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

When he published his history of the unioni-

zation 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 iden-

tification 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?Apowerful combinationofprurientspecu-

lation and social anxiety greeted the apparent on-

slaught 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 dou-

ble the number of women.2 While there is no corre-

sponding 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 overshad-

owed 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 connec-

tion between the motion picture and its female audi-

ence; 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 would-

be actresses arriving in Los Angeles revealed deep

anxieties about women’s economic and sexual inde-

pendence 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 under-

scored the success stories of famous film stars who

began their careers as extras, undermining the cau-

tionary tales that warned of the perils of motion

Denise McKenna received her doctorate from theCinema Studies Department at New York Universityand currently teaches at the University of California,San Diego. Her dissertation is called The City ThatMade the Pictures Move: Gender, Labor, and the FilmIndustry in Los Angeles, 1908–1917.Email: [email protected]

Film History, Volume 23, pp. 5–19, 2011. Copyright © John Libbey PublishingISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America

FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 1, 2011 – p. 5

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 warn-

ings 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 ex-

posed 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 fe-

male 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 narra-

tive takes her to the studio gates. Both “girls” were

bound up with an emerging mythology of moviemak-

ing’s powerful appeal to women; but while the movie-

struck 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 popularityof extra work

By the mid-teens, the extra girl was already estab-

lished 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 be-

tween 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 inter-

views, 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. Al-

though she moves up through the ranks of extras,

Ella’s sense of achievement is more profoundly tied

to her husband’s successful transition from delivery-

man to working actor.

These “interviews” with Ella reinforce the con-

nection between extra work and women’s work. At

the same time, they rewrite the image of the delu-

sional and transient extra girl into a character who

reconciles domestic responsibilities with a satisfying

work life. However, the salacious association be-

tween 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 ex-

ploited extra girl into a respectable “studio girl”. More

importantly, updating the Studio Club helped the

industry retool its own image into that of a “benevo-

lent” employer.10

The shift of the motion picture industry to Los

Angeles in the early 1910s, and the growth of perma-

nent studios in the area, coincided with the public’s

increasing fascination with all things film-related, giv-

ing the city and the film industry a joint interest in


6 FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011) Denise McKenna

making studio life appear respectable and transpar-

ent. The public’s understanding of the film extra

consolidated around the figure of a hopeful young

woman, with attention focusing primarily on the sex-

ual economy of the growing studio system. The stars,

the directors, and even the films themselves may

have gained social standing as the decade pro-

gressed, but the extra girl eluded respectability.

Local newspapers and magazines provide

some insight into the way that film work was charac-

terized 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 Cali-

fornia. Aside from the physical benefits, these per-

formers 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 romanti-

cized 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 some-

times they are hired for the sake of their

clothes; bank clerks, law students, stenogra-

phers, 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-

Fig. 1.Lasky Studio“EngagementDept” registrationcard for “Adrian

Hope”,supposedly usedby an undercoverreporterresearching aseries of articleson Hollywoodextra work.From H.Sheridan-Bickers,“Extra Ladies andGentlemen”,Motion Picture

Magazine(August 1917):92.


The photoplay or the pickaxe: extras, gender, and labour in early Hollywood FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 1 (2011) 7

ward movie applicants reveals a certain discomfort

with cinema’s democratic appeal, although it is still

more generous than other accounts of film’s phe-

nomenal 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 Ange-

les, 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, career-

minded 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 appli-

cants 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 Sin-

gling out former chorus girls also marks female ap-

plicants 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 sus-

pect 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 his-

torical traditions than those associated with the cho-

rus 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 entertain-

ment 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’ personali-

ties and lifestyles, but also mapping various trajecto-

ries 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 pic-

tures. 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 Pick-

ford, Arthur Johnson, Henry Walthall, Owen Moore,

Florence Lawrence, Barry O’Neil and the Gish sisters

all first appeared as extras.18 Details about how indi-

vidual stars started may have been somewhat idi-

osyncratic, but one theme that emerged in the “how



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 trans-

forms a young woman into something more beauti-

ful, more talented, or more desirable than she was

before.20 One of the last nineteenth century incarna-

tions 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 phenome-

non, 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 relation-

ship 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 workingclass

Waiting – to get a job, to begin a scene, or simply to

be discovered – was one of the defining charac-

teristics of extra work and fueled the popular impres-

sion 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 news-

papers 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 re-

ported 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

Fig. 2. “How toBecome aPhotoplayer”,Motion PictureStory Magazine(May 1913): 116.



by a nationwide recession.25 The Employment Bu-

reau 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 look-

ing 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 un-

employment 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 unem-

ployed.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 at-

tracted by the benefits of wages rather than the barter

system of labour for goods offered by the city. Com-

pared 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, depart-

ment 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-

Fig. 3. Dressingrooms for extras

at the Fox studio.From H.

Sheridan-Bickers,“Extra Ladies and

Gentlemen”,

Motion PictureMagazine

(August 1917):96.



ing film extra work through the Employment Bureau.

If the applicant stated his preference for motion pic-

ture work over “steady jobs, which include real la-

bour”, 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”, rele-

gating 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” occupa-

tions. 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, sug-

gesting how class-based bias shaped attitudes to-

ward extras, and film work in general. Their interest

in extra work was disdainfully attributed to a “histri-

onic” 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 ap-

peal and the practical need to cast both men and

women, effectively collapsed the gendered division

of labour that most often clearly defined other occu-

pations. 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” oc-

cupations that justified relegating women to posi-

tions that were temporary or easily replaceable.35 The

transience of extra work for men and women alike

was already linked to the impermanence that char-

acterized women’s labour in general.

The connection between extra work and

women was further reinforced by the material practi-

calities 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 out-

number men.36 Shifting demographics heightened

local tensions over the problem of single women in

the city, which often focused on the rapidly expand-

ing film studios where women were employed in

great numbers and in many different capacities. Con-

cern 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 inves-

tigation 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 pub-

licized their efforts to protect women working as

extras.37 Griffith’s studio was opened up to local

investigators who praised the “morally perfect” con-

ditions 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 hous-

ing 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



good citizenship, however, and a few months later

Paramount star Anita King was appointed as a City

Mother. Professionally, King had already demon-

strated her abilities as an emissary for the industry

on her well-publicized adventures, driving cross-

country 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-pro-

file appointment glamorized the alignment of the film

industry, civic leaders, and local reformers at the

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 appli-

cants.

The extra underclass

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, tran-

sience, 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 ap-

pearances, 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 Glick-

man points out, the ideology of working class man-

hood 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 working-

class 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 strength-

ened 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 re-

sponsibility that defined working class masculinity,

explaining the contemptuous suspicion toward un-

employed men who preferred the photoplay to the

pickaxe.

Despite the industry’s assiduous attempts to

court middle-class respectability during the teens,

Fig. 4. Mrs.Lucile Brown,

“through whomapplications are

made for film

assignments atReliance studio.”

Los AngelesTribune (30

January 1916).



filmmakers had a lot to gain from extra work’s wide

appeal and its accessibility to working-class appli-

cants.47 When Los Angeles began block-booking

extras for mob scenes through the Municipal Em-

ployment 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 unem-

ployed and the city itself. In sending men out for

“snaps” (off-season theater work), the Employment

Bureau institutionalized extra work as a form of un-

employment 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 la-

bour 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 su-

pernumeraries” 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 Mu-

nicipal 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-

ent strategies emerged for coping with both produc-

tion 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 im-

pacted 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 indus-

trial production was through the regulation of em-

ployment.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 re-

placeable. 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 compa-

nies 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 at-

tempts to organize resulted in occasional work stop-

pages 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 influ-

ence of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a

particularly feared labour organization. The IWW had

been blamed for the Wheatland Hop Riot near Sac-

ramento in 1913 and its members were often por-

trayed 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



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 condi-

tions that were described as “chaotic”, “abomina-

ble”, and “appalling”.60 The newly organized

International Union of Photoplayers of America com-

piled a list of demands that touched on unpredictable

hiring practices, poor working conditions, and the

lack of employee rights. Overall, the new union de-

manded 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 compa-

nies. They were further undermined by increasingly

rationalized production practices that stratified work-

ers and studio design that housed extras separately

in their own building.62 Industry leaders also consis-

tently 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

Fig. 5.Disappointed

extras at the Foxstudio. Sign

reads, “All Casts

Are Filled/NoMore People

[illegible]/To-Day.”From H.

Sheridan-Bickers,“Extra Ladies and

Gentlemen”,Motion Picture

Magazine(September1917): 83.



of discord between management and labour at a

time when industry leaders were trying to impress city

officials and local business leaders with their eco-

nomic 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 work-

ing 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 Tracht-

enburg points out, Nineteenth Century collective ac-

tion 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 em-

ployer’s authority.66 Unionization in any form chal-

lenged 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-la-

bour business practices in Los Angeles provided the

film industry a relatively safe haven from union domi-

nated cities in the East and also provided the political

and economic support necessary to control labour

unrest. The strikers’ inability to attract attention out-

side 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 disen-

franchised. Furthermore, the strikes signal how the

ascendancy of the extra girl worked to the film indus-

try’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

deferred and aligned extra work with a fantasy of

success, not with a radicalized underclass of work-

ing-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 encour-

aged a fetishistic attachment to the star’s body by

erasing any evidence of its production, effectively

distancing screen work from the individual per-

former. 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-profession-

alization 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 differ-

ent 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 prof-

its. To the industry’s advantage, the extra girl repre-

sented 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



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 alle-

gorical figure, the extra girl represents the most po-

tent 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 in-

dustry 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 ob-

scured 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 prac-

tices 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 Pick-

ford’s ever-increasing salary, it was eminently appli-

cable to the unruly extras who were defined by their

superfluity, not their willingness to work. Effacing

labour from the extra’s screen performance effec-

tively 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 dis-

counted. 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 thankRichard Allen, Mark Lynn Anderson, Mark GarrettCooper, Eric Hoyt and Shelley Stamp for comments onearlier versions of this essay.

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 Her-

rick 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.

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 schol-

arship, my related argument engages the same

period with a slightly different focus.

5. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History

of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1994):

74–77.See also Stamp, “It’saLong Way to Filmland”,

340–345.

6. Shelley Stamp, Movie Struck Girls: Women and Mo-

tion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); see also

Adrienne L. McLean “‘New Films in Story Form’:

Movie Story Magazines and Spectatorship”, Cinema

Journal 42.3 (Spring 2003): 3–26.

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.

9. 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 movie-

struck 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.

10. Heidi Kenaga, “Making the ‘Studio Girl’: The Holly-

wood Studio Club and Industry Regulation of Female

Labour”, Film History 18.2 (2006): 120–139.

Notes



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 Photo-

players”, 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.

13. 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 IntoMotionPictures”,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 IBecame aPhotoplayer”,Motion Picture Maga-

zine (January 1915): 76

18. Kingsley, “How Famous Film Stars Have Been Dis-

covered”, Los Angeles Times (18 October 1914): III,

2.

19. 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 AsquithandLeslie Howard,andfamously

based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 stage play

Pygmalion.

20. Gail Marshall also examines the various manifesta-

tions 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).

21. See L. Edward Purcell “Trilby and Trilby-mania, The

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. This connection was reinforced by theatrical man-

agement practices and contract law, particularly

legal disputes between female performers and their

male managers. See Lea S. VanderVelde, “The Gen-

dered Origins of the Lumley Doctrine: Binding Men’s

Consciences and Women’s Fidelity”, The Yale Law

Journal 101.4 (January 1992): 775–852. Vander-

Velde also discusses the importance of the “Svengali

paradigm”, which associated female talent with a

visionary male and further emphasized the proprie-

tary 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 Chi-

cago, 1880–1920 (Chicago: The University of Chi-

cago 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.

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.

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 Cali-

fornia Press, 1993). Tania Modleski also provides a

succinct summation of the relationship between hys-



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 (Balti-

more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) and

Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gen-

der, Class, and the Origins of Modern Office Work

1900–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

1992).

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.

38. “They’re Not All Bad”, Los Angeles Record (1 January

1916): 3.

39. Margaret Saunders, A Study of the Work of the City

Mother’s Bureau of the Los Angeles Police Depart-

ment. Masters Thesis, University of Southern Cali-

fornia, 1939.

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. “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.

44. “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”, Exhibi-

tor’s Herald (15 April 1916): 29.

45. Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American

Workersand the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1997), 35–45.

46. Ibid. For more on the discourse about sexual exploi-

tation, 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 audi-

ence 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 Twen-

tieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press,

1999).

48. Perry and Perry, 12–13.

49. Ibid, 11.

50. “Too Many Extras”, Variety 37.13 (27 February 1915):

22.

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 Con-

trol”, 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”, Cam-

era Obscura 15.1 (2000): 122–161.

56. George Mowry, The California Progressives (Chi-

cago: 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



would share the lunch with his wife by passing food

under the fence.

59. “93 Men Seek$2.50 Each forFilm 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: Uni-

versity of Illinois Press, 2010), chapter 3.

63. “Motion Picture Actors Strike Over Company Pay-

days.” 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’sSons,

1977); and Stimson, Rise of the Labor Movement in

Los Angeles, 358–361.

64. 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

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 (Nor-

wood, 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 re-

quired largenumbersofextras, many of themscantily

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”



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The Photoplay or the Pickaxe: Extras, Gender, and Labour in Early Hollywood

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