Human Resources: The Body of the Extra in Classical Hollywood, 1925-1940 [electronic resource].

9781369632354

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2016.

1 online resource (278 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

This dissertation examines extras casting practices in Classical Hollywood in the era between the founding of the Central Casting Corporation in 1925 and the appointment of former FBI agent Howard R. Philbrick as its General Manager in 1940. By understanding how studios found, organized, and typecast people in film backgrounds, this dissertation argues that extras were verbally and visually articulated as an underclass perceived through the lens of criminal identification practices. Aligning the casting process with policing mechanisms both criminalized the body of the extra and situated the casting agent as an investigator. Chapter One examines this link through the formation of Central Casting in the aftermath of the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle scandal and trial in the early 1920s, and the "extra problem" in which the moral graft of the movie colony was understood as a result of a population influx of job-seekers. Central Casting was then charged with the task not just of controlling the extra population for employment, but also in categorizing them according to moralizing standards, for which it engaged as its primary tool Alphonse Bertillon's anthropometric criminal portrait. Despite the grooming of a highly efficient and bureaucratic system, Central Casting's basis in and focus on moralization and classification necessitated the establishment of an auxiliary "runners system" described in Chapter Two. This system was established in order to sufficiently communicate and draw upon viable extra players who lived in segregated neighborhoods around Los Angeles, and who did not use the "call-in" system, as did the registered extras, but who instead were the domain of a hired intermediary representative of a satellite community (a "runner"). Chapter Three understands the implications of this system's described organization as it impacted the bodies of extras, which were put in danger, harmed, and sometimes destroyed by movie-making. In particular, this chapter investigates Noah's Ark (Michael Curtiz, 1928), whose flood sequences are known to have resulted in the death of employed extras, and which, on screen, literalizes the allegory of credit, preserving the billed bodies in the structure of the ark, and putting at risk those uncredited. Chapter Four finalizes the link between extra and criminal bodies by looking at films that engaged incarcerated populations as extras. By employing prisoners in film backgrounds, films called attention to parallel issues across these groups of people: portrayal and anonymity, arrest of movement, cataloguing, labor compensation, and finally, silence.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

August 03, 2017

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2016.

Yale University.