The Brutal Hiring System That Exploited Hollywood’s Forgotten Extras

Back in the 1910s and 1920s, before sunrise, thousands of people looking for work would congregate in front of movie studios like Paramount, Universal, and Fox. Then a studio assistant director, who was in charge of that day’s shoot, would walk out and select extras based on how they looked. Anyone not selected wouldn’t get paid for coming out in the first place, and some people would walk miles to get to the next studio gate. There were no laws. That was just the way it worked in Hollywood.

With no central hiring system, extras used private employment agencies called “casting sharks.” In the early 1920s, these talent brokers charged $5 to $25, about a few days’ salary, just to put your name in the registry, plus they took a percentage of what you were paid. Extras paid twice, once to get listed and again every time they worked, barely making enough to eat and live.

Silent-film star Mary Pickford, co-founder of the studio United Artists, watched as hordes descended on Los Angeles in search of movie jobs, an estimated 10,000 a month in 1923. She used her nationally syndicated columns to warn the hopefuls not to leave home if they didn’t have at least five years’ savings, which was about $1,000 to $2,000, since most of them found little or no paid work at all.

In 1910s and 1920s Hollywood, hiring was up to the whim of whoever was making decisions about who got hired, whether independent brokers, casting supervisors, or studio employees. There was no union and no law protecting extras from these powerful figures, who could exert their will freely. Some used that power to demand sex from women in return for a role, or even a screen test. To refuse could be career suicide, with no one to turn to.

In 1924, Will Hays, president of the studios’ trade group, hired social scientist Mary van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation, a research organization, to survey working conditions in Hollywood. Her report documented widespread underemployment and fee-skimming by private agencies, giving the studios their first hard evidence of a problem they’d mostly ignored. She recommended a deeper, joint inquiry with state labor officials. That inquiry came next.

After Mary van Kleeck’s 1924 survey of Hollywood working conditions, California’s Industrial Welfare Commission dispatched an investigator, Marian L. Mel, to Hollywood in 1925 to make sure that extras were being properly treated, particularly women and child performers. She found that the studios were consistently violating state-mandated work hours and did not give advance notice of potentially hazardous night shoots or underwater scenes. Mel helped establish initial guidelines on working conditions, dressing rooms, and advance warning of safety hazards, and later became director of the Women’s Division at Central Casting, a studio-created employment agency that emerged around the same time.

Will Hays, the industry trade association executive, incorporated Central Casting Corporation on December 4, 1925, and it went into operation the following year. Owned and funded by the studios themselves, it replaced private casting houses, which were allegedly extorting extras’ hard-earned money, and helped keep government regulators from stepping in. By eliminating most of what outside agencies had charged, it saved extras around $300,000 annually that agencies had been skimming.

At Central Casting, extras who were registered with the agency called in on a switchboard every morning hoping for work. Operators used teletype machines and card files to match their names to the names of studios calling for extras. In the 1930s, the board received tens of thousands of calls a day. And most people heard the same thing: “Nothing today.” While Central Casting’s centralized hiring system may have been more orderly, it wasn’t any more productive.

Even as Central Casting ended the fee-skimming extras had suffered under private agencies, the company incorporated race into its operation. In 1927, it established a separate division, under the supervision of Charles Butler, that specialized in Black extras. Nonwhite extras were filed in separate folders and were primarily called for stereotypical, demeaning parts. Outside brokers such as Tom Gubbins were contracted to provide Asian performers. Neither Black nor Asian extras had much access to the general casting pool open to white extras.

In late 1926, nine studios signed Hollywood’s first major labor agreement, the Studio Basic Agreement, with five American Federation of Labor unions representing carpenters, painters, electricians, musicians, and stagehands. Studio executives flatly rejected proposals to add any workers employed in front of the camera. For another seven years, background players and even leading men had no guaranteed minimum daily wage, no set working hours, and no overtime.

Dress extras were those who played the rich in scenes like a ball or formal dinner. They received more than regular extras, but had to buy, wash, and bring in their own suits, gowns, and furs, sometimes costing $1,000 or more. That salary bump was basically the studio’s clothing budget passed on to them.

But even after Central Casting dropped its commissions, assistants at studios still decided who got recalled for additional days of work, and some of them ran what amounted to an off-the-books kickback racket. Extras had to pay them between $1 and $2 a day in cash, presents, or booze, or risk being blacklisted and never called back to that set again. It was a form of blackmail, and it was against the law.

Michael Curtiz’s 1928 film Noah’s Ark featured hundreds of extras in a flood scene. During filming, Curtiz released nearly 600,000 gallons of water in a torrent that hit without warning. Set pieces fell apart, and the flood swept actors away in its path. Three background extras died, 1 actor lost a leg, and 35 ambulances arrived at the scene. California made its first film safety law after the flood scene disaster in 1929.

At Central Casting, extras were categorized into pay levels ranging from a few dollars for simple background roles to higher amounts for “dress extras.” With the onset of the Great Depression, studios unilaterally reduced those pay scales and moved many extras into the bottom tier, pushing their wages below what they needed to survive. An initial New Deal-era regulation that established a minimum wage for extras was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court.

In March 1933, during a national bank crisis brought on by the Great Depression, the studios announced 50% pay cuts and asked for 16-hour workdays without extra pay. In response, Eddie Cantor, James Cagney, and other actors formed the Screen Actors Guild. By the end of the year, thousands of extras had joined the organization, giving it enough membership to pressure the studios into setting actual minimum scales. Finally, extras had a union.

When director Michael Curtiz was shooting Warner Bros.’ The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), he put running “W” devices, tripwires, on the field and galloped cavalry horses over them, throwing the animals and their riders to the ground. The riders were injured, and four horses were so badly hurt that they had to be destroyed. Congress investigated after public outcry, and by 1940, studio executives agreed to give the American Humane Association actual power to enforce set safety and prohibit such devices.

By the middle of the 1930s, the number of Central Casting members was vastly out of proportion with the amount of available work, and the typical extra was earning too little to survive. In 1936, after getting advice from the newly formed Screen Actors Guild as well as state labor authorities, Central Casting stopped accepting applications and cleared the books of more than 12,000 non-permanent actors. The result was a roster of steady extras, people who were making enough money to pay their bills.

Prior to the rule, freelance talent agents were able to charge extras and actors exorbitant commissions, sign them up to exclusive long term contracts, and in some cases, double as producers who would hire their clients for below minimum wage. Rule 16-A of the Screen Actors Guild put a ceiling on commissions, eliminated the upfront listing fee, and prohibited an agent from also being an employer. The old casting shark strategy was finally stopped dead in its tracks with the passing of Rule 16-A.

The area outside the drugstore on the corner of Sunset and Gower, where unemployed “cowboy” extras waited all day to be called in to work by one of the low-budget Western studios nearby, came to be called Gower Gulch. There, in February 1940, extra Jerome “Blackjack” Ward killed another extra, John “Johnny Tyke” Tyacke, in a shooting that ended a long-running feud. Ward was tried in July, but acquitted when other extras testified that Tyacke had threatened him.

When the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) won its landmark 1937 contract for screen actors, it was a big deal. Extras were guaranteed hot meals every five hours, with financial penalties for production companies that didn’t deliver, overtime after eight hours, and hazard pay for dangerous “wet work” scenes. SAG, however, divided its members into different voting classes. Extras filed as Class B members (later renamed “Junior SAG”) had no say in the union, while speaking actors had a vote. The indignity of paying dues without a vote caused the extras to secede in 1945 and charter their own union, the Screen Extras Guild.

This content was created with the help of AI.