Part-time labor, full-time dreams: extras, actors, and Hollywood's on-screen talent

Part‐Time Labor, Full‐Time Dreams: Extras, Actors, and Hollywood's On‐Screen Talent, traces the political economy of on‐screen labor in the film industry from the beginning of narrative film in 1910 through the 2012 SAG‐AFTRA merger. Since the demise of the vertically integrated studio system Hollywood, like many other industries, has moved toward an increasingly flexible workforce. Although Hollywood labor practices have changed, I argue that for actors, the exploitative conditions and the struggle to find work in this glamorous field remained consistent throughout Hollywood's history. The large pool of actors is important because it helps keep competition high and wages low. ❧ This project relies on archival research, analysis of industrial documents and film texts, and participant observation in order to make its intervention in existing scholarship on stars, actors, their labor and its potential rewards. Each of the four chapters presents an episode in the history of actors and extras, including the struggle to unionize extras; epic film production and the effect of location shooting in two productions, one shot in Pakistan and England and one in the U.S.; the importance of reality work as a point of entry for aspiring on‐screen talent; and, the history of the SAG‐AFTRA merger in 2012. I conclude that labor conditions for actors and extras (anyone below the level of star) have always been flexible and thus were historically out of sync with the dominant industrial structures of the studio system and are more accurately aligned with what we would now consider to be post‐Fordist practices.