Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1928)

Why Cry Over Extras? woman of that type, so we arranged for her to work several days at seven-fifty. Whereupon she abused us roundly because the pay was not bigger. And I saw her afterward on Hollywood Boulevard riding in a new Packard car with a man, who, I was informed, was the husband she had told us was dead. "She was a well-to-do woman who did not need the work but who was drawn here by this glamour thing, the desire to say she was a picture actress. There are lots of those." Her Hair Bleached at Six OUR conversation was interrupted constantly by calls on the telephone to which Miss Barton replied automatically, " Not a thing today, dear. Nothing today, Jack. Nothing. Nothing. Our only call is for eight Chinese. Nothing." Now and then she left her chair to repeat the words to people who trickled into the office one by one or in little groups. " I wanted to see about gettin' into pitchers," a shambling man with a pipe in his mouth would say. Miss Barton would explain to him about the Central Casting Bureau. "Can't I even get a three-dollar job?" whined a chinless young man. "Not here. We get them through a bureau." " I want you to see my little girl," a stout matron, dragging a six-year-old child, approached the desk. "Honey, show the lady how you can do the Varsity Drag." The child, pert, be-ruffled, rouged, with dreadful bleached curls clustering under her elaborate pink silk bonnet, instantly snapped her small fingers, wiggled her little hips and kicked her thin legs in preposterous, childish interpretation of lewdness, winking, grimacing, smiling, humming a tune the while. And her mother looked on with a fond, artificial smile, glancing with shrewd eyes at the weary Miss Barton to see what impression was being made. Pathetic? Yes. Pathetic for the tot who is robbed of her childhood and forced into a hard precocity while she is still a baby. Pathetic that a mother should so exploit her child. Tawdry exhibition. Unbelievably cheap and ugly. "There are thousands of 'em," averred Miss Barton when the two had gone away, indignant at not getting in to see the casting director. Once An Extra, Always One " T DON'T know what it is," she went on, J, shaking her head, "that keeps them trying and trying. Year after year we see the same faces. They don't give up hope. They don't make enough to live even in semi-decency. But they go on and on. "Once a person has worked one day — one hour or five minutes — in a picture, from that time forth he is an actor. He will not admit that he ever did anything else in his life. {Continued from page ji) "There was a barber across the street from this office. He had a nice little shop and was doing well. One day we needed a big, burly chap to wear a certain costume and stand in a scene for an hour or so. Just atmosphere. It was an emergency call and Supernumeraries innumerable: the army of extras required for one of the several big spectacular scenes in "Noah's Ark" we had to get a man right away. So we asked the barber, who happened to be big enough, to come and help us out. "Next day he put out a 'For Sale' sign on his shop. He sold it and now he is making the rounds of the studios every day. He is an actor." There is enormous bewilderment upon the part of all the people who deal with extra workers day after day. Why do they do it? How can they keep it up? Fred Schuessler, casting director at United Artists, opines shrewdly that it is often "just plain laziness!" "It is an easy life, really, you know," he said. "There are a lot of people who are not driven by any ambition to act but who don't want to work at regular jobs. They can hang around studios, work a few days at a time, loaf until the next job and make barely enough money to live. They are part of the glamourous bustle of the movies. They can say to their friends, 'I am an actor.' They can see John Barrymore and Mary Pickford at close range and bask in reflected glory when they tell about it outside. The Money's Not the Thing "'T^HERE are men with dependent famiJ_ lies who won't take any other kind of job because the lure of this thing has caught them. There are well-to-do people who make tremendous efforts to get this sort of work for the same reason. These people will some times offer to turn their pay checks over to anyone who will get them in." "These people seem to expect to agonize," says Dave Allan, head of the Central Casting Bureau. "They seem to think it is part of the game. In spite of the fact that everything possible is done to protect them and to make conditions as fair as possible for them, in spite of the fact that every applicant is required to read a statement describing the conditions he will have to meet before he can be registered, and in spite of the fact that only one half of one p)er cent of applicants ever are registered— nevertheless they continue to insist upon agonizing. "Extra work is, at best, only casual labor. A man who digs ditches may have been forced into that type of labor by conditions over which he has no control. But no one is forced to do extra work. They"do it because they prefer to do it. "Yet they trade upon their poverty and exploit their very hunger in an attempt to get work. They persist in thinking that we have personal grudges against them which are keeping them out of jobs. More than one extra has threatened me with physical violence. "But the thing not one of them will ever believe is that he may have nothing to offer which is of any value to the industry." Wasted Wailing IT IS not conditions in the industry which make the extra a pathetic figure, really. The pathetic thing is that there are so many of that sort of people in the world. Deluded, childish beings, hoping where there can be no hope. Struggling where a struggle can be of no avail. Agonizing where agony is wasted. Individual pathetic cases — yes. You will find those among any class of people. The old actor who has slipped from prominence and who knows nothing else to do. He is pathetic. But these are comparatively rare. But the rank and file, I insist, are here because they choose to be here. With all too many the agony is a pose. Hunger is a ruse. The/ are not struggling: they are drifting. Flotsam. Hangers-on. Weak beings, choosing a futile existence because it requires little effort. The large number of these makes it difficult to discover the talented few among them who have reason to struggle and who have ambition and ability. No. I am sorry. I simply cannot weep over extras as a class. 68