Hey, a thread where I have some expertise!
I may have shared some of these stories in another thread at some point, so forgive if you’ve heard these.
When I first moved to LA, although I had some performance experience, I did not intend to become an actor. However, when the job I had moved out here for dried up, and I got tired of temping, I worked almost exclusively as a non-Union film and TV extra for a couple of months. This was in 1998, so if things have changed, my info is out of date.
I hooked up with CenEx, the non-union arm of the legendary Central Casting. I walked in, they took my picture, and said I was in their system and could start calling for the next day’s work that very afternoon, which I did.
The way CenEx worked, you had to call them about 99% of the time, as opposed to them calling you. Various casters within the company would place a voice message as to the sort of physical type they needed, and if heard the message when you called in, and you thought you matched, you called another number, they called up your picture, gave you a thumbs up or thumbs down, and if you were selected, they’d tell you where and when to show up.
Non-union extra’s made state minimum wage, which at the time, was $5.75/hr. If you showed up at all, however, you received a day’s pay. I and several dozen others once got $46 apiece for hanging around for a half hour on the lot where they shot “Ally McBeal” because the cast and crew decided after we had all arrived that they were too tired to film one of their bar scenes. If you were kept over 8 hours, you got time and a half. More than 10 hours, you got double time. I made a decent check off two really long nights on “Lethal Weapon IV”. There was a standard myth that if they kept you past 12 hours, they were supposed to pay you a day’s pay every hour, but it never happened to me, so I don’t know if it was true or not.
Now, while you are on set for a single day’s shoot, you are not at home calling into the message list. Cell phones are discouraged on set by crews, and are likely to get stolen while you are working, as are laptops. Some extras I met were registered with more than one casting agency, and hired a third party to call in for work for them. As this was my only paycheck for several weeks, I refrained from paying a sizable chunk of it that these places charged as a fee. You might luck out, and get to be a regular background person on a series that had recurrent scenes in the same location, but that was hit or miss. I got chosen to audition be a backgrounder for the first season of “That 70’s Show”, but didn’t make the cut.
One thing that’s nice, especially if you are a little short that week, is that they feed you on set for free, and most of the time, the food wasn’t too bad. On sitcoms, the stars ate with everyone else, so the food was better.
Now, your A-number-one job once you arrived on set was to find the particular director’s assistant who had your pay voucher. We were always given a contact name, but this person had invariably pawned the task of dealing with extras off on some underling. Now, the union agreements at time dictated that the first, i forget, 10 or 15 extras hired for a set HAD to be union. After that, it was up to the production, who of course always went with cheaper non-extra background talent.
So if you were called onto a set, you KNEW the DA had been given 10 or 15 union pay vouchers. If one of the union extras had not shown up for any reason, and you whored yourself out appropriately to them, they MIGHT give you an unused union voucher, and you’d be paid union scale for that day. So every set was nothing but a glad-handing session with the voucher person. Most sets announecd they were not distributing union vouchers to us, they were so sick of it. never managed to get my hands on one myself.
Once you received union scale for three jobs, you were required to join the union anyway. Actually, you might have to join two. SAG more or less covered anything done on film, while AFTRA covered video. The fee to join each was in the four figures, so you didn’t want to try and collect too many vouchers anyway. Every now and then, SAG and AFTRA talk about combining, which they know would increase new membership, but it always gets voted down in the end.
I talked to a few union extras, who told me you really needed to know where your next job was coming from before you went union, since if you weren’t one of the first 15 called, you weren’t working.
So your best bet after that was to get a “bump”. Bumps were various inconveniences one might be called upon to undergo which the rules dictated required extra pay. Getting wet or cold was a bump. Getting any special makeup, such as prosthetic applicances, was a bump. Nudity was a bump, etc. So some people got extra money that way. I forget if I did any of those.
If I had not been subletting in Brentwood, and been a little more agressive at getting jobs (I never got turned down by CenEx, which many of my fellow extras considered a miracle), I might have been able to make an extremely modest income from it, but after a couple of months, I took a more permanent job.
But that was in 1991.