Recent winner of the the New Masses prize for ‘Proletarian Novel,’ her ‘Marching, Marching,’ Clara Weatherwax looks at life on the bottom rung of the Hollywood ladder for actors, the extra. Written in 1936, it is a story familiar: low pay, union busting, partnership with the military, racism, sexism, power-mad directors, and as much exploitation of as the producers can get away with.

“Ain’t Holly-wood Romantic?” by Clara Weatherwax from New Theatre. Vol. 3 No. 6. June, 1936.

If you haven’t enough worries, if your salary as a soda jerker or chainstore clerk is too high, if you enjoy hanging on to a telephone all day every day. become an extra.

“They treat us like props,” a little extra girl on a $3.20 check said. I thought of some sets on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot at Culver City: elaborate fronts soon to be junked. I asked about wages, hours, conditions, clothes.

“I don’t get much, work’s so uncertain,” she said. “Sometimes you get a call and it’s for just a few minutes. Other times you work so long you could drop dead. The law says the limit for women is sixteen hours, but I’ve worked longer, sometimes twenty-three and a half hours straight. I used to think,” she half smiled, “that I could make the dress parade. But doing mob work once in a blue moon like I am…”I didn’t say anything, just looked at her. She added, probably not knowing the way her face lifted with hope, “Of course, I might get a big chance. Something that’d make me stand out from the mob. I know I could do it, if I just get the chance.”

Sidney Skolsky, well-known Hollywood columnist, gives a few additional details:

“The extra girl lives in a single room, no kitchen, for $25 a month; or two rooms and a kitchenette for about $45 a month…An extra generally lives with another extra…They take turns sitting in the room all day, waiting for the phone to ring, and if one girl receives word about ‘a call,’ the other will go along and try too.”

I visited an atmosphere worker in her room. “Take me, I’m lucky,” she said. “I’m more or less international. I’m dark. I can work on Spanish pictures. Italian and French, too, but not English pictures.” She was sitting on her bed, pajama-clad legs tucked under her for warmth. Pale, very slim, pretty, nervous.

She wasn’t well-appendix trouble. She needed money badly, for doctors. “I’ve been out of work for a while, but I usually average three days a week.”

“How do you get to the studios? They’re so far apart.”

“I have to keep a car. It takes a lot for clothes, too. Of course, it’s hard when you get a slack spell. But I’m really luckier than most.”

And she is. Not ten per cent of those looking for extra work can get it.

People are classified according to the front they can keep up. The mob workers get $3.20 or $5 a day. Atmosphere or dress people pull down $7.50, $10, $12.50, or $15 checks-when they work. Under the NRA wage scale, still in effect, $25 a day is the minimum wage for a “bit” extra. But the producers know the angles. When the code was drawn up, the status of the “actor” was not defined! So certain chiselers-Columbia and Paramount have been the worst in this regard-took quick advantage. By calling a man an actor they can pay him as low as $1 for speaking lines for which a bit player would receive a minimum of $25.

Members of Motion Picture Producers’ Association of America hire extras through Central Casting, a private corporation controlled by the Association. Central gets a percentage on all people placed. It has a list of over six thousand (of which seventy-five per cent are on relief). This does not include any of the thousands not listed at Central who receive occasional mob work, usually for $3.20 a day. Fraternal organizations and relief rolls supply most of the crowds and racial groups. Certain producers can and do save themselves huge sums by hiring crowds, at the lowest wages paid for extra work, through still other channels. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hires hundreds of such extras through the Chamber of Commerce at Culver City, which it controls. Warner Brothers work a similar racket at Burbank.

The chisel cuts other ways, too.

For the Florence Nightingale picture, Angel of Mercy, Warner Brothers hired fifteen hospital nurses on $10 checks, although Central Casting had over fifty unemployed extras qualified for the parts. After the day’s work on this same picture, many of the crippled war veterans used in the Crimean war scenes, hobbled as best they could all the way over Cahuenga Pass to save forty cents carfare.

You have seen U. S. Army, Navy, and Marine forces in certain pictures. Producers used them instead of regular extras-it’s cheaper. Marines appeared in Columbia’s U.S. Smith, filmed at the Marine Base in San Diego. In Sons o’ Guns, Warner Brothers employed about two hundred members of the 160th Regiment of the California National Guard, dressed as German soldiers. Many of them had to get leaves of absence from their jobs in order to work on Sons o’ Guns.

Government services and equipment are provided free to the studios. This means that employed and unemployed taxpayers feed the military forces, pay their wages, and furnish them and their gear to the producers for nothing, thus throwing more extras out of work. Extras are, of course, protesting this species of scabbing, through the Junior Screen Actors’ Guild.

The Screen Actors’ Guild (Senior and Junior), with a membership of over five thousand, is affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The Junior branch, for extras, was formed two years ago last November; dues are $5 a year, with an entrance fee of $10. A major function of the Guild is to settle thousands of complaints for its members.

One of the worst cases occurred last October. Forty women were called to the MGM set at 5:30 P.M. for work on Riffraff. In the rain scene, they were soaked and hurled down by the full force of water from three fire hoses, backed by wind machines. Driven water, cold and sharp as icicles, blinded them and flung them about. Many were skinned from ankles to thighs. One woman was knocked unconscious. Another was paralyzed for hours. No drying equipment was provided; no towels, until a few appeared at 3:30 A.M. For working from 5 :30 P.M. to 5 :30 A.M. under these conditions, each woman got $11.25. The union obtained an adjustment for them and additional payment for their treatment and injuries. The film itself, blurred by so much water, had to be retaken, but the few women who returned next night said that because of the organized protest, conditions were vastly improved.

In The Crusades, the infernal machine crushed a man’s leg. De Mille shouted furiously because the man’s comrades stopped the machine to help him. Men are cheap; retakes are expensive. In the battle scenes, extras were cut and injured. In Lives of a Bengal Lancer, many men had bones broken. One is still in the hospital although it happened over a year ago. And if you think it’ll easy to collect compensation for studio accidents, just ask any who’ve been hurt!

Directors are known to pray for accidents. It is quite usual for emergency cameras to be posted at all angles about certain mob scenes, grinding away, covering the action just in case something “accidentally” happens to give the picture a gruesome bit of “realism.”

More and more extras turn to the Screen Actors’ Guild, sensing the power of organized labor. By protesting the use of seventy of Victor McLaglen’s lighthorsemen in 20th Century-Fox’s Under Two Flags, extras had them jerked out. They got an apology from McLaglen, too.

A Mexican, working on a $7.50 check, in Dancing Pirates at United Artists Studio, was asked to speak a line in Spanish. This put him in the bit extra group. He also worked one fourth check overtime. The Junior Guild got him the $21.87 adjustment he was entitled to. The assistant director’s excuse for not having paid him was “because he was a Mexican.” The assistant stated he “did not pay Mexicans for speaking lines.”

A tragedy even greater than underpayment for racial reasons lies in the types of roles given to Negroes, Mexicans, and certain other races. Disagreeable, weak, or buffoon parts are assigned them. Only occasionally a Negro gets a real part. Afterwards, he must drop back into extra work. Where a white player would be rocketed to stardom, the Negro will be called uppity if he asks for more than an extra’s wages.

Since the NRA was scrapped, numerous disputes have been referred to the California Industrial Welfare Division, but since its Chief, Mabel E. Kinney, got her job through Louis B. Mayer, it naturally interprets cases of abuse in a way which puts the victim on the spot rather than the producer.

Nevertheless, the Guild has won many improvements. Sometimes decisions affect twenty or a hundred extras, or all in general. Extras must now be paid for cancelled work calls unless a release is given in time to accept another call. Those interviewed at studios are now paid carfare. Extras are paid for fittings. They get into their costumes on studio time, too.

Too many extras, however, do not yet realize the great power they could exercise through belonging to the Guild and taking a lively part in its work. Even members are not fully aware of what power they have in hand. Unity exists on the surface between both the Junior and Senior Guilds, but not in reality, for the Junior membership lacks the most basic of all rights-the right to a strike vote. When actors and extras alike see the supreme value of real unity, not only among themselves but between the Guilds and other crafts in the industry, the producers will be faced with a closed shop under which unions can dictate working conditions, hours, wages.

The New Theatre continued Workers Theatre. Workers Theatre began in New York City in 1931 as the publication of The Workers Laboratory Theatre collective, an agitprop group associated with Workers International Relief, becoming the League of Workers Theaters, section of the International Union of Revolutionary Theatre of the Comintern. The rough production values of the first years were replaced by a color magazine as it became primarily associated with the New Theatre. It contains a wealth of left cultural history and ideas. Published roughly monthly were Workers Theater from April 1931-July/Aug 1933, New Theatre from Sept/Oct 1933-November 1937, New Theater and Film from April and March of 1937, (only two issues).

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/workers-theatre/v3n06-jun-1936-New-Theatre.pdf