Hollywood Unknowns: A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins

By Anthony Slide

Extras, bit players, and stand-ins have been a part of the film industry almost from its conception. On a personal and a professional level, their stories are told in Hollywood Unknowns, the first history devoted to extras from the silent era through the present.

Hollywood Unknowns discusses the relationship of the extra to the star, the lowly position in which extras were held, the poor working conditions and wages, and the sexual exploitation of many of the hardworking women striving for a place in Hollywood society. Though mainly anonymous, many are identified by name and, for perhaps the first time, receive equal billing with the stars. And Hollywood Unknowns does not forget the bit players, stand-ins, and doubles, who work alongside the extras facing many of the same privations. Celebrity extras, silent stars who ended their days as extras, or members of various ethnic groups—all gain a deserved luster in acclaimed film writer Anthony Slide's prose. Chapters document the lives and work of extras from the 1890s to the present. Slide also treats such subjects as the Hollywood Studio Club, Central Casting, the extras in popular literature, and the efforts at unionization through the Screen Actors Guild from the 1930s onwards.

Slide chronicles events such as John Barrymore's walking off set in the middle of the day so the extras could earn another day's wages, and Cecil B. DeMille's masterful organizing of casts of thousands in films such as Cleopatra. Through personal interviews, oral histories, and the use of newly available archival material, Slide reveals in Hollywood Unknowns the story of the men, women, and even animals that completed the scenes on the silver screen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781628469066

Anthony Slide

Anthony Slide has written and edited more than two hundred books on the history of popular entertainment. He is a pioneer in the documentation of women in silent film, writing the first biography of Lois Weber, editing the memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, and authoring the first study of women silent film directors. Lillian Gish called him “our preeminent film historian of the silent era.”

Book preview

HOLLYWOOD UNKNOWNS

HOLLYWOOD UNKNOWNS

A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins

Anthony Slide

www.upress.state.ms.us

Designed by Peter D. Halverson

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of

American University Presses.

Copyright © 2012 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

All illustrations are from the author’s collection, unless otherwise noted.

First printing 2012

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Slide, Anthony.

Hollywood unknowns : a history of extras, bit players, and stand-ins /

Anthony Slide.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61703-474-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-1-61703-475-6 (ebook) 1. Extras (Actors)—United States.

2. Motion pictures—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

PN1995.9.E97S55 2012

792.02’80973—dc23

2012005306

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

THE EXTRA GIRL’S LAMENT

I wonder when he’ll cease to say,

Yes, we have no work today.

Over, and over, and then–again

He brawls this plaintive old refrain;

And smilingly, which hurts the more,

Enquires just what you’re looking for.

However quick the framed reply

He’ll answer back with twinkling eye,

Sorry, my friend, nothing doing today.

The same old story in the same old way.

You get a tip from one of your pals,

The Chaplin Lot wants boys and gals.

You walk because you haven’t a car

With a job in view it don’t seem far.

But there he stands—the man at the gate,

And his greeting is, Sorry, too late.

It has to break sometime, that’s certain

Before the fall of the final curtain;

But if it don’t and I must wait

And meet the chap at the Pearly Gate,

I won’t be surprised to hear him say,

Sorry, too late, nothing doing today.

—Anonymous

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The impetus for this book was a meeting in 2010 with a lady named Pauline Polly Wagner, who was at the time almost one hundred years old, and who was introduced to me by her friend, Steve Vilarino, as Hollywood’s oldest extra. To my astonishment, not only was Polly a very personable lady, she was also incredibly intelligent, with a host of stories about her life and career. As an extra and bit player, Polly was one of the forgotten names in Hollywood. Talking with her, I began to think about the whole spectrum of Hollywood extras, their lives and their histories. And so this book was born.

Years earlier, I had the opportunity to meet with and interview a handful of other individuals, now all deceased, who could be categorized as extras, although not necessarily throughout their careers. For their memories and their conversations, I am grateful to Paul Bradley, Lila Finn, Bess Flowers, Katherine Ann Porter, and Satini Puailoa, as well as to a handful of leading players: most notably Priscilla Bonner, Norman Lloyd, Doris Nolan, and director Robert Florey, whose reminiscences added to the story. Diana Cary (Baby Peggy) also spoke with me, but because she plans her own, personal account of life as a Hollywood extra, she was, understandably, unwilling to answer all my questions. Fred Datig talked at length with me about his father, also named Fred Datig, a legendary casting director at Universal, Paramount, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. As a resident of Los Angeles for much of my life, I have otherwise met some of the other extras or characters who people this volume, including Gertrude Gertie Astor and Vince Barnett.

As always, my primary resource was the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and I thank the staff there. At the Cinema Library of the University of Southern California, Ned Comstock was as helpful as always. If Ned should ever decide to give up his job as an archivist, he would be the best research assistant in the business. Also at USC: My thanks to Sandra Joy Lee, curator of the Warner Bros. Archives, and to Marje Schuetze-Coburn, senior associate dean of the Doheny Memorial Library. I also made use of the holdings of the Los Angeles Central Library and the Santa Monica (California) Main Library.

Special thanks to Valerie Yaros at the Screen Actors Guild for making available to me the archives of the Screen Extras Guild.

I must also thank Robert Gitt, Patricia King Hanson, Mike Hawks at Larry Edmunds Bookstore, Marty Kearns, Bruce Long, Jeffrey Richards, Henry T. Sampson, Jr., David Stenn, Kevin Thomas, and Zareh Tjeknavorian. And thanks to Patrick Reynolds, who knows more about computers, it seems, than anyone else in the world, and who has rescued me from the abyss countless times in this horrendous computer age.

Again, I must thank Leila Salisbury, director of the University Press of Mississippi, for her support. Also at Mississippi, I would like to thank Anne Stascavage and Valerie Jones on the editorial staff, and my copy editor Lisa Paddock.

Back in 2000, when John Parris Springer’s Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature was published, I described it in a dust jacket blurb as so good and so original. As I have used it for background information on the extra in fiction, I now realize just how good it really is. My earlier comments fail to do the book justice.

All illustrations are from either the author’s collection or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).

HOLLYWOOD UNKNOWNS

INTRODUCTION

We are the mortar between the bricks, said legendary character actress Beulah Bondi, describing her work and that of her colleagues on screen.¹ If the character player is the mortar and the stars are the bricks, how then may we explain the purpose of extras, bit players, and stand-ins? Their performances and their contributions to the films in which they appear—or more rightly the films in which they serve—are seamless. They are the unknown performers, without whom many a project might remain unrealized, but who, with few exceptions, are irrelevant in terms of their names and qualifications. They exist neither in the credits nor (with some not always honorable exceptions) as attention seekers or celebrities. They are neither the mortar nor the bricks; instead, they provide that unknown quantity that is always part of the moviegoing experience and of the moviemaking program. The extras may constitute crowds—occasionally a face in the crowd—or they may be more accurately described as atmosphere. To a large extent, it is the extra who adds substance to all the non-intimate scenes in a film. Extras endure and survive, and they have done so almost since the beginning of the motion picture. Yet they are both unknown to and unnoticed by their audience and generally by the players that they are hired to support directly or indirectly.

Milton Sills, one of the great dramatic actors of the silent era, came up with a sensible distinction between him and the extra: The gulf between the ‘extra’ and the actor is rather wide. It is defined largely by the accolade known in the industry as ‘screen credit.’² What Sills ignores is that at times extras add as much, if not more realism to the scene as the actor. Above all, they provided a setting in which the lead players can demonstrate their special talents.

There was a distinct caste system in Hollywood during the silent era. At the studio, stars occupied lavishly furnished bungalows, while extras shared two rooms—one for the women and one for the men—furnished only with wooden benches, one long table, and individual lockers. Relationships among the players were described this way in 1932:

Stars and featured players mingle freely at work and at play. There is a feeling of intimacy and friendship between them. The important free-lance actor, provided he is accepted as a good fellow, joins this group socially.

Here the line tightens. The bit player finds himself just outside. At times he mixes with the star, due usually to a previous association in the old days of pictures or on the stage. He is not accepted in the full sense of the word, however.

No law keeps the extra from associating with the important actors. But there is an unwritten rule governing his actions. He stays by himself or with his group on the sets and is rarely invited to social gatherings of the celebrities.³

The disparity between star and extra was never more evident than in salary, a disparity comparable today almost to the discrepancy between the take-home pay of workers on an assembly line and that of the CEO. For example, for the Warner Bros. 1944 production Passage to Marseilles, the studio hired twenty extras to play convicts. Each worked for a minimum of two weeks and took home a weekly paycheck for $82.50. In contrast, the female star, Michelle Morgan, was hired for a minimum of three weeks at a weekly salary of $3,500.00.⁴

One star of the silent era sympathetic to the plight of the extras was John Barrymore. It is reported that he walked off the set in the middle of the day, leaving a couple of hundred extras with nothing to do. He was not particularly tired, but he was aware that making a living was difficult for extras. By deserting the set, Barrymore guaranteed them another day’s work.⁵

The director quickly became cognizant of the relationship between star and extra. When placed in close proximity to a star on the set, the older, more experienced extras would—once the camera began rolling—introduce little pieces of business to draw the audience’s attention to themselves. At the same time, there were many kindly leading players who would watch over some of the younger extras, suggesting they keep close to the star in one shot in order to require their presence in the next. Particularly if the scene was being filmed late in the day, the extra would be called back the next day to continue the sequence of shots.

Extras learned, though, to avoid close-ups. Once an extra’s face was registered in a close-up, he or she would not be wanted again in the film for fear of audience recognition. It was not for the extra to behave like a character actor, becoming a film hog or a lens louse, monikers given those too cozy with the camera. As Rob Wagner explained in 1918, Suppose, for instance, that you had appeared in a street scene in France, as a peasant; it wouldn’t do to see the same face, a few minutes later, peerin’ out of the Tower of London.⁶ If an extra was careful, it was said, he or she might appear in every scene of a five-reel production. Extras were equally adept when it came to making an exit from a scene on camera. If one made an exit through a door while the camera was rolling, more than likely that one would be retained to make an entrance through another door in the next scene.

Some basic rules applied to extras on the set. Fred W. Beetson, then president of Central Casting, delineated these rules in 1928:

An extra must first learn, and constantly practice until she is proficient, the art of make-up. From the moment she enters her first set, she must learn to give explicit and unquestioning obedience to orders from the director and his assistants. She must constantly observe the work of the experienced players about her, and from them learn:

1. To guard against looking into the camera unless directed to do so, or walking into the camera.

2. To remember her position at a given point in the production so that she can later take that same position in the event of a close-up.

3. To guard against walking across a scene in such a way as to cover the principals.

4. To know the camera range so that in doing a close-up she will not move out of the range.

5. To reduce the speed of action from a normal speed to a slower rate which will register in the camera.⁷

As Photoplay commented in 1927:

Without the types [the extras], the majority of pictures could not be made. In the present stage of motion picture making, they are absolutely essential; yet, how little kindness and consideration and justice they receive from those who are so dependent upon them. Millions of words have been prodigally strewn before millions of eyes, describing the many phases of the stars’ sugar-coated lives; but our types remain unheralded and unsung. They are mere background. And into the fabric of that background is woven stark and bitter tragedy—the tragedy of living.⁸

It was novelist Theodore Dreiser who succinctly—as succinctly as Dreiser ever could be—summed up the reality of the extra’s existence. The extras knew that the majority of shots in which they appeared would never make it to the screen. The stars, the leads and the character players, would intentionally receive the most worthwhile positions in the shot. Ultimately, those who work in atmosphere are never—not even by accident—seen to advantage on the screen. As one commentator wrote in the late 1920s, extras would encounter poverty, pathos and perversity in this fabulous paradise of prosperity, plenty and prodigality.⁹

Most commonly, extras were the mainstay of the crowd picture, about which Vachel Lindsay wrote in 1916. According to Lindsay, at that time crowd pictures were best represented by D. W. Griffith’s one-reel short, The Battle (1911), and by the George Beban vehicle, The Italian (1915), in which extras were chosen to represent Italian crowds in a recreation of Venice and then as inhabitants of a New York ghetto. And it was Lindsay who noted that the most prominent crowd picture, a film as important in the art and theory of the motion picture as in its use of extras, is The Birth of a Nation. It is a Crowd Picture in a triple sense, wrote the always-perceptive Lindsay. On the film, as in the audience, it turns the crowd into a mob that is either for or against the Reverend Thomas Dixon’s poisonous hatred of the Negro.¹⁰

In The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith introduces some interesting parallel casting, with leading players assigned extra roles that touch upon or correlate with their other appearances in the film. Jennie Lee, who plays the faithful Negro retainer of the Cameron family, also has a bit part early in the film as an abolitionist who is greatly moved by the plight of the Negro slaves. George Siegmann, who plays Silas Lynch, the black leader who seeks to destroy white Piedmont, is also the leader of the Confederate soldiers who rescue the town from an attack by a renegade Negro band. And Robert Harron, who plays Stoneman’s younger son, is also, in blackface, the Negro soldier who arrests Dr. Cameron and arranges his humiliation. The casting may be nothing more than a private joke on Griffith’s part, but it raises an interesting academic question as to the manner in which actors can—and obviously did—portray conflicting roles in the same production.

In later years, the crowd picture was more often than not the province of director Michael Curtiz, who was as cavalier with his extras as Cecil B. DeMille apparently was. He just naturally loves to work with mobs, wrote producer Hal Wallis in a studio memorandum.¹¹ Perhaps Curtiz’s most abusive, almost violent, confrontation with extras took place during the filming of Noah’s Ark (1929) at Warner Bros. (see Chapter Two, below). Both Curtiz and DeMille, it seems, experienced a feeling of power that came from having a crowd of extras at their command. Both were autocratic when faced with a mass of anonymous extras. Brutal treatment of masses of extras on the set has become synonymous with these two directors.

Stories relating to DeMille’s treatment of extras are legendary—and often, perhaps apocryphal. As illustrated in trailers for various productions, from his vantage point high above crowds of extras in one costume film or another, he would excoriate them for wearing wristwatches or for sporting modern hairstyles. Perhaps the most famous confrontation between DeMille and an extra took place on the set of North West Mounted Police (1940). Addressing a company of five hundred consisting largely of extras, he insisted upon absolute quiet. After a couple of minutes, he noticed that one female extra was whispering to another. He ordered the culprit to come to the platform upon which he was seated and to tell the entire company what she had said. Eventually, she revealed her comment: I wonder what time the old baboon is going to let us go to lunch? The assembled company howled with laughter, and DeMille responded, Right now.¹²

It might seem a spurious argument to many, but DeMille’s response may well illustrate an innate respect for his extras. As he explained during the making of Cleopatra in 1934, We take 1,000 extras and break them into groups of 100, each under an assistant director. Those groups are split into tens, each under a competent actor. The scene is explained and every man and woman has a definite role to play, a definite thing to do. You may not believe it, and most audiences never notice it, but some of my finest actors are extras.¹³

DeMille always took time with his extras. In 1924 he pointed out, The extra’s only opportunity lies in his application when he is called to work. They should study closely the experienced actors’ technique—instead, when not in a scene, they stroll off, talking. Even when they work, they are too often inattentive.¹⁴ The director told of a young man with a good personality and a wonderful physique and grace, whom DeMille was considering using in bit parts. But the extra failed to pay attention to his would-be mentor and was dropped. Surprisingly, it is a tale often told about the silent era—of extras unwilling to devote themselves to their craft, who act like automatons, who in mob scenes would hide behind the scenery, knowing they would not be missed.

Working on The Golden Bed in 1925, DeMille attempted to inspire his extras:

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I know it’s cold and the lights hurt our eyes and it is tiresome standing around—but let’s forget all that and show Keokuk a real Hollywood party. Let’s have life, action, enjoyment…. I said enjoyment! I can almost see the hearse, the heads lowered, the hats off. I can hear the tum-tum- ta-tum. Enjoyment! Laughter! On the screen teeth mean laughter. I don’t care how you feel—show your teeth and I’ll get what I want.¹⁵

Pauline Wagner recalls, Every single scene, he’d gather the cameraman, the propman. Every single person that was working for him had to come in front of him and he told them every single thing about the scene. You had to sit there, and this would take over an hour, sometimes even longer, because he went into detail.¹⁶ Extras were nonetheless anxious to appear under DeMille’s direction, so much so that in the summer of 1937, some six hundred rioted at Paramount when only half their number was selected to be interviewed for participation in The Buccaneer (1938).

One director who was much liked by extras was W. S. Woody Van Dyke, whose credits include White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), The Thin Man (1934), and San Francisco (1936). He was known as one take Van Dyke, with perhaps little time for niceties. But as Minta Durfee, a silent actress turned extra recalled, He always showed great personal concern for the extras.¹⁷

By the mid 1910s, extras had become proficient at understanding how individual directors behaved, knowing these men’s whims, their fancies and their weaknesses. Extras noted which directors might reduce a female member of their group to tears and those who would pick upon the weaker members of the fraternity. Extras quickly determined that they had means at their disposal to obtain revenge, methods for ensuring that a scene played badly or that a star found herself suddenly out-positioned by her supporting players.

While extras, bit players, and stand-ins are here grouped together, linked by a common thread of anonymity, they must of necessity be considered as separate groups—at least during the formative years of the motion picture. First came the extras, then the bit players, and finally the stand-ins. The members of each group are strongly interconnected in that extras might become bit players, and both extras and bit players might ultimately move on to be stand-ins for the stars. All might in the fullness of time become if not stars, at least leading men and women. Even stunt persons began as extras, with the ability to perform a stunt little more than a requirement for being an extra, along with ability to dance or to ride a horse. But by the 1930s, these stunt persons had become screen performers in their own right.

Director Cecil B. DeMille demonstrates to an extra how a yoke of bricks should be carried on the set of The Ten Commandments (1956).

In 1925, Photoplay described the elite of film extras as Hollywood’s 400. They were all relatively young, beautiful film ornaments, haughtily graceful, well-dressed and handsome—but as superfluous to the conflict of forces in the drama as the oil paintings on the wall.¹⁸ The Hollywood 400, however, represented only a small percentage of the extras that the film industry might require for specific roles. They would have to be not only young—sometimes children—but often old. They might need to be bearded and to have a variety of ethnic backgrounds—racials, they were called. They might need to be ice skaters or genuine cowboys. With the coming of sound, an extra might well need to have a voice—not a specific voice but one that could be part of an ensemble singing, screaming, or booing.

Some of the 1,500 extras on location for Gunga Din (1939) pause for a tea break. AMPAS.

The number of extras actually working on a given production bore, in all probability, little connection to the number of extras that studio publicity might claim to be on the set. Extras were an inexhaustible commodity as far as studio publicists were concerned. Their number would increase in proportion to the scope and size of the production. No audience member was present to count just how many were present in a given scene, and nobody in the studio accounting office was going to provide financial figures as to the numbers actually working on a given day. When the Los Angeles Times reported that more than five hundred extras were at work on the George Arliss vehicle Voltaire (1933),¹⁹ who could dispute the claim of a legitimate newspaper? If the studio press book claimed that one thousand extras were providing background for scenes shot in Yuma, Arizona, for Suez (1938), or that 1,500 men were appearing in the final battle footage of Gunga Din (1939), who was there to argue with this fact?²⁰ Did the reported 350 extras watching Ingrid Berman burn at the stake in Joan of Arc (1948) outnumber those at the actual execution? Did two hundred extras really make the journey from Hollywood to the Mojave Desert for Tension at Table Rock (1956)? The heaviest use of extras in modern times was for the parade sequence in 20th Century-Fox’s Hello, Dolly! (1969), with some sixteen units comprised of 657 persons passing amidst 3,108 extras. The only comparable sequence on the same lot was the funeral of Queen Victoria staged for Cavalcade (1933), which boasted three thousand extras.

Hollywood extras came from all walks of life—and many had known former (and better) careers. Among the extras appearing in George Cukor’s 1933 production of Sylvia Scarlet are: former silent leading man Gaston Glass; the first wife of Rudolph Valentino, Jean Acker; an early flyer, Major John Farrell; Beth Taylor, the sister of actress Laurette Taylor; Russian painter Yasha Louie; and a minor former film director named Mel Forrester.

The extras are the cowboys walking around town or riding in the sheriff’s posse, who, because such extras would hang out at a Hollywood drugstore rather than on the prairie, gained the soubriquet of drugstore cowboys. These extras were generally acknowledged to be the most clannish of the group. Extras are the various types, both male and female, inhabiting the dance hall or the ballroom. They can be noble Romans or ignoble convicts. They can be well dressed or shabby. They can work six days in seven or one day in six months. Their hiring occurred initially at the whim of the casting director or the assistant director. For the women, sexual harassment was part of the hiring process. One industry commentator in 1919 wondered if extra work could be anything but an alibi for prostitution.²¹ These female extras were movie moths—poor, fragile, lovely creatures drawn to this lamp of fortune, fluttering dizzily about it and so apt to be singed before they are through.²² Little wonder the term moth quickly became synonymous with those female extras known to perform favors.

There were what might be described as amateur extras, those who did it not for the money but for the fun of being in a movie. In the early years, this group was dominated by members of the social set, perhaps wintering in Los Angeles, a change of scene from their East Coast mansions. All a studio had to do was contact the social secretaries, and their employers would rush over to whatever set they were told to report to, all dressed up in their finest gowns and jewelry.

The attitude of commentators in fan magazines, trade papers, and the popular press, was generally positive and sympathetic towards the Hollywood extra. One major exception was the influential critic Otis Ferguson, writing in 1941 in The New Republic:

The Hollywood bureaucracy is an inhuman and absurd machine second only to that of the various bureaus in Washington, no doubt about that. But there is one problem the extras have in general. The problem is themselves. In general they constitute no class of agriculturally or industrially dispossessed; they are not victims of geographical disaster; they are not skilled workers preempted by the Machine. They have converged on the town in swarms, attracted by the smell of easy money—which some of them have enjoyed in former times and latterly fallen out of.

But the main trouble with them in common is a lack of ambition, of willingness, of worth in the thing they are doing…. It is not pointed out that their pay when they work is three to thirty times that of unskilled labor anywhere in the world.²³

The lives of Hollywood extras fascinated fan magazine writers to such an extent that in November 1932, Screenland thought it necessary to inform its readership breathlessly that extras would fake the murmur of conversation in films with the words wah-wah-wah. However, the story of the Hollywood extra is more a story of tragedy than of elation. It might be easy to reject the hardships of life as an extra by simply acknowledging that it was self-induced suffering. Some extras had boundless enthusiasm and, at least at the beginning, a belief in themselves and their potential for success. At the same time, many went to work each day—or on those days when they had employment—because being an extra was a job, a job for life with which they were content and from which they expected no promotion.

The most sorrowful of stories relating to an extra has nothing to do with pay or treatment on the set. It involves an elderly woman who died during the filming of Thomas H. Ince’s Civilization (1916). Her distraught husband would nightly visit the theatre where the film was being shown in the hope of seeing his wife on screen. He had no photograph of his loved one. That is the other side of the ‘extra’s’ life—the side we do not see on the screen; the side they are apt to forget who so readily traduce the character of those of whom they know nothing.²⁴ And then there is the tragedy of a particular aged couple. Only the husband was employed. On the set of Intolerance (1916), assistant Joseph Henabery noticed that one elderly male extra did not eat his lunch with the

Reviews for Hollywood Unknowns

[janarose1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Extras, bit players, and stand-ins were a large part of the film industry. Although these people are largely unknown and unrecognized, their stories are fascinating. This book provides a chronological accounting of extras within the industry and the standards and hardships they might face.I thought this book was very well written, organized and entertaining. It was interesting to read about these men and women and the evolution of the film industry. Overall, I highly enjoyed this book and think that any aspiring actor/actress or anyone interested in Hollywood or the film industry will find it equally as enjoyable.