,
1977); and Stimson, Rise of the Labor Movement in
Los Angeles, 358–361.
For more on the failed efforts to unionize Hollywood
during the 1910s see Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes;
Michael C. Nielson, “Labor Power and Organization
FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011) 19
in the Early U.S. Motion Picture Industry”, Film History
2.2 (1988): 121–131; and “Toward a Worker’s History
of the U.S. Film Industry”, in Vincent Mosco and Janet
Wasco (eds), The Critical Communications Review,
V.1: Labor, The Working Class, and the Media (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1983), 47–59.
65.
“Men Who Refuse to Work Before the Camera in
Nude.” One strike was called for at D.W. Griffith’s
studio. It seems likely that the male extras who
refused to pose nude were working on Intolerance,
with its elaborate Babylonian sequences that required large numbers of extras, many of them scantily
clad.
66.
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America:
Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1982), 89. See also Ava Baron, Work
Engendered: Toward a New History of American
Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) and
Johanna Brenner, “On Gender and Labor History”,
Monthly Review 50.6 (November 1998).
67.
Danae Clark, Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural
Politics of Actor’s Labor (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 19.
68.
Ibid., 22.
69.
Heidi Kenaga, “Making the ‘Studio Girl’”. See also
Kerry Segrave, Film Actors Organize: Union
Formation Efforts in America, 1912–1937 (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2009), 22–31.
Abstract: The Photoplay or the Pickaxe: Extras, Gender, and Labor in Early
Hollywood,
by Denise McKenna
During the 1910s, the extra girl emerged as a type of “star” whose persona was defined by the always
ambivalent narrative associated with extra work: that the discovery of unknown talent or screen charisma
could equal fame and fortune. This essay examines the emergence of the extra girl as the representative
of the film industry’s anonymous underclass, whose rise as a figure of fascination and concern deflected
attention from the heterogeneous appeal of extra work. Despite scandal and controversy, the extra girl
represented a much more manageable image of Hollywood’s underclass than the chaotically diverse and
potentially radical masses that were also glimpsed at the studio gates. In describing the cultural politics
of extra labor, the essay focuses on the de-professionalization of extra work, narrative tropes that helped
define extra labor as a feminine occupation, and attempts to manage labor problems with extras in Los
Angeles’s burgeoning film studios.
Key words: Motion Pictures (labor issues); Los Angeles Municipal Employment Bureau; Hollywood Studio
Club; Women in Motion Pictures; “The Extra Girl”
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 19