5.5: Concluding Futures?

Despite the added compensation, both material and symbolic, that Treme provided its workforce, the production demanded a lot from its eager extras. In making the series speak to the worthiness of the city’s recovery and renewal, producers sought extras who could speak to New Orleanians and for New Orleanians. Extras had to be highly invested in those vernacular details that made up Treme’s carefully crafted mise-en-scène. The moral politics of recognition as a worker depended on whether extras could act both as referents and as bards for the place known as New Orleans. These roles could involve more labor, often for no payment, but they also raised the specter of reification when a musical number took front stage, leaving the performances of the extras in the background. In its most extreme formulation, the labor of being an extra could be framed as a gift, which perhaps unavoidably led to hurt feelings when the gift was not recognized or reciprocated.

None of these aspects of extras’ labor are registered in the quantitative analyses of jobs produced by film tax credit policies. They do, however, add nuance to the terms local and labor, which motivated these policies as well as provided fodder for both political consensus and critiques. The strategies that production companies, such as Treme’s Fee Nah Nee, use to be more moral and just while holding the bottom line may ultimately result in other costs. If the production includes only individuals with enough free time to do the work, either paid or unpaid, then the policies cannot be said to be building toward sustainable economies. In fact, it could be that the presence of so many extras with entitlement helps drive down the day rates of those who lack the time or the proper social networks to be desirable employees in the future. At the same time, the role of production companies in promoting themselves as instruments of urban economic recovery merely furthers the notion that private companies are the best managers of the public good. In an era of endless crises—political and economic—it is worth remembering that film production companies’ reliance on cheap or free labor undermines the economic bases for public services that all workers need, such as decent public schools, health care, and wages that bring the majority above the subsistence level. Until these needs are integrated more seamlessly into the New Orleans film economy, it will be no wonder if production companies continue to put their most marginal workers at the center of their most moral employment strategies.