Tales of a Failed Filmmaker – The Extras Scam

People are told that one of the gateways into the film industry is through being an extra.  You pay your dues in the background of other movies while you make contacts and get to know your way around.

When I first moved to LA in 1995, there were a number of these agencies you could sign up with that had their own ways of finding you work.  Some of them charged a fee up front for you to sign up with them, and they took a very small finder’s fee whenever they got you work; others took no fee up front but got a larger percentage with each job they found you.

Over the years these other agencies dwindled until only a few remained, and only one truly dominates the industry, Central Casting.  Central was a company that charged an upfront fee and took a small percentage of your paycheck.  There was also a yearly fee to remain in their databank.  They made huge amounts from starry eyed hopefuls like myself who had been told this was the gateway to working in the film industry, and by offering our services to multi-million dollar movies for minimum wage.

In order to get work, we had to call in and wait through a long list on an electronic message saying what types of people they needed the next day.  You had to call in over and over, waiting for several messages hoping they needed your type.  If your type didn’t come up, you had no work for the next day.  Of course, you had to give up taking any other work, and when you did get on a set, you were paid so little it didn’t come close to making up for the days you didn’t get anything.  And we continued to pay our fees to remain with Central Casing year after year.

But this is what we were told we needed to do, so we kept doing it.

Then in 2011, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office started cracking down on extras casting companies that charged up front fees.  This issue had come up when there was a scourge of complaints from people who had paid to be included in services but never received work.  Being at the height of the Great Recession, the issue was much more serious, and agencies were required to provide true employment services like in any other business.

In some ways, these agencies were caught in the middle.  Movie studios and production companies have a long history of shafting employees at the bottom.  While they make movies and shows chastising the wealth gap, they have the largest disparity in payment.  Their “above the line” stars, producers, etc. will make millions while the “below the line” extras and production personnel make minimum wage or less.  They are infamous for having an over-abundance of unpaid interns who are supposedly lucky to be there and are “learning” the craft as they get their bloated employers coffee.

It was these studios and companies which were pressuring the extras agencies to provide them with cheaper and cheaper labor, all along expecting fancy offices in the wealthiest areas of town.  So the extras agencies had fallen in line to remain open, passing on the charges and low pay to their employees.  But after the City Attorney’s crackdown, many had no choice but to shut their doors.

But not Central Casting.  They were big enough to last a bit longer; long enough to come up with a different solution.  Recognizing the annoyance of their employees needing to call in to find out about work, they began to provide a service that could call in for you.  No longer would you need to sit on the phone for ten minutes at a time wading through listing after listing, then having to call in again a few hours later if there wasn’t anything for you.  Now you could get a call-in service to do all that for you, and they would call you to let you know you have work.

Of course, this could all be bypassed if Central Casting simply placed their listings online so people could see at a glance if they fit anything.  Or, god forbid, they could do the casting and simply call the people they felt were appropriate for the parts, rotating in actors who hadn’t worked the day before so everyone gets even amounts of work.  But Central Casting isn’t going to bother with all this, you know why?

Because the call-in service is even more profitable than the original payment to register.  While it used to cost about $25 to register and the same to renew each year, it now costs $70 per month to get the call-in service.  Of course, you can choose to bypass the call-in service and call in each day yourself, but you’ll find that there are only very obscure and extremely specific listings; such as little person with a nose ring and a tattoo on his neck, or people who are missing limbs.  Occasionally they’ll offer jobs to people who have fancy, classic cars, but let’s face it, you aren’t getting any of those on an extras salary.

This is because the call-in service gets the listings first.  They fill it with their list of customers who are paying $70 a month, and the only listings that are making it to Central Casting’s messages are the obscure ones the call-in service couldn’t fill.

This obvious scam only gets by the City Attorney’s Office because they opened the call-in service under a different name, Extras Management.  It’s not particularly subtle, however, as the management office is directly across the street from Central Casting, and they even tell you at Central Casting when you register that you should go over to Extras Management and sign up to ensure you’ll get work.

Of course, work is not assured.  In fact, even when you’re called onto a job, it’s still not certain.  Even though you must have your schedule cleared for the day of a shoot, accepting no other work, if the production company decides to cancel, they can do so, even up to the last minute, and you are not compensated.  This means that, from the moment Extras Management calls you, you cannot accept any other work.  You must be available for the shoot, and you must show up.  But if the production company changes its mind or falls behind schedule, it can cancel your job, even if you drove clear across town and turned down other work.

What’s worse, they can require that you clear your schedule for several days, then decide they don’t need you after the first one, even if it’s too late for you to find other work.  This was exemplified in a heartbreaking way on a set I was on a while ago.  There were over 50 of us who had been told we had three days of work.  We all showed up and worked through a hectic schedule, standing out in the hot sun and trying to get shade since they didn’t have an air conditioned area for the extras.  (Of course they had plenty of air conditioned units for the “above the line” people in this show that made fun of elitism, but nothing for the extras.)  After 5:00, when it was too late to find other work, we were all told they wouldn’t be bringing us back the next day.  I’ve never seen so many people break down in tears.  I’m certain that if you were to watch that episode of the show and look into the background, you would see a plethora of wet faces.

This was during the Great Recession.  Many of these people were counting on the work to pay for rent.  This was near the end of the month, and several said they would now be evicted because they had no chance of making rent.  Some smuggled craft service food off the set because it would be all they would have to eat.  All this while the producers who made these decisions were going home to large houses and hefty paychecks for making a show deriding greedy rich people.

Oh, and by the way, Central Casting still pays only minimum wage for the days you do work, and they take a percentage out for themselves.  This means that the $70 a month one pays Extras Management isn’t even covered in one day’s worth of work.  It takes a day and a half before you become profitable.

It is a shameful racket, one that Central Casting profits from under the table.  One might have hoped Schwarzenegger might have done something about these practices when he was governor, but he was part of that “above the line” elitism that never sees the suffering of those at the bottom.  He had the air conditioned room that never even saw where we were.