The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra

The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1928) is an 11-minute experimental short you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich. Made on a few hundred dollars of the filmmakers' own money, it became one of the earliest avant-garde films produced in the United States.

A man arrives in Hollywood to become a star and gets processed by the studio system instead — the number 9413 stamped on his forehead, his name gone. Florey and Vorkapich tell it through expressionist double exposures and compressed symbolic imagery rather than conventional scenes. Two industry insiders making a deadpan autopsy of the dream factory. Stream it online on iFILM.