The Extra

The Extra is set in a future California where members of a desperate populace sign contracts to participate in reality death films, knowing that less than 20% of them will survive. It’s a view of the future—and Hollywood—as delightfully cynical as Kurt Vonnegut with sympathetic characters, Hollywood executive sleazeballs and much more.

Less than a hundred years in the future, pollution, economic disaster, and the rapacious greed of the corporate oligarchy have brought America to its knees and created dystopian urban nightmares, of which Los Angeles may be the worst. Curtis, Japh, and Jool are film extras, who - with the help of a couple of very gutsy women - survived being anonymous players in a "live-action" film in which death on-screen meant death in real life. Surviving the shoot made them rich enough to escape the post-apocalyptic hell that LA has become.