5.3: A Little Extra Work for a Lot of Extras

In this calculus of righteous spends for the right costs, extras had a particular function in Treme. Extras, known by the euphemistic oxymoron “background artists,” have historically been the most abundant local hires. Since the early twentieth century, studios have relied on the ever-renewable reserves of people flocking to Hollywood. They lured them with promises that they might “break in” to the industry if they worked hard and were lucky. Even today, the trade lore generated in Los Angeles describes how people working as extras gain a foothold in the industry by building a resume and a social network, which then leads to a stable career. Despite the low probability of Hollywood fulfilling these promises even in the classical age of production, labor unions have struggled to organize the waves of everyday people who work only irregularly, if at all. As a result, extras on a set have been the most plentiful but also the cheapest hires in the labor force. In New Orleans, extras may put in up to sixteen hours a day, only to receive as little as fifty or a hundred dollars, depending on the size of the production budget. Most of the labor then involves waiting for a chance to be in a scene.

In a local economy characterized by low wages and precarious employment, Treme set a high bar. One extra said he made $108 for only ten hours on the set; when the crew no longer needed him, he was dismissed but still got paid for a full day’s work. The daily contracts were particularly attractive to workers in other cultural and service industries in the city, especially during seasonal or cyclical lags. As a freelancer in the arts scene explained, “If you make $100, that’s great. You can get your groceries, and your beer, and your cigarettes and go on to the next gig.” Beyond this, however, Treme drew on a reservoir of eager would-be extras based on the ethical promise of the program to the local cultural economy. Some of these extras had lived through Katrina, but many were new migrants who simply felt that they were contributing to something larger than a daily gig. Some even described doing extra work while visiting New Orleans, adding that they would do such a thing only for the love of Treme.

I came to these insights somewhat haphazardly in what began as separate studies of the program’s production and reception, which gradually merged when I realized that in forty interviews, nearly every self-proclaimed fan of the show I spoke with, about half my sample, had worked as an extra, intended to be an extra, or had friends who were Treme extras. While this was a representative sample neither of all viewers nor certainly of New Orleans writ large, my research subjects opened a window into the deep feelings the program evoked and then put to work. These emotions demonstrate tensions in the moral economy of the production, illustrating the challenges of sustaining any local film economy that would recognize its most localized but least visible workers.