Embrace the Pandemic: Gendered Extras Work at Pixar for Disney

I analyze the labor relations depicted on Disney “making of” docutainment focused on production team members working separately and together on Zoom from home during the pandemic on Pixar films. I address how the films and their featurettes were distributed and promoted on Disney as part of "diverse voices" content hubs . I argue that such positioning of the extra-text functions as part of Hollywood’s “managed self-disclosure” (Caldwell 2009), which is emblematic of how production workers internalize industrial logic (Johnson 2013). Parker and Parker (2011) note that the revealing extras are those in which contributors disagree, resulting in more of a continuum of reflections. I assess moments in the extras, filmed-from-home during the pandemic, when what feels like “confessional talk” is met by the editor’s attempt to craft a “preferred reading.” The slippages can feel like an intentional bolstering of a “make it look messy” style of production work identified by Gitlin (2000) in his writing on broadcast TV trying to look edgier than more standard fare. My contention is that popular memory, production worker memory, industry memory, and contractual memory embedded in extra-texts work in conjunction with each other to create negotiated meanings. I aim to demonstrate that extra-texts can function as what I term, production memoir, a form that combines contractual and confessional talk. Contractual talk stays on message, whereas confessional talk feels impromptu, as if it is a personal revelation or an unexpected confession even if it is part of the performance of self or of a production team identity. I argue that production memoir relies for its effect on the interplay of episodic and perceptual memory (memory related to time and place where something happened versus the perception of larger patterns in what is recalled). This kind of filmic record of pandemic production can be a very intriguing archive for scholars to access and analyze. Now part of a chapter in my Disney _ book.