Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television 9780822388968

Citation preview

Production Culture

console-ing passions Television and Cultural Power Edited by Lynn Spigel

PRODUCTION CULTURE Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television

JOHN THORNTON CALDWELL Duke University Press Durham and London 2008

∫ 2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

vii

1

Acknowledgments

Introduction Industrial Reflexivity and Common Sense

37

Chapter 1 Trade Stories and Career Capital

69

Chapter 2 Trade Rituals and Turf Marking

110

Chapter 3 Trade Images and Imagined Communities (Below the Line)

150

Chapter 4 Trade Machines and Manufactured Identities (Below the Line)

Chapter 5

197

Industrial Auteur Theory (Above the Line / Creative) Chapter 6

232

Industrial Identity Theory (Above the Line / Business) Chapter 7

274

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing Conclusion

316

Shoot-Outs, Bake-Offs, and Speed Dating (Manic Disclosure/Non-Disclosure)

Appendix 1

345

Method: Artifacts and Cultural Practices in Production Studies Appendix 2

362

A Taxonomy of DVD Bonus Track Strategies and Functions Appendix 3

368

Practitioner Avowal/Disavowal (Industrial Doublespeak) Appendix 4

370

Corporate Reflexivity vs. Worker Reflexivity (The Two Warring Flipsides of Industrial Self-Disclosure)

Notes

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Works Cited

433

Index

445

Acknowledgments

This book began as a series of five public lectures at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and at the University of Bergen, Norway, in May 1996 and September 1997 entitled: ‘‘Liminal Industry: Ceremonial Rituals of the Production Culture,’’ ‘‘Iconography of the Technical Culture: Local Knowledge, Demos, and Testosterone,’’ ‘‘Textual Practices of the Marketing Culture,’’ ‘‘Critical Production Practice: Screen Theory of the Programming Culture,’’ and ‘‘Multichannel Branding and the Migratory Patterns of Industrial Texts.’’∞ I thank Jostein Gripsrud for his invitation, and Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Lennard Hojbjerg for the opportunity to inaugurate with these lectures the yearlong multidisciplinary research initiative at the University of Copenhagen in 1997 entitled ‘‘The Humanistic and Psychological Study of Visual Media and Visual Cognition.’’ These essays were subsequently updated and presented at a number of universities and conferences internationally from 1997 to 2003. Some of the general ideas of these papers —on branding, the digital sweatshop, masculinity and gendered technologies, liminal professional rituals, worker anxieties, outsourcing, and industrial reflexivity—appeared in short form, excerpted, or adapted as part of other studies in The Encyclopedia of Television (1997, 2003), Electronic Media

Acknowledgments

viii

and Technoculture (2000), Emergences (2001), The New Media Book, (2002), Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook (2002), and New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (2003). These essays, albeit revised extensively to incorporate and address recent developments in film and television, were also presented between 1996 and 2005 at the University of Oslo, Norway; Aarhus University, Denmark; Siegen University, Germany; University of Stockholm, Sweden; University of Teipei, Taiwan; Shanghai University, China; University of Warwick, England; Birmingham University, England; Wesleyan University; Dartmouth University; University of Southern California; University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; University of California, San Diego; University of California, Santa Cruz; University of California, Berkeley; Ohio University; Northwestern University; the Console-ing Passions Conference on Television, Media and Feminism (Notre Dame and Milwaukee); and the Society for Cinema Studies Conference (Ottawa, San Diego, Chicago, Washington, and Denver). For their invitations, valuable feedback, and provocative questions on those and other occasions, I gratefully thank Elizabeth Traube, Tain-Dow Lee, John Fullerton, Jan Olsson, Mark Williams, Nick Couldry, Karen Riggs, Herman Gray, Lynn Spigel, David Bordwell, James Bennett, Tom Brown, and Charlotte Brunsdon.≤ Others along the way provided valuable editorial advice on various projects: Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Toby Miller, Horace Newcomb, Sherry Ortner, Karen Brodkin, and Je√rey Sconce. In many ways the book at hand builds on my earliest research on ‘‘low theory’’ and ‘‘industrial semiotics’’ in film/video cultures of production, which was published in Cinema Journal in 1993, American Television in 1994, and Televisuality in 1995. The book at hand provides the opportunity to update, expand, and bring together the Copenhagen and Bergen papers in a unified and integrated way for the first time, even as they were originally conceived and publicly presented.≥ I would like to thank several presses for allowing me to extensively revise and reprint here updated versions of the original papers: ‘‘Industrial Geography Lessons,’’ in Mediaspace, ed. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy (Routledge, 2003); ‘‘Convergence Television,’’ in Television after tv , ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Duke University Press, 2004); ‘‘Probe Technologies and Deep Texts as Industrial Geography Lessons in the Age of Digital,’’ in Allegories of Communication ( John Libbey, 2004); ‘‘Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (Television),’’ Cinema Journal (fall 2005); and ‘‘Critical Industrial Practice,’’ Television and New Media (May 2006).

Acknowledgments

I am especially grateful to Ken Wissoker, for his interest and support in the project; to Courtney Berger and Justin Faerber, for their editorial assistance; and especially to the two anonymous reviewers of this manuscript. Their insightful challenges and extensive suggestions—on several successive drafts —made this book far better than it would have been otherwise. The reviewers also convinced me that the manuscript I ‘‘completed’’ in 2005 was actually two books posing as one, which means that portions of the original project will appear elsewhere. Many thanks to my colleagues at ucla — Nick Browne, Janet Bergstrom, Teshome Gabriel, Doug Kellner, Steve Mamber, Denise Mann, Kathleen McHugh, Chon Noriega, Sherry Ortner, Steve Ricci, Vivian Sobchack, Barbara Boyle, and Robert Rosen—who created a rich environment in which to pursue this research over the past eight years. I also benefited immensely from my experience on the faculty at ucsd from 1996 to 1998, where my production teaching and film studies research on production gained immeasurably from exposure to the cultural, ethnographic, political-economic, and sociological methodologies and work of my colleagues Phil Agre, Susan Davis, Daniel Hallin, Robert Horowitz, George Lipsitz, Chandra Mukerji, Daniel Schiller, Michael Schudson, and Ellen Seiter. I hope that my Northwestern advisor and mentor Mimi White and my professors Jack Ellis, and Chuck Kleinhans, will each see their own influence as well, for they did indeed inform this manuscript in fundamental ways. The anthropologist Bill McKellin kindly allowed me to observe his extended ethnographic fieldwork among the Managalase, and this proved to be a formative influence in my own research fifteen years later. Sadly, I am not able to thank two individuals in person: the late George Custen and Lisa Kernan. George taught me a lot about the classical Hollywood system and helped me publish my first book. Lisa and I shared many good discussions about behind-the-scenes film knowledge after I discovered her recent book Coming Attractions and before she passed away this summer. She was the ideal of what an educator, scholar, and activist can and should be. Only after sixteen years of college-level teaching in film/video production and the visual arts was I fortunate enough to earn an appointment at a doctoral research university. This position has allowed me to work with Ph.D. students over the last few years, whose dissertation committees or research continuously stimulated and challenged my own thinking. Many thanks in this regard to Miranda Banks, Daniel Bernardi, Gilberto Blasini, Erica Bochanty, Vincent Brook, Michael Clarke, Rebecca Epstein, Chiara

ix

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Ferrari, Tarleton Gillespie, Bambi Haggins, Felicia Henderson, Erin Hill, Jennifer Holt, L. S. Kim, Paul Malcolm, Katynka Martinez, Maria Munoz, Vicki Mayer, Ross Melnick, Candace Moore, Catherine Saulino, Sudeep Sharma, Sharon K. Sharp, Beretta Smith-Shomade, and Eric Vanstrom. Since 1999, a yearly seminar I have taught at ucla entitled ‘‘ftv201: Media Industries and Cultures of Production’’ has provided the setting in which the research for this book was systematically tested, debated, and refined. I am grateful for my many productive conversations with these graduate students and others: Joshua Amberg, John Bridge, Stephen Charbonneau, Adam Fish, Colin Gunckel, Cecilia Hastings, Robert Hernandez, Ali Ho√man, Victoria Meng, Daren Overpeck, Mary Samuelson, and Laurel Westrup. Finally, thanks to a group of friends who kindly helped me make sense of things over the years: David Brokaw, David Clausen, Dante D’Ambrosio, Joe Davis, Stan DeWitt, Chuck Dickson, Robert Finney, Devora Gomez, David Johnson, John Pudaite, Jose Sanchez-H., Joel Sheesley, Eric Stedfeld, Brian Stein-Webber, Mary Stein-Webber, Mike Stracco, Gregory Taylor, and John Walford. Their assistance and friendship will always be much appreciated, even as memories of our times together fades. My family, of course, provided fundamental forms of support and personal encouragement during the writing of this book, especially Thekla E. Joiner and my parents Paul and Ruth Caldwell. I dedicate this book to my three children— Otis John, Julia Thornton, and Stephen Joel—and not just because of my recurring penchant ‘‘for connecting everything to everything else’’ but because they were always a part of everything that I saw and heard and thought about as I wrote and rewrote Production Culture.

The guiding principle is the same: societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One only has to learn how to gain access to them. —Clifford Geertz, ‘‘Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight’’ Everybody is hyper self-aware. We live in a post-everything universe. —Josh Schwartz, executive producer of The O.C.

Introduction

Industrial Reflexivity and Common Sense

This book explores the cultural practices and belief systems of film/video production workers in Los Angeles—not just those of the prestige producers and directors but also those of the many more anonymous workers, such as ga√ers and grips, in Hollywood’s lower castes and crafts. Fieldwork for a study of this sort is complicated by the fact that film and television today reflect obsessively back upon themselves and invest considerable energy in over-producing and distributing this industrial self-analysis to the public. Once considered secondary or backstory phenomena, industry self-analysis and self-representation now serve as primary on-screen entertainment forms across a vast multimedia landscape. Stylish on-screen metacommentaries now pervade the worlds of both viewer and producer.∞ The fact that the new industrial narcissus places so much of this self-consciousness on the screen, outside, and in public makes traditional scholarly questions about a ‘‘behind-the-scenes’’ or ‘‘authentic’’ industry ‘‘inside’’ seem rather beside the point. Critics and theorists have traditionally hyped reflexivity and deconstruction of this sort as indications of vanguard cinematic agitation or critical audience resistance. Management experts, however, would probably deem

Introduction

2

such practices as merely sound corporate promotional and marketing strategies.≤ Although in this book I examine both style and marketing dimensions, I also argue that industrial reflexivity needs to be understood as forms of local cultural negotiation and expression as well, for the lived production communities that create films, programs, ‘‘making-ofs,’’ behind-the-scenes docs, dvd bonus tracks, show-biz reports, and cross-media film/tv franchises. I recognize that film and television are far more than either industries or groups of media corporations that simply manufacture entertainment or compete as part of a national economy or international cultural marketplace. While film and television are influenced by macroscopic economic processes, they also very much function on a microsocial level as local cultures and social communities in their own right. Film and television, in other words, do not simply produce mass or popular culture (a muchstudied perspective for over seven decades), but rather film/tv production communities themselves are cultural expressions and entities involving all of the symbolic processes and collective practices that other cultures use: to gain and reinforce identity, to forge consensus and order, to perpetuate themselves and their interests, and to interpret the media as audience members. In the end, I hope that the reader of this book will agree that the picture of the worlds of workers that I o√er in these chapters proves to be as critically provocative and culturally significant as the on-screen content of prime-time programs and widescreen films that critics and theorists traditionally analyze. Far from involving rote or merely intuitive work, many film/television workers (including those in the manual crafts) critically analyze and theorize their tasks in provocative and complex ways. Knowledge about the industry, whether approached through industrial documentation or personal interviews, is usually highly coded, managed, and inflected. For this reason, I have tried to avoid two familiar scholarly traps: attempting to ‘‘directly’’ analyze the social group and limiting my analysis to on-screen forms produced by the social group.≥ Instead, I have paid particular attention to any available evidence of the social group’s own entrenched interpretive frameworks and self-analysis. Throughout the chapters that follow, I also insist that this ‘‘culture as an interpretive system’’ approach always be seen as fully embedded in the play of power and politics.∂ Because insider knowledge is always managed; because spin and narrative define and couch any industrial disclosure; and because researcher-practitioner contacts are

Production Culture

always marked by symbiotic tensions over authenticity and advantage, media studies must avoid limiting research to a clean menu of disconnected methods: textual analysis, reporting, interviewing, economic analysis, or ethnography. In this book I argue that the complicated layers of public relations management at work in every layer of the production cultures of Los Angeles mean that researchers would benefit by questioning the value of overt or intentional explanations (especially unsolicited ones). Strangely, the industry itself is cynical about the veracity of its own educational disclosures, sometimes likening them to the overly earnest and therefore highly suspect sort of ‘‘help’’ o√ered by used car salesmen.∑ My decade-long research for this book leaves me with at least one nagging hunch, a kind of ‘‘inverse credibility law’’: the higher one travels up the industrial food chain for insights, the more suspect and spin-driven the personal disclosures tend to become.∏ The producers and executives I interviewed who’ve learned to converse ‘‘spontaneously’’ in tightly crafted prefab sound bites prove this point dramatically. By habit, many speak from corporate ‘‘scripts.’’ For this reason, shifting emphasis to the industry’s ‘‘deep’’ texts, rituals, and spaces sometimes o√ers a very di√erent picture of film/television, since such things are seldom o√ered as o≈cial public explanations—big statements, that is—about ‘‘what production means.’’ One of my aims here is to find and suggest concrete ways by which media studies might reconsider its methods in the face of an industry that is increasingly preoccupied with workaday forms of critical and cultural analysis that are at some points privately exchanged and at other times publicly dramatized. This regularized ‘‘outing’’ of embedded production knowledge occurs within two broad cultural registers: first, in private or bounded disclosures to production personnel themselves (of the sort I examine in the next few pages and in chapters 1–5); and second, in public disclosures to the viewing audience (via the reflexive, on-screen genres I examine in chapters 6 and 7). Each register brings distinctive challenges to media scholars. The four sections that follow introduce key perspectives of the book as a whole: first, a discussion of methods and precedents; second, an examination of trade and worker talk; third, a consideration of deep texts and artifacts; and fourth, a discussion of the scope, limits, and implications of the book.

3

Introduction

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By fall 2006 NBC makes media’s critique of itself unremarkable. Here, Studio 60 brings prime-time reflexivity nationwide, even to this tagged industrial railyard adjacent to the refineries in Wilmington, California. Photo © J. Caldwell, 2006.

AN INTEGRATED CULTURAL-INDUSTRIAL ANALYSIS

Throughout this book, I utilize an integrated cultural-industrial method of analysis. My approach is synthetic, and I examine data from four registers or modes of analysis: textual analysis of trade and worker artifacts; interviews with film/television workers; ethnographic field observation of production spaces and professional gatherings; and economic/industrial analysis.π I have attempted whenever possible to keep these individual research modes ‘‘in check’’ by placing the discourses and results of any one register (textual, ethnographic, interviews, and political economy) in critical tension or dialogue with the others. This method of cross-checking proves useful when interrogating production practices where, for example, the rhetoric of studio press kits does not jive with explanations provided by production craftspeople; or when demo tapes used to market equipment conveniently elide or gloss labor issues raised through more macroscopic industrial analysis or spin; or when sunny disclosures in interviews with producers are contradicted by cost-saving new technologies that displace and stress production workers. The integrated methodology used here, although perhaps larger

Production Culture

than the traditional ‘‘tool kit’’ employed in textual or stylistic analysis, still very much fits within a critical film and media studies tradition. In some ways, my approach also responds to the anthropologist George Marcus’s proposal for ‘‘situated, multi-locale’’ field studies that integrate microsociological cultural analysis with macrosociological political economic frameworks.∫ In other ways, this book follows Paul Willis’s call to find and articulate examples of critical theory embedded within the everyday of workers’ experience—that is, through the pursuit of a kind of indigenous cultural theory that operates outside of academia.Ω I have been particularly drawn to this idea of ‘‘theorizing from the ground up’’ as an alternative to conventional approaches. My project is also less about finding an ‘‘authentic’’ reality ‘‘behind the scenes’’—an empirical notion that tends to be naive about the ways that media industry realities are always constructed—than it is about studying the industry’s own self-representation, self-critique, and self-reflection.∞≠ This approach is less informed by traditional anthropology and its functionalist explanations than it is by the ‘‘interpretive’’ anthropology of Cli√ord Geertz. Both methodologies depend upon fieldwork, but Geertz builds his model on hermeneutics rather than on an explanation of direct social function. As Geertz states: ‘‘The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.’’∞∞ Following the philosopher Paul Ricouer, Geertz argues that the ethnographic problem is not about ‘‘social mechanics’’ but about ‘‘social semantics,’’ which for him means systematically treating ‘‘cultural forms . . . (as) texts, as imaginative works built out of social materials.’’∞≤ Like Geertz, my project aims to ‘‘look over the shoulder’’ of film and television workers in terms of the ‘‘interpretive’’ nature of their practices. But beyond this I also hope to suggest how these industrial ‘‘critical’’ or ‘‘theorizing’’ artifacts, rituals, and mediated forms of reflexivity express an emerging but unstable economic and social order in Hollywood. Although critics seldom acknowledge film/video workers as theorists or ethnographers, these workers do in fact produce ‘‘self-ethnographic’’ accounts and daily deploy what I define as critical industrial practices.∞≥ As for definitions, this three-part concept signifies trade methods and conventions involving interpretive schemes (the ‘‘critical’’ dimension) that are deployed within specific institutional contexts and relationships (the ‘‘industrial’’

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Introduction

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Production workers continuously reflect on the production task and its technologies. Here, software designers discuss the digital replication process. Los Angeles, June 2001. Photo © J. Caldwell.

environment) when such activities are manifest during technical production tasks or professional interactions (labor and ‘‘practice’’). Approached this way, for example, critical industrial practices include the general framing paradigms that writers and producers use to conceptualize and develop screen content for film and television (industrial aesthetic theory). The rubric also references incremental forms of analysis that directors and editors stage and deploy over time during the production or postproduction process (critical analysis as production management). Critical industrial practice also informs and governs production work worlds such as those of camera crews. As part of craft habit such crews rigidly segregate and atomize worker tasks, even as they network worker communication, in more holistic ways. Camera-crew work assignments still follow a Taylorist industrial logic, where each worker is assigned a discrete physical subtask or routine (to pull focus, to load mags, to clean the gate, to operate, to move, to measure, to scrim or flag). Yet camera-crew interactions and trade communications also function at a higher level as Geertzian cultural expressions that work to make sense of the overall image-making enterprise. Together, directors of photography (dps), operators, assistants, ga√ers, and grips in e√ect comprise

Production Culture

what the sociologist Bruno Latour terms ‘‘actor-networks.’’∞∂ Craft workers (actors) follow trade conventions to collectively move the production along, using networks that ‘‘distribute cognition’’ across the group as part of industrial habit.∞∑ These interactive forms of cognition during a shoot suggest that scholars should look beyond the standard split between film ‘‘theory’’ and film ‘‘work,’’ and consider how film industrial practices, technologies, discourses, and interactions also involve critical analysis, theoretical elaboration, and aesthetic sense making. My research in this book can be described as a cultural studies of both industrial film/video theorizing (a cognitive and social activity) and production (a cultural practice). Such study asks how collective theorizing (conventionalized sense making) is animated in practitioner tools, trade artifacts, and social behaviors in film/television’s industrial culture. In various chapters I also will return to another recurring theme by suggesting how self-ethnographic discourses and cultural theorizing can be understood alongside broader developments and threats—including digital technologies, runaway production, and globalization—now faced by the film/video production community in the United States. To more fully understand ‘‘film’s production of culture’’ today means looking more closely at ‘‘the culture of film/video production,’’ especially as its conventions and craft habits are threatened. Here I should note some provisos and definitions concerning scope, media specificity, and method. First, although I pose some generalized conclusions about film/video production in the chapters that follow, such references should not be taken to stand for ‘‘the industry’’ in a totalizing or unified sense. Such a monolith does not exist, even though the term industry is deployed monolithically in popular and trade presses as a rhetorical convention. Hence, in this book I use ‘‘production culture’’ in a plural and generic sense (as a collective of discrete constituent cultures and subcultural parts). While ‘‘the industry’’ label may be significant ideologically and rhetorically, the term covers over a great cultural heterogeneity and diversity of economic and trade interests. The fact that in Southern California alone there are now approximately 250,000 workers directly employed by the film and television industries means that cultural heterogeneity and institutional specificity must ground the analysis of any one area.∞∏ For this reason, in the chapters that follow I typically examine very discrete sectors of the production community (camera support technologies and their users, trade show

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Camera crews, like this one directed by the DP Lazlo Kovacs, ASC, ‘‘distribute cognition’’ across segregated craft subspecialties and interactively function as ‘‘actor-networks.’’ Photo © 2004, J. Caldwell.

rituals, etc.). I have tried to foreground a range of specificities (labor sector, technologies, program genres, etc.), types of data considered (trade publications, interviews, observation, etc.), and various institutional limits (geographical, economic, and market scope) when explaining various industrial practices. My research, for example, has been limited to and localized in and around the Los Angeles area. It has involved a combination of fieldwork, interviews, textual analysis, and historical and archival research carried out between 1995 and 2005. It has primarily but not exclusively dealt with below-the-line and trade practices rather than management.∞π And it has focused on rather traditional forms of film and video production rather than online, dot-com, cyber practices or computer programming. Even the many discussions of ‘‘digital media’’ in the various chapters that follow should be understood within the context of motion picture and television production in Southern California rather than as an index of Silicon Valley or the dot-com/high-tech sector in New York.∞∫ The latter arenas provide very di√erent contexts and social formations for analysis, with fully developed research traditions and critical literatures of their own. Second, the production sector in Los Angeles area (and as I frame it

Production Culture

here), involves the interaction of personnel from both film and television. This overlap is especially true among workers in below-the-line crafts.∞Ω The notion of a common labor pool also describes workers in some programming genres and technical categories more than others.≤≠ The careers of most screenwriters and producers, for example, tend to be more closely restricted to either film or television, not both (although this is changing). Yet the writers’ union (wga) and producers’ guild (pga) o≈cially represent personnel from both film and television.≤∞ Therefore, to talk about industrial cultural theorizing for below-the-line cinematographers, editors, and ga√ers means examining both film and television.≤≤ This cross-media working relationship, furthermore, now reflects higher-order interactions involved in the corporate sphere as well, given the multimedia ‘‘repurposing’’ practices of the new, multinational media conglomerates (Time-Warner/ aol /Turner/hbo, Viacom/cbs /mtv /Paramount, etc.). Given the extensive changes in both the production and viewing of contemporary film and television, it is very di≈cult to talk about film studies today without also considering cinema within the diverse contexts of electronic media. While film producers still mouth the old cliché that ‘‘it’s all about putting butts in the seats’’ (of theaters), less than 15 percent of feature revenues now comes from theatrical box o≈ce income. Beyond Hollywood’s persistent cultural rhetoric, the electronically mediated home now functions as the most economically strategic site for both television reception and film consumption.≤≥ Studying worker beliefs and industry reflexivity within these two qualifying contexts brings distinctive challenges. The specter of industry’s educational disclosure as hard-sell manipulation, which percolates in studies throughout this book, evokes the sadly familiar rhetoric of mutual contempt that marks an apparent gulf between film/television, on the one hand, and intelligence/objectivity, on the other. The screenwriter William Goldman’s classic taunt that ‘‘nobody knows anything’’ in Hollywood asserts that intellectual incompetence rather than critical acumen defines the industry, even as it adds self-loathing to the industrial mix.≤∂ Yet industry missives dismissing intellectuals have their own history as well. Variety mocked the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker’s comprehensive 1950 ethnography Hollywood: The Dream Factory as the naive musings of an outsider: ‘‘A dull and tedious tome. . . . Downright silly. . . . Most of it could have been put together by any Hollywood correspondent in two weeks.’’≤∑

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Regardless of Powdermaker’s important insights, her crime quite simply was that she was an outsider asking her own questions rather than Hollywood’s. The skewerings of Goldman and Variety are part of a history of rifts, write o√s, and denigrations whenever anyone tries to ‘‘seriously’’ study Hollywood or when industry producers or ‘‘players’’ pose publicly as prescient theorists. Part of this rift is based on anxieties about who knows what in Hollywood, and what (if anything) can be known about the place. Another part results from an overdetermined cultural ‘‘mystique’’ that continues to invoke the industry’s decades-old quasi-medieval authority about how the industry works, what it means, and what ‘‘really’’ goes on ‘‘behind the scenes.’’≤∏ The trades regularly question the motives and legitimacy of anyone analyzing film/television. Oddly, even academic books that are overtly ‘‘deferent’’ to industry creators are criticized by the trades as ‘‘naive’’ reworkings of ‘‘network press releases’’ transcribed by scholars who apparently don’t know that ‘‘most producers are also salesmen . . . creating their own mythology . . . with joy.’’≤π Dismissals of this ilk, however, function as cultural posturing as much as disinterested analysis, especially within the broader context of workaday gossip and ‘‘dissing.’’ In this cynical milieu, everyone in Hollywood is on the make, every account is spin or back stabbing, and every contact is exploitation in the making. Even ‘‘insider’’ analysts are ripped if they betray ‘‘outsider’’ motives. Nicholas Kent flays the veteran trade writer Paul Rosenfield for ‘‘hyperventilating’’ while interviewing (‘‘worshipping’’) Dawn Steel in her o≈ce.≤∫ Some academics can indeed pass muster if they demonstrate secret-society membership.≤Ω Yet other serious film/television theory scholarship gets ripped mercilessly. As one executive producer intoned: ‘‘That’s just elitist psychobabble. It sounds like it was written by a professor of malapropism. That has no bearing on the real world . . . of what film is really supposed to be about.’’≥≠ Before leveling this damning broadside against academics, the journalist citing it had first carefully established his own legitimate personal credentials—that is, as a ‘‘real’’ screenwriter and producer. Trade reviews frequently challenge both production research and journalistic analysis over issues of authorial identity and legitimacy vis-à-vis the industry.≥∞ Legitimizing one’s industrial identity can be accomplished via first-person self-disclosure or third-person ‘‘outing.’’≥≤ Significantly, selfdisclosures also serve as the very way that industry wannabes and up-andcomers learn to work cocktail parties and receptions or hustle agents or

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producers in order to ‘‘take a meeting.’’≥≥ While the media scholar may disclose past media experience to demonstrate legitimacy, the industrial informant will calculate the value that an academic interrogator may have for the informant’s own career or professional fortunes. Such informants are, after all, well versed in evaluating and scanning nametags while ‘‘working a room’’ or a market in order to quickly move and gauge the career mobility potential of any new acquaintance. The ‘‘any news is good news’’ approach to pr does not fully explain informant requests to go ‘‘o√ record’’ or threats made to deny disclosures after interviews. Yet industrial informants know that scholars now ply their wares on an extensive, multimediated public sphere, one that includes many of the same publishing and public forums frequented by their own studio or company marketing department. The extensive array of critically demanding industrial activities that I have researched for this book, however, puts industry’s habitual posture of intellectual contempt into some doubt. Placed within these parameters, readers will discover that this book dialogues with and draws from several interrelated disciplines, including sociological cultural studies,≥∂ the sociology of work,≥∑ interpretive anthropology and performance studies,≥∏ institutional theories of art,≥π political economy,≥∫ and new technology research.≥Ω Although my research involved a series of ethnographic observations done over a ten-year period, I do not consider this book necessarily anthropological (in part because of the crosssector, cross-industry scope of my project). Somewhat out of frustration from the start, one of my goals was simply to consider whether better terms and categories might be formulated to describe and explain new and emerging production practices that have not been adequately theorized (or in some cases recognized). I do hope that by attempting to describe new developments with more precise terminology this book may at least have some pre-anthropological and pre-social science value. That is, more convincing terms are clearly needed simply to describe recent changes in production, including the trends I introduce in the chapters ahead: migratory labor and churn, outsourcing’s bid culture, speed shooting and hyperproduction, the digital sweatshop, the director/producer as bible, masculinized tools and worker masochism, gendered production space, industrial contact zones, studio tracking boards and countertracking boards, criticism as stealth marketing, branding as industrial viral practice, and the collapsed workflow caused by the ‘‘di’’ (digital intermediate). Such con-

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cepts and descriptive terms from film/television studies may have some preliminary utility for scholars in other fields, including cultural sociology and the emerging field of ‘‘media anthropology,’’ as they turn toward contemporary film and television production as sites for ethnographic research.∂≠ This recent turn toward cultural studies of industry builds on a provocative set of earlier interventions that we would do well to reconsider. The early scholarship on Hollywood that began in the 1940s with the work of the sociologist Leo Rosten and the ethnographic anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker established useful precedents for fieldwork and methodologies focused on the film production culture in Los Angeles.∂∞ Yet in the decades that followed their insights were largely disregarded by academics who showed greater interest in a wide range of mostly nonindustry conceptions of cinema (film aesthetics, director studies, national cinemas, film and culture, psychological aspects of film, film and ideology, etc.). This nonindustrial inclination in film studies held until the early 1980s, when the industry was ‘‘rediscovered’’ on two fronts: first, by historians using archival methodologies; and second, by two books that directly took on the challenge of researching the lived cultures of contemporary Hollywood.∂≤ Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley’s important book The Producer’s Medium and Todd Gitlin’s Inside Primetime both appeared in 1983 and were based on extensive interviewing with practitioners as well as fieldwork in Hollywood.∂≥ Yet the two books provide contrasting case studies in how academic theory can inflect even interviews with very di√erent ideological meanings. It is useful to compare the two books in terms of a methodological distinction that some anthropologists and linguists make in studying cultures.∂∂ By synthesizing and intercutting numerous interviews together under the general framework of cultural hegemony, Gitlin framed personal interview disclosures as examples of how dominant culture manages and controls the daily decisions made by film/television practitioners. In Gitlin’s approach, cultural theory is deployed to decode and reinterpret local practices and personal explanations as corporate expressions. Newcomb and Alley’s approach, by contrast, shows greater deference to the personal explanations and general propositions provided by their interview subjects. Yet they too sketch out a theoretical scheme (albeit more general than Gitlin’s hegemony model) to orient their interviews. Newcomb and Alley adapt Victor Turner’s more benign theory of ‘‘liminality,’’ which they use to explain the television producer’s role in helping to make

Production Culture

prime-time television a ‘‘public forum’’ for American culture at large.∂∑ While Gitlin’s producers negotiate and act out capitalist imperatives passed down to industry via dominant cultural interests, Newcomb’s producers essentially function as active participants and members of the American mass audience. While my work uses negotiation of the sort that Gitlin invokes, and adopts the notion of producers as cultural interpreters that Newcomb proposes, I must explain worker activities as an outgrowth of something less monolithic than a dominant capitalist system or macroscopic than a mass culture forum. One reason my approach is necessarily more delimited and bounded than either Gitlin’s or Newcomb’s is that they were examining industry executives during the height of the three-network ‘‘broadcasting’’ era when ‘‘least objectionable programming,’’ ‘‘average Nielsen families,’’ ‘‘economies of scale,’’ and a mass audience were realistic industrial goals and assumptions of audiences and critics alike. My analytical task, by comparison, is to make sense of film/video workers who function as part of a very di√erent ‘‘postnetwork’’ industrial world defined by di√erent tendencies and categories, notably ‘‘narrowcasting,’’ ‘‘niche’’ demographics, ‘‘tiered’’ programming, ‘‘economies of scope,’’ increasingly unstable business and labor relations, endless content ‘‘repurposing,’’ and seemingly endless ‘‘multichannel’’ and ‘‘multitasking’’ choices. Because of the reduction in scope, splintering of tastes, shifting modes of production, and technical instabilities characteristic of the later period, my fieldwork must necessarily account for industry through narrower forms of ‘‘local culture.’’∂∏ The ‘‘one size fits all’’ aspirations of general or classical film theory necessarily gives way here to something far more heterogeneous. In the last decade, several important books explored new methods for researching production in this same context.∂π Julie D’Acci, Herman Gray, Jostein Gripsrud, Jane Shattuc, Amanda Lotz, and Elana Levine all further integrated the critical interviewing mode of Newcomb, Alley, and Gitlin in important directions by situating the insights of producers within various theoretical, textual, social, and historical contexts.∂∫ Elizabeth Traube, Barry Dornfeld, Arlene Dávila, Laura Grindsta√, Vicki Mayer, and Georgina Born in turn brought increasingly sophisticated methods from anthropology and ethnography to study production.∂Ω In pursuing an integrated culturalindustrial analysis of recent production trends, and given these precedents, I have found particularly resonant the literature on the sociology of work and organizations by Paul M. Hirsch, Howard Becker, Paul DiMaggio, Andrew

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Ross, and Angela McRobbie,∑≠ as well as the research on creativity and constraint in organizations by James Ettema and D. Charles Whitney.∑∞ Studying what might be termed the ‘‘indigenous’’ interpretive frameworks of local production cultures provides specific insights about how individual filmmakers make aesthetic decisions, put theoretical ideas into practice, and make critical distinctions in their job tasks and work worlds. Even as I acknowledge the importance of valuing indigenous or lay theorizing, however, I resist deferring entirely to the local categories and aesthetic paradigms of producers, at least as final guarantors of authenticity or meaning. This latter possibility (a form of authority based on ‘‘naive’’ ethnographic or journalistic deference) is no less problematic than what some have attacked as the ‘‘naive’’ forms of textual analysis that film scholars have traditionally favored due to disregard for media law, policy, and film/video production methods.∑≤ Interviews with and statements by producers and craftspeople in film can be conceptually rich, theoretically suggestive, and culturally revealing, yet we should never lose sight of the fact that such statements are almost always o√ered from some perspective of self interest, promotion, and spin. That is, modern film and media companies are resolutely proprietary in nature; they guard many internal processes and onscreen content decisions possessively; they force employees to sign ‘‘nondisclosure’’ and ‘‘confidentiality agreements’’; and their employees usually only enter the public world and trades as opportunities to hype projects in development or distribution or to fuel pr campaigns and marketing initiatives.∑≥ Going to industry to ‘‘get it right’’ is valuable to a certain point, but such an approach fails unless we see and consider such expressions as embedded within broader cultural commitments, economies, and industrial traditions that in turn inflect and transpose those very expressions. Understanding production talk as cultural sense making and self-ethnography requires more carefully and comprehensively considering the practices, expressions, and self-representations of producers, crew members, and technicians. In the next few pages I introduce how reflexive talk by these workers can be viewed as rich, coded, cultural self-portraits. In the subsequent section I play devil’s advocate by considering what insights mere industrial artifacts (‘‘deep texts’’) can provide that explicit explanations (‘‘trade talk’’) largely circumvent.

Production Culture

INDUSTRY’S SELF-THEORIZING TALK

Production ‘‘insiders’’ predictably di√er in the way they explain and theorize their film/video production work. As the cinematographer Michael Chapman, asc, states bluntly: ‘‘The cinematographer’s job is to tell people where to look.’’ Garret Brown, dp and the inventor of the Steadicam, however, is more expansive: ‘‘Why move the camera? The reasons range from the very most primitive (the simple 3-D e√ect) to the most absurdly complex (intersecting dramatic, kinetic, psychological and optical possibilities).’’∑∂ Variety, however, takes a more businesslike approach: ‘‘Studios increasingly need specialty labels to guarantee a supply of original and sometimes kudo-worthy work, particularly at a time when tent-pole and franchise pics have become their new bread-and-butter. . . . When [company founder] Schamus isn’t writing and producing, he’s a Columbia University professor known for his classes on film theory and what he calls ‘no-budget’ production.’’∑∑ The first cinematographer evokes a fairly common view among practitioners: that production is task oriented and nontheoretical. The second cinematographer, by contrast, suggests that even camera design—with its machine userinterface as a psychological/theoretical nexus—is as complex as anything from high theory in the academy. The third account describes the function of film theory in film marketing and explains the economic logic and theoretical background (that is, ‘‘high theory/low budget’’) of the new feature artfilm specialty division of the multinational Universal Studios. Another filmmaker, dp Michael Grady, deftly theorizes how his complicated technical approach to exposure control, emulsion engineering, and lab chemistry follows logically from his ‘‘experimental’’ film aesthetic derived from Wong Kar-Wai, Michael Mann, and Martin Scorsese.∑∏ Despite their apparent di√erences, all of these accounts raise the issue of theoretical competence as a factor in the making of contemporary movies. These habitual explanations suggest that we should ask how self-theorizing is being used to make creative and technical decisions on the set and within production organizations. Such questions must be asked vis-à-vis very specific modes of production. Managing or soliciting the input of writers and producers over the course of twenty-four or thirty-six television episodes, for example, is always ultimately subsumed under the shadow of the person at top. In October 2003 I spoke with Jon Cassar, producer/director of the hit Fox Network television series 24. Filmed dramatic series on television have, like sitcoms, tradi-

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tionally been writer-driven shows. Each series usually has a master script with all of the essential narrative details about characters and plots combined in a bound typewritten booklet called the series ‘‘bible.’’ Newer series like 24 and The Shield and Boomtown, however, are more stylish, frenetic, and highly cinematic than both sitcoms and the traditional hour-long dramas of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Because these shows are shot, directed, and edited like contemporary feature films, the status and authority of the series bible has shifted. At one point in my interview with Cassar the following exchange took place: Writers of series television have always had ‘‘bibles’’ to serve as blueprints or lexicons, from which all future scripts are developed, as a way of achieving consistency of tone and point of view. How is the look of these (newer) series established and maintained from a postproduction perspective? I assume that is a very important part of both The Shield and 24—to establish a style of editing to carry through the entire series. CASSAR: Well I think you have the human bible. The producer/director, that’s on the show. Like Scott is. Like I am. That’s on the show for the whole duration. So you’re the one that keeps that all constant. You’re the one that talks to all the new directors. You’re the one that makes sure they all understand the style. And you will oversee all of that. And in my case that will go all the way through the mix. Including sound spotting and music spotting. So you become that person in a way. So there isn’t a written bible, but there’s me. That’s my job. I have to make sure everyone understands what we do.’’∑π CALDWELL:

When Cassar asserts that he—rather than a written text—is ‘‘the human bible’’ for the entire filmed series, he has in e√ect ‘‘embodied’’ the artistic work of hundreds of professionals in the crew and studio. But he has also described an industrial practice that has been largely unrecognized by academic media studies scholars. Newcomb and Alley were among the first to have recognized that it is the ‘‘writer/producer’’ (usually the executive producer) in prime-time television who functions as ‘‘auteur.’’ This stands in stark contrast to film, where the director has always assumed (at least symbolically and publicly) the position of author. Newcomb and Alley’s conception still holds true in much of television (sitcoms in particular). But a great deal has changed stylistically, economically, and technologically since the network era that Newcomb and Alley described. Jon Cassar does not write for the series 24. Nor does Scott Brazil write for The Shield. Yet the intensive

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An onscreen struggle over authorship is staged by NBC, when three levels of filmic reality (and their film crews) collide in self-analysis and in deconstruction of the series Homicide. This episode, which aired on January 3, 1997, was directed by Barbara Kopple and produced by Barry Levinson. Composite photos of video frames by J. Caldwell

cinematic demands, frantic shooting schedules, high production values, and the need to maintain consistency of look and narrative texture across sixteen or twenty-four di√erent episodes per year (written by dozens of di√erent writers and directed by many di√erent episode directors) has lead to a new authorial function: the series ‘‘producer/director.’’ Practitioners argue and rationalize that the written template is no longer su≈cient to guarantee stylistic integrity throughout a series. Especially in shows defined by manic style, frenetic editing, and complicated storytelling, the director/ producer has emerged as a defining site of artistic authority in current industrial practice. This is but one example of how explicit industrial theorizing describes pervasive film practices and changes in production, of which academic theorists have been largely unaware. Industrial self-theorizing, of the sort Jon Cassar and Scott Brazil practice, disregards many of the fundamental principles on which scholars judge and

Introduction

18

evaluate theory. Communication and film theory—whether from classical traditions or contemporary revisions—have tended to value theoretical arguments based on their e√ectiveness at being systematic, logical, and/or convincing in accounting for how film/media works or means. And while the field of film theory has developed from early forms of impressionistic engagement to rigid scientistic analysis to totalizing ideological models and finally to more modest interventions, most industrial self-theorizing practices seldom live or die by their systematicity, detail, logic, or comprehensiveness. Instead, practitioners theorize in practice—that is, at work, in trade narratives and professional interactions—in a very di√erent manner. The production world’s self-theorizing disposition can be characterized in six ways: instrumental and inductive, ecumenical and eclectic, unintentional and e√acing, reductive and proprietary, real-time or preemptive, and commonsensical. From this perspective, industrial critical practices can be usefully considered not simply as social postures but as cultural performances as well. The attitude or demeanor of industrial self-theorizing in socio-professional situations frequently combines contradictory or competing impulses. For example, when production is explained publicly, practitioners usually speak from an instrumental and inductive perspective. While overtly suspicious of contemporary or ideological academic theory, for example, many screenwriters will fully embrace and acknowledge Aristotle’s Poetics, Lajos Egri’s theory of story structure, Joseph Campbell’s myth theory, and Jung’s archetypalism to explain their work or screenplays in general. This is because such philosophical sources ‘‘work.’’ Such theorizing functions instrumentally because it provides a logic to the daily writing practice and fits a long-standing (and financially proven) industrial mode of production. Most screenwriters will say that good screenplays aren’t good because they illustrate Aristotle, Egri, or Campbell. Instead, working writers presuppose that Aristotle, Egri, Campbell, and successful contemporary screenwriters recognize and describe properties of narrative that are universal in nature. Theory (with a capital ‘‘T’’) gives way here to the assumption that writers are dealing with a kind of ‘‘natural law’’—but it is a form of narrative theorizing, nevertheless. This kind of old school or traditional theorizing practice has been fully incorporated into studio and network story departments, script doctoring, and the wga, so much so that it is now relegated and categorized as ‘‘common sense’’ rather than critical theory. Industrial self-theorizing and sense making are also ecumenical and

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Haskell Wexler, ASC, lights a set, demonstrates a look, and directs a camera crew. Production talk and work protocols like these follow historic conventions that can be understood as ‘‘fully embedded’’ cultural texts and practices. Los Angeles, 1997. Photo © J. Caldwell.

eclectic. Film editors may work hard careerwise to develop individual styles (usually based on the conscious appreciation of specific filmmakers, film historical traditions, or cinema aesthetics). Yet in terms of the production choices they’ve made they will also respond to questions in public by saying that they are open to any and all ‘‘solutions’’ that happen to work to solve a given production problem. Production workers tend to be ecumenical in that they are willing to use any solution (any aesthetic tradition or theoretical perspective) as long as it provides a tool to overcome some obstacle or a key that fits the film. Cinematographers will do the same thing when employing or choosing from among camera or lighting technologies. Each technology brings its own aesthetic possibilities, and dps choose among these alternatives when confronting the unique lighting and exposure constraints of each location. Essentially cinematographers, camera operators, and editors must of necessity be versatile and hybrid theorizers, ones that never prejudge the look of a production. This is because they are required to work to render someone else’s vision (a director’s); they approach each location or set inductively and from the ground up (even if they’ve had a rough plan in preproduction); and they must be able to choose from an extensive set of otherwise competing aesthetic traditions (film noir, montage, expressionism, the mtv style, Rembrandt lighting, neorealism, etc.) to achieve their ends.

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Industrial self-theorizing and sense making frequently pose as unintentional and e√acing. Below-the-line workers seldom talk of imposing their will or vision upon filmed material or the footage they’ve been given. Consider one editor’s description of an increasingly overwhelming postproduction process now in vogue with fast-paced prime-time dramas: With the new (frantic) editing styles, do you try to get more, or less ‘‘coverage’’ during a shoot? I’m curious about shooting ratios for example? SCOTT POWELL: I’ve never received this much footage in a show. Or paid less attention to the script. We go through and read the film. And we do a lot of rewriting after it is shot. Yeah, it’s a challenge. It’s a lot to go through.’’∑∫ CALDWELL:

Powell here describes a process in which the filmed scenes and footage impose their will on postproduction workers. The key to this process is e√ectively ‘‘reading’’ or formally and critically analyzing the film, and then responding with editing decisions that are appropriate to the material in the can. When Powell talks of ‘‘rewriting’’ the film he does not mean relying on, rendering, or deferring to an original script (or the writer’s vision). He refers instead to building a film organically from the filmed footage at hand, which is only generally informed by one of 24 ’s episodic scripts. Even prestigious film editors like Powell refuse to discuss their specialty as a preconceived art form; they sometimes refer to it as craft, but frequently discuss it as a very unremarkable form of physical work. A few celebrated cinematographers, like Vittorio Storaro, when given the opportunity write and speak overtly, expansively, and in detail about the theoretical concerns (including psychoanalysis, color theory, and cognition) behind lighting and moving image making. Yet these few influential ‘‘aesthetes’’ are far from the norm for the vast majority of cinematographers or members of the camera union. The director of photography Steve Burum draws out what he considers to be one of the most important characteristics of cinematographers: ‘‘They learned together, and they developed this technique, and they invented this equipment. Everything that you see on a camera was invented by a cameraman, because he needed to do something, and he didn’t know how to do it. And they had these machine shops and they would just fabricate the stu√.’’∑Ω Burum acknowledges a degree of initial ignorance on the part of cameramen, but he is clearly unapologetic about it. Rather, from his perspective this status gives the cameraman a clean slate from which to see, engage, and

Production Culture

solve problems. His argument is pragmatic: the filmmaking art is essentially a process of physical problem solving based on the obligatory need to overcome production obstacles. Burum’s view is an update of the adage that ‘‘necessity is the mother of invention’’ (and innovation), and it contributes to one of the dominant poses among below-the-line film/video workers. Above-the-line creative personnel (producers and directors in particular) pose with greater variation in sense of purpose. Their position of authority and relative autonomy at the top of the production labor pyramid gives them greater license to claim creative agency and credit for themselves. Even though feature film and prime-time production involves hundreds of specialists working collectively, retrospective or public comments by individual producers and directors about a given production will occasionally claim sole responsibility for the success of a film (however, no one tends to take responsibility in public for films that are failures or flops).∏≠ Yet many others have learned the traps of egotism and the pragmatic value of more carefully distributing artistic credit in public demonstrations of deference.∏∞ Industrial self-theorizing and sense making are reductive and proprietary. No matter how complicated, intimidating, or overwhelming the behind-the-scenes picture of a studio back lot or a computer-generated imagery (cgi) e√ects department may appear in a making-of, the dvds that include such things will typically explain or reduce the whole undertaking using fairly archaic notions linked, for example, to the persistence and playful ‘‘magic’’ of artists and medieval alchemists. Industrial Light and Magic (ilm), pdi, and Pixar corporations employ legions of workers, including digital artists, programmers, and computer scientists. Yet behindthe-scenes genres that highlight these companies gain little by explaining the studio’s on-screen success as the result of workers possessing technical or computer engineering degrees. After all, such expertise is available to any corporation that chooses to hire engineers or technicians. Disney was among the first to have mastered the use of behind-the-scenes shorts and making-ofs in the 1950s as part of its film/tv multimedia studio, as Chris Anderson has shown.∏≤ True to its origins at Disney five decades earlier, making-ofs about Pixar, pdi, and ilm (or those broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel, Bravo, or amc) tend to mimic the genre structure pioneered by Disney. For example, making-ofs about special e√ects in a summer blockbuster will typically establish an educational and scientific discourse early on in the episode, thus giving viewers a ‘‘special’’ glimpse of the high

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Technologies also function as loaded cultural artifacts. While the interface design and use of production tools are ‘‘fully embedded’’ within production culture, staged demonstrations for other technicians (like this one, featuring Cirque de Soleil aerial performers), also function as ‘‘semiembedded’’ practices. Through trial technical demonstrations, proprietary technologies stimulate ‘‘imagined worlds’’ for potential users: here, ‘‘Super-Technocrane.’’ Los Angeles, 2001. Photo © J. Caldwell.

technology and scientific wonders housed at the company. This educational and futuristic discourse tends to change when the same making-ofs subsequently explain such wonders not as the result of high-tech science but rather of a cadre of hard-working but caring techs and geeks who are, the viewer is led to believe, actually talented artists driven by intuition and personal vision. Among other things, this generic formula—where sci-tech morphs into artistic vision through sleight of hand—helps ‘‘brand’’ Pixar, pdi, and ilm as unique sites of personal innovation. Such e√ects companies represent themselves as forward-thinking, visionary boutiques; places where distinctive personalities and proprietary imaging skills are made available to clients (and audiences) who chose to pay for, watch, or invest in their services. Industrial self-theorizing and sense making are also preemptive or realtime. Unlike academic theory, which somehow manages to agree on a loose but de facto canon of films and issues (which it uses as the basis for theoretical deliberation), contemporary industrial theorizing frequently unfolds even as or before a given film or television show screens or airs. Vaporware helps explain why this happens in some instances.∏≥ But this preemptive temporal tendency is also because almost all of the low industrial theorizing

Production Culture

that I’ve referred to in this introduction is driven by or contained within marketing campaigns. Since in American television almost 80 percent of all new shows fail and are canceled each year (low ratings), and films fare little better (uneven box o≈ce receipts), advance rhetoric and deliberation about the significance, origins, audience prospects, stylistic approach, director’s background and intentions, and use of technology typically flood the trade sphere and now the blogosphere, months before the forthcoming film or television show ever appears in public. Hyperbolic arguments like the following are commonplace in production company press kits: ‘‘This is possibly the most advanced production metaphor to hit our industry since David Wark Gri≈th decided it might be nice to move the camera. . . . With a techno-panorama of 30 screens displaying camera image, computer elements, or control interfaces, the view at the location (of the shoot) becomes a cacophony of components that contribute to a greater whole. . . . The new technologies have a learning curve that not only includes lots of new equipment and personnel, but an entire new glossary that everyone needs to be familiar with.’’∏∂ The ambitious historiographic claims made in this industrial text are formidable: a mere commercial spot produced in 2003 somehow displaces D. W. Gri≈th as the architect of a fundamentally new cinematic technique. Additionally, all filmmakers will now apparently have to reckon with and adjust to this ‘‘breakthrough,’’ given the new technological and formal standards that have resulted. In addition, the ‘‘tropes’’ and forms of figuration used in this press kit are recognizable to film theorists and scholars: an ‘‘entirely new’’ film ‘‘glossary’’ has been developed; and a fully ‘‘immersive’’ visual experience is now ostensibly available for audiences. This production executive at a regional hd (high-definition) production house spins these ambitious theoretical claims to describe his company’s recent commercial production (entitled ‘‘Red Riding Hood’’). Even before the spot airs, therefore, preemptive theoretical arguments touting these cinematic breakthroughs (along with photos proving the distinction) circulate in the postproduction trades. Personal disclosures by film workers in public tend to be deferential, e√aced, and modest. Self-theorizing claims in the printed trade press, on the other hand, tend to be fueled by more acutely partisan marketing and advertising goals. Industry public relations writers occasionally refer (usually o√ the record) to writing for trade magazines as a form of prostitution

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or ‘‘whoring.’’∏∑ Many trade ‘‘articles’’ (or most of the articles at some less prestigious publications) are merely hastily reauthored company press releases. Other industry public relations writers specialize in ‘‘planting’’ faux articles in the lesser video production trades (this is more likely to happen in fairly narrow specialty trades like Video Systems than in more prestigious industry-wide publications like Variety ). Trade editors regularly accept such ‘‘articles’’ if they include lists of general ‘‘tips’’ for doing things better in the production specialization. Yet this form of ‘‘helpful,’’ but stealthy, writing in the trades usually conceals some vested interest. A company’s new programming language, computer code, or proprietary technology, for example, may be presupposed or legitimized by the ‘‘helpful’’ suggestion list being o√ered to the field at large. Following through on the suggestion contained in a stealth trade article may require a practitioner/reader to purchase a ‘‘third party’’ company’s proprietary technology, which is subtly presupposed or required by the trade article’s technique tip in question.∏∏ Finally, industrial film/video self-theorizing and sense making are commonsensical. Production personnel frequently hesitate to admit or assert that their film or creative project has intellectual or cultural significance, or that it participates in a broader theoretical dialogue outside of industry. Even though production personnel may speak at length about filmic form, the production process, how the film works, and even how they see the film related to culture and societal trends they generally will not go to extratextual ends (like scholars) to explain or justify what they’ve done. One director I spoke to, however, implicitly o√ers rather sophisticated theorizing about audience engagement and interactivity: Have . . . you thought about how this kind of frantic editing and production style (in 24 ) is analogous to the de facto ‘‘editing’’ that viewers now do when they ‘‘surf ’’ from channel to channel with their remotes? SCOTT BRAZIL: I know that my wife . . . will watch (a show) on Tivo. And I’ll come upstairs. And suddenly, I’ll hear that, whatever that little tone is—dut, dut, dut (if you don’t have Tivo, go buy it, it’s brilliant). And it’s in the middle of a show and she’s zipping through a scene. And I’ll say ‘‘Why are you doing that?’’ And she’ll say, ‘‘I really don’t like that character.’’ And then she goes to where the next character appears that she’s interested in. And I think that that is really interesting. She’s edited the show herself. To watch what is interesting to you. It is scary (for a producer to see). That’s what we do.’’∏π CALDWELL:

Production Culture

Perhaps more than any other statement that I’ve cited thus far, Scott Brazil’s comments embody many of the attitudes and postures of industrial theorizing practice. His approach, I would argue, is profound and pragmatic, grounded and speculative—and it connects the filmic form (something he creates professionally at the studio) with a provocative theory (something he discerns from his marriage and home life) about how audiences work to customize texts through interactivity, resistant reading, and home editing strategies. More than anything, though, Brazil’s insights are presented as ‘‘common sense.’’ In this pragmatic process-driven inductive approach to theorizing film form and e√ect, practitioners enact a kind of theory that scholars like David Bordwell and Noel Carroll have called for— namely, ‘‘middle-level theorizing’’ that is workmanlike, specific, delimited, and local. In talking and visually representing film/television in this way to themselves, practitioners assume a stance that some scholars might deem ‘‘theoretical modesty.’’∏∫ But to reduce this localism, inductive tendency, and speculative modesty to the status of ‘‘mere’’ common sense (making it unlike theory in status and intention) is to miss important similarities between common sense and theory.∏Ω In analyzing the nature and cultural function of common sense, Cli√ord Geertz is particularly vexed at anthropologists—not because they tend to find and so a≈rm ‘‘complex’’ abilities in ‘‘primitives’’ but because they describe and force these abilities and behaviors into artificial categories imposed from the outside.π≠ Geertz rejects artificial, a priori definitions of complex categories in analysis and also describes how common sense presupposes the existence of a ‘‘preemptory reality’’ that underscores the immediate availability of experience rather than deliberated reflection upon it. Yet Geertz also describes a number of the systematic characteristics and critical functions of common sense that closely align with the properties found in production’s self-theorizing.π∞ Unfortunately, some media and film theorists have maintained a far darker vision of common-sense making than did Geertz, and broadly prosecuted common sense as the cultural breeding ground of ‘‘ideology.’’ According to this view, common sense naturalizes contradictions, normalizes authority, and closes down debate about conflict and power.π≤ Such suspicions make academics fairly cynical about the reasoning capacities of those below them in the cultural hierarchy, including workers. Yet media workers and scholars are not well served by this tired, dismissive caricature. Saying that common sense is suspect is like saying that cognition is suspect: both

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are pretty useless assertions. Sometimes common sense actually turns out to be prescient, self-evident, and logical; a productive way to make sense of things, whether through trade texts or trade talk. At other times, however, trade artifacts betray and indict trade talk’s slippery origins in marketing and spin, as I indicate in the next section. DEEP TEXTS AND ARTIFACTS: NBC 2000 AS SELF-THEORIZING

Many socio-professional behaviors and expressions in production culture pose as pragmatic, functional, and ‘‘merely’’ commonsensical (mostly in venues involving personal disclosure and interpersonal trade talk). At the same time, however, an entirely di√erent set of symbolic artifacts show film/video production cultures to be highly reflexive and self-consciously organized around activities involving critical and aesthetic ‘‘interpretation’’ (a focus most evident in industrial icons, demos, and mediated forms). Fully understanding production culture, therefore, means recognizing the industry’s Janus-like stance or profile. On the one hand, face-to-face, verbal, and ritualized forms of interaction tend to explain and legitimize the industry and its practices in commonsense terms. On the other hand, mediated, textualized, and produced forms of trade communication seem strongly predisposed to critical analysis, metareflection, and generalizable (or more theorylike) explanations about film/video.π≥ My approach to the coded and inflected nature of practitioner talk is to consider it alongside a more systematic study of what I term the deep industrial practices of film/video production. That is, practitioners constantly dialogue and negotiate a series of questions that we traditionally value as part of film studies—including questions about what film/video is, how film/video works, how the viewer responds to film/video, and how film/video reflects or forms culture. Yet filmmakers (as opposed to theorists) seldom systematically elaborate on these questions in lengthy spoken or written forms. Rather, this form of embedded theoretical ‘‘discussion’’ in the work world takes place in and through the tools, machines, artifacts, iconographies, working methods, professional rituals, and narratives that film practitioners circulate and enact in film/video trade cultures and subcultures. Rather than simply accepting and legitimizing a producer’s generalizations from interviews about how film/television works or what it means, such explanations should be grounded within the contexts of the material,

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Making-ofs are also produced for professional consumption. This corporate DVD can be approached as a Geertzian opportunity for ‘‘over the shoulder’’ observation of indigenous, corporate critical theorizing, and it fits within a category of ‘‘semiembedded’’ or ‘‘publicly disclosed’’ deep texts. 2001. Photo © J. Caldwell.

symbolic, and representational practices of production workers (see appendix 1). ‘‘Looking over the shoulder’’ of crew members—by analyzing the deep texts, demos, machines, and artifacts that they circulate among themselves—frequently o√ers insights considerably more complex than ‘‘direct’’ production worker talk. One example of embedded industrial reflexivity in particular—namely, deep texts exchanged as part of a network ‘‘makeover’’ campaign—o√ers the chance to test this methodological hunch and suspicion about direct trade talk and foreshadows many of the themes of the book. Film and television now invest considerable energy in behind-the-scenes disclosures among professional workers, circulated as part of professional inter- and intraorganizational communication. These industrial disclosures and exchanges frequently involve forms of critical self-reference that are ‘‘mediatized’’ (produced in video, audio, digital, iconic, or technical formats or ritual interactions). Industrial reflexivity in media form, intended for and circulated among professionals, also regularly ‘‘leaks’’ into the on-screen world of audiences and fans.π∂ In a provocative corporate videotape ‘‘demo’’ prepared to explain details

Introduction

28

of the nbc 2000 ‘‘makeover campaign,’’ executives appear on camera to rally their own a≈liate stations, employees, and advertisers by showcasing a set of new theories that were intended to ‘‘reenergize’’ the network. The nonbroadcast tape—used in network a≈liate meetings and advertising upfronts—begins confessionally with executives bemoaning the impact of the viewer’s remote control, which regularly causes ‘‘25 percent dips in viewership between shows.’’ Then, in poignant images and sound bites, as inspirational music fades up, the same execs describe seven categories in nbc’s new ‘‘value-added’’ on-screen viewing experience. The demo visually illustrates each tactic with graphic ‘‘chapter’’ intertitles. The first strategy, titled nbc’s ‘‘Living Window,’’ inserts a graphic frame at the end of each series episode, which shows behind-the-scenes footage from the production. The video then previews a second tactic, namely ‘‘video diaries’’ made by stars like Will Smith that the network calls ‘‘Backstage nbc.’’ The third strategy, ‘‘Classic nbc Moments,’’ interjects historical archival footage at hour and half-hour programming breaks, which are illustrated by black-and-white footage of a young Michael Landon singing to a swooning female audience on the early 1960s show Hullabaloo. Melodramatic music swells up to underscore the teary nostalgia of the moment. ‘‘Trivia,’’ the fourth reflexive strategy announced by nbc management to its industrial partners, provides short game-show-like doses of ‘‘interesting facts’’ about the network. The demo exemplifies this with questions about which tv stars (‘‘Jay Leno,’’ ‘‘Mary Tyler Moore,’’ etc.) had appeared as phone-in guests on nbc’s hit show Frasier. The fifth strategy dramatized on the video, termed ‘‘Special Events,’’ showcases a montage of historical Olympic coverage produced by nbc decades earlier. This device provides the trade, audience with opportunities for chest-thumping nationalism as part of the network brand. ‘‘Flow,’’ the sixth illustrated chapter theorized in the corporate campaign tape, includes a self-righteous but suspect summarizing claim by one 1994 nbc executive: ‘‘Well, we have created flow.’’ The nbc exec is apparently unaware of the academic Raymond Williams’s formulation of flow in 1974. More remarkably, he is also apparently ignorant of his own network’s invention and implementation of ‘‘flow’’ programming practices by the nbc president Pat Weaver in the early 1950s.π∑ The seventh and final reflexive strategy of the makeover campaign outlined on the demo is termed ‘‘Impact.’’ Footage of grateful a≈liate stations follows in this section, thanking the network for allowing them to ‘‘participate’’ in the parent corporation’s sweep-

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President Warren Littlefield tells affiliates that the network’s ‘‘makeover’’ campaign was as important for NBC’s success as their top-rated series ER. In explaining the secrets of NBC’s new ‘‘seamless’’ programming strategy, executive vice president John Miller, unaware of Raymond Williams’s theorization of ‘‘flow’’ in 1974 or President Pat Weaver’s own invention of flow programming strategy at NBC in the early 1950s, claims the innovation as his own in 1994–95 corporate video: ‘‘We’ve created flow.’’ Composite photos of video frames by J. Caldwell.

ing nation-wide changes. A montage of thank-you letters from the heartland heaps e√usive praise by local broadcasters on nbc and its branders. To drive home the point, in a move either ignorant of or in calculated denial about competitor mtv /Viacom’s industry-recognized, critically acclaimed fifteen-year innovative success in branding, the ‘‘Impact’’ chapter concludes when an nbc executive returns to the screen to state: ‘‘We’ve created a personality that’s never been a part of a network before.’’ Warren Littlefield, nbc president, then drives home the hyperbole: ‘‘Was E/R an important part of the 1994–1995 season? You bet. But so was nbc 2000.’’ Music up. Fade to black. In this odd, mediated executive summary—essentially an internal on-screen marketing campaign—the network awards nbc’s corporate self-analysis of televisual flow and identity with the same marquee status as nbc’s own Emmy-winning A-list dramatic programming. Intended to lure distracted, channel-surfing viewers back to the network, the seven on-screen strategies of obsessive self-reference theorized by executives fueled nbc’s promotional activities in the mid-1990s. Ironically, many viewers who left to graze on cable channels elsewhere did so with complaints that the ‘‘ad clutter’’ had simply gotten too overwhelming on the traditional broadcast networks like nbc. The corporation’s counterintuitive

Introduction

30

The 1995 makeover videotape NBC 2000 served as a theoretical primer outlining numerous strategies for making interstitial material ‘‘entertainment content.’’ This included ‘‘hotstarts’’ between shows, ‘‘trivia’’ contests, ‘‘backstage diaries,’’ nostalgic ‘‘classic moments’’ from NBC archive footage (here, Michael Landon sings on Hullabaloo in 1962), and marketing ‘‘feedback’’ raving about the exciting ways that the makeover would ‘‘rebuild’’ the nationwide family of affiliates (lower right). Composite photos of video frames by J. Caldwell.

response? With its network makeover, nbc simply jammed more and more information and ‘‘entertainment content’’ into smaller and smaller blocks of interstitial programming space. Shows now started ‘‘hot’’—that is, simultaneous with the end of the preceding show. As a result, the final minutes of each ending and transition became graphically dense to the point of illegibility. End titles were squeezed and extruded into high-speed microscopic credit rolls—which angered production workers industrywide. Meanwhile, the newly keyed-in secondary promotional content supposedly ‘‘entertained’’ viewers during the blurred transition. In the new scheme, each show morphed with the one that followed, and both were glued together into an amalgam of network minutiae, nostalgia, fragmented making-ofs, fan surveys, frenetic graphics, archival finds, and inspirational shtick. nbc had apparently overdosed on self-referentiality. The dense, textual, marketing cloud that resulted each evening in prime time merely guaranteed that no discernable breaks remained in which viewers could switch to another

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Reflexive films/series follow an institutional logic, as NBC/ Homicide exploits on-screen deconstruction for critical distinction and exploitation by local affiliate broadcasters. Fictional scenes in one episode interrogate the nature and limits of the ‘‘art vs. reality’’ conundrum, while both the episode and the ‘‘News at 11’’ that follows consciously interrogate the contradictions of documentary and genre theory—as local and programming cross-promotional tie-ins. Composite photos of video frames by J. Caldwell.

channel. Arguably, this on-screen gambit was less about intelligibility or legibility of messages than it was an attempt to hijack and take on the wearying channel-changing ‘‘work’’ of the viewer. Indeed, nbc now had built audience-like, remote-control channel-changing behavior into the network programming flow itself. Who needed to go elsewhere if channel grazing was now ‘‘helpfully’’ prepackaged for the viewer, in-house and in advance? The makeover demo, screened at a≈liate meetings and up-fronts, analyzed and justified the on-screen overhaul for nbc’s anxious partners. Critical self-theorizing stood front and center as a privileged corporate activity. While some scholarly attention has been paid to reflexive on-screen textual practices in one broad category of public disclosure (behind-thescenes knowledge produced and distributed for audiences ), far less attention has been directed to the second register of disclosure exemplified by nbc’s

Introduction

32

makeover campaign (behind-the-scenes knowledge circulated among professionals ).π∏ In the first five chapters that follow I take on this latter regime of internal industrial disclosure and reflexivity as the chapters’ primary focus. Even the examples introduced thus far suggest that the very strategies promoted by academic theorists as resistant forms of textual or on-screen ‘‘criticism’’ may end up fulfilling fairly rudimentary branding (reflexivity), marketing (intertextuality), and programming (deconstruction) functions in the industry’s management, program development, and business sectors.ππ FRAMEWORKS AND LIMITS

In the chapters that follow I pay considerable attention to how creative workers use self-reference to make sense of industrial and technological change; how critical reflexivity adds value to and sanctions contemporary post-Fordist industrial practices; and how reflexivity promotes flexibility and responsiveness in new forms of media conglomeration. Yet in these same chapters I do not generally push beyond cultural, economic, and institutional analysis and perspectives in order to consider more speculative, philosophical questions.π∫ Especially important in this regard are questions about how unique or distinctive these kinds of industrial reflexivity are to film and television; whether other industries and sectors share, teach, or learn these practices from Hollywood; and how or whether industrial reflexivity in U.S. film and television production can be situated within broader historical, intellectual, and cultural shifts in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.πΩ Anthony Giddens puts forth a major argument about the importance and centrality of reflexivity in late modernity and the age of globalization.∫≠ For Giddens this late modern condition means that human subjects are required to and (in many cases) now able to master ‘‘selfmonitoring’’ activities in order to function e√ectively. But whereas Giddens poses reflexivity as a more general condition involving the idea of a traditionally unified subject, the industrial reflexivity I examine in this book is not so easily explained as a symptom of a general human or historical condition. Nor is industrial reflexivity solely an outcome of comparably generalizing theories of self-reference. Michel Foucault’s theory of selfdisciplining as a response to widespread societal surveillance, for example, or Christopher Lasch’s theory of cultural narcissism, like Giddens’s generalizing approach, both make self-reference a deleterious outcome generated

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The multichannel spectrum is loaded with metacritical programming in which the industry proudly opens itself up for public consumption (here, exposés, behind-the-scenes programs, critical debates about film, reality series about film school, and shows deconstructing TV. Composite photograph by J. Caldwell.

by sociopolitical forces.∫∞ Angela McRobbie challenges Giddens’s general concept by forcing it to speak to actual sociological conditions through ethnographies of highly specialized cultural work sectors (like fashion and club culture).∫≤ The sorts of task velocity, client churn, and employee mobility that I encountered over the last decade in Hollywood characterize these other sectors as well. McRobbie shows that the cultural logic and semiotic economy of new flexible artistic labor extends far from the soundstages, television studios, and edit suites of Hollywood. Like Andrew Ross, McRobbie traces out the sometimes-alienating logic of the new flexible cultural industries, which oversell the notion of gratifying labor, career mobility, democratic management, and workaholism as creative forms of self-fulfillment.∫≥ Unlike the creative industries in New York and London that Ross and McRobbie analyze, however, film and television production in Los Angeles continues to survive with less volatility and relatively more predictability than either dot-com or club cultures. This relative predictability follows

Introduction

34

from a paradox. On the one hand, Hollywood is rather distinctive in maintaining very old forms of Fordist industrial predictability: a massive unionized workforce, a rationalized system of entitlements and inside dealing, and the unique geographic agglomeration of local suppliers, producers, and facilities that Allen Scott identifies.∫∂ On the other hand, Hollywood exploits very new forms of post-Fordism: diversity of tastes, heterogeneous identities, artistic or niche narrowcasting, and cultural innovation as part of a pervasive and edgy new multimedia experience economy. The industrial inertia that results from this mix of normally divergent organizational modes—geographic anchoring and industrial continuity alongside boundaryless cultural innovation—gives film and television their historic persistence and cultural resilience. Unlike Giddens, Foucault, and Lasch, the industrial reflexivity examined here appears to be not just an outcome but a constituent of production culture’s input and output processes. Reflexivity, in this book, emerges as part of both corporate macrostrategies and human microstrategies. That is, reflexivity operates as a creative process involving human agency and critical competence at the local cultural level as much as a discursive process establishing power at the broader social level. This mutual alignment may give film and television entertainment much of its resilience, since the alliance synthesizes the gratifications of human creative resistance with the excessive profitability of new forms of conglomeration. The new conglomerates generate relatively little anxiety at national policy levels because they have, apparently, mastered the responsiveness, nuance, user-friendly demeanor and self-conscious textual sophistication characteristic of very legitimate local cultural expressions. In each chapter that follows I examine one discrete category of trade communication and worker expression. The first two chapters examine trade storytelling conventions among workers as a symptom of labor conditions and then the ways that media corporations and trade associations organize space culturally across labor and craft divisions. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on ‘‘below-the-line’’ work sectors and consider how trade imagery, equipment iconography, demo tapes, and technologies function as cultural representations and as components of ‘‘imagined communities.’’ Chapters 5 and 6 analyze cultural practices in the ‘‘above-the-line’’ worlds of producers, directors, and studio and network executives, with a particular interest in how new practices of writing by committee, mentoring, networking, and branding fuel and manage the instabilities of these worlds. Finally, chapter 7

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Viral marketing as prime-time programming: online solicitation invites fans to interactively ‘‘interview’’ for a job with Entourage ’s manic onscreen agent Ari. Photo of HBO poster in West Hollywood, J. Caldwell, 2006.

builds on the insights of close technological, sociological, and cultural analysis in the preceding studies to consider how these industrial conditions predispose film/television to certain forms of ‘‘flexible’’ on-screen content. The concluding studies are especially focused on how economic conditions, repurposing strategies, digital technologies, and the dvd have made production, distribution, and marketing a unified ‘‘viral’’ process driven by reflexivity. The industry now constantly speaks to itself about itself, sometimes in public. It also makes these dialogues and debates available in various multimedia formats. Some of these reflexive artifacts and deep texts are intended only for the closed world of the studio or edit suite; others are ostensibly intended to allow viewers access to the ‘‘inside’’ of the industry and the production process. But this trend is clearly not just a ‘‘top-down’’ process either. Yes, corporations now make film knowledge, general aesthetic speculation, and critical analysis parts of their consumer media products, viewing experience, and marketing campaigns. But practitioners and artisans also produce and circulate deep critical texts among themselves, and they do so for very di√erent reasons than companies tiered lucratively inside of the giant conglomerates.

Introduction

36

Unlike a hundred tell-alls, this book o√ers no privileged ‘‘keys to the kingdom’’ of Hollywood. As a genre, popular behind-the-scenes tomes are obliged to promise and deliver an insider’s pose. Yet no singular secret or governing principle to ‘‘the business’’ can possibly exist. Production cultures are far too messy, vast, and contested to provide a unified code—to either job aspirants or scholars—for breaching its walls. Given this metaphor, I’ve aimed my sites closer to the ground by seeking instead to better understand the industrial masonry, cultural textures, and social mortar used to shore up the walls and carefully guarded portals surrounding the industry’s center. Interestingly, this behind-the-scenes shoring of mystique proves to be every bit as important for film and television workers as it does for their audiences. And that is an important part of the story in the chapters that follow.

It’s gotten more and more difficult, if not impossible, to cover up what went on on the set when crew members can go from the day’s work to pounding out gossip on the internet. —Laurence Mark, coproducer of Jerry Maguire1 It makes me crazy when I hear some producer who’s making $7 million say they have to take a movie out of the country because labor here is too expensive. I’m making the lowest (hourly wage) on the set, but it’s electricians and construction guys who are doing the hardest work with the biggest risks. —Electrical lighting technician, AKA blogger ‘‘Peggy Archer’’ on the Web site Totally Unauthorized2

Chapter 1

Trade Stories and Career Capital

Film studies as a field matured in part by embracing narrative theory as one of its defining methods. An impressive body of theoretical books, written over the course of many decades, has focused on the narrative analysis of film and television.≥ Yet little or no attention has been paid to the trade stories that practitioners tell among themselves within the work worlds that produce films and series. In this chapter I look at the ways the production culture in Los Angeles makes sense of itself, to itself, through trade narratives and practitioner storytelling rituals. Trade stories have long been a source of knowledge and a form of pedagogy intended to help assistants and trainees master their specialized crafts in unions and guilds. Various narrative trade genres (making-it sagas, coming-of-age tales, against-all-odds technical anecdotes, and cautionary tales) also help practitioner communities weather change in the face of technological flux and economic instability.∂ In this chapter I describe some of the formal characteristics of trade stories (who tells them, using what forms of plot and character development) and then place trade storytelling within specific labor sectors and working contexts. Finally, I suggest possible cultural functions for the

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Table 1

trade genres

context / work sectors

cultural functions

≤ War stories ≤ Against-all-odds allegories

Below-the-line technical crafts (operators, editors, grips, etc.)

Establishing craft mastery; labor mystique; mentoring system (via moral character and triumph of will) Skill set: certitude, physique, and belief

≤ Genesis myths ≤ Paths-not-taken parables

Above-the-line creative sector (dps, directors, writers, producers)

Professional legitimacy and accumulation of career capital (via pedigree and industrial ancestry) Skill set: intuition, vision, name dropping

≤ Making-it sagas ≤ Cautionary tales

Unregulated and nonsignatory sectors (assistants, agents, reps, clerical)

Career salvage operations; boundary and turf marking (via networking, hooking up and giving back) Skill set: quid pro quo human relationships

trade groups that tell and hear trade stories. This chapter is organized around a provisional list of popular trade genres, their contexts, and their functions, as noted in table 1. The breakdown of genres as delineated in table 1 should not be taken as a set of firm categories or as a necessary or complete list of trade genres, contexts, and functions. Rather, the genres listed there can be usefully examined as recurring tendencies, while the relationships to sectors and cultural functions can be viewed as symptomatic rather than as definitive or determining.∑ In the pages that follow I will demonstrate how practitioners employ these symptomatic trade stories to make sense of their specific work worlds and their creative or managerial task at hand.

Trade Stories and Career Capital

WAR STORIES (BELOW-THE-LINE TECHNICAL CRAFTS)

Audiences attending even a few talks or public appearances by production personnel will likely introduce them to one of the standby trade narrative conventions: the production war story. In person and in print film/video practitioners commonly tell their personal and professional stories via anecdotes and allegories that connect film/video creation to military struggle and war footing. Although producers and directors will sometimes slip into this mode, the tendency is most pronounced in the trade storytelling practices of below-the-line workers in the technical crafts (camera operators, sound recordists, editors, grips, and ga√ers). Consider the following story, which is employed as both a pedagogical lesson and a fairly transparent allegory of the work done by members of the American Society of Cinematographers: Cronenweth was executing a handheld shot that tracked the Japanese soldier (played by Toshiro Mifune) as he struggled through the jungle on the island location. The island was littered with debris, making it very di≈cult for Cronenweth to move smoothly. Hall recalls, ‘‘Jordan was handholding a Panavision camera, probably with a 1000-foot mag. It was hot, 90 degrees or more, and the humidity was 95. We were all drenched in sweat, wearing swimsuits, tee shirts, and sandals made of rubber thongs. Mifune went over a hillock full of vines. As Jordan followed him, shooting wide-angle, he stepped on a wooden board. It was a rotten board with a rusty nail sticking out of it, and the nail went right through Jordan’s thongs, through the sole and out of the top of his foot. But Jordan was so into the shot that he didn’t even feel it! He kept right on shooting. He lifted his foot to take a sideways step, and up went this six-foot board attached to his foot. Jordan was trying to shake the thing o√ as he kept doing the shot! Finally, mercifully, someone yelled ‘Cut!’ That was Jordan. He was so deeply into cinema that pain came second.’’∏

Benjamin Bergery, who in this passage is quoting dp Conrad Hall, asc, here introduces his ostensibly definitive primer on camera operation and lighting by underscoring the obliviousness to pain required by a truly committed camera operator when bogged down in the warlike conditions of location production. Note the care with which the storyteller emphasizes images of su√ocating heat and sweat, skewered sinew, and lost blood as almost natural extensions of the camera operator’s task. Note the concern with tactility and texture as well as the need for a strapping physique in

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order to haul around successfully a heavy and burdensome Panavision camera. More interesting still is the storyteller’s ability to e≈ciently bring this trade story to a successful narrative resolution or denouement (‘‘someone mercifully yelled ‘Cut!’ ’’). This dramatic arc, furthermore, is made complete when a ‘‘moral lesson’’ to be learned from the tale (working ‘‘so deeply into cinema [means] that pain came second’’) is tagged onto the parable by the narrator. The below-the-line and working-class assumption that production is a form of war is a notion shared by others—including some screenwriters who are handsomely paid for rewrites and script consulting even though many who do this never achieve the required on-screen writing credit needed for above-the-line status.π Closely related to the war-story mythos of production is what I term the ‘‘against-all-odds’’ allegory. This story form serves as a useful means to establish a set of ideal character traits: lowly origins, physical perseverance, and tenacity. Trade stories in the technical crafts—that is, tales told by editors, camera operators, and production workers—frequently emphasize modest or lowly personal origins, even though the practitioner may be creating film/video for mainstream media companies or prestige studios. For these workers, locating their genesis on the professional peripheries establishes four assumptions in public discussions. First, it underscores the humble, unexceptional origins needed to create the rising action and dramatic arc of the classical myth of heroism. The cinematographer Daryn Okada, asc, underscores this narrative premise. When he was asked where he studied or trained, Okada replied: ‘‘Unfortunately, film school was beyond my financial grasp, so I focused my time on reading about art, photography, and film history. I also read American Cinematographer when I could get my hands on a copy. To gain practical experience, I donated time on student films, shorts, documentaries and low budget features in any job that was open.’’∫ Second, the against-all-odds genre works to highlight the pluck, persistence, and tenacity of the worker in finally achieving his or her now well-earned success. For example, when Okada was asked who were his early teachers and mentors, he stated: ‘‘I tried to get on the union roster but it was closed to me. I wish I could have worked in the studio system, learning from other cinematographers.’’ This response by Okada is an interesting rhetorical gambit: namely, he is explaining to one honorary labor organization (the asc) his exclusion as an ‘‘outsider’’ by another interrelated but supposedly more closed-rank labor organization (the iatse camera union local).

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At a lighting and camera workshop for other cinematographers and gaffers, DP George Spiro Dibie shares from his personal experiences about how to use and master the new high-definition cameras and equipment. Regular gatherings such as these are instrumental not just in craft pedagogy but also in legitimizing certain ways of doing things, discounting alternatives, and in forging solidarity and a sense of professionalism among workers. Hi-Def Expo, Los Angeles Center Studios, 2005. Photo © J. Caldwell

The third function of the against-all-odds mythos occurs when accounts of outsider discrimination and industrial exclusion suggest that the craftsman has the related ability to make art or creatively innovate with few temporal or financial resources and support. The manufacturer Eastman Kodak exploits this common trope in a series of biographical stories that make up its ‘‘On Film’’ marketing campaign. In one segment, the cinematographer Sam Bayer states: ‘‘One of the things I learned in art school is that you don’t need twentyfive years of training to create a great painting. You have to dig inside of yourself and create something that comes from your heart and soul. mtv was like an experimental film school for me. . . . It’s a combination of intuition and experience. Stanley Kubrick was one of my heroes. I had a zoom lens he had developed for Barry Lyndon pulled out of mothballs for a commercial where I wanted a particular e√ect. I can’t explain the technology, but I knew what I wanted it to do. I also know that if I use a certain film and push it two stops on a dark city street, I’m going to create an emotional experience.’’Ω Note the emphasis that the ‘‘untutored’’ cinematographer Bayer places on creating something out of nothing, and of using forgotten, dust-covered technology to create even in the commercial sphere of advertising a work of ‘‘heart and soul.’’ Remarkably, Kodak’s promotional biographical tale explicitly links this artistic capacity not to the multimillion dollar Hollywood

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projects that keep the corporation’s stockholders afloat, but to Bayer’s lone and scrappy ‘‘bohemian’’ origins in New York. Kodak draws out the allegory’s moral lesson by noting that Bayer ‘‘was a ‘starving’ painter before he directed and shot his first music video, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, in 1991.’’ Such character traits also make the practitioner featured here ideally suited for future work in an industry that pays increasingly less for more work. This basic narrative premise—that low budgets are the mother of invention—circulates broadly among production personnel, where a couple of key nonmainstream work worlds usually serve to reference the artist’s ‘‘boot camp’’ experience. The Spartan-like conditions of these worlds allowed for experimentation and the time needed to learn and master the rigorous skills of the craft. Many camera operators and editors talk of disciplining their craft in the largely nonunion and nonlucrative world of documentaries, as noted below in a passage from my interview with Scott Willingham: CALDWELL: What were the driving objectives or concerns behind your choices in the editing room early in your career? WILLINGHAM: As I moved up, I found myself working on a lot of documentaries, and a lot of very low budget ones at that, where the footage was so minimal—what we had to create sequences from was so minimal—that we had to break a lot of rules just to make the scene work. And I think . . . it was good training for what I’m doing now. We had to scrape and scratch to make things happen. And because of that . . . you try a lot of things . . . and the rules go out the window.∞≠

Innovation comes by breaking the rules, and breaking the rules is an almost obligatory part of most documentaries. This is especially the case when directors fail to film from enough di√erent angles and provide enough traditional shot ‘‘coverage’’ to enable the editor to cover over technical problems and continuity errors. The dp Scott Palazzo admits that the aura retrospectively assigned by mid-career filmmakers to these ‘‘boot camp’’ experiences may be suspect in their aspirations. Palazzo describes his genesis in music video production as quintessentially chaotic and without any form of systematic intention. What personal influences did you draw on in your editing styles [in music videos in the 1980s]? PALAZZO: I don’t think my experience was quite so noble. Eight or ten years ago I was a camera operator/dp. And I think because of the tightness of CALDWELL:

Trade Stories and Career Capital

budgets that were handed to us we were more innovative, trying to do a tv show with no preproduction, no scripting, no blocking, so the camera movement and crossing the line and not shooting traditionally really lent well to the need to get the work done and in the time frame that we were asked to do it in. They gave us plenty of creativity and license and . . . it was hard to do something wrong.∞∞

Although these retrospective tactics paint a picture of managed sloppiness, the posture of the allegories also enables workers to ‘‘dig-in’’ rhetorically and to legitimize their craft’s advancement institutionally. Staged storytelling by below-the-line and creative communities revalues cooperation and struggle. The survival of the crafts, guilds, and worker communities depends on collective reimagining, since solidarity is regularly threatened by displacement and obsolescence. Consider the following account by director Spike Jones Jr., who shows considerably more anxiety about the creative possibilities of Spartan resources than did Willingham and Palazzo: Has the quickened pace of these shows a√ected shooting days? Budgets? Time allocated for postproduction? . . . What you are up against timewise on these shows? JONES: There’s good news and bad news. The good news is ‘‘all bets are o√.’’ The bad news is . . . ‘‘all bets are o√.’’ There are no rules. You can use polaroids, you can use anything. . . . I just went in and did a pitch, and the amount of money is ridiculous, and what they are accepting to shoot on, is almost Scotch tape. I’m serious. I’m not lying. So we ordered a case of Scotch tape. Because we wanted the job.∞≤ CALDWELL:

In this account, the glow of the ‘‘happy accident’’ archetype has worn thin. Dynamic low-budget creativity is no longer worn as a badge of accomplishment by this filmmaker. Jones is numbed and dispirited by the low production values, low budgets, and low-end technologies that define production aesthetics in the cost-conscious age of reality television. What somehow survives this feeling of resignation is the sense that the filmmaker can still somehow pull o√ an e√ective show with few or no resources. A sense of ever-increasing budgetary and production-value scarcity pervades these variants of the trade story. Fourth, and finally, the against-all-odds allegory commonly serves as a form of cooperative griping about working conditions and lack of respect.

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In some ways these narrative practices appear Zen-like in their studied avowals of deference and self-deprecation. But they are also implicitly tales of woe and evidence of battle scarring—that is, griping tactics that may seem benign to bosses but score points against those at the top nevertheless. One of the best examples demonstrating the trade story as cooperative griping is the current ‘‘12 On/12 O√ ’’ job safety campaign being waged throughout the industry. 12 On/12 O√ is a grassroots practitioner movement aimed at compelling studios, producers, and unit production managers (upm’s) to limit workdays to twelve hours maximum, with twelve hours o√ for turnaround and no more than six hours of work before or between meals. The goal of the campaign is to reduce workplace dangers that come from unrealistic managerial and scheduling demands intended as production ‘‘shortcuts.’’ The campaign involves wearing cautionary T-shirts with the ‘‘12 On/12 O√ ’’ message, where workers are urged to consult a Web site with instructions about how and how not to wear and use the shirts on sets and locations. The Web site also o√ers compilations of stories to underscore the hostile conditions that workers face across the industry. Sobering tales of production worker deaths set the stage: ‘‘The length of . . . production days has been a hot topic . . . since the March 6, 1997 death of assistant cameraman (ac) Brent Hershman. Hershman (35) was killed when he fell asleep at the wheel and hit a utility pole driving home after a 19-hour work day on ‘‘Pleasantville’’ a New Line Film. . . . (Hershman started out as a camera loader in 1991 and was working up the ac ladder.)’’∞≥ But while posted anecdotes of death like these circulate among belowthe-line workers, the campaign ratchets down this posture in suggestions about how to deal with network and studio executives and wayward producers. The following instructions and recommendations for deployment of the shirts and slogans on the set suggest that the campaign is also formally gun shy. Notice how this helpful ‘‘users manual’’ also bu√ers and dulls the potential teeth of the project: 1 2

3

4

We do not encourage an ‘us vs. them’ mentality. We don’t recommend that you wear these on day 1 of a production (unless your cousin is the Director!). In fact, click on instructions for Use, for more innovative ways of using the shirt; and We are not a union or a≈liated with any unions or other entities. Welcome to 12 On/12 O√ !∞∂

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The ‘‘12 On/12 Off ‘‘ labor campaign for safer working conditions for film/video crew members stemmed from a grassroots effort to pressure producers and studio executives to prevent jobrelated deaths and injuries during production. Minimum demands: #1-No more than 12 hours of work; #2-No less than 12 hours for turnaround; #3-No more than 6 hours between meals. 12 On/12 Off website compiles war stories of workplace production injuries and death. Photo © J. Caldwell.

The campaign 12 On/12 O√ is a film/video workers’ response to death, injury, and the pervasiveness of abusive work schedules in production. Yet in the passage cited above the campaign organizers try to distance themselves from the (apparently) negative connotations of ‘‘unions’’—the very groups that historically have forced worker protections through contract negotiations. The 12 On/12 O√ campaign seems ambivalent about the increasingly contentious realities of the division of labor in Hollywood. The publicized trade narratives stand as sobering tales and warnings, but the campaign still encourages its participants to smile and act collegial as ‘‘good workers’’—even as they protest. Even unionized workers sometimes adopt this pose of ‘‘smile as you resist’’ now that an oversupply of labor and nonunion work dominates the production scene and makes them even more expendable. Below-the-lines storytelling is coded in ways that allow advocates for workers to invoke critical theory to justify their interventions. The veteran

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Desperation at work, in outsourced contract labor, stimulates ‘‘against-all-odds’’ trade stories in ‘‘digital sweatshops’’ just as in below-the-line field production work. Here icons for DVD authoring software and Silicon Graphics digital graphics software. Composite photos of promotional posters by J. Caldwell.

Murphy Brown producer Bob Je√ords, author of Je√ords’s Rules and Regulations, a widely used compendium of union rules, feared that producers might resist working shorter days, but only initially: ‘‘[Shorter days] removes some of the creative flexibility in their minds. But we know from aesthetics philosophers that limitation is a great impetus for the creation of art. So if we give them good guidelines, the quality of the product might very well improve.’’∞∑ Je√ords’s theory invokes and underscores the paradigm that physical limitations create the very conditions for innovation, even as it enhances corporate profits for producers as well. Ironically, this business theory (i.e., that hardships create e≈ciencies and profits) proves to be very congruent with the war story and against-all-odds practitioner genres. Unfortunately, the complaints coded into below-the-line trade narratives—about harsh working conditions, worker character, and creative triumphs of the will—

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may also reinforce opportunistic business practices that will ultimately make labor conditions worse, rather than better. GENESIS MYTHS (ABOVE-THE-LINE CREATIVE SECTOR)

War stories and against-all-odds allegories give to storytellers an earned mystique of technical mastery that is crucial for those who function as mentors in the industry’s stratified labor caste system. These ‘‘narratives of authority’’ cultivate character through celebrations of work, su√ering, and survival. A second set of trade narratives—the ‘‘genesis myths’’—function less as celebrations of work (su√ering at the production task and vocational survival) than as celebrations of an originating moment and artistic pedigree. Whereas survival at work establishes value in the first genre, acts of anointment or mentoring establish value in the second. In some ways, genesis myths function as the glue intended to create social cohesion in a work or trade group. This is reminiscent of the football programs that use ‘‘story nights’’ as institutional forms of male bonding so that recruits realize that coaches have personal problems similar to those held by the recruits themselves (for example, growing up in a hard-luck dysfunctional home).∞∏ The tendency to narrate one’s career in public based on an ex nihilo moment (rather than ongoing struggle) is more typical of above-the-line creative personnel (directors and creative producers) than below-the-line sta√ers. Sometimes narrated explanations of trade origins invoke acts of symbolic annunciation or an ex cathedra anointment by a mogul. Consider the following comment from an industry worker on the terminology used in production design: ‘‘The old Hollywood designation ‘art director’ was no longer su≈cient to describe the accomplishments of Menzies. So David O. Selznick anointed him his ‘Production Designer.’ The title we use today.’’∞π In descriptions like this one about the historical shift from the designation ‘‘art director’’ to that of ‘‘production designer,’’ practitioners muse on moments of seeming inevitability in which the industry is finally forced to recognize the centrality and broad significance of their given specialization. Another designer furthers this assertion of inflated centrality by justifying the shifting to an above-the-line designation since it was a truer reflection of the fact that ‘‘Menzies so completely designed the movie from a visual point of view.’’∞∫ Yet what the Art Director’s Guild is far less likely to suggest in public is that Selznick may actually have used the shift in terminology to

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wrest power and creative control away from the four disposable directors who were fired during the production of Gone With the Wind. Selznick, in e√ect, made the production designer Menzies his personal partner and then exploited his newly enhanced status in a way that rendered the film directors largely dispensable. Others describe their originating moment in terms linked more to familial ancestry and incarnation than to a symbolic public annunciation like that of Menzies. Jim McConkey, dp, while mourning the death of his cinematography mentor Jean-Yves Esco≈er, reminisced on the metaphysical ways that insight and sensibility are passed down from man to man: ‘‘It took me about half the production to understand that while he was a perfectionist, it was also a communication thing. It just took him a while to trust that you had his vision at heart when you first started working with him. Once he understood that you understood what he wanted, he was easier to work with. His death was particularly devastating for me, because it did take a long time to establish a close relationship with him. But once I did, working with him was very fulfilling. It’s sad to lose him as a person.’’∞Ω Trust, bonding, and male mourning are all linked in this tale about the ‘‘passage’’ of legacy and artistic sensibility from master to disciple. This variant of the genesis myth gives contemporary status to practitioners by establishing a special, interpersonal pedigree of distinction. In some ways, this cultivation of industrial ancestry is reminiscent of the ‘‘descent claims’’ that anthropologists use to show how lineage determines identity, land claims, and value in some traditional non-Western cultures. Career capital can also be accumulated via tales of vision and character building tied to regional roots and vocational origins. One screenwriter shows how well character trumps the mindless shallowness of industry’s ‘‘glad-handers’’: ‘‘Nothing builds character or prepares an individual for the life of a screenwriter like being a Cubs fan. . . . It’s been nearly four years since that [script] sale and the financial cushion is gone. I’ve been writing on spec . . . and my movie, although allegedly green-lighted, is mired in the Exalted Tinsel Abyss. Once glad-handing producers no longer return my calls, and a formerly buoyant agency is now doing diddley for me. But you know what, I can take it. I will prevail. I’m a Cubs fan. I’ve been waiting for next year my entire life.’’≤≠ A golden moment emerges in this sad tale of lost innocence and Wrigley Field in September. But this narrated pedigree of loss also predisposes the

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screenwriter to survival and success. Unlike the motifs of anointment and mentoring in the genesis genre, the working-class aura of a regional sports fan suggests here a centered quality of Zen and the art of survival; something far di√erent from the landed descent claims of either the anointed or the mentored. The baseball caps seen on screenwriters around Los Angeles may be an obligatory part of the writer’s vocational uniform, but they can serve as cultural and hereditary totems as well. Many practitioners demonstrate far lower aspirations than those who use the annunciation or incarnation scenarios to establish their working genesis. In fact, many times genesis myths are merely name-dropping business rituals or self-serving spoken business cards, as it were. Consider the following tale of life on a set as described by one emerging film director: Peter, Steve informed us, went through the dga training program and had just come o√ ‘‘The Mod Squad.’’ Peter arrived clad in his souvenir jacket, with ‘‘The Mod Squad crew’’ emblazoned on his left arm, fresh with stories about Claire Danes and Giovanni Ribisi. I would later observe that both of the ad’s were fond of publicizing their a≈liations through their clothing. What they didn’t literally wear on their sleeve, they would mention on ample occasion. Daren had gotten his mfa in production after graduating from a prestigious, private Ivy League college. Daren and Robert had a dga meeting to attend that week. Daren was interviewing for a job on a movie that starred Brendan Frasier, about which he noted, ‘‘Brendan and I haven’t worked together since ‘George.’ ’’ I assumed that George was shorthand for ‘‘George of the Jungle.’’≤∞

On this location set industrial ancestry is not invoked to underscore distinction or to emphasize metaphysical personal capabilities. Instead, endless references to supposed A-list films and relationships with big-screen actors are intoned. The function of this on-set behavior is at least twofold. First, ancestral name dropping functions as a kind of walking-talking resume and/or personal demo reel. Second, the practice functions as a form of territorial turf marking. Much as dogs urinate to mark, announce, and warn others about their turf, these producers constantly drop ancestral names to denigrate or discourage the many lesser figures and wanabees on the set. The annunciation and incarnation variants of genesis described earlier work well to inspire those within a specialized craft or trade community, and this is especially the case when these stories are told o√ the set or during down times. The turf-marking variant of genesis works very di√erently by making

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50 Insiders’ reflections among abovethe-line ‘‘creatives’’ include ‘‘pathsnot-taken’’ parables in events that mirror the ‘‘story nights’’ used by football teams to ‘‘bond’’ players. Here, the producers and stars of The Simpsons share behind-the-scenes stories to ‘‘professional’’ audience members at the WGA offices (right), while even ‘‘technical standards’’ organizations like SMPTE provide greenrooms and author’s lounges for their insider trade speakers (left). 2001. Photo © J. Caldwell.

antagonism the operative and defining feature on a set. One approach functions to create a≈nities and devotion among specialists and trainees. The other approach functions to keep everyone else on the set, especially those in other crafts and departments, o√ balance and on guard. One approach builds a≈nities and the other marks the ostensible importance of one’s specialty, no matter how insignificant it truly is. This latter e√ect, and turf marking in general, are even more valued in a sector I have not yet addressed: namely, the unregulated film and television related work worlds that exist o√ the lot and out of the studio—worlds that are examined more fully in the next section. Another narrative mode related to the genesis trope of origins is what might be called the ‘‘paths-not-taken parable.’’ Rarely will a practitioner express public regret over having missed out on a career opportunity. Yet some stories also clearly set up and dramatize stark contrasts between the work world as represented by the individual and an alternate world in which the practitioner might have worked but chose not to pursue. Consider, for example, the director Jon Cassar’s ‘‘paths’’ parable, which underscores both the financial and moral di√erences between making feature films and making film for television: CALDWELL: Anything else you want to say . . . about what you are up against timewise on these shows? Your task? CASSAR: It reminds me of a story of Kiefer Sutherland; he’s the lead in our show 24. He went to do a movie between our two seasons . . . He wasn’t the lead in it, but he was there for a month. When he got back I asked him, ‘‘How

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did it go?’’ And he said: ‘‘We could have shot everything we did there in a month in the equivalent of two days [here]. And it would have been better.’’ [In television] you’re under the gun all the time. And it’s harder for us, because we have twenty-four episodes to do. So it’s a very long season. And we come up against it because of the air dates. It gets really tight. . . . It’s really high energy. You have to come in, you have to move quick. And I think it helps the show. I really do.≤≤

Cassar and Sutherland are both A-list figures. Both discuss their series 24 as filmmakers would, and both have worked in features. Yet here the director takes great pleasure in underscoring the lazy, unproductive results of bigbudget filmmaking, which he contrasts to the frantic but committed production process and sophisticated results of prime-time television filmmaking. In a sense, this tale mocks big screen cinema and cultivates the sense that the best work takes place ‘‘outside’’ the sluggish big screen factories. Cassar wears an outsider stance on his sleeve even as he produces one of the most critically and commercially successful prime-time dramas. Who would want to work in feature film after hearing this kind of confident and cynical trade talk? Such stories suggest that the goals of genesis myths and paths-not-taken parables are congruent. Specifically, the idea that the practitioner-teller rose to fame from humble origins resonates with the paths-not-taken goal of establishing the teller’s continuing ability to produce creative works despite his supposed position as a semioutsider. Workers value trade tales told from a (largely symbolic) position slightly o√ center. MAKING-IT SAGAS (UNREGULATED AND NONSIGNATORY SECTORS)

War stories and against-all-odds allegories seem to resonate especially well in the below-the-line technical crafts, while genesis myths and annunciations fit the career postures that above-the-line creative workers assume and master. The first set of story types tends to emphasize the teller’s relation to his or her physical conditions or material task. The second set tends to focus on the teller’s psychological disposition and internal relations, in which career stands as an ideal of self-actualization. A set of stories in yet a third labor sector—what I refer to as unregulated film and television labor— focuses on workplace networks and interpersonal relations. Agents, reps, managers, producer’s assistants, personal assistants, accountants, sales, and

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clerical workers all fulfill labor roles that are not regulated by the ‘‘signatory agreements’’ between the major studios and the major guilds and unions. Yet this wide and diverse set of employees represents the majority of workers in the film/television industry. Compare the di√erence in scale between regulated union work and unregulated nonunion work. The iatse editor’s union and the Writers Guild each have fewer than 8,000 ‘‘active’’ or current members, and the Writers Guild has only 1,870 and 3,194 members actually employed writing for film and television respectively in a given year.≤≥ Contrast these numbers, and this scale, to the industry as a whole, where a total of 250,000 workers of all sorts are directly involved in film and television in the Los Angeles region. The third sector considered in this chapter thus includes a large, incredibly diverse group of occupations, most of which involve little or no time on soundstages, back lots, locations, or television studios. The trade stories told here tend to emphasize very different kinds of ‘‘skill sets’’—namely those emphasizing personal networking, hooking up, and ‘‘giving back.’’ All of these narrative motifs presuppose that success in the industry is based on the quid pro quo exploitation and management of all human and trade relationships. Most of the occupations in this unregulated sector have intermediary functions within and between institutions. That is, reps, agents, managers, sales personnel, and assistants all spend considerable time soliciting, managing, and monitoring interpersonal a≈liations and human relationships in the work world. The constant emphasis on mediation places a premium on successful relationship building as a proven form of negotiation.≤∂ Many sales representatives in television syndication, for example, somehow invoke physical hardship and di≈cult pilgrimages despite the fact that they have generous expense accounts and salaries. With the future of first-run television syndication increasingly in question, the National Association of Television Program Executives produced in 2000 a feature-length video entitled The Legends of Syndication to help orient newcomers to the syndication industry; to explain the logic and practices of syndication; and to provide an oral history of the many (now aging) ‘‘stars’’ of syndicated selling. More than simply a history of the ‘‘traveling salesmen’’ that go from one independent station to another to sell first-run syndicated shows, Legends provides particularly good insights into the ethos and self-perceptions of syndicated personnel. Story after story focuses on the hardships of the early days. Old timers note that ‘‘long before video projectors and PowerPoint presenta-

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tions’’ they had to lug ‘‘hundreds of pounds of heavy 16mm projectors and reels’’ in order to build client relationships. Veterans describe the vast distances of rural areas covered and the hard-sells made despite sweat and fatigue from lugging the av gear into formal pitches at tv stations as well as presentations made to local station owners on ‘‘dairy farms.’’ In Legends executives reminisce on camera about their original sales territories (southern Indiana, Ohio, rural Nebraska) as a montage of maps from those remote areas slide through the image. One exsalesman, after having lied about not being underage, boasts of braving a blizzard by foot in order to get to the first sale of his career. A succession of syndicators then o√er their best anecdotes of missed appointments, odd coincidences, and quirky behaviors by competitors and clients. The themes and motifs in these narrative segments create a composite self-portrait of these practitioners as hardy, tough traveling, confident, and aggressive competitors—who nevertheless remain skilled at the human touch needed for extensive relationship building. The narratives that practitioners put up on the big or small screen are sometimes not as interesting or as culturally suggestive as those that individuals tell each other in the workplace and o√ the lot. Sometimes overt making-it narratives reveal common, conventionalized, and problematic forms of sexual politics and gender segregation. For example, Paul Schrader, as an unemployed aspirant and wannabe writer/director slept with women only long enough to get access to their Rolodexes, before then moving on to women with more connections, better address and contact information, and potentially higher status in the industry. The publicist Beverly Walker recounts her disbelief in finding Schrader rifling through her Rolodex for contacts: ‘‘I really think he would steal his own mother’s diary if he could.’’ Peter Biskind deciphers Schrader’s sexualized career-advancement narrative as ‘‘forming attachments to those above him in the food chain. Since he was a bottom feeder at the time, almost everyone, even a publicist, qualified.’’≤∑ This behavior is no small turn for the author and intellectual of Transcendental Cinema, a highly theoretical account of the spiritual dimension of cinema. By contrast, Biskind’s tell-all book spins the story of a stunted and repressed ascetic who, once unleashed, meets his career-driven libidinal other in the hills above Los Angeles. And the rest becomes part of the history of how Schrader’s group ostensibly ‘‘saved Hollywood.’’≤∏ Most of the time the trade publications tone down considerably the

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tabloid-like tenor of these narratives. Yet Broadcasting and Cable, Variety, and the Hollywood Reporter also regularly ‘‘retell’’ trade stories and personal anecdotes that are loaded with problematic sexual politics and gender assumptions. For example, an issue of Broadcasting and Cable devoted to ‘‘reality television’’ invoked recognizable gender and class stereotypes within the same feature story. Consider the personal qualities assigned to each ‘‘narrative’’ character in the following passage: ‘‘In an industry largely populated with those who make every day Casual Friday, Wong is a standout, often looking as if she has just stepped from the pages of Vogue. On a recent day, she wore a Chanel pink and white boucle jacket, white seersucker pants and pumps with 3-inch heels. ‘I don’t look good in jeans, she says.’ Wong’s personal style telegraphs the kind of programming she’s looking for: tasteful, family-oriented and optimistic. But like any good buyer, Wong has perfected the art of saying ‘no.’ ’’≤π The story explains Wong’s success as a corporate executive as based on her ability to perform both feminine glamour and, when needed, a dragonlady style toughness. But the same trade account treats other female ‘‘success stories’’ in the same world of reality television very di√erently. Consider how the story narrates the mere casting director of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy : ‘‘ ‘Such are the early morning woes of slob-dom,’ grunted Danielle Eifler, casting director for Scout Productions. It’s 9 a.m. and the hyper-chatty 28 year old is videotaping a dingy third-floor walkup apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. Bleary-eyed from three apartment visits in Brooklyn the night before, Eifler is casing out every inch of the miniscule disaster area. . . . For the actor turned ‘talent’ scout, 15-hour workdays are nothing new. . . . And she’s not meeting beautiful people either.’’≤∫ In these passages the trade story assigns and reinforces certain stereotypes about the industry and gender based on employment status. The female network executive’s success is described as daunting because of her designerlabel, glamour-induced demeanor. The female casting director’s success down in a lower caste in cable is sketched out in terms of her stress-induced fatigue and sleeplessness in a world without ‘‘beauty.’’≤Ω The same account describes male successes, however, in very di√erent terms: ‘‘Fleiss doesn’t quite fit the Hollywood mold. An imposing man, he favors all-black surfer shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops. His corner o≈ce is dark, decorated with a black velvet sofa, lava lamps and posters of Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead. And dangling from the ceiling is a straight jacket emblazoned with

Trade Stories and Career Capital

the logo of his company, Next Entertainment. . . . Next to his phone, he keeps a hand-written list of 16 copycat reality series, all of which borrow one or more elements from The Bachelor. . . . Fleiss pledges to sue them all.’’≥≠ Here the trade first creates a recognizable bad boy image for this executive (as an edgy, masculine vanguard force). The story then underscores him as a threat and litigation nightmare to all of the other reality television ‘‘ripo√ ’’ producers out there (including those reading this issue of Broadcasting and Cable). In telling the story of the reality television industry, the trade has chosen to segregate various narrative characters (all termed ‘‘power brokers’’) by way of acute cultural typing: the female network executive is intimidating because of her sexuality, glamour, and toughness; the female casting director is a tough worker-bee who is true, plain, and devoted; the male producer is virile and scary, marking his turf for any would-be challengers. Whether the writer believed these stereotypes or merely described them in the workplace is beside the point: trade stories participate in and reinforce such stereotyping even if or as practitioners act them out in person at work.≥∞ Intermediaries in non-network television work worlds favor their own set of narrative stereotypes. One trade story—in the genre of ‘‘I drank and bullied my way to the top’’—serves as a variant of the su√ering, surviving, and seduction genre. This story arc cultivates the volatility and unruly quality of the work worlds within which nonmainstream tv is produced. The book Tabloid Baby, Burt Kearns’s ego-fixated first-person account of how he ‘‘invented reality television,’’ sketches out an anxious Darwinian work world peopled by hard-drinking, sexually virile men driven to success in the homosocial workspace imported successfully by Rupert Murdoch via A Current A√air and Hard Copy in the late 1980s. With satisfaction, Kearns takes credit for beating and breaking legitimate tv news with tabloid tv (which legitimate news finally came to copy) during this period. Typical of many career allegories and user guides for the unregulated cadre, Kearns writes with the same confrontational tabloid approach that he ‘‘mastered’’ in his series. Chapter titles like ‘‘Lesbians, Cripples, and Clowns’’ and ‘‘Rob Lowe’s Big Dick’’ provide contexts for female marginalization. Women are identified by the quality of their breasts, as in ‘‘Riva, who despite her tweetybird voice was a grand billowing bird, with even grander and more billowing breasts.’’ Women are demeaned, such as the reference to Maureen O’Boyle’s cold and ridiculed personality, whereas men are rewarded for their

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masculine sexual capabilities. Kearns describes his collaborators as the ‘‘Wild Bunch’’ and the ‘‘wolfpack,’’ which essentially allegorizes Kearns’s entire production company as a gang of sexual-professional predators.≥≤ The e√ect of such an account presupposes that some industry players have a kind of bloodlust for savage competition and career advantage. One learns from this storytelling tome a guiding moral—the sense that brutal career and labor volatilities bring with them acute lures and seductions. This narrative lesson is intended to serve well the hungry film/tv aspirants, interns, and production assistants who, like Kearns, have enough sexual and producing confidence to exploit in the interpersonal carnage that lies ahead. Other industry work sectors are also still largely segregated by gender. If Kearns and Schrader tell tales of sexual advantage and confrontation as masculinist skill sets, another subset of the surviving-and-seduction genre o√ers career guides outlining female sexual behavior and workplace voyeurism as vocational competencies. Fran Harris’s 2003 book Crashing Hollywood presupposes a kind of ‘‘clothing-optional’’ alternative in the career track with its subtitle How to Keep Your Integrity Up and Your Clothes On and Still Make It in Hollywood. With chapter titles like ‘‘Will You Still Respect Me in the Morning,’’ ‘‘Safe Sex,’’ and ‘‘How to Give Good Phone,’’ Harris draws out a sexualized allegory of career growth without being overly explicit in her career proverbs per se. Although she is ambivalent about the standard ‘‘Fake It Until You Make It’’ adage that newcomers master, she is sold on the importance of developing yourself as a ‘‘personal brand.’’ The author discusses the ins and outs of ‘‘bladder management’’ on pitch or meeting days and redefines key metaphors for the realities of the business: ‘‘How to be a good lay. Some of you need to get out of Pornville for a second—I’m talking about a di√erent kind of lay right now. In Hollywood ‘laying pipes’ means planting seeds or laying the foundation for a relationship.’’≥≥ While Harris intends to desexualize the biz in passages like this, she implicitly makes intercourse the paradigm for all business relationships. Another behind-thescenes career guide says it all in its title: tv , Sex, Lies, and Promos. Yet the book’s authors, Deidre Hanssen and Jodi F. Gottlieb, provide highly useful details about how to manage personal relations in the workspace. In order to meld opposite personalities in the workspace, Hanssen and Gottlieb caution that ‘‘being a creative field, the promo world is filled with egos and they often clash.’’ In explaining how to work with a boss you hate, they state: ‘‘Kiss up to your dislikable boss every chance you get, because he or she will never see

Trade Stories and Career Capital

your insincerity which will give you daily reinforcement that your boss is an idiot.’’ They also explain what the hard-core expectations are for career advancement: ‘‘By your late thirties you should have been promoted to management.’’≥∂ Unlike Harris’s book, Hanssen and Gottlieb’s account is ultimately less sexualized because they speak from a fairly regular, sanctioned, and traditional part of the television establishment (that is, the promotional departments in local and network television), where promo is discussed as a field and lifestyle lures are secondary. Hadley Davis’s Development Girl, another volume in the genre, uses sexual initiation to provide a context for learning the craft of content ‘‘development,’’ as noted in the book’s subtitle: The Hollywood Virgin’s Guide to Making It in the Movie Business. The trade stories that Davis tells provide a set of useful character or interpretive archetypes when analyzing the drama of development departments. She lists these narrative archetypes in order: ‘‘DGirl, D-Guy, Big Boy, or Power Babe in the o≈ce.’’ She also underscores the perks and rewards that give symbolic status to the winner in ‘‘o≈ce politics’’: ‘‘The higher you land in the [food-chain] hierarchy . . . the more assistants you have to order your cappuccinos, make your restaurant reservations—you name it.’’ Davis later discusses in detail how the D-Girl can dress for success, to which she even adds helpful diagrams showing women how to wear designer outfits ‘‘to die for.’’ She also spends considerable ink in a section of the book titled ‘‘Sex and the Single D-Girl and D-Guy: What You Need to Know About Whom to Sleep With.’’ One subsection within this unit is titled ‘‘It Isn’t Whom You’ve Slept with but Whom You Haven’t Slept with That Matters.’’ This subsection contains an excerpt from Davis’s personal narrative—highlighted with an industrial moral: ‘‘After the dashing producer and I discussed our mutual careers, he turned to me and asked, ‘So, do you have a personal life?’ Our meeting in that moment took an ambiguous but not unexpected turn. Social and business life inevitably blur. Accept it, and work it, girls, but don’t become involved. Remember, you are always in a more powerful stance if a man hasn’t seen you naked but wishes he could than if he already has and has nothing more to gain. Your job is to collect people. . . . Use sexual tension as a lure, but be smart about going too far. The entertainment world is small on both coasts, and who has been with whom is common knowledge. It is best to flirt within the business but to date out of it.’’≥∑ Davis draws out life’s lessons from her veteran experience in these valuable ‘‘rendezvous’’ and ‘‘networking sessions’’: ‘‘So how do you tell if it’s a

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meeting or a date or . . . ‘if he’s flirting with me to work or working with me to flirt?’ The most jaded D-Ladies would argue that you can’t tell because every meeting in Tinseltown is about one thing: ‘Are you fuck-able?’ ’’≥∏ Under Davis’s guidance, interns, applicants, and production assistants are urged to prepare themselves for the inevitable in Los Angeles: the hookup as both networking opportunity and index of job performance. Clearly, a wide range of inclinations informs these narrative practices. The labor narratives of Kearns and Schrader map out a work world defined by interpersonal volatility, on the one hand, and predatory masculinist aggression as vocational competencies, on the other. By contrast, the labor narratives of Davis, Harris, and Hanssen and Gottlieb underscore the importance of unsubtle, highly calculated forms of female sexual gamesmanship in the o≈ce. Both strategies—predation and seduction—are somewhat logical given the slippery and unstable nature of the nonunion, nonguild work worlds being explained for readers who want to work in them (tabloid television, D-work, networking, promotions, and personal branding). The allegorical posturing in these career tales functions as an earnest announcement that a≈rms the presence of the unregulated (and largely unknown) work specialty being anchored by the narrative. Without the regulatory mechanisms of the standard studio, network-a≈liate, union, and producer’s agreements those involved in ‘‘assisting,’’ sales, marketing, development, and representation face the uphill battle of even (or ever) being acknowledged as serious or discernable specializations. For this reason, many of these trade narratives circulate in the trade publishing borderlands. Or they appear in cheap paperback form as quick reads about ‘‘how to make it in the industry,’’ written by various ‘‘D-Girls,’’ assistants, and freelance self-styled media ‘‘personalities.’’ Like the below-the-line genres, trade narratives by workers in these unregulated sectors are arguably tied to the economic and labor conditions of the specific communities in question. In this case, the widespread lack of formal labor standards, protections, and benefits creates a cadre of underpaid/overworked aspirants who without security exist only through selfannunciation—and then only on the fringes of the pop-trade divide. Unpaid interns and poorly paid producer assistants learn their lessons at an early age: making it in a Darwinian world with an oversupply of labor means figuring out how to brand oneself in relation to some other known player or mother brand (Warner Bros., Sony/Columbia, Paramount, etc.)

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or producer. As a result the narrative practices in the unregulated, nonproduction sector sometimes feel more like a cross between Cosmo, personal hygiene tracts, an online dating self-profile, and a new-employee orientation manual. Many of these books serve, in e√ect, as ‘‘dummies’ guides’’ to solicitation and hooking up as professional skill sets. Not surprisingly, the excessive, highly personalized self-disclosures in these genres are authored from a sector of the industry that is most fully impacted by the goal of a post-Fordist, capitalist media industry: flexibility. Institutional flexibility allows studios and corporations to quickly adapt to changing economic and technical conditions. But it also benefits from a churning workforce by accommodating the personal anxieties, volatilities, and impermanence of the migratory laborers that work in these jobs.≥π With little permanence or job security, and with none of the regimentation of production proper, workers tell stories that a≈rm constant interpersonal flexibility, quid pro quo networking, and mutual exploitation as vocational skill-set. STEALTH MARKETING AND FAKE BUZZ

As the examples examined thus far indicate, individual practitioners and their trade groups have learned to exploit the possibilities of gossip, anecdotes, and trade stories. It is worth noting that corporations within the film and television industries have also learned to master the storytelling skills of the individuals within the company’s or studio’s walls. Because trade stories and production gossip now churn around most films and series, studios and networks have had to learn how to engage and contain this unsanctioned story world by creating informal trade stories of their own. In some ways, the modern studio and network marketing departments are masters of institutionalized—and stealthy—storytelling. Before addressing the issue of how corporations disguise their promotions as practitioner talk, it is worth considering the ways they work to constrain and discipline the kinds of worker storytelling that unfolds on the lot or soundstage. The Hollywood career consultant Linda Buzzell underscores just how vigorously studios enforce ‘‘confidentiality agreements’’ and impose and enforce ‘‘termination agreements’’ as well. Coming or going, workers tell trade tales at their own peril: ‘‘Your attorney . . . may communicate directly with the company on your behalf, just to let them know they have to handle this right—or else. . . . Should you worry about your previous

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employer bad-mouthing you when your references are checked? At the behest of their lawyers, large employers are usually very careful these days, acknowledging only your dates of employment and your job title.’’ Buzzell argues that termination is a crucial moment warranting legal intimidation as a countermeasure to control the resulting corporate storytelling and fallout. Her assertion underscores the popular assumption that firings can result in damning tales intended to sink one’s career: ‘‘Do you want to sue your former employer? In a small industry like ours, very few choose this option, no matter how justified it may be. There is a common fear that ‘you’ll never work in this town again’ if you pursue your lawsuit.’’ Buzzell then underscores that the real solution in this predicament is to be a convincing storyteller rather than a litigator: ‘‘Whether you are a full-timer or a free-lancer, it’s important to put a good spin on why you left your most recent job. When you are mired in emotion, it can be hard to be positive and creative when you are explaining why it’s a ‘good thing’ that you are moving on. A professional can help you develop an explanation that is both comfortable for you and moves you toward a better job.’’≥∫ The recipe for success: fight negative spin with positive counterspin and hire a professional story-spinning consultant to put the lid on all other rumors. As I suggested in the introduction to this volume, the press is enmeshed in a messy dance to control the information and gossip that passes from a studio or network to the trade press. As with the mtv /Viacom’s confidentiality agreement reproduced here, almost every film and television company takes the position that all company information or news is proprietary. Unauthorized storytelling is a threat that must be monitored and managed. The editor of Videography tells a tale that underscores this point: ‘‘For the first time, we held publication of our April issue until the first day of nab [National Association of Broadcasters convention]. This meant that while I could include a ton of previously unannounced products, I also had to keep my big mouth shut. (We were in one meeting, signing Non-Disclosure Agreements, and Katie, my managing editor, pointed her pen at me, snorted, and said, ‘Good luck with little Miss Chatterbox over there.’ The product managers looked worriedly in my direction. But I think I managed to keep the lid on.)’’≥Ω Later in the piece, the trade editor consciously likens the trade writer’s task to that of Harry Caul in Francis Coppola’s The Conversation, since her task involves eavesdropping and deciphering planted industrial secrets. The Videography account reveals that the publication is very much in

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The new conglomerates obsessively guard their ‘‘secrets’’ by forcing ‘‘nondisclosure agreements’’ and signed ‘‘confidentiality statements’’ on employees ranging from those at high levels to volunteer interns. Unauthorized trade stories are deemed suspect institutional threats. Photo © J. Caldwell.

bed with the industry, in a relationship managed by how and when proprietary information will be leaked. Even if the film/video trades can be so easily bought o√, individual workers are far more di≈cult to control. The studio executive Tom Sherak describes how the floodgates of behind-the-scenes storytelling have been unleashed alongside the development of the Internet: ‘‘We live in a world of gossip. Information flows like a river down a mountain. Ten years ago if you were at a test screening and hated the movie you could only tell your four friends. Today, you can go on the internet and tell the world.’’∂≠ Aljean Harmetz underscores the nature of this insurgent narrative threat to the studios: ‘‘Today there are few secrets on any Hollywood film set. And the 100 crew members and 14 leading actors have little loyalty to their current studio bosses because they will be working at a di√erent studio next month.’’∂∞ In essence, film/video institutions today are ‘‘leaky.’’ Trade stories and gossip can easily wash away the best-laid plans of a studio’s marketing department.

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The studio marketing bosses, however, soon saw this narrative insurgency as an opportunity for profitable countermeasures—specifically the creation of ‘‘fake buzz.’’ Fake online gossip and fan buzz by studios attempts to look and sound like ‘‘authentic’’ fan or practitioner ‘‘buzz,’’ and companies will go to great lengths to have their Web authors dumb down and destyle their stealth-gossip messages to make them look authentic. Sometimes this covert fan espionage blows up in the face of the studio or network marketing bosses as when nbc’s fake fan site ‘‘discovering’’ and hyping their behind-the-scenes series Studio 60 was busted because its fan posturing was excessively breathless and inane.∂≤ Far from being apologetic about this kind of stealth practice, the long-time Warner Bros. studio boss and now Yahoo! ceo Terry Semel likens this practice to the ways that antibodies are used to fight infection in the body: ‘‘It’s a viral marketing technique. . . . I’ll put money on the fact that those message boards have what we call ‘seeding’— like you seed a lawn. They seed the board with [propaganda].’’∂≥ Jim Moloshok, former head of Warner Bros. Online, uses the analogy of religious proselytizing to explain how the viral seeding works: ‘‘If you can lock onto someone and make them an evangelist for your project, it’s worth it. . . . The logical extension is for entertainment companies to try to create buzz on projects.’’∂∂ Dana Calvo describes how cbs operatives went undercover to begin exploiting the new storytelling trend: ‘‘After Blair Witch . . . marketing tools that masquerade as one fan’s obsession became part of the studios’ promotional machines.’’ But ‘‘cbs marketers enter chat rooms and read the copy to learn what fans want from the network.’’∂∑ Industry executives show no remorse or even ambivalence in being caught at this sort of espionage against the fans. George Schweitzer, cbs executive vice president of marketing, justifies the strategy dismissively in moral terms: ‘‘People don’t care where it comes from. Whether I go on there and say, ‘there’s an interesting show and chat with someone,’ and I don’t identify myself as someone from cbs, or whether we run an ad, it’s spreading information anyway.’’∂∏ A trend emerges here (which will be more fully examined in chapter 7): corporate employees now actively masquerade—as stealthy lurkers and identity poseurs—among interpretive audiences in the online world. Film and television fans beware. Legions of poorly paid industry assistants and interns are lurking online and speaking as and for fans. This is now the marketing rule rather than the exception.

Trade Stories and Career Capital

LEAKY STORY-WORLDS AND STUDIO TRACKING BOARDS

As we have seen, trade storytelling has emerged as a privileged cultural preoccupation of film/video workers. Two recent developments demonstrate that this will to tell stories—by those normally hidden backstage and behind the camera—extends beyond production spaces proper. First, practitioners now participate and ‘‘perform’’ their stories in a range of ‘‘spokenword’’ venues in Los Angeles. Spaces like Un-Cabaret’s ‘‘Say the Word,’’ and Jill Soloway’s ‘‘Sit ’n Spin’’ at Comedy Central’s theater space, allow producers, directors, writers, actors, and editors to publicly read and/or present their personal narratives to audiences. Even as making-ofs and behind-thescenes programming floods television with depictions of production work, flesh-and-blood production workers are themselves stepping out into the light of day to deliver their own stories to the public. In addition to the spoken-word theatrical venues, film/video workers now also have ‘‘new media’’ outlets for their (once-hidden) storytelling skills. Hillary Carlip, the ‘‘host and editor’’ of a Web site called Fresh Yarn.com, explains her group’s mission statement with an invitation to online viewers far from Los Angeles: Welcome to Fresh Yarn—the first Online Salon for Personal Essays. Part literary publication, part virtual spoken-word, all personal essays. Twice a month, Fresh Yarn presents six new pieces written by a diverse lineup of all-star writers, directors, producers, performers and personalities. You’ll read stories from this emerging genre that are humorous, provocative, dramatic, simple, sweet, raunchy, intimate, bold—and all true. . . . As a writer and performer now deeply immersed in the art of the personal narrative essay, it has become apparent to me that there is a vital sub-culture of amazing talent engaged in this emerging genre. Writers in varied fields—television, film, journalism, fiction—as well as directors, producers, artists, performers and personalities, are all being drawn to telling their true stories through personal essays.∂π

Freshyarn.com is structured along the lines of a literary journal but includes extensive biographical links and backstory on each film/video worker-author who presents stories for posting. Matt Price, one of the actors from Imagine Entertainment’s and Fox’s series Arrested Development posts a surreal story about his experience acting as a dog in a Spanish television commercial shot in Madrid. He concludes and ties up the loose

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To combat the destabilizing threats of the ‘‘leaky story-worlds’’ of crew workers, the studios and networks mount all-out initiatives to ‘‘leak’’ their own preferred behind-the-scenes narratives. Corporate handlers and publicists lead journalists around by the nose at ‘‘press junkets,’’ tightly orchestrated ‘‘set visits,’’ and incestuous annual story-sharing courting rituals like the Television Critics Association meetings. Some trade writers refer to their profession as a kind of ‘‘whoring.’’ Photo © J. Caldwell.

ends of his narrative arc on the Web site with a poignant resolution fitting of Fellini: ‘‘I sit in the Delta Crown Room in Madrid waiting. . . . The room is full of loud Americans complaining about the pulp in the orange juice. I overhear a small tour group from Florida talking about how Curb Your Enthusiasm is the funniest show on tv, and ‘Did you see the one where Larry told the black guy to get his car because he thought he was the valet?’ ‘That’s so American,’ I muttered under my breath, as I left the Madrid Crown Room for the main terminal to get one more glimpse of the beautiful Spaniards walking by.’’∂∫ This narrative yarn from a practitioner on location is spun with an air of cultural distinction. When such tales are posted on a Web site, the production narrator also intervenes into the social sphere. Yet critical self-portraits like this must be placed in the context of corporate activities—including fake buzz and stealth marketing—that also cross over and respond to the same digital/cultural divide. One of the most sobering examples of how the film/television industry has used digital media to develop and exploit corporate storytelling comes in the form of ubiquitous online ‘‘tracking boards.’’ Traditionally, gossip

Trade Stories and Career Capital

and buzz about screenplays and potential new projects in film and television circulated informally around Los Angeles through telephone conversations and casual meetings between those with enough clout to acquire or to green-light a film or television series. The o√-the-record and unobservable nature of these discussions reinforced and perpetuated the critical claims by outsiders, new writers, and producers that the industry was really an ‘‘old boys’ network’’—in e√ect, a coalition comprised of those with similar interests even if they ostensibly worked for competitors. Shared gossip about scripts making the rounds could sink a project even before a screenwriter or producer went from studio A to studio B. A narrative ‘‘grapevine’’ ruled the development pipeline, and it was controlled by executive and agency storytellers with privileged ‘‘inside looks.’’ Agency and studio tracking continues to take place through exclusive communication back-channels—much to the consternation of writers and producers who would rather get a fair and unbiased reading of a script only after they pitch it to a studio or network. The Web site FilmTracker.com first defines the idea of a ‘‘tracking group’’ and then lays out the mission of their own back-channel network: ‘‘A tracking group is a private group of film or television executives who track, discuss, and discover new available material in the marketplace. Primarily focusing on scripts and manuscripts coming out of agencies and management companies, tracking groups share information on customized message boards. Originally a job done on the phone, tracking has become a successful Internet community tool, allowing up-to-the-minute information on new material. FilmTracker currently has over 200 individual tracking groups, representing more than 400 production companies, studios and distributors.’’∂Ω This definition is followed by a statement focusing on what is arguably the most important aspect of the service in the minds of users and executives: secrecy and privacy. Secrecy and Access to Tracking Boards You and your group members are the only people that have access to your group. In fact, unless you create a public group that is open to any Baseline member, no one using the site will even know that you have a group. The information you post to your Tracking Board is not accessible, viewable or editable by anyone except your group members. You are responsible for the information posted and controlling whom you invite into your group. Al-

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though BaselineFT will maintain complete privacy of your Tracking Board and does not review your groups’ postings or information (see our Privacy Policy), we do reserve the right to remove unacceptable, o√ensive or illegal information should it become necessary.

Baseline’s FilmTracker service is only the most recent way that those in charge of film/television content control what gets developed. In essence, the FilmTracker service works by controlling how and what scripts get gossiped about and, more importantly, who gets to participate in generating the buzz that results. While stealth marketing, Internet lurking, and fake buzz works well in the gossipy world of viewers and users on the ‘‘back end’’ of distribution, rigidly controlled access to agency and studio tracking boards on the ‘‘front-end’’ of development manages practitioner gossip as well. Gossip is by nature uno≈cial and unruly. It has never been completely controlled from the top. But industry has found ways to rationalize and discipline it as a business practice. As of September 2004, several groups were mounting potential countermeasures to the heavy-handed control and exclusion of studio tracking boards. The wga counterattacked on its Web site with a link to a screenwriters’ Web board that ‘‘tracked’’ the reputations— good and bad—of producers across Los Angeles. Once word spread, this rebuttal board created howls of protest from producers and studios across town who claimed that it was ‘‘unfair’’ for screenwriters to take cheap shots at producers, especially from the cruel cover of anonymity. Many producers found their reputations besmirched when screenwriters told tales of how they were exploited and abused by producers. Although some producers earned high marks, many others were hit hard. The screenwriters, however, seemed perplexed at the negative reaction from those above them in the food chain. Producers, agencies, and networks had for years been secretly evaluating, criticizing, and rejecting the work of screenwriters through tracking done undercover. But now that the screenwriters had mounted a token e√ort at sending ‘‘feedback’’ the other way, the executive world of producers was having fits. Other online monitoring sites like ‘‘Totally Unauthorized’’ and ‘‘Defamer’’ have taken up the wga’s counter-studio-tracking-board ethos by anonymously posting online damning behind-the-scenes stories about producers. Still other Web sites allow Hollywood assistants to vent about their low pay and ‘‘screamer’’ bosses.∑≠ Tracking boards, whether (managerially) from the top or (anarchistically) from the bottom, serve as collective forms of

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Below-the-line hourly wage workers make studio/network story worlds ‘‘leaky’’ for media companies, but the physical struggles and ‘‘war stories’’ told here also help legitimize personal careers and craft distinctions. Yet scholars seldom study the industry from ‘‘the ground up’’ or as a symptom of broader industrial change. Here, a caterer at Raleigh Studios, Hollywood, 2005 (top); a dolly grip, Los Angeles, 2004 (left); C-stand adaptors used by grips and gaffers (center); camera crane operators, Los Angeles, 2003 (right). Photo © J. Caldwell.

critical deliberation and evaluation. Traditionally, those on top managed the process. With exclusive online tracking boards a very select group of crosscorporation decisionmakers critically evaluate prospective projects and scripts. As a result, films and television series today sink or swim based on the professional gossip that circulates around them through storytelling channels to which very few have access. Of course, as with fake buzz and stealth marketing it doesn’t take a genius to see that damning tales about scripts can be ‘‘planted ’’ by those with vested interests in this controlled venue. Buzz thus can become a self-fulfilling, if sometimes punitive, prophesy. Trade narratives in film/television production cultures serve several gen-

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eral functions—namely as rationalizations, solidarity-making devices, guarantors of career mobility, forms of social pedagogy, and self-serving legitimation. Through these trade story practices, production personnel close ranks to weather change and mark their professional boundaries. These intense forms of communicative and narrative interaction fit the ethnographer Andreas Wittel’s model of ‘‘networked sociality,’’ in which technologybased cultural activities substitute for actual community for independent professionals in the new creative industries in the United Kingdom.∑∞ By circulating highly reflexive forms among themselves, practitioners do not simply learn new things. Instead they also work to convince—and to acknowledge to themselves—that their distinctive value to the industry lies in some unique specialty of their guild, or craft, or trade association. These narratives of self-a≈rmation, then, fulfill a broader need that the labor sociologist Harry Braverman finds across the newer, flexible industries. That is, trade narratives verify that a storyteller has a specialized expertise that goes beyond ‘‘the obligations of simple labor’’ and proves that he or she can do the one thing required of any professional in Hollywood: successfully and repeatedly negotiate one’s own value.∑≤ The examples examined in the chapter indicate that practitioners tell trade stories as part of conventionalized industrial habit, and that the intensity of trade storytelling is extreme because professionals must work far harder to restrict access to industries where labor is as potentially open as it is in Hollywood than in industries where it is closed.∑≥ In this way, production workers are less like those who tell trade stories in closed professions that restrict access through strict credentialing (e.g., lawyers) than they are like those in professions marked by openness and calculated self-reliance (e.g., salesmen, entrepreneurs, or freelance crew members). In the case of film/video production, workers tell trade stories to themselves as forms of turf marking and exclusion, as ways to will-into-being professional a≈nities, and as navigational tactics that their professional communities need to face technological change and economic uncertainty.

Do you go high-end . . . or do you jump in the pit with all the other DV cameramen running around fighting over the low-ball jobs? —Cameraman, describing vocational competition as ‘‘fighting pit’’∞ You’ve all heard of it. Some of you have attended it. Most of us dread it. It’s the loudest night of the year. It’s seventy minutes of ear burn for the hearing impaired . . . it’s the sound editing bake-off.≤ —Comment on a postproduction contest staged as ‘‘bake-off’’

Chapter 2

Trade Rituals and Turf Marking

Film and television space traditionally has been discussed almost entirely as a perceptual matter tied to the blocking and placement of a camera and actors.≥ The framing and movement of a shot and the actions or looks of an actor determine whether the viewer is aware of ‘‘on-screen’’ or ‘‘o√-screen’’ space; or whether a director favors shallow compositions and claustrophobia or compositions in depth. Yet a director’s stylistic approach to the space of a film or television narrative is only one way that space impacts the look and feel of a film or television program. In addition to the perceptual and cognitive space of the viewer created via mise-en-scène, the industry pays considerable attention to two other variants of space: first, the material and physical ways that space is organized and managed on a film/video shoot (on location or on a soundstage); and second, how trade talk and trade iconography cultivate notions of space in conceptual and cultural terms. Because in this book I address the cultures of production rather than the aesthetics of the frame, I am most interested in the latter two conceptions. Ultimately, I will suggest that material and conceptual uses of space do impact the sense of space and narrative that viewers experience when watching the screen at home or in the theater. But this connection between

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the space of making and the space of watching is more circumstantial than direct. Clearly, the ways that a production unit organizes its members and technologies reflects a cultural understanding of what the group is and how the various members should relate to each other. Similarly, the ways that the film/video trades talk about symbolic notions like ‘‘Hollywood,’’ ‘‘globalization,’’ or ‘‘runaway production’’ says much about the cultural perspectives of film/video practitioners. Beyond such cultural expressions, in this chapter I will suggest that trade talk, rituals, and representations (of Hollywood, globalization, or runaway production) are all self-reflections as well. For example, by placing piracy, o√shore production, overseas exhibition, and media consumption ‘‘elsewhere’’ (rather than inside its corporations) the industry imagines that it centers the cultural peripheries.∂ Trying to understand the organization of space in film/video production without examining the rituals and activities that occur within production spaces would be shortsighted and unproductive. Thus we should add to a consideration of the symbolic and cultural deployment of space an analysis of the activities that are performed within those spaces. Culturally, production space only makes sense as workers enter and use it. For this reason, each section of this chapter will focus on specific trade rituals enacted in particular spaces. For example, the small-scale, proprietary, private space of creative executives will be analyzed through the conventionalized ritual of the film/ television ‘‘pitch meeting.’’ Second, the semipublic professional space of film/video trade shows will be examined in terms of ‘‘cultivation’’ and ‘‘solicitation rituals,’’ both of which facilitate networking. Considered as ‘‘contact zones,’’ such trade spaces help the industry create a sense of willed a≈nity among disparate a≈liates; a common, symbolic identity that keeps the largely imaginary concept of a unitary industry intact. Finally, o√-thelot spaces where commercial relations are forged will be examined via rituals of ‘‘negotiation’’ and ‘‘deal making.’’ While the first two categories of rituals (pitching and trade shows) bracket o√ special zones where significant work activities take place, the third category (deal-making and negotiation) potentially allows practitioners to ‘‘cross over’’ the boundaries separating industry zones. In this scheme, specific trade rituals can function as navigational guides and career maps that allow practitioners to travel across the bounded material spaces and hierarchies erected by the industry. In the sections that follow, taking this kind of integrated approach means

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Space is organized and deployed as a corporate and cultural expression at industry gatherings. Here, Xena: Warrior Princess codes an ‘‘immersive’’ trade space involving sights, sounds, tastes, and touch. NATPE, New Orleans, 2000; photo © J. Caldwell.

theoretically moving beyond the early formulations of cultural spaces influenced by Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault in order to incorporate the insights of anthropological performance theory, sociologies of work, worldsof-production theory, and economic geography.∑ Moving in this direction keeps the constraining assumptions (formation of power and control ethos) posed by the French theorists in constant tension with the enabling perspectives (agency and collective action) presupposed by performance theories. The worlds of film/video production involve the continuous negotiation of complex forms on both sides of the equation: control (space, boundaries, continuity) and agency (action, imaginative behavior, change). Before examining in more detail the three broad critical spatial paradigms introduced above (pitching, networking, deal making), I want to make some preliminary distinctions. Film/video practitioners engage and conceptualize space in at least five general ways—personal spaces as cultural presentations; material spaces and master plans; tactical spaces as countermeasures; conceptual spaces as cultural representations; and collective spaces as social negotiations—which I discuss in turn as follows.

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Personal space as cultural presentation

Approaching the industry through the frameworks of performance studies and cultural spatial analysis raises the methodological question of why we would consider complex explanations of industrial phenomena when simple ones might su≈ce. After all, writers pitch, editors mingle, and producers negotiate as part of their working tasks. Yet what is striking about participating in or observing a pitch session, a trade show, or a demo aimed at negotiating and crossing borders is that practitioners themselves frequently o√er second-order cultural explanations or critical metacommentaries about professional interactions of the sort that I am suggesting here. The trade metacommentary that circulates around key ‘‘focused gatherings’’ (the pitch meeting, the trade event, the deal negotiation) is precisely the form of activity that Geertz would approach as one culture’s critical analysis of itself. In very basic terms workers do three things in a trade space: they appear, they act, and/or they interact. Within the first category of activity (appearing), a film/video worker’s presence is not just phenomenological but also highly coded in a cultural sense. Consider the following explanation by a screenwriter about the importance of one’s appearance in trade presentation: If you walk around the room dressed like Cary Grant, they’re going to think you are nuts. It’s sneakers, jeans, a T-shirt under a button-down, under a sport jacket. However, you want the best sport jacket you can a√ord. . . . You finish o√ with well-tailored jeans. Again, Helmut Lang makes great ones, and some good sneakers—like Pumas or Adidas—but never, ever running shoes. Basically what you are doing here is combining some very un-sloppy clothes in a sloppy way. To sell myself—to other writers as well as the ‘suits’—I have to look like a young, educated, creative type. The truth is, I would rather wear something more interesting, but there really is a uniform. You can update it, you can improve it, you can make sure it fits really well, but it is still a uniform.∏

Contrast this cultural interpretation of a screenwriter’s vocational dress code to a very di√erent sartorial prescription for success on the set o√ered by a director: The most important question . . . one that would set the tone for my film and perhaps my entire career: Which T-shirt should I wear for the first day of shooting. You might think that I should have spent my final days reviewing the shot list or running lines with actors. But no. The T-shirt question plagued me. It is every modern director’s defining moment. Remember that the first day on

Trade Rituals and Turf Marking

the set, about 65% of the crew members have never met you. It’s essential to command respect right out of the box. ‘‘Who is this young tyro?’’ they’ll be asking. ‘‘Is he aesthetically hip enough to lead us?’’ The real problem is that people want and expect directors to wear the uniform: old-school, low-top colored sneakers, preferably converse All Star; jeans, ripped in the knee and ass; hard-to-find T-shirt with oversized button-down Oxford; hip lightweight jacket with car-related sticker (stp, gto), nerdy-cool glasses and, of course, the ever-present backward baseball cap so that no one knows if you’ve showered.π

Such comments serve as users guides for how to successfully design one’s onset presence. Further, they dramatically illustrate Erving Go√man’s and Arlie Hochschild’s views of everyday life as forms of self-performance.∫ For the screenwriter this means choosing simple but expensive designer clothing and then mixing and wearing it in a haphazard, apparently disinterested way. For the director this means trumping all of the others on the set with esoteric art-school clothing and odd combinations that mix nerdy geekness with working-class automotive knowledge. Although the net e√ect of the screenwriter’s presentation is understated quality, and the net e√ect of the director’s prescription is edgy slumming, both professionals describe and justify their workday ensembles as ‘‘uniforms.’’ Far more than simply clothes, uniforms are by definition coded with significant cultural meanings. Uniforms connote rank and/or specialization, a function fully appropriate in the hierarchical structure of Hollywood. Uniforms also articulate specific kinds and expectations of demeanor and competence. The male screenwriter is coded as sensitive, tasteful, and approachable (someone not prone to unruly a√ect or acting out). The male director by contrast is given a longer behavioral leash. He must be avant-garde and hip if he wants to inspire the technical cadres to submit to his unproven leadership. More than simply physical phenomena, production spaces and the conventionalized behaviors within them serve as highly codified arenas for asserting status and rank among practitioners.Ω This function fits within the cultural and symbolic variant of space described at the start of this chapter. Practitioners exploit a recognizable rhetoric of space and demeanor to reflexively make sense of the creative task, as well as the ever-changing industrial landscape and their supposedly ‘‘essential’’ role in it. Consider in this regard the producer and ceo Peter Guber’s summary description of the industry in the terms that he presented it to hundreds of eager career trainees at a panel on ‘‘making it in Hollywood’’: ‘‘In the sixties, change was

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linear and incremental. In the eighties, change became spatial—and developed like a Polaroid picture. In the new millennium, change is like a stack of Polaroids—with everything developing all at once and on all levels. To make it now, you need a completely new set of skills.’’∞≠ Guber’s cogent metaphor of the shared, instantaneous development of a stack of Polaroids fits perfectly with the business plans of both of the studios at which he was head—Mandalay Pictures and Sony/Columbia. Both studios, after all, have made cross-platform multimedia ‘‘repurposing’’ (i.e., developing ‘‘content’’ simultaneously for film, television, new media, video gaming, music, publishing, and sports) an obligatory, corporate house rule. In what some term the poststudio and postnetwork age of film/television, ancillary markets, merchandizing, and consumer tie-ins are no longer afterthoughts in the creative process. Rather, marketing, distribution, and merchandizing personnel are brought in at the earliest stages of script development and work to prefigure the final narrative and presentational form that any ‘‘primary’’ film or program now takes. Yet not all spatial allegories of industry are as organizational in nature. Consider the ‘‘super-agent’’ Arnold Rifkin’s formulation of space as addressed to the aspirants at the ‘‘making it in Hollywood’’ panel: ‘‘I became very good at talking by phone. At knowing by the voice and intonation at the other end how good a project or a pitch or a personal relationship might be. Talking must be a part of an agent’s skill set. . . . (But) when you finally get fifteen minutes or an hour for a meeting, yes, show up. But then be clear: that it is your space. Take it. Hone it. Use it.’’∞∞ Compared to Guber’s approach, Rifkin’s career road map suggests that Zen-like mastery is required of the sensitive, discerning, and finally decisive super-agent. Earlier comments by Rifkin at the same event showed him to be aware of the complications of the contemporary cross-platform multimedia imperative (i.e., the di√erences between film and television, for example), when he stated that ‘‘movie Raisinets simply don’t taste the same when you eat them at home and watch videos.’’ Yet in elaborating the career proverb cited above, Rifkin lays out a model of agency packaging that is almost mystical in nature. Like a martial artist, we are led to believe, the true agent sifts through and touches the souls of his workaday phone contacts, but then disarms all comers during high moments of appointed ‘‘face time.’’ With public allegories and truisms like these, Hollywood provides what are in e√ect institutional geography lessons for its apprentice players, mentees, and wannabes. Some spatial lessons, like the current public relations boost-

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Material spaces are also part of corporate master plans and identities. Here, massive soundstages stand like imposing fortresses, and vigilant security gates, guards, and walls underscore the militarist stakes involved in production work at the LA Center Studios. Photo © J. Caldwell.

erism in film/tv trade publications surrounding issues of media ‘‘globalization,’’ are macroscopic in function because they help orient and inform strategic business decisions about the nature and significance of synergies, conglomerations, antipiracy practices, and free-trade agreements. Other geography lessons, by contrast, are microscopic and can be used in a more therapeutic and developmental manner to guide media career pilgrims through the often-contested corridors of human-corporate relations. Material Spaces and Master Plans

The spatial organization and physical presence of a production unit, whether on location, in the studio, or in postproduction, has always announced and interpreted the industrial and cultural significance of production. Production firms spend considerable resources custom designing buildings and workspaces that adequately ‘‘express’’ the ostensible personality or the brand of a company. The stylistic means of achieving an individualized spatial identity are as diverse as the companies and products produced in the sprawling Los Angeles area. The new Disney studio in Burbank used cuttingedge postmodern architecture to evoke the company’s newfound attitude and ‘‘commitment’’ to animation in the 1990s. Across town, the newly arrived and well-capitalized company Electronic Arts broke with the Fordist factory ethos entirely in their design scheme: ‘‘Animators and engineers at

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ea’s two-building studio in Playa Vista can escape their darkened cubicles to shoot hoops, spike volleyballs or score soccer goals. Or they can soak up the sun and the coastal breeze at a courtyard that features a toe-dipping pool, a fountain, a boardwalk and deck chairs.’’∞≤ In contrast to Disney’s quality postmodern design scheme and Electronic Arts’ antiassembly line Gen-X playground, Trinity Broadcasting in Costa Mesa re-created adjacent to its studio a reasonably faithful replica of Christ’s ‘‘Via Dolorosa,’’ or Way of the Cross, from ancient Jerusalem. As a studio guide describes the first-century experience to visitors: ‘‘The only thing we don’t have are dirt floors and beggars.’’∞≥ But once inside the tbn television studio proper, gilded-plastic Baroque chandeliers and ornate furniture tableaus rule a set design befitting the heavenly milieu espoused in tbn’s broadcasts. Chiat/Day—a heavyweight ad agency involved in commercial production for film/television— redesigned its creative working spaces in Los Angeles’s Venice area based on a very di√erent blueprint for utopia. In 1994 the company set about building a more dynamic space that it called ‘‘virtual o≈cing.’’ The features of the new Fritz Lang/Metropolis–like microcosm called ‘‘Chiat town’’—which supposedly reorganized company work along the lines of a pedestrian-friendly city with a central park, ka√eeklatsches, and ‘‘neighborhoods’’ for each worker—is described by Frances Anderton as follows: ‘‘While it may be striking and lively, with its jazzy cli√ dwellings, billowing tent structures, flying balconies, exposed plywood partitions and touches of whimsy (like a bar made of surfboards), it doesn’t quite break the pecking order. . . . Two company principals who had spaces equal to everyone else’s now have impressive suites overlooking Central Park, and while creative pairs get prominent, private ‘cli√-dwellings,’ most of the rest nest in the open-plan area.’’∞∂ The sweeping design changes at Chiat/Day elicited extensive employee complaints and antagonism. Even the company’s president, Bob Kuperman, waxed nostalgic about their previous cramped quarters and the ‘‘friction and upset’’ attending it that made creativity possible: ‘‘There’s something to be said for the fact the overcrowding did cause a high level of energy and creative output. The company is right on the edge with its new quarters.’’∞∑ In this scheme, the artists’ utopia for one worker turned out to be for another a stress-inducing creativity factory.∞∏ The emphasis here on production space as a design force that can stimulate innovation and productivity (via stress) also typifies the ‘‘digital sweatshops’’ that I describe in the next chapter. Disney, Electronic Arts, tbn, and Chiat/Day all used design over-

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Recreation folded into ‘‘24/7’’ below-the-line production work: opposite sides of the alley outside of Soundstage 2, Los Angeles Center Studios, 2005. Photo © J. Caldwell.

hauls to create production worlds that serve as o≈cial interpretations— rendered in three-dimensional space—of their respective companies. As corporate replicas, the resulting production spaces also publicly express and articulate to workers and visitors the central themes, individual strengths, and identity of each production enterprise. Tactical Spaces as Countermeasures

The strategic use of architectural space to represent a company’s production ideal is not, however, simply a corporate activity nor does it represent the last word on how a space will actually be used. Individual film/video practitioners also constantly redefine production areas in symbolic, tactical ways that are meaningful to them. Consider, first, the essay ‘‘Building a Small Studio: Basic Concepts in Digital Video Feng Shui,’’ which appeared in the trade publication dv .∞π As a ‘‘how-to’’ guide on the meditative organization of production space, this article counsels small, independent video contractors to cultivate patience and restraint before acquiring new video equipment, as well as to systematically meditate on life and business goals before designing a humane workspace. ‘‘Have you ever walked into a strange building and known immediately where to go to find what you were looking for?. . . . Were you able to find a comfortable place to meet, work, drop o√ your package, or hang up your coat? . . . Good facility design and good

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systems engineering should disappear from your awareness. What you are left with is the creative task at hand and the means to accomplish it.’’∞∫ The author—a seasoned ‘‘video systems engineer,’’ we are told—has o√ered a kind of tract on ‘‘Zen and the art of equipment maintenance and design’’ even as he has implicitly promoted himself to the readers of dv as a contractor whom they might want to hire to reduce their sense that production work takes place in a highly competitive ‘‘snake pit.’’ While reengineering and technical upgrades allow practitioners to gain control of spaces that normally dominate them, other practitioners treat building master-plans as unstable design schemes that they can redefine via countero≈cial artistic expressions. The following description by the journalist Lisa Le√ of one animator’s tactical use of space as an institutional countermeasure contrasts with the kinds of top-down control via design fantasized in the boardrooms at Disney, tbn, and Chiat/Day: ‘‘Defined . . . as ‘veal fattening pens,’ a customized computer (cubicle) might strike some artistically inclined purists as the ultimate cop-out. . . . [The animator] Shoshana Stolove[’s] theme: ‘my individuality and spirituality [is] expressed through drawings of winged goddesses and angels. Tour guides come through with tour groups, and young girls always seem particularly enchanted by my cubicle.’ ’’ In the same account another animator, Marilyn Zelinsky, is quoted as saying that ‘‘ ‘It’s alienating to be told you are going to sit there for 8 hours and it’s going to be a jail cell.’ ’’∞Ω In this article Le√ describes the complicated ways that several animators have individualized their cubicles as countermeasures against the cramped material conditions that digital workers face within the Nickelodeon Animation Studio in Burbank. Stolove’s partition-mounted visual collage of fantasy images stands as her whimsical response to both the workspace and to curious passersby. Le√ explains this dynamic in reference to two disturbing metaphors: the fattening pens of livestock slaughterhouses and incarceration in cramped jail cells. These analogies are about as far as one can get from the ideal of feng shui wistfully promoted in the trade publication dv . Both accounts and spatial metaphors (of feng shui and veal fattening pens, respectively) concern smaller, human-scale production activities. The first account is o√ered by a video equipment trade publication and promises to salve anxieties and end worker claustrophobia. This can be achieved, we are told, by seeking simplification, healthy ergonomics, and psychic balance— principles that are informed by East Asian philosophical reflections on

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spatial organization and quality of life. The second account is journalistic and describes a far messier reality: the cramped conditions of a digital artist. Given its trade context, the first account serves to promote the purchase of new equipment (in order to realize the feng shui ideal). The second account stands as a more sobering image of lived pathos. It can be better understood by examining the economic conditions that govern the digital work pens being described. While the independent producer of video industrials addressed in the first account might fantasize about creating and designing a ‘‘transcendent’’ (but relatively small-scale) production space, the digital artisan addressed in the second example will, perhaps, forever be aware of her role as a small manual chunk functioning in a factory assembly line that alienates workers by design. Conceptual Spaces as Cultural Representations

Two examples—the ‘‘threats’’ of piracy and nonunion work—show how conceptual or symbolic references to geographical space work to articulate and shore up the industry’s own imagined identity. First, the public campaign by the industry and the Motion Picture Association of America (mpaa) against ‘‘piracy’’ that began in 2002 has spotlighted unscrupulous overseas bootleg operations that mass produce—and thus ‘‘steal’’—the intellectual property of Hollywood (via home videos, dvds, cds, etc.). While such rhetoric asserts criminality in places like China (which are cast as cold international monoliths devoid of conscience), Hollywood’s antipiracy campaigns refuse to indict the extensive piracy practices at work within Hollywood itself. Rather than acknowledging culpability within studios, production companies, and transfer houses in Los Angeles, the mpaa erases most of the domestic traces of culpability on its global map so that criminality only occurs outside of its borders. Such tactics aim to elicit pity and industry support from government on issues like global trade—the film lobbyist’s ultimate goal. In 2003 a series of 35mm spots featuring below-theline workers, set builders, and stunt doubles screened before feature films in multiplexes throughout the country. In these spots blue-collar workers earnestly appeal on camera to viewers to stop ‘‘downloading’’ movies at home, since doing so threatens their personal and familial livelihoods as hardworking Americans. In essence, the major studio executives and their financial interests use a ‘‘working-class’’ front to elicit widespread public empathy —even though the same studios and interests are themselves responsible for

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consciously sending thousands of production jobs to Canada and overseas. By cultivating the specter of an unfair, external threat to the American way of life—using a global map with clean insides and suspect outsides—Hollywood covers over its own obvious duplicity and internal culpability in the matter of piracy. Hollywood also redraws the domestic and national map over the issue of nonunion work. During election years, industry lobbyists and California’s elected o≈cials ring their hands over the ‘‘loss’’ of film/video production jobs to ‘‘right-to-work’’ states like North Carolina. Once again, culpability is ‘‘o√ loaded’’ to the perimeter of the nation’s cultural map, since cheaper ‘‘nonunion’’ employment ostensibly happens only overseas. Yet the industry is as responsible for threatening union work within Los Angeles as it is for concealing piracy that supposedly takes place elsewhere. Since the late 1980s more film/ video production work in Los Angeles has been nonunion than union—a fact that is contradicted by the public posturing of the studios and networks that have continued with a business-as-usual attitude since that time. In reality, the new media conglomerates in Los Angeles have themselves found ways to circumvent the need to utilize union labor for feature film and network television production. Sometimes this is done through coproductions, other times it is done by shifting a feature project from a larger studio to a smaller ‘‘indie’’ film company within the same conglomerate. Many times union busting is accomplished by contracting out series programs to an array of ‘‘independent’’ production companies in Los Angeles, many of which are not bound by union agreements. Thus the ‘‘threat’’ of nonunion work, like the ‘‘threat’’ of piracy, is largely a rhetorical and public relations campaign by the studios. In both cases here, studios gain cultural legitimacy and economic benefit by redefining domestic/global geographies through symbolic references to the space of film/television work. Studios and networks regularly reestablish their cultural presence through geographical ‘‘centering’’ activities like these—even if their actual activities on the ground betray all sorts of complications and complicities. Given the ways that I have considered industrial theorizing practices thus far, the use of space, the rhetoric of space, and the trade rituals that take place in those spaces can all be usefully understood as critical selfcommentaries and (sometimes wishful) cultural self-expressions.

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COLLECTIVE SPACES AS SOCIAL NEGOTIATIONS

Pitching

Contemporary film and television are guided by a set of conventionalized production rituals: pitching, packaging, writing by committee, and note giving. Scholars have historically explained film/television form in terms of genre, narrative, or modes of reception. I would argue that the social performance of show making itself must also be considered to fully understand film and television form. Taking this approach means considering how film/television creators function as industrial actors in a larger ensemble of creative workers. Films and programs are not simply authored ‘‘texts.’’ ‘‘Industrial actors,’’ choreographed through tried and tested modes of institutional interaction create film and television. The volatility of cinematic and televisual form in the 1990s and after results in part from the manner in which films and shows are initiated and developed. With the use of the fulllength screenplay as the point of origination for the show/deal now long obsolete, and the detailed prose treatment typically used only to sell a producer’s optioned idea to a network, producers and screenwriters now rely on the quintessential short-form show starter: the ‘‘pitch.’’ Pitching is in many ways a kind of performance art.≤≠ The ability to e√ectively reduce a sixty or ninety minute narrative to two or three spoken sentences carries a premium in Hollywood. Pitching is closely related to the ‘‘high concept’’ in marketing (the ability to understand a blockbuster film in one sentence or one image) and ‘‘log lines’’ (the reduction of a film or television program story arc to a short and easily quotable summary line for use in tv Guide or Entertainment Weekly ). But whereas the notion of high concept for Justin Wyatt and Richard Maltby serves as a strategy for feature development and marketing, and log lines as a screenwriter’s term for a one sentence description linking story arcs to advertising, pitching describes the interpersonal ways that both are enacted and performed among individual creators within the production/development chain.≤∞ The producer and executive Jonathan Treisman makes clear the widely held truism that for survival and success today a screenwriter’s acting skills are as important as his or her writing skills: ‘‘We all know that Hollywood is not a meritocracy where only the best scripts, books, or ideas get made into films. You have to learn to pitch e√ectively to get your projects purchased in

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The new post-Fordist media industries are fueled by endless cycles of affiliation. Film/TV markets create charged spaces (with big-screen icons, mood lighting, plush carpeting, and alcohol) for interpersonally intense moments of the legal relationship-building necessary in bidding, pitching, and dealing. NATPE, New Orleans, 2000. Photo © J. Caldwell.

this very competitive marketplace.’’≤≤ To enable writers to become performers, Treisman helpfully o√ers his ‘‘best-selling Audio cd Workshop: ‘The Writer’s Hollywood Toolkit.’ ’’ Some screenwriters and consultants vouch for the stand-up dramatization mode of pitching as a way to nail down the deal. Others swear by the importance of visual aids as part of the performance process. Mark Itkin explains the Pavlovian logic of using pitch ‘‘props’’: ‘‘I’m a strong believer in some form of visual presentation. (The reality genre) began with buyers looking at existing formats from overseas. Since the buyers are conditioned that way, if you can give them that visual presentation, you are one step ahead.’’≤≥ Daniel Laikind, the executive producer of upn’s 2004 series Amish in the City, underscores the logic of this approach: ‘‘Every jackass has an idea, but the way you can make yourself special is if you are a jackass with a tape.’’≤∂ In whatever guise, writers must hook the attention of an agent, producer, buyer, or executive in a matter of seconds with the promise of something original. If the buyer is initially enticed, the writer must be prepared to flesh out additional details of the show’s structure, logic, and backstory in an incremental narrative process of question-and-answer and give-and-take with the buyer. If the buyer ‘‘passes’’ on the idea, pitchers must be immediately ready to o√er additional story ideas. The reality television executive producer David Noll of City Lights Television states that he ‘‘likes to have 90 ideas working at once,’’ six

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of which he takes into any pitch meeting.≤∑ To prepare for pitch sessions Noll’s company systematically researches every network’s demographics and current slate of programs and keeps separate ideas for each network pinned on a wall under the network’s name. In contrast, competitor Banyan Productions ‘‘keeps dozens of series ideas in development and five dvd projects in pre-production.’’≤∏ Banyan’s latest pitch reflects how the pitch ritual has triggered the hyperactive pace at which reality television as a genre now changes. Regarding Banyan’s proposed wedding-themed series The Dress, director of development Ben Ringe states: ‘‘It’s the Osbournes meets American Chopper for young women.’’ The pitch is more than a simple temporal devolution of the long-form narrative from lengthy screenplay to summarized treatment to short premise. Pitches work by hooking the buyer with a short but recognizable convention of some sort, then glomming, spinning, or aggregating it with some other unconventional element in order to create a ‘‘just like X, but with Y’’ variant. One result of this logic of juxtaposition and variation is that story sessions are now defined by excessive cross-genre hybridization. And since both short attention spans and retorts of ‘‘already done’’ fill the meeting room during pitch sessions, the e√ective pitcher must have an arsenal of possible show premises to fall back on. The kind of pitch or story-idea quantity that results from the widespread use of pitch sessions also ratchets up both the speed and extent of cross-genre hybridization. The result is that shows now must clearly demonstrate originality to get optioned or greenlighted, and they must do so quickly with a rapid ‘‘just-like-but-verydi√erent’’ premise. Another result is that the stylistic outcome of this social ritual means that contemporary tv in the multichannel postnetwork era owes more to Andre Breton and surrealism than it does to an Aristotelian telos and the classic three-act plot. In industry lore Miami Vice (1984–1989) stands as the classic example of the pitch-driven show, with nbc’s Brandon Tartiko√ ’s two-word pitch ‘‘mtv cops’’ used to launch the most stylish of network tv’s mid-80s showcases. Both cbs and critics subsequently pitched the Saturday morning show Pee-Wee’s Playhouse in a way that directly leveraged and then mocked a serious children’s programming predecessor on pbs —as ‘‘Mister Rogers on acid.’’ Both examples suggest the extent to which what might be called the ‘‘pitch aesthetic’’ informs tv today, not simply by updating a genre with a new twist but also by positioning the new show over and against a compet-

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ing network or programming entity. Consider in this regard the wave of denigrating criticism that greeted the implicit pitch and the pitch aesthetic of Fox’s reality show Temptation Island in 2000–2001: ‘‘Take Survivor and Blind Date, add a dash of Change of Heart, top it with a scoop of Jerry Springer, and you’ve got Temptation Island, Fox’s hit version of ‘When Good Spouses Go Bad.’ ’’ But consider also how such a pitch aesthetic raises the ratings stakes by setting in motion counterpitches and pr spins as well. One rival network executive counterpitched Temptation Island in a way intended to hype its own show’s alternatives: ‘‘It’s like Fox swallowed Survivor and then crapped it out.’’≤π The hyperhybridization of the pitched show here (which juxtaposes elements of five previous shows), meets an antagonistic counterpitch that reduces the hit to a meager, binary scatological collage. The industrial performance art of pitching inculcates the production culture with a clockwork-like dependence on endless variation/replication and a process of generic aggregation. This helps explain the wealth of cinematic and televisual forms across the multichannel spectrum. Yet pitching is not simply a way to turn the written story into the spoken word. Pitching is as much an interpersonal activity as it is a conceptual one. Brenda Hampton, the writer and executive producer of the long-running series 7th Heaven, underscores the embodied and tactile qualities of the successful series pitch: ‘‘I desperately wanted to meet Aaron Spelling. So the night before the meeting, I sat at home and thought of the story. I went to Aaron’s o≈ce the next day, and he pulled his chair knee to knee with me and made me feel so comfortable. I gave the best pitch I’d ever done. Mr. Spelling liked it immediately. We pitched it over the phone to the wb then and there. [The network] said yes later that day.’’≤∫ Hampton’s description about how interpersonal sparks and quality ‘‘face time’’ worked so well in this situation also shows how one successful pitch usually leads to another in a sometimes endless and repetitive development chain (from the pitcher, to the agent, to the producer, to the studio, to the network). Michael Selditch, director of Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, stresses the importance of understanding the pitch ritual in terms of longer-term human relationships: ‘‘In these pitch meetings, you aren’t just selling your idea; you’re also selling yourself. You want to make a connection with them because it’s not just about your idea. They also have to want to work with you if they buy it.’’≤Ω Selditch goes on to describe pitching as a cross between human resources development and interpersonal courting. In

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some ways (at least in television as compared to film) the content of a pitch is no more important than the possibility that the pitcher on display might be asked to join the production company’s ‘‘team’’ or ‘‘family.’’ Using a classical supply-and-demand model, Jacquie Jordan, supervising producer of amc’s Sunday Morning Shootout, explains why relationships frequently trump content in the pitch ritual: ‘‘The thing that people forget is that every network has their own development team. They’re already coming up with the ideas internally, so it’s not like they are completely short on them.’’≥≠ In the context of broadcast, cable, and reality television, then, pitch sessions also function like company personnel interviews done in group form. The development team is always already intact. But the team can always add more members if the pitched idea is original and if the pitcher brings some ‘‘resource’’ tied to the pitched idea that is not already in the possession of other team members. While professionals in the various film and television production cultures usually pose as ‘‘insiders’’ (whether they are or not), group marketing events at the National Association of Television Program Executives (natpe) and the National Association of Broadcasters (nab) conventions o√er opportunities for many attending ‘‘insiders’’ to role-play as ‘‘outsiders’’ and aspirants to the field. One curious example that theatricalizes the practitioner’s intensely private sphere—and e√ectively resegregates the field into graded categories along an insider-outsider spectrum—is something called the ‘‘Pitchfest.’’ At the 2000 natpe convention, between eight hundred and one thousand participants and attendees (professional program producers and buyers) served as ‘‘audience members’’ in the syndication association’s annual Pitchfest. Members of this group watched as other producer/buyer attendees, ‘‘chosen randomly,’’ were asked to ‘‘come on down’’ in front of the audience to pitch proposed projects (mostly television series) to heavy-hitter talent agents from caa, Endeavor, and the William Morris Agency. After each number was called, shrieking and ecstatic independent producers came down to demonstrate their pitching abilities on an elevated stage that looked not unlike that on the game show Wheel of Fortune. On one side of the stage a large timer ticked o√ the brief period that each pitcher had to present their projects to three Hollywood agents who, dressed in dark suits and holding clipboards, sat on the other side of the stage. The aspiring producers were given three minutes to make the hard sell (one minute to summarize the project; one minute to answer questions

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from the agents; and one minute to take suggestions about how to improve the project and presentation). Those who faltered or fell far short of expectations were ‘‘gonged’’ prematurely o√ of the stage by the agents. Pitcher number 48, an African American producer named Sabrina Lamb, uncorked what was to be the winning pitch for a show entitled Callaloo and Cornbread. She began by singing and altering an old standby: ‘‘Day-oh, day ay ay-oh. My tv show needs a network home.’’ Lamb cut from the lyrics and hollered ‘‘Callaloo and Cornbread’’ and licked her fingers emphatically, ‘‘umh, umh, umh.’’ She then sketched out the plot summary in short order: ‘‘A half-hour romantic comedy set in Brooklyn. It’s I Love Lucy meets Ally McBeal with Caribbean seasoning. (audience howls) Callaloo and Cornbread is a story of Kim—a small town southern gal and her adventures in the big city. Where she takes on life, love, and law school. She gets a job in the Caribbean restaurant where she forms a love-hate relationship with the boss, turns-o√ the Law School Dean, and eats . . . bull . . . penis . . . soup! It’s (as if hollering from the plantation fields) Callaloo and Cornbread! ’’ With the audience in an uproar, and the emcee warning ‘‘That’s one minute!’’ the agents then jumped in with attempted witticisms (‘‘What does he eat in the next episode?’’) and suggestions for improving the pitch. ‘‘Q: What network? A: nbc, 8 o’clock, Thursday night.’’ More applause. Q: ‘‘Who do you see in the lead? A: Lauren Hill and Chris Rock!’’ Agent: ‘‘If you get Lauren Hill and Chris Rock, you’ll have a bidding war (pointing to himself and the other agents on stage) between Endeavor, caa, and William Morris.’’ The winners of Pitchfest were promised a trip to Hollywood, face time with studio and network executives, and the chance to pitch their show and see it developed for prime time. Yet, after a hard day of selling on the convention floor, there were cracks in the general euphoria and adrenalin in the room. Although the names of caa and William Morris were tossed around conspicuously, the agents themselves were not household names. The power and ostensible experience of the dark-suited white male judges was sometimes suspect as well. One agent compared the uniqueness of the winner’s pitch to the ‘‘many’’ that he ‘‘had heard over the years’’—a career that turned out, oddly enough, to be a mere two years as an agent. Many of the pitchers, in fact, seemed to have had more years of experience in the media than did the agents, even if some of that experience was in the lower castes such as independent production or regional broadcasting. Yet the aura of Hollywood and the lure of access to it bewitched even these seasoned

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professionals, who at times appeared as no more than desperate outsiders. The fragile nature of this facade based on an artificial cultural geography finally began to break as the emcee and judges paused to allow last year’s winner to appear on stage. Intended to underscore the substantial and valuable nature of her experience in Hollywood, last year’s winner instead drifted o√ into a rambling litany about all the ways that her trip had actually been a failure. Her meetings were not with real players, her pitches were not bought, and her winning project from last year’s Pitchfest was never developed. All of the participants on stage smiled in denial. Last year’s winning malcontent was eventually pulled from the stage, and the ecstasy of pitches and possible ‘‘discoveries’’ continued unabated. Even if the tangible results of this large group performance by professionals accomplished little in the way of actual or new tv programming, the Pitchfest itself clearly fulfilled an important and a≈rming symbolic function for the trade organization. Identities and hierarchies were broached and bartered out in the ‘‘open’’ in a way that rea≈rmed a long-standing cultural geography in the United States —one that places Hollywood and the West Coast in the big leagues and broadcasters in the heartland as the farm system for talent. As with the ‘‘how-to-make-it’’ events and the semipublic panels intended to mentor newcomers, public pitchfests (even for professionals) construe the powerful in moments most candid. These ‘‘super agents’’ and judges are, apparently, merely sensitive and caring lay colleagues who are willing to share secrets and provide the kind of ‘‘face-time’’ never possible in the overpopulated, agent-inaccessible world of Los Angeles and Hollywood. But all of this pitching, mentoring, and sharing of secrets also functions in the way that gossip traditionally has in neighborhoods. It functions, that is, as a way to create solidarity, community, and a (perhaps false) sense of empowerment through guild and trade association knowledge about ‘‘how things are really done.’’ Occasionally the tensions between pitcher and power player break through to the surface. In natpe’s annual ‘‘Interactive tv Pitch Competition’’ in 2001, testy judges shot down pitchers with increasing impatience. The ceo Martin Davis rebu√ed the recurring theme that new shows would somehow inevitably exploit e-commerce: ‘‘Interactive tv is not going to be successful as an excuse to buy things.’’≥∞ Geo√rey Darby, the president of productions at Oxygen Media, begged the producer/pitchers in the audience to stop linking their shows to the same old set of suspects: cyber-

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chats, online polls, and Internet shopping. Finally, Genessa Krasnow, a creative executive at Microsoft tv, summed up the experts’ patronizing view of the producer-audience, and the wasted opportunity of the event, by noting with resignation: ‘‘We need to do a little more educating.’’ Such ‘‘lessons’’ did not sit well with many in the crowd, who then shot back: ‘‘If the ideas expressed in the interactive pitchfest are so bad, why is Hollywood doing so much that’s so similar?’’ A short year after the dot-com crash it appeared that the blind were now leading the blind. While semipublic pitchfests betray a power struggle between the industry in Hollywood and its aspirants and mentees, power is also very much an issue in the many working pitches that unfold each day in Los Angeles. On one level pitching is a form of groveling. Structurally, a pitch session presupposes a kind of desperation on the part of an idea holder who is lucky enough to have been granted an audience with a higher-level idea buyer. Sessions range from short to very short, with the clock ticking and the prospect of a ‘‘pass’’ and session termination always pending. Kenneth Lonergan underscores what might be termed the local politics of the pitch interchange: ‘‘I always feel like they’re trying to move your original idea and make it go their cliché. And your job is to move their cliché to the nearest original idea.’’≥≤ Pitching thus might at first look simply like an interactive way to develop a narrative. On another level, however, it is about who gets to control narrative development and to what degree. Networking (Trade Shows, Willed Affinities, Speed Dating, and Soft Sell)

While pitching involves human-scale face time to negotiate content development and control, the industry also creates cultural identities through larger-scale staged enactments and rituals. Networking, like pitching, has been a recurring preoccupation and trope in trade talk. Technical trade groups like the American Society of Cinematographers (asc), for example, facilitate networking and relationship building o√ the lot and outside of work through the organization’s annual golf tournament and ‘‘open house’’ at the asc ‘‘clubhouse.’’ The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hosts an annual ‘‘bake-o√ ’’ for the sound editors nominated for Oscars. As with Pillsbury’s or Betty Crocker’s culinary contests, competitors reveal their secret recipes in a celebratory atmosphere. While most in the packed audience treat the event as a contest for the technical cadre, the event gives

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participants an opportunity to showcase their wares to future colleagues and employers. In production talk, trades, and events like these, career and personal success are regularly linked to an individual or organization’s ability to create supportive personal networks, institutional coalitions, and alliances. Each year the television networks hold ‘‘a≈liate meetings’’ at which time the network brass and programming heads try to build confidence and solidarity among the regional station groups and local broadcasters that comprise the network’s largely symbolic ‘‘family’’ across the country. With local a≈liate anxiety over the benefits of network a≈liation regularly in doubt; with fickle critics in position to financially kill or renew series; and with ad agencies always threatening to jump ship to other networks when superior ratings are found elsewhere—these pilgrimages by the networks out to the provinces are really attempts at reconciliation. The success of the network ‘‘family’’ depends upon e√ectively communicating concern for the business associates and partners normally dispersed across the country. While press conferences are part and parcel of these maintenance rituals, so too is a graded hierarchical system of parties. For example, upn —faced with precipitously declining viewership only a few years into its launch as a network and with trade rumors flying about the job insecurities of its executives Dean Valentine and Tom Nunan—worked overtime at natpe 2000 to keep its nervous local broadcasters on board for the coming season. The network threw a lavish invitation-only party for its a≈liates and partners—an event that featured ample catering and an exclusive concert performed by the B-52s. The higher floors in the Hilton that week hosted even more-exclusive network and corporate parties. The lower floors and suites hosted cash bars and generic, obligatory association receptions sponsored by those less anxious to cultivate reconciliation or seek more prestigious business relationships. In other venues, such as the annual ‘‘up-fronts’’ in New York, clips and previews of the upcoming fall season are screened in a socioprofessional setting intended to allay anxieties about the quality of programming coming to the locals via the network pipeline. The stakes involved in a≈liate meetings and upfronts became clear in 2001, when nbc (then embroiled in an fcc-refereed ti√ with local broadcasters) abruptly canceled its long-standing meeting with the locals a few short weeks before the scheduled network-a≈liate family ‘‘getaway’’ in Las Vegas. The local nbc a≈liate broadcaster Jack Sander explained why the a≈liates were so ‘‘upset’’

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Film and television trade shows are far more than places where professionals simply go to gather with colleagues and acquaintances. Some conventions (like the NAB shown here in 2001), are so massive (with over a hundred thousand attendees annually) that entire television networks (like ‘‘Convention TV’’) are set up to ‘‘cover’’ all the ‘‘live, latebreaking’’ news on the floor and in the enormous corporate pavilions. Huge financial stakes are involved in sales of costly proprietary technologies in an industry driven by almost immediate obsolescence and short corporate lifespans. Photo © J. Caldwell.

with the punitive tit-for-tat actions of their parent: ‘‘We can find ways to have our network meet with the a≈liates en masse at least once a year. That does not seem like an unreasonable request to me.’’≥≥ Staged networking rituals are all about building consensus and common cause among otherwise scattered parties. When legal actions crack the well-managed facade of the coalition, networking rituals fall apart like a house of cards. Industry associations, trade groups, and large multinational media corporations employ at least two basic networking strategies. These general strategies can be termed ‘‘solicitation’’ and ‘‘cultivation’’ rituals since they involve the creation and maintenance of group identities and collective a≈nities. Solicitation and cultivation rituals tend to occur in specific kinds of intermediate industrial spaces (discipline-specific convention-floor areas or meeting rooms, hotel suites, open houses, and nonprofit professional associations). Such zones typically function as institutional halfway houses or contact zones that bring together potential partners in an ostensibly neutral industrial zone.

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Solicitation Rituals/Space

The television and media industries are defined by a Darwinian imperative to survive by gaining advantage over competitors in a given market sector. Survival of any production company means convincing prospective clients that the company stands as a cost-e√ective and cutting-edge setter or exploiter of trends. The flip side of this competitive jockeying envisions decline, obsolescence, or bankruptcy for competitors. Media production is by definition a contentious world. Ironically, survival within contestation depends upon the ability to forge flexible, supportive alliances. Hence the need for picking up partners who can fill one’s needs while avoiding those who can shipwreck one’s future. Production trade shows—like natpe, the nab, and ShowBiz Expo—function as bracketed moments during which players in the field seek out partners (suppliers, clients, manufacturers, purchasers, coproducers, contractors, etc.) for imagined synergies of one form or another. The nab convention in Las Vegas typically has over one hundred thousand attendees and regularly o√ers special mixers within this professional-communal setting aimed at soliciting partners out of the morass of potential competitors. For one nab, the company Lightworks produced for their vip system one of the show’s most elaborate demo tapes—one that underscored the need to solicit career-saving partnerships. The demo sounds and looks initially like an episode from The X-files, but then ends up feeling dramatically more like low-budget porn. The demo opens in the crowded hallway of a fairly large postproduction house. A brooding woman named Lauren (a ‘‘Scully’’ lookalike) struts toward the camera as two men try to calm her down. Her problem? Her production is over budget (on a ‘‘big-budget doc’’) and her deadline (‘‘she’s got a drop-dead date of Friday’’) looks impossible to make. A weasely male oΔine editor (a Dana Carvey lookalike) tries to attract her attention in the photocopy room (‘‘I’m pretty quick’’), by o√ering to edit it on an underpowered oΔine system. She passes (‘‘I’ll blow a budget . . . or a blood-vessel’’). An older man, acting fatherly, tries to console her with a reality check (‘‘I’d like to help. But as your online editor, I can’t do what’s not in my vocabulary’’). As the two men try to settle her down (in a soft sepia- toned lounge with leather furniture and abstract art on the wall), she erupts: ‘‘I mean—this project is a career maker, or breaker. . . . I need some help here.’’ The two male escorts exchange a succession of glances in close-up, recognizing nonverbally that they must acquiesce and

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refer her to a man with more power. As a swarthy young man emerges from the hallway darkness and enters the room in a wide, low-angle shot, the online editor ambivalently confides his secret to Lauren: ‘‘Meet Chris Carter—the hottest free-lance editor in town.’’≥∂ At first curt but then intrigued, Lauren listens to the mystery man as he begins to reduce the altered-state soap opera to a lengthy (and oddly out-of-place) tech writer’s monologue about the various benefits and downsides of online versus oΔine editing. The generic transmutation in this demo doesn’t just explain how one can save one’s career technically—it also models the interpersonal and heterosexual mannerisms needed to solicit and tap into o√shore free-lance production potency. Here Lightworks vip poses as the strange new man in town, even as it dramatizes how to interpersonally work an o≈ce space as a requisite, networking skill set. Spaces for solicitation include pavilion-size corporate tableaus as well as the fictional worlds dramatized in the moving-image demo form described above. At major trade shows like ShowBiz Expo and the nab, key transnational media corporations like Sony, Panasonic, and Quantel pay a premium for enormous display floors that dominate the center of vast convention complexes. Sony recently channeled its thousands of attendees through as many as fifteen di√erent subareas for Sony products and services—all with massive video walls. Stretched across numerous monitors, satisfied partners and clients gave pseudo-religious personal testimonies of devotion and gratitude to Sony: for rewarding small business; for responding sensitively and intuitively to the product and supply needs of end users; and for developing, as the video walls confessed, personal ‘‘long-term relationships.’’ In a proprietary Sony arena so vast that attendees were given road maps to navigate by, these ubiquitous video walls underscored to newcomers a motif also recurrent in other transnational corporate pavilions and displays: far from being focused on the bottom line, Sony’s partners and clients, as it were, comprised a close and intimate ‘‘family’’—one based on selfless care and mutual trust. Professional solicitation rituals also function at a third level beyond the fictionalized or allegorical space of demo tapes and the therapeutic familybuilding space of the trade pavilion. Production trade conventions are so big, in fact, that entire ‘‘television networks’’—like Testa Communication’s ‘‘Convention tv’’—have sprung up to ‘‘cover’’ and cablecast the limitless activities of these important moments of vast group consensus. Many at-

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tendees with next-morning hangovers might identify such networks as the purveyors of the rote trade show and booth information scrolling on closed circuit hotel room tvs at the Las Vegas Hilton, the Sands, or the Sahara. Yet Convention tv’s stated aims are much more primetime. Complete with ‘‘dawn to dusk’’ coverage and electronic news gathering (eng) crews ‘‘capturing late-breaking news . . . on the floor’’ (‘‘real events’’ like these are usually scripted from a stack of preexisting corporate press releases). Convention tv also uses a three-camera studio operation, complete with bantering news readers and anchors, who occasionally stage contests and on-air giveaways that are organized and promoted as participatory and interactive parts of what it terms ‘‘the convention experience.’’ Enjoining the editors of the trade publication Post magazine and the nab ‘‘to serve as judges’’ at one convention, Convention tv promised that a ‘‘winner would be announced live,’’ on camera and on the floor, ‘‘at the Tektronix corporation booth.’’ Making media events of this kind also provides other opportunities to cover and report them. ‘‘And our crews were there to catch all of the excitement,’’ the network plugged in a lead-in to a later ‘‘newscast.’’ The winner, now caught on camera, gave an ‘‘aw-shucks, it was nothing’’ explanation of his prized contribution. ‘‘We just shot what happens in an edit suite during a worst-case scenario . . . We literally had only an hour to put the thing together before we hit the FedEx delivery . . . We just squeaked it in.’’ Convention tv then cut back to the studio anchor for the wrap-up: ‘‘And that’s our show for tonight. We’ll be back tomorrow with a special highlight edition. . . . Thanks for watching.’’ Each July and December/January in Los Angeles or Pasadena the television industry reaches out to the press and o√ers ‘‘inside’’ access to the activities and programming strategies of the major networks along with screenings of forthcoming shows. These television critics’ meetings provide human contact and access to new shows, but they also touch the lives and stroke the egos of the press. Television journalists have always had an uneasy relationship with the networks and the studios. Critics and reviewers are sanctioned as journalists to cull and dredge through both the good and the bad of programming during the year. Yet they are very much dependent on the studios and networks to gain access to the very stars, shows, and personnel that make this backstory possible. Critics’ meetings thus serve the networks as a carrot rather than a stick—an incentive used to cultivate a climate conducive to positive critical reception. Sometimes at the annual critics’

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meetings, however, the carefully cultivated image of a combined industry front opening itself up to journalists begins to crack. Historically, network presidents at the meetings have followed the ‘‘rules.’’ That is, they have politely taken their turns giving sneak previews and opening up dialogues with critics—rather than discussing or criticizing the programming being o√ered by the other networks. In the July 2004 meetings, however, this sense of rule-governed decorum completely broke down when nbc and abc made damning and unequivocal condemnations of their competitor Fox. On the attack after having had its key reality television ideas ‘‘ripped o√ ’’ by Fox, abc warned the other networks to closely guard any content development idea, because Fox ‘‘will steal it, plain and simple.’’ Je√ Zucker, president of nbc Universal Television Group, also abandoned the unwritten convention of civility and restraint at such meetings when he ‘‘outed’’ to critics two previously unknown reality television programs being internally developed by Fox. In turn, Fox’s entertainment president Gail Berman counterattacked: ‘‘People who are acting as if they invented the sport of boxing are disingenuous, at the least.’’ Fox’s reality programming chief Mike Darnell then brought the internecine warfare full circle when he arrived for his critics’ presentation dressed in boxing shorts and gloves and practicing a fighter’s footwork to the musical theme from Rocky: ‘‘Eye of the Tiger.’’ Even though the networks have always been highly competitive, they have learned well over the years the benefits of at least symbolic cooperation in industry-wide events like the critics’ meetings. Now, however, the manic pace and volatile economics of the reality television genre (which accelerates the practice of copying ideas from other networks) has made even this kind of industry-critic schmoozing an unpredictable proposition. These examples show just how focused trade groups are in cultivating what they consider to be essential forms of solicitation, networking, and professional ‘‘hooking-up.’’ Participants are not unaware of the interpersonal connotations of this approach. Pitched as ‘‘dream-selling bazaars that linked entrepreneurs with each other and with eager investors,’’ the annual Virtual International Community (vic) and Los Angeles Venture Association (lava) networking rituals in Los Angeles attracted up to fourteen hundred attendees for a single bash. One new technology consultant outlined the industrial logic of the events as follows: ‘‘I think that face-to-face interactions help to establish trust.’’≥∑ Debora Vrana extended the interpersonal focus further by likening the events to the sex industry: ‘‘If some of last year’s network-

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‘‘HD Speed-Dating for Professionals’’ in Los Angeles, 2005: ‘‘high-definition’’ content development is stimulated and managed by staging a rapid succession of five-minute socioprofessional ‘‘hook ups’’ with strangers. ‘‘Soft sell’’ is a necessary competence in much of film/ TV, and these organized rituals, based on LA’s ‘‘singles scene’’ aim to kick start the glacially slow shift to HD. Photo © J. Caldwell.

ing parties had a meat-market feel, [consultant] Cowen said he didn’t notice. ‘I’m married,’ he added.’’ Yet the high-tech collapse in 2001 exposed the rigid class values underlying this supposedly heated arena in which men and women could hook up for fun and profit: ‘‘There were people last year with pierced body parts, tattoos. This year, the only piercing I saw was in the cuΔinks.’’ Networking events and schmooze-fests like these feign desire for integration and diversity, but real forms of di√erence don’t work well in the consensus-building, culture-forming machines at work here. The trade artifacts circulating at networking events, and the buildings housing them, also function to guide participants through the consensusforming process. First, fictionalized and allegorical demo tapes ‘‘project’’ professional viewers into hypothetical scenarios that establish the high stakes involved in successfully building and managing human relations in the work world. Second, exposition pavilions provide ambient and ubiq-

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uitous media commentaries that narrate potential buyers as they navigate the maze of subproducts within each corporate expanse of the mother brand. This ambient narration is frequently voiced in ‘‘real time’’ via audio or video walls that electronically augment physical space. Third, on an even broader topographic level, convention television networks script, stage, and then report and interpret the entire experience as ‘‘news.’’ Thus the hypothetical ‘‘what-if ’’ future state of the demo tape, the ‘‘here-and-now’’ augmented present state of the narrated pavilion, and the ‘‘there-and-then’’ network mapping of the trade cohort’s recent past through reportage together provide an overdetermined temporal heuristic. These deep textual and ritual forms, that is, attempt to underscore the (vested) ‘‘meanings’’ and ‘‘insights’’ of the convention’s spatial experience—along with the state of the production industry—in future, present, and past tenses. In this sense, these conventions are neither grand industrial singles bars nor personal columns for corporate players with precarious profit margins or, worse, takeoverprone debt. Although the organizers stage and facilitate these vast shared trade events as necessary mixers for professionals who need to network and schmooze, the deep texts and rituals that circulate in these spaces go far beyond this role. As personal-professional guidebooks, they interpret and chart the meanings, the social significance, and the economic logic of these trade spaces even as the practitioners walk the vast and disorientating physical floors of the exposition halls. Cultivation Rituals/Private-Public Contact Zones

The film, television, and digital media industries are characterized by an extreme stratification and division of labor, a pyramidal top-down management structure, and a winner-takes-all business plan. Yet many of the favored industrial rituals act blind to the group-based contestation that inherently defines the production enterprise. Indeed, many deep texts and socio-professional rituals work (sometimes incessantly) to promote an antithetical idea: that the industry is collaborative, personal, and humane. To cultivate this perception, the industry works overtime in press releases and trades to underscore the many critical ‘‘private’’ moments and ‘‘interpersonal’’ spaces that drive e√ective film/tv producing and content development. Some critical industrial interactions bring important moments of privacy ‘‘out into the daylight’’ in enabling social gestures ostensibly intended to ‘‘help’’ others in the field. Given this impulse to make the private sphere public shows that

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the appetite for ‘‘behind-the-scenes’’ information and ‘‘secrets’’ is not unique to fandoms, gossip columnists, Entertainment Weekly, or show-biz reports broadcast on Access Hollywood. Rather, the same appetite for ‘‘useful’’ trade and career secrets circulates in the professional sphere in the form of semipublic panels on ‘‘how to make it in the industry’’ and in various mentoring initiatives and apprenticeship schemes. Many experts and seasoned veterans in Hollywood, for example, frequently explain success with all of the rhetorical tools and themes that a motivational speaker or revivalist might use. ‘‘Integrity,’’ ‘‘humanity,’’ ‘‘dedication,’’ ‘‘self-sacrifice,’’ ‘‘face time,’’ and ‘‘personal vision’’ are all repeatedly lauded (in public rhetoric at least) as keys to getting ahead. Even those ‘‘players’’ who might be infamous for years of budget-busting excess, badbet developments, derailed productions, colleague back-stabbing, and corporate ‘‘exit strategies’’ due to ‘‘irreconcilable creative di√erences’’ regularly pose in public, oddly enough, as altruistic mentors and facilitators. Those who o√er ‘‘to give something back’’ to the field, that is, frequently posture (or are publicly packaged) as seasoned veterans, guiding hands, wise sages, and noble moralists. Furthermore, this acting out (and demeanor overhaul) frequently takes place in what might be termed ‘‘halfway spaces’’ that exist between the private and the public spheres of the professional: guild halls, film festivals, cinematheque retrospectives, film/tv museums, summits and panels, industry conventions, trade shows, and universities. Even a cursory glance at the material and physical barriers erected around the entertainment industry in Los Angeles (fortress-like studio walls, security details, bodyguards, and cul-de-sacs) makes it imminently clear the extent to which business interactions are highly proprietary and sequestered away from those on ‘‘the outside’’ by design. In contrast, cultivation rituals and mentoring activities in these contact zones often pretend to bring out into the light of day the heretofore hidden secrets of the bunkered practitioner. The natpe convention in New Orleans in 2000 employed a diverse range of intermediate spaces in which private workings from the highest levels of industry were ‘‘performed’’ as semipublic events. These staged selfdisclosures (panels, keynotes, and special events) were presented at the city’s convention center and hotels and were covered by the trade press, but they could be seen and heard only by registered fee-paying professionals and buyers from the field. The keynote presentation by the organization’s chairman provides some context for this process. The syndicated producing and

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selling industry that natpe represents had before the convention entered a period of great crisis and instability. This state of a√airs was caused in part by the impact of new technologies, newly cutthroat competition, government deregulation (the end of Fin-Syn and ptar),≥∏ and threats by many of the major syndication studios (who now openly questioned the value of the long-standing association) to pull out of natpe altogether in order to go it alone. Yet one would never have suspected this level of contention and business chaos based on the suave and comforting appeals to attendees in the audience by natpe’s chairman, or on the rousing cheers that answered him when he stepped through what was essentially a multimedia pep rally for the state of television at the dawn of the new millennium. After an introduction, the curtains parted, the lights dimmed, and a high-resolution wide-screen video unspooled. As a rapid-fire montage of clips charted the history of the United States (in thirty seconds), a gray-haired African American actor gave a nostalgic and a≈rming testimony in direct address to the audience: ‘‘I was there when Dr. [Martin Luther] King shared his Dream with the world . . . and I was there when Mark McGwire broke the homerun record. . . . Yep, I’ve seen a lot in my day. Thanks to television, of course.’’≥π When the lights faded up, the chairman noted, ‘‘We think this psa says it best.’’ He then vocally repeated the final graphic of the spot, ‘‘Television: The World’s Best View,’’ and the syndicators in the audience—almost entirely white male executives—roared their approval. This high-productionvalue spot by the trade organization appeared a few weeks after the naacp and other civil rights organizations had attacked the television industry, in press conferences and policy documents, for its exclusionary racial practices and for making programming almost entirely ‘‘white.’’ It was not entirely clear whether the nostalgic tearjerker on the screen worked in this room because the executives in the audience longed for simpler and more stable times in television or because they feared for the impact of yet another broadside (this one racial) against an already faltering industry. Yet this production was more than just a Geertzian self-reflection, a demo to be circulated internally inside the production and syndication culture. The chairman announced that the tape was ‘‘available in standard ntsc, dtv, and, we’re proud to say, in hdtv (applause).’’ ‘‘Television: The World’s Best View’’ was also given freely to attendees and broadcasters for use as a ‘‘public service announcement’’ to air back at their home stations. Such a transfor-

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mation, from a demo (of the industry speaking to itself ) to the so-called public service announcement or psa (of the industry allowing the lay public to hear the industry speaking to itself ) carried both internal and external benefits. On one register, the deep text calmed self-doubts about the possibility of exclusionary and regressive practices. On another register, as a quasi-public text, the spot struggles to a≈rm the trade organization’s ‘‘historical’’ commitment to a race-free logic of the ‘‘human spirit.’’ The meanings of deep texts are not fixed but rather shift according to the industrial, regulatory, and cultural spaces in which they screen and circulate. Deal Making (Hard-Sell Negotiations and Shoot-Outs)

Deal making and various forms of negotiation are fundamental and important parts of the daily production enterprise. Deal making generally favors harder forms of selling than does networking, since deals are negotiated with a specific financial or legal objective in mind. While networking rituals are a≈rmed in largely symbolic ways, deal making ideally results in written contracts and formal transactions. Deal making (like networking) is particularly evident in large industry rituals that involve markets and sales, like syndication or film markets or the annual television ‘‘up-front’’ meetings in which networks sell advertising spots to ad agencies for the upcoming season. Held each May in New York, these sometimes elaborately staged annual preview and presentation events introduce the new fall programming season to advertising agencies, and they have become an obligatory calendar high point and organizational target for each of the five major television networks. While trade group conventions like that of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (smpte) as well as television network ‘‘a≈liate meetings’’ provide spaces designed for networking, relationship building, and relationship maintenance, other collective rituals like network up-fronts emphasize mostly hard-sell interactions and intense hype. Still other large, collective events like the nab and natpe meetings provide di√erent spaces for both networking (technology user-group meetings) and hard sell (the equipment pavilions manned by legions of sales reps). Hard-sell deal making can take several forms. The sales personnel at the Mipcom tv program market in 2002 were described in warlike terms: ‘‘As Hollywood program suppliers troop to the 39th annual Mip tv trade show in Cannes, they would do well to don battle fatigues.’’≥∫ By contrast, the upn up-front meeting in 2001 was carnivalesque and comic, an approach

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If speed-dating facilitates ‘‘soft sell’’ deal making, then bringing the stars and big guns out to the heartland is a form of ‘‘hard sell’’ at syndication markets. Here, on-screen talent and ‘‘booth babes’’ are flown in from LA to wow local broadcast station owners and quickly close deals and sales for next year’s programming. Photo © J. Caldwell.

that matched the ‘‘big event’’ status of its venue—Madison Square Garden. William Shatner introduced and mocked the network president Dean Valentine as a man who ‘‘develops original shows, or pays the wb for their shows.’’ Executives from upn parodied themselves in reenactments of ‘‘how they ‘stole’ the Bu√y series from the wb,’’ even as the musical theme from Mission Impossible accompanied their performance. Shatner and Valentine then staged a skit in which they were ‘‘chained together in a jab at upn’s reality flop Chains of Love. ’’ Warlike or carnivalesque, the act of selling series or selling advertising spots requires a kind of intensity usually absent in softer forms of schmoozing. Yet, as with pitching, the harder a company tries to twist arms or make sales the more likely the staged event in question will come apart at the seams. In fall 2004 nbc placed a new animated primetime series from Dreamworks at the center of the network’s advertising campaign for the season. Father of the Pride was based on Siegfried and Roy’s animal act in Las Vegas, but before the series premiered the ‘‘real’’ Roy Horn was mauled and dragged o√ the stage by a 600-pound tiger that left him for dead. Given the strategic importance of the series to the network and the $1.6 million price tag for each half-hour episode, however, nbc decided to cross-promote the show rather than to pull it or cancel it. For its

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May 2004 up-front ad agency meetings, nbc showcased the series alongside clips of an hour-long news special, hosted by Maria Shriver, on Horn’s recovery from disfigurement. Intended to humanize the tigers and their handlers, and to promote the animated series via another nbc program aired at the same time, the stunt had the opposite e√ect. Meg James describes how hundreds of ad agency buyers viewing the clips in Radio City Music Hall were stunned by nbc’s apparently naive exercise in bad taste. Sheri Ann Brill, the programming director for the ad-buying firm Carat USA, summarized the general feeling of disgust: ‘‘It really gave people the creeps. You know, the public’s memory is very fleeting, but then they put that guy up there and they remind you that (he) was almost murdered by the cartoon character the show is based on.’’≥Ω Stunned by the loss of ad sales, nbc dropped its plans to air the two shows together during the September premiere week. The importance placed on negotiation tends to increase in those areas of the production industry that are not governed by signatory agreements, preestablished union contracts, intraconglomerate relations, or long-standing company alliances. Michael Beiber, director of business a√airs at Industrial Light and Magic (ilm), describes how the shift to digital production— which has essentially shifted the control of the means of production to parties outside of the traditional studio or network walls—has relative to the past made the task of negotiation even more crucial, flexible, and multidirectional as well as dependent on more talk with more companies. As Beiber notes: ‘‘The digital production industry is not a mature industry. Business deals within it are all more flexible in nature than in other sectors, because big portions of many films are made by others outside of the studios. This has created greater concern for studios who have to give up a lot of control. But it’s done for a lot of money. That’s the nature of the business. . . . It’s service for a fee. And bidding is a creative process. With quite a bit of dialogue going on, between lots of companies. Profit margins are very slim. But capital costs are very high. Labor is very costly now as well. There’s lots of competition for talent.’’∂≠ Part of the task on any given production is to figure out which personal relationship is most instrumental in making the production possible in the first place. Unlike various forms of ‘‘in-house’’ production (on a sitcom’s soundstage or a film studio’s back lot), specialized production or e√ects work ‘‘sourced out’’ to a digital boutique, e√ects house, or postproduction

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house depends in many cases on the personality and stature of the director or filmmaker being courted by the post-house or boutique. As Beiber further notes: ‘‘But there’s also the question of the client. Every deal is di√erent because connections may be because of studios, or because of directors. Each director travels around to various facilities. You have to know what kind of support studios will give to a director.’’∂∞ Strategies for tough deal making are sometimes systematically tied to conciliatory and softer forms of negotiation once the contracted ‘‘relationship’’ has been established and production work actually begun. For example, ilm uses a ‘‘hard-on-contract/soft-on-job approach’’ in its relationshipbuilding business plans. After successfully negotiating a contract where all cost-overrun contingencies and possible change-orders are covered, ilm cultivates an ideal that it terms ‘‘cooperative development’’ with its new partners, stating that ‘‘as a practical matter, we will go back and re-do (if needed). We are more flexible in practice (than when bidding or establishing payment schedules).’’∂≤ To participate in solicitation and cultivation rituals at industry conventions like natpe and nab as described above, many practitioners journey from their regional o≈ces to places like Las Vegas or (before Katrina) New Orleans. Once business relationships are solicited and initiated, the strategic importance of repeat business means that large media corporations work hard to create the spaces and social interactions necessary to maintain those clients. These spaces for relationship maintenance are as important for ‘‘below-the-line’’ personnel as for executives. Sony Broadcast regularly stages subsidiary events around larger trade conventions for this purpose. At nab in Las Vegas, Sony invited camera operators and potential Sony buyers to participate in an annual ‘‘retreat’’ and ‘‘shoot-out.’’ These activities were filmed one year and then edited into promotional videos that were circulated the following year at nab.∂≥ A new demo tape for Sony’s new ‘‘Betacam pvw-537’’ broadcast eng camera resulted from the retreat—a demo tape that looked (sans Clint Eastwood) and sounded (complete with haunted whistling) like a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. In the tape a deep, gravelly male voice speaks the rugged poetry of camera-operator bonding, over long shots of the western landscape: ‘‘Below the solitude of the last spring snow. . . . Down through the rugged canyons carved by time. . . . Came men and women of a special breed. Known to shoot first and ask questions later, they came for something wild—and they found it—in Las Vegas!’’

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The video then cuts to the bright lights of Vegas, as limo-borne cameramen (using the pvw-537, of course) cut through the cityscape at night. This segment ends with soft-core images of screaming bikini-clad females shooting through nearby waterslides as a keyed graphic zooms toward the viewer: ‘‘Going Wild in Las Vegas: The pvw-537.’’ A technical discussion of the new camera’s features follows, throughout which are other examples of what these technicians might call ‘‘eye candy.’’ The net e√ect of the tape, however, is to show Sony benevolently inviting regional cameramen to Beta-test their latest cutting-edge-rig from helicopters, limos, and horses provided at the shoot-out and retreat. The promotional video as a whole, however, suggests that male bonding and partying (with those whom you share a technical a≈nity) is as important to maintaining usership as are any purely technical descriptions of the product. The ‘‘Going Wild in Las Vegas’’ tape provides a troubling image of the aggressive (rugged, tough, mastery) and masculinist (moving, mounting, going wild) ideology of what is apparently an ideal camera operator in the marketing plans of the multinational equipment manufacturer Sony. These highly publicized industrial ‘‘pilgrimages’’ help corporations maintain their precarious relationships with key partners: advertisers, the press, technology users, and local a≈liates. Yet several economic factors—increased competition, high capitalization costs, and inside dealing by conglomerates —have gradually forced smaller independents out of a previously ‘‘open’’ market. With as many as 80 percent of syndication sales now made with long-time, ‘‘inside,’’ or ‘‘captive’’ partners well in advance of syndicated markets, trade associations starting in 2001 began reevaluating the benefits of the long-standing megaevents and carnival-like program bazaars that have defined the industry for decades.∂∂ The harsh economic situation in the syndication industry had become so bad by January 2002 that all of the major Los Angeles studios (Columbia Tri-Star, Paramount, etc.) had pulled out of the natpe convention floor entirely ‘‘as cost-saving measures.’’ What they booked, instead, were entire floors and suites in nearby luxury hotels. By this gambit, the majors shifted sales away from the leveled, democratic chaos and the wide, bazaar-like nature of a convention-floor tv market. They now focused on more personal forms of relationship building, and they deployed perks and managed the graded hierarchies inherent in more exclusive parties, meetings, and receptions. From a political-economic perspective, these changes in industrial and marketing behavior have come alongside the

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increasing corporate conglomeration that has forced many independent stations and ‘‘mom-and-pop’’ syndicators out of business. The trade culture shift—from the more democratic interactions of a convention floor (a horizontal scheme based on multiple points of access) to the individuated solicitations of the hotel suites (a vertical scheme based on exclusivity)—mirrors an ongoing constriction of diversity, competition, and content in the syndication industry as a whole. CONCLUSION

The spaces and riturals that I have examined thus far challenge the monolithic ways that critics and academics have sometimes described the industry. Any serious look at production space and trade rituals necessarily confronts the culturally coded dimensions of a vast practitioner world inhabited by many di√erent groups that are provisionally bound together by consensusbuilding interactions. Yet discussing the cultural meaning of space and production rituals can be far more complicated than providing a physical description of them. The question of meaning returns us again to the quandary of meaning for whom: individual practitioners, socio-professional groups, or media institutions? The type of data and methodology used changes the answers to such questions. Interviews, for example, show that film/video production workers are quite clear on the first account: the personal logic of such practices. Trade rituals like pitching and networking serve as mechanisms for personal fulfillment and career advancement—both of which are identifiable as meaningful personal motives in both ‘‘Maslow’s hierarchy’’ and ‘‘uses and gratifications’’ research.∂∑ However, participant observation and trade demos—from di√erent methodological perspectives— provide a much surer sense of the social logic of production space and trade rituals. Staged focus gatherings in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, or New Orleans are far more than bounded personal phenomena. Such spectacles involve large heterogeneous worker communities that constantly attempt to secure or ‘‘fix’’ their common identities and amorphous institutional borders through symbolic means. Field observation suggests that production spaces and rituals function in at least four di√erent ways beyond ‘‘work’’: as industrial consensus-forming gatherings; as group self-reflection activities; as cooperative negotiations responding to new technology threats or economic changes; and as socio-professional networking rituals ‘‘bracketed o√ ’’ from

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The expanding concentric zones around the closed inner sanctums of production constantly cultivate the notion that a center does exist, and that access is possible if one can migrate through the ever-more difficult and exclusive zones of production’s ‘‘borderlands.’’ Here, professionals and amateurs constantly intermingle when crews ‘‘occupy’’ neighborhood territory: street signs direct workers to locations for Fox’s series House (left). At right, in the new world of reality TV and DVD making-ofs, Fox warns pedestrians to ‘‘beware,’’ since the studio will take their migration through the occupied space being filmed to signify legal approval that Fox can use their likenesses on air without further approval or payment. Los Angeles, 2005, 2004. Photo © J. Caldwell.

‘‘regular’’ work by trade associations to serve as collective therapeutic exercises. The first, second, and fourth of these functions might be explained along the lines of Victor Turner’s notion of ‘‘liminality.’’ Turner describes conventionalized events like Melanesian sing-sings and Caribbean Mardi Gras celebrations as special cultural moments that are bracketed o√ from standard life tasks, wherein communities and cultures reimagine their collective identities through symbolic and ritualistic means. For Turner, liminal events allow cultures to move beyond direct ‘‘what is’’ declarations (an ‘‘indicative’’ sense of time) to reflect about ‘‘what if ’’ possibilities (a ‘‘subjunctive’’ sense of time). Many film/video production trade rituals adopt the latter approach by imagining—and showcasing—industrial possibilities on a liminal/corporate stage. The third function listed above (negotiations of technological and economic change), however, begs for a higher-order perspective and explanation. New media technologies and global production/distribution economies are not simply personal or social phenomena. By their very scale they require an additional level of industrial and political-economic analysis. Viewing and documenting trade spaces, architectures, and commentaries

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provides a useful sense of the institutional logic of such practices. The force of trade architecture, trade boundaries, and rites of access to special trade worlds suggests an industrial logic that is far less benign than the logic of personal fulfillment or even the Turnerian logic of social, liminal discovery. Alongside the enabling trade activities mentioned above, material and corporate structures also almost always function as barriers. Studying various barriers to trade entry and participation, as well as barriers to unorthodox work behavior, forces researchers to acknowledge the vested political and economic interests that are always at work in the highly commercialized trade sphere. To broach this last issue, two analytical perspectives not normally combined in film/television critical studies have been considered in this chapter: first, the cultural geography of production spaces (studios, locations, guild and union halls, equipment pavilions); and second, the conventionalized, socio-professional rituals (pitch-sessions, trade shows, mentoring events, and deal-making) that take place and define those spaces. A comparison of these two registers (production spaces and conventionalized interactions) provides an organizational map that helps chart the institutional logic of film/television production space. An industrial map of this sort raises important questions about the symbolic and ideological significance of the many concentric ‘‘borderlands’’ established and carefully maintained by media industries (via gatekeepers, agents, and insiders who manage acceptable forms of travel between adjacent border zones). The picture of trade space that results challenges the postmodern view that culture involves the erasure of space as a meaningful category. Instead, production geography showcases what Couldry calls the ‘‘complexification’’ of space, especially in the ‘‘borderlands’’ that exist between the cultures of consumption and the cultures of production.∂∏ A close examination of the deep spatial texts from industry referred to above underscores the industry’s public articulations of space rather than postmodernism’s ‘‘erasure’’ of space as a meaningful category. That is, far from o√ering mere postmodern ‘‘simulations’’ or ‘‘virtualities,’’ trade rituals and demo tapes betray an obsession with space and place. They also reinforce the notion that production spaces (far from being illusory or simulated) are actually physical, robust, and demanding. Whereas Couldry describes the physical boundaries, symbolic boundaries, and institutional edges via the journeys that lay audiences make to and from industrial space, I take as my focus the faux and modified public and private spheres that are constructed

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for professional community members inside or within those institutional boundaries and edges of production. I have also considered how these spatial tendencies function as cultural self-representations. That is, such tendencies provide a de facto taxonomy of the ways that the production culture bounds and identifies itself within a graduated, culturally coded caste system of concentric zones. The therapeutic private sphere, faux-private workplace, faux-public negotiating spaces, and semipublic contact zones are all used in some way to make sense of technological change and economic uncertainty and to manage the sometimes unruly forces of labor. Video documentation and demo tapes from a series of industrial professional rituals and events (pitch fests, trade shows, shoot-outs, retreats, industry summits) demonstrate how intermediate contact zones are culturally defined and industrially managed. More than simply cognitive meditations that help build and maintain morale (which is an essential resource for career longevity in any craft), the narratives and themes in various demo tapes and trade accounts about space cultivate the notion that a graded taxonomy of social spaces exists for practitioners. This navigable taxonomy can be aligned with an institutional map of production subcultures and is comprised of concentric rings whose boundaries the trade gatekeepers carefully manage. The concentric zones for ritualized interaction examined in this chapter can be summarized (moving from the innermost region to the outermost border), as follows: The highly proprietary private sphere of the pitch session and the high-level development meeting; a studio/network inner sanctum, as it were. The therapeutic private space of the corporate retreat and the team-building workshop. The faux-private space of the workplace, studio, and soundstage, wherein constant discursive interventions (like note giving and production meetings) by management create instability and anxiety through implied surveillance. The faux-public space, or the sequestered public sphere, created at professional trade shows, conventions, technical bake-o√s, and camera shoot-outs where ostensible contestation and celebration is staged for professionals in the community. The semi-public space of advertiser up-fronts, fall preview a≈liate meetings, professional awards shows, and press junkets where a place for access is extended to intermediaries for the public. Critics, journalists, and television are

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allowed to ‘‘cover’’ the industry in these highly controlled ways. These practices tend to sanction audience consumption from a specific, regulated vantage point. The public nature of these ‘‘stages’’ (ocular or virtual keyholes) is typically overannounced in publicity. The resulting aura of consensus and common cause frequently covers over severe contestation and dissension within the guild, the association, or the trade organization in question. Finally, contact zones for mentoring and recruitment, emerge at moments in which those with ‘‘insider’’ knowledge venture out to halfway spaces to share personal insights on ‘‘making it in the business,’’ ‘‘how the business works,’’ ‘‘how to pitch,’’ ‘‘how to take a meeting,’’ and ‘‘how to start a career.’’ These contact zones provide one of the few points of lay human contact and promise to help aspirants achieve more e√ective ‘‘skill sets,’’ but exist at the furthermost ring of the studio/network maze in film schools, universities, screening Q&A sessions, internships, and festivals.

With an ‘‘insider-outsider’’ binary as a central metaphor marking these zones, travel or movement between zones is only possible at key moments involving rituals demonstrating industrial competence and professional skill. As a result, many of the deep texts and socio-professional rituals examined in this chapter can in fact be viewed as ‘‘primers’’ on how to ‘‘cross-over’’ the various concentric borders outlined above and, therefore, how to ‘‘make it’’ in the industry. Who scripts the industrial theater staged in these worlds? This is where the imaginative possibilities of Turnerian performance intersect with the power and control logic of cultural geography, as discussed at the beginning of the chapter. The corporate status quo, that is, auditions and casts those who get to ‘‘cross over’’ to the next higher zone. At the same time, however, the rituals, networking behaviors, and the industrial, textual metacommentaries by professionals (on how to succeed industrially), also provide enabling support for aspiring practitioners who must navigate the studio or network maze.∂π In the tripartite spatial scheme (conceptual, material, cultural) that I have used throughout this chapter, the smaller empowering spatial tactics and behaviors of workers frequently counter the material, constraining spatial strategies of the industry. Such a tension e√ectively makes production space far less like a prison than like a personal and collective turf battle. In such a turf battle, all of the many how-to, mentoring, networking, demo-tape, and deal-making prescriptions (trade artifacts

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viewed here as forms of industrial ‘‘theory’’) also serve as industrial road maps. Pitchfests, shoot-outs, bake-o√s, how-tos, and demos provide navigational coordinates that allow workers to locate industry gates, perform publicly, and cross over otherwise segregated and guarded production sectors. The best evidence that personal motives, social position, and corporate interests coexist within systems of institutional management comes in the ways that individual workers themselves connect their personal space to broader industrial and economic systems. As cited in the epigraph that opens this chapter, one freelance cameraman’s anxiety is expressed in metaphors that liken the video production marketplace to a debt-driven technology fighting pit: ‘‘Do you go high-end with hdcam and hope you get enough business over the life of the loan payments to justify the expense, or do you jump in the pit with all the other dv cameramen running around fighting over the low-ball jobs?’’ Another worker describes the on-set barriers and belligerent gatekeepers that keep low-level workers away from more ‘‘important’’ workers and from the catered food they eat: ‘‘Working on movies is not a day in the park. . . . Movie extras are made to wait [to eat] while complete idiots do take after take after take. We are rudely told what to do by nasty, power-hungry production-assistants. We are basically seen and treated as stupid, willful cattle. Of course, there are much worse ways to make money than spending a day watching a movie get made.’’∂∫ This account reinforces a truism in the film and television industries: that animal waste flows downhill, and that even the lowest and most poorly paid production assistants will find workers with even less power to defecate on. While the metaphors di√er (a fighting pit versus a cattle herd), both anecdotes associate the human space of personal action with industrial corporate territories. As I show in the next two chapters, these kinds of geographically expressed resentment and anxiety are especially pervasive in the worlds of below-the-line workers.

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I learned about the politics of the business and how specific you have to be with your [demo] reel and how to market yourself. I think people who go to film school and do a reel in a vacuum come out and don’t really have that knowledge. —Maria Demopoulos, production manager.1 Using his home as a studio and his family as his cast, this penniless Peckinpah shot a crude 5-minute video. . . . He tried to show his demo tape to the major networks (abc, cbs, Telemundo), but couldn’t get past the guards. —Narrator, ‘‘Behind the Laughter’’ episode, The Simpsons

Chapter 3

Trade Images and Imagined Communities (Below the Line)

Trade imagery sometimes o√ers important and exacting glimpses into the demeanor of a company and its workers. It can sometimes provide a more holistic sense of company activities and worker relations than can o≈cial corporate press releases, statistics, or even market research. For many media corporations such imagery now serves a key role in marketwide, intercompany, and intracompany communications. Film and television companies, in particular, acknowledge image making as their primary business, and they use reflexive images (images about images) to cultivate valuable forms of public awareness and employee recognition inside and outside of the organization. On the scholarly front trade imagery has been overlooked for a number of reasons, in part because of the disciplinary divide separating organizational ethnography and sociology on the one hand, and visual anthropology and visual studies on the other. Business studies and media/ film studies have also underestimated the cultural role of worker-generated imagery, given in the first case a corporate predisposition toward abstract economic models, and in the second case a healthy theoretical cynicism about the veracity of ‘‘the trades’’ (Variety and the Hollywood Reporter) that any first-year graduate student masters. Yet a visit to a set or studio will show

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that workers participate in a very local visual culture even as they produce entertainment products destined for wider export elsewhere. In chapters 6 and 7 I will show that visual practices are central parts of corporate branding, programming, and repurposing, respectively. By considering abovethe-line and executive perspectives, in those chapters I will demonstrate how trade imagery helps mediate relations among a diverse range of more widely seen on-screen media texts and institutions. In this chapter, however, I focus more narrowly on how trade imagery mediates relations between the workers who create film and television. I am particularly interested in two perspectives here: first, that of the images and icons that circulate largely o√ the public’s radar (in the semipublic sphere of film/video trade publications, equipment documentation, and demo tapes); and second, that of the iconography that both represents and expresses below-the-line production cultures (imagery depicting the work worlds of editors, cinematographers, animators, etc.). Viewed in these ways, below-the-line iconography is loaded not just with inferences about how craftspeople imagine themselves, but also with suggestions about how cinematographers and editors create (to borrow and industrialize Benedict Anderson’s term) ‘‘imagined communities.’’ The circulation of trade iconography and personal demo tapes are imaginative means that help create and maintain these craft- or discipline-specific communities. The commercialization of trade iconography at the corporate level, by contrast, works to regulate and constrain these same craft groupings and can be viewed (to borrow from John Kelly and Martha Kaplan’s key rebuttal of Anderson) as ‘‘represented communities.’’≤ The tension between these two sometimesconflicting poles—the imagined production community (interpersonal, expressive, genealogical) and the represented production community (corporate, historical, managerial)—informs much of the discussion of visual trade imagery that follows in this chapter and in the book as a whole. Business models are generally top-down formulations that represent the perspectives and interests of management, policymakers, or investors rather than labor. Trade iconography, on the other hand, frequently serves in more of a ground-up fashion—as negotiated expressions or exchange opportunities that are collective in origin. While the art historian or art critic establishes personal origins for works of visual expression, I take trade iconography to have a less personal function. Trade iconography represents an ongoing visual dialogue and cultural commentary by and with workers.

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Threatened by the rise of nonunion and runaway labor, the IATSE unions in film/TV have been far more prodigious in their own public relations efforts, which include the publication of trades (here, the ICG), union merchandizing, and local socio-professional gatherings. As production increasingly becomes a ‘‘represented community’’ in corporate properties (like DVD making-ofs), unions work hard to cultivate an ‘‘imagined community.’’ Los Angeles, 2003. Photo © J. Caldwell.

Even if Sony creates production imagery for a new line of digital cameras, such imagery shouldn’t be written o√ merely as corporate arm-twisting. Promotional camera or editing iconography almost always presupposes, in some way, a camera user’s or editor’s perspective and cultural understandings in addition to those of the manufacturer. In this sense, the examples in this chapter should be viewed as cross-cultural ‘‘icons’’ rather than as mere forms of visual documentation. Like icons, that is, trade representations are collectively generated and culturally coded; usually with connotations that go well beyond mere depiction or physical description. As a result, belowthe-line trade iconography is frequently more heterogeneous and contested than the monolithic top-down visual branding campaigns launched by film and television companies from their boardrooms. Executives typically describe corporate branding campaigns, for instance, as somehow wholly original innovations created by management visionaries and marketing departments. Technology makers and technology users in film/video, on the other hand, have much more grounded and fluid contingency-based interrelationships. This orientation makes the iconography that passes back and forth between them more like a form of collective critical analysis and less like mere hype.

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PRODUCTION CHURN AND NOMADIC LABOR SYSTEMS

The production of highly reflexive technical demos and trade iconograpies results in part from changes in the film/video’s mode of production since the studio era. Whereas camera operators, editors, mixers, and grips once punched clocks at the studios that employed them, getting work and keeping work today is far less predictable, even after a practitioner has ‘‘broken in’’ and achieved journeyman status. Below-the-line workers today survive by learning how to exploit what I would call a nomadic labor system. That is, even after a technical worker has obtained employment and established credentials and competency, they still must hustle for every new production they hope to work on. Furthermore, each new production (at least in primetime television and feature film production) functions in a manic, serial manner. That is, each shoot is essentially a new corporation that starts up, functions intensely, and closes down in a matter of months. In this system of serial corporate churn, the pay is usually high but the hours are incredibly long. After a production ‘‘wraps,’’ this burst of labor intensity is followed either by unemployment or a scramble to find new work, or both. As a result, to stay employed below-the-line workers must start angling for the next job even before their current one concludes. What usually results is that a small coalition of workers on one shoot will migrate in a loosely cohesive fashion to another shoot. If group work has been e√ective on one television production or film shoot, the heads of technical departments (sound mixers, art directors, dps, key grips, set decorators) will usually bring their ‘‘team’’ of several (now proven) assistants along with them to the next production that hires them. In the nomadic system, however, membership on a technical team is seldom fixed and unchanging. In fact, as nomadic teams travel from incorporation/shoot to incorporation/shoot some faces will be the same but some will always change. In this sense labor nomadism is an amorphous enterprise. On any given set, the employment origins of the current collection of workers can be ‘‘archaeologically’’ traced back to a diverse set of tributaries that flow, overlap, and intersect before their confluence into a production team involving scores or even hundreds of workers on the current project. These tributaries are not simply institutional histories involving specific studio or production company employment periods. Instead, nomadism also provides forms of experiential and cultural capital formed from hard-

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Hourly wage workers travel from job to job, in gradually modified networks, making the skilled workforce a product of constant churn and mutation. On any given set you can ‘‘archeologically’’ trace back the aesthetic origins of a film/series look via the confluence of worker migrations from earlier benchmark experiences achieved by the collective. Photo © J. Caldwell.

learned insights and interpersonal creative influence between workers. The reasons for the serial reaggregation of creative and technical expertise are several. At times, studios seek out specific nomadic teams deemed responsible for some perceived stylistic breakthrough on one film or series that they want to emulate on a pending project. Many times, department heads will simply bring along workers with whom they get along, or they will take those who have proven they can work quickly and bring projects in on time and under budget. Below-the-line workers frequently talk of this shifting process of coalition building in terms of personality issues and trust. In the studio/network era film and video production workers were parts of highly institutionalized (rather than ‘‘imagined’’) communities. That is, the studio factories largely assigned meanings to groups even as they managed them in house. With the breakup of the studio system and the disappearance of network oligopoly, employee churn has placed a far higher premium on the ability of crafts workers to identify themselves as unique, valuable, competent, trustworthy, and (as importantly) cost e√ective. Anxiety over the current system of churn and nomadism occasionally evokes

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among current executives a studio-era nostalgia for controlled and orderly ‘‘identity building’’ from the top down: ‘‘There was a more cohesive nature to the industry then. Those who worked at mgm or Warner Bros. were loyal to mgm or Warner Bros. In every sense of the word. Today, if there’s a disagreement on the set, in no time 400 people know about it and talk about it.’’≥ Identity building and critical competence within a craft are no longer limited to the classical system of production but have instead been outsourced to boutiques and independent companies ( just like the digital labor that I evaluate in the next chapter). Given this, some studio executives now acknowledge how important it is for technical workers and post-houses (who are bidding for contracts) to e√ectively articulate their distinction and to ‘‘educate’’ studios as a way of ‘‘buying in’’ to a production. As one executive stated: ‘‘How are we going to do it? After discussions with our creative studio I do a study of how the media will be used . . . in conjunction with both the clients and vendors. I look for the right mix of creativity and technology. I’m not an expert in computer e√ects. I expect my vendors to be able to explain to me clearly [the process and issues].’’∂ The executive goes on to explain how this kind of participatory, preproduction critical analysis and teaching dialogue functions as part of the studio’s approach to business negotiation: ‘‘A lot of vendors will tell you what they think you want to hear. But I’m looking for a good sense of production strategy. How do they help me? I’m not looking for a service to hire. . . . One of the best things I can hear from a vendor is: ‘If this were my product, this is how I’d spend my money.’ ’’∑ This studio thus seeks out bidders who will invest their creative distinction as a form of ‘‘pride of ownership’’ into partnerships with the studio. This is one example of the way that the industry constantly converts economic transactions (at least rhetorically) into human relationship terms. To succeed in this serial bidding process, workers must be able to self-consciously articulate how and why they do things in the distinctive ways that they do, and to convince others of this logic as well. In the studio mode of production, a fairly rigid system of mentoring and on-the-job instruction formed a craftsman’s development. Cinematographers like John Bailey, asc, describe in golden-age terms this decades-long process: ‘‘The collegial comradeship of cinematographers and the passing of the torch are abiding realities in an art that requires so many years of apprenticeship.’’∏ While this medieval system of personal bonding and ap-

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prenticeship ruled work, however, a di√erent kind of technical trade discourse was emerging alongside of it—one that would make the intellectual and critical dimension of the guild system ‘‘transportable.’’ For almost a century the journal American Cinematographer, published by the American Society of Cinematographers (asc), has made the aesthetic practices of cinematographers available to many outside of either the asc or the union. It is important to note that the asc is neither a union nor a part of iatse or the studio signatory agreements; rather, it is a self-selecting ‘‘honorary’’ organization of only a few hundred members, and it grants membership to distinguished cinematographers only. The asc has served as a prototype for the kinds of critical industrial theory that are the focus of this book and that are now practiced in scores of other professional organizations and in over a hundred production trade publications as well. Unlike iatse’s camera union, which largely kept its methods to itself, the asc promoted the intellectual activities and aesthetic theories of the group far beyond the confines of the select few who populated sets and locations in Southern California. The asc elevated itself ‘‘above’’ mere technical ‘‘craft’’ status by cultivating an aura of serious scholarship and intellectual inquiry about the ‘‘art’’ form. Initially, this aura helped cinematographers enhance their position within a fairly closed industry system.π Now, however, the same process is deployed among almost all of the film/video specializations, arguably for economic reasons. Within the nomadic labor and serial employment system now in place, any area that wishes to remain vital—in the face of endless new technologies, increased competition, and changes in production—must constantly work, through symbolic means, to underscore the distinctiveness and importance of their artistic specialization. This imperative—for constant public reflections and ‘‘theorizations’’ on the craft—is one reason that demo tapes, trade iconography, and practitioner imagery have moved front and center as trade practices. Even though film/video production is by definition collective, practitioner public reflections and trade iconography of the sort examined in this chapter almost always cultivate a contradictory view—namely, that the craft in question is somehow at the center of the entire production enterprise. Consider the production designer Richard Sylbert’s view that his specialization, design, drives the production process: ‘‘There is such a thing as structure: visual structure. It has nothing to do with the cameraman, it has

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While below-the-line grips celebrate working-class machismo, so do above-the-line A-list film directors like Michael Bay. In a world with an acute oversupply of qualified labor, even the DGA regularly underscores their status and legitimacy through working class iconographies that underscore strength and control of the churn and uncertainty that is production. (Left, Avenger marketing brochure; right, cover of DGA Magazine.)

nothing to do with the director, and it has nothing to do with the actors. It has to do with this particular script.’’ The same trade documentary for the Art Director’s Guild underscores the lesson: ‘‘Chinatown has its moral and emotional force because of the composition that Sylbert devised. . . . A set of simple ideas that all convey the inevitability of the tragedy of Chinatown.’’∫ Assigning to production designer Sylbert the primary artistic agency for Chinatown might surprise the film’s screenwriter Robert Towne or the film’s director Roman Polanski. But the real ‘‘dialogue’’ underway here is not an interpersonal one but rather an institutional one, responding to a di√erent organization: the asc. In 1992 the asc coproduced the film Visions of Light, which, like the book Masters of Light before it, established the centrality of cinematography in filmmaking.Ω In 2002, the Art Director’s Guild did essentially the same thing for their specialization, production design, in a documentary titled (significantly) The Hidden Art of Hollywood. A book titled First Cut cultivated a similar sensibility for the editors in 1992.∞≠ And there are numerous books of this sort written by and for directors.∞∞ So, even though workers constantly experience work as cooperative on the job, trade iconography and demos typically express more self-serving aesthetic theories; ones that make the specialty in question unique, deter-

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mining, and separable from the others on a shoot. In the current industrial climate, many industry sectors work hard to persuade others in the trade public of the determining importance of their specialized craft. Consider the following ‘‘behind-the-scenes’’ explanation of how great film work can be accomplished if normal budgetary, schedule, and labor restraints are ignored. In the film Blade Runner, removing normal production pressures ostensibly allowed those in the set-building and design trades to innovate by working alone: ‘‘We prepared the movie for nine months. Which is very, very unusual today—for a film to have that much preparation time. And it was through sheer accident. Because partway through the production period, the actors went on strike. So we just kept prepping and designing it, and redesigning, and improving it. And during that actors strike the only group of people that were on the film were my art dept. And it was because of the amount of time that we had to prepare and to analyze and to conceptualize the film that we were able to arrive at what you have on the screen.’’∞≤ Behind-the-scenes trade accounts like these show that extensive forms of focused analysis, conceptualization, and aesthetic distinction make up the craft of set building and design. Most of the time, however, working conditions inhibit these results. According to this partisan scheme, therefore, ‘‘other’’ technical areas (the rest of the crew) end up constraining true innovation for the community doing the ‘‘imagining’’ (the art department). Behind-the-scenes background documentaries about the asc and the Art Directors Guild (adg) like these are used to ‘‘brand’’ organizations and crafts as unique and inordinately valuable to the production task. They also claim distinction apart from the collective intercraft enterprise as a whole (much as the adg and asc did for production designers and cinematographers). Trade icons, furthermore, show how production suppliers critically dialogue with below-the-line workers about the nature, function, and value of a given craft. Externally, the visual construction of an imagined community for a technical specialty can give legitimacy to the group in contests over hiring or contracting, and so has economic benefits. Internally, trade icons and video demos have several pedagogical functions: they teach technique; they teach the conceptual logic of using tools; and they help the group negotiate change. In the next section of this chapter I explore these tendencies and functions by focusing on three types of visual practice: the demo tape; the self-portrait (as cultural analysis); and the cultural politics of

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below-the-line imagined communities, which includes something I will refer to as production’s ‘‘military-identity complex.’’ DEMO TAPES, DEMO CAREERS

An entire genre of ancillary video production circulates in and around the production world in the form of demo tapes or reels, which are essentially moving-image ‘‘calling cards’’ used to snag projects, make bids, sell equipment, and pitch services. Every dp, editor, and e√ects artist worth his or her salt hawks these tapes, as do the specialty production boutiques that o√er individual services, looks, and stylistic sensibilities. Getting work or landing a client is based on an ability to individuate and di√erentiate one’s creative work, within a given technical trade, from the rest of the pack. As part of this ‘‘separation-from-the-pack’’ process, demo tapes serve as crucial forms of symbolic currency in a system of exchange that has little time, any longer, for the pre-electronic business rituals of face-to-face meetings or the timeconsuming screening and review of complete sample works in choosing free-lance workers, independent contractors, or new equipment. Today, many in the industry consider an e√ective demo reel to be a necessary mechanism for e√ectively soliciting new production work. Some film/video production workers spend as much time cultivating their demo reels (incorporating critical feedback, involving others as coaches) as they do on some of their more predictable daily tasks. For example, when Maria Demopoulos was a production manager she spent two and a half years producing her demo reel of spec spots. As she notes, ‘‘I wanted to do one spot, then show it to a few people and get some feedback before I did the second and the third and the fourth because I wanted to make sure I was making the right steps and strategizing the right way.’’∞≥ The filmmaker Demopolous explains how good demos are like good commercial spots. Her work experience in advertising production has taught her not just how to edit promotional form e√ectively but also how to manage and exploit human relationships to ensure upward mobility. The system of nomadic and outsourced labor discussed earlier has helped make many outsourced tasks more anonymous and ambiguous than in the past. New forms of production have shifted small slices of larger projects out to contracted workers or niche firms. This outsourcing of creative work has, among other things, placed in jeopardy the conventional assignment of credits, especially

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for many workers who are contracted to render small parts of a larger project anonymously. Even below-the-line artisans must continually establish, cultivate, and update their personal identity through demos and credits to build the career capital for employment negotiation, As Michael Beiber, a digital e√ects manager at ilm, states: ‘‘Studios still have the view of the old studios, regarding credits. They still believe a head ‘greensman’ deserves credits, but not all of the animators or e√ects artists. We disagree. We tell [the studios], ‘This is why they are working! It goes on their resume. So that they can get their next job, at places like this.’ They are working on productions so that they will get their name on the screen.’’∞∂ Beiber argues that workers now work not just in a financial economy but also in a ‘‘symbolic’’ one. That is, part of a worker’s payment is in proof of reputation via visible evidence of distinction. Clips from past productions make these moving-image proofs and video ‘‘resumes’’ possible. Beiber even suggests that future employment is dependent on collecting these proofs and on-screen credits. Creditless anonymity undercuts employability, and demos help create public trade identities as end-title credits become less of an entitlement. The clips of past work that make up demo reels, therefore, can be viewed as ‘‘payments’’ in aesthetic prestige—that is, what in addition to their fees contract workers or boutique firms can get back, or leverage, out of a specific studio brand or the television industry as a whole. Demo tapes come in various forms and formats. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, demos circulated primarily on the vhs videotape format. While this method continues to some extent, many companies began producing interactive demos on cds in the mid-1990s, and then designed them for their increasingly complex Web sites in the late 1990s. Today, dvds have become the demo format of choice for a range of trade participants because of their ample storage capacity. Individual production workers produce show reels of their best and most recent work. Postproduction companies anthologize highlights from past work by their sta√s, thereby making their demos composite trade biographies for the company.∞∑ Production equipment manufacturers produce and distribute demos introducing new products in user-friendly theoretical terms to potential buyers/users. Film studios produce demos of upcoming projects. Television networks produce demos comprised of highlight clips for each new upcoming season. In chapters 5, 6, and 7 I will examine demos by studios and networks illustrat-

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ing above-the-line and corporate critical marketing practices (branding tapes, epks [electronic press kits], up-front tapes, behind-the-scenes docs, and making-ofs). Here I want to focus on the ‘‘lower-level’’ demo genres, since they visually depict below-the-line work worlds that are generally given short shrift in the more popular industry trades. Demo tapes are more than just advertisements that connect unique looks to names. They are also ‘‘primers’’ of new videographic technique; ‘‘user guides’’ that explicate stylistic options for each new type of production technology; and ‘‘lexicons’’ that schematize and conjecture on the uses and probable meanings of new technologies. Demo tapes are, at least in the sense that scholars like Dudley Andrew have defined ‘‘theory,’’ essential workaday forms of theorization about the medium.∞∏ As practitioners jockey for position and compete for projects they also circulate knowledge about stylistics. Demo reels show the industry constantly speaking to itself about itself; boasting about stylistic prowess even as demo producers struggle to legitimize themselves in the eyes of clients. Status and leverage depend on establishing a consciousness of ‘‘influence’’ among practitioners in a given specialization. As a result, each new demo tape that circulates in some ways participates in a dialogue with all of the other demos that are already stacked in producers’ o≈ces, on production managers’ desks in commercial companies, and in postproduction suites throughout the industry. At an even higher institutional level (that of corporate demo tapes), the business and merger ‘‘synergies’’ that frequent trade publication headlines (e.g., project-specific linkages between the ‘‘demonstrated’’ specializations of Disney, Pixar, ilm, etc.) really mirror the atomization and ‘‘boutique’’ individuation that now rules the production world as a whole. Demo tapes, in e√ect, codify corporations, manufacturers, technical workers, and creative individuals. As a result, they also help ‘‘brand’’ production units based on their potential value as synergistic ‘‘chunks.’’ Structural changes in the corporate world make demo tapes far more pervasive in the industry today than they were two decades ago. As much as anything else this change has had to do with the commercial advertising industry’s important role in television. Commercial spot production, along with music television, has ‘‘taught’’ film/television in more ways than one. These non-feature o√–prime-time worlds fulfill several basic functions: first, they are content-hungry proving grounds for new, risk-taking produc-

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tion talent; second, they provide de facto (even if sometimes unintended) r&d (research and development) of new production techniques and technologies; and third, they have taught television to conceptualize in stylistically intense short-form segments. All of these functions play out even as the music video and commercial worlds have worked for two decades to denarrativize much of the on-screen content that issues from the multichannel spectrum. The demo tape is part of the lingua franca that facilitates and mainstreams these levels of exchange and stylistic transformation. The 1990 Rebo Studios/Shawn Pritchard hdtv Compositing Demo, for example, has no narrator. Nevertheless, it functions as a site for these three levels of exchange.∞π The on-screen content and form of the Rebo/Pritchard demo tape connotes the obligatory twin gods of commercial production: ‘‘state-of-the-art’’ technology and ‘‘cutting-edge’’ stylistics. The demo achieves this goal by showcasing art historical content and by fetishizing a virtual world of high-resolution surfaces through its digitally imagined camera gaze. A graphic title introduces the demo as pedagogy: ‘‘The art of compositing.’’ The footage that follows includes digital combinations that consciously reference modernism, Aztec-deco, and the surrealism of de Chirico and Dali. Art world iconography has, in fact, been a dominant iconographic repository (an image bank of sorts) in demo activities. The ongoing struggle to raise the identity of any corporate production brand above the competitive clutter will probably continue to make such iconography a favored way to demonstrate competence as an artist and technician. The much-celebrated pdi Morphing Demo from 1993 stands as a perfect example of the ideal, multivenue, industrial demo ‘‘crossover.’’∞∫ The client’s project—a Michael Jackson music video, which experienced wide circulation on mtv —also served as the production company’s demonstration tape. At the end of the demo version, pdi included footage showing the camera pulling back to reveal the soundstage on which the video was shot. At the end of the successful take, a director emerges with a tagline consisting of a verbal accolade to the digitally morphed actress: ‘‘Great [performance]! How did you do that?’’ This tagline serves as a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment by the production company that the only real performance at work here is that of pdi’s cgi artists. These are the practitioners, after all, who had mastered the endless, technically di≈cult sequence of

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matched face morphs.∞Ω The music video that pdi produced also started a rage of morphing clones and imitations, in everything from primetime spots to new software developed for Macintosh personal computer platforms. As I discussed in chapter 2, production trade shows (like natpe, nab, and ShowBiz Expo) function as bracketed moments when industry players seek out partners for imagined synergies of one form or another (with suppliers, clients, manufacturers, purchasers, contractors, etc.). The nab convention in Las Vegas regularly o√ers events within this professionalcommunal setting aimed at soliciting partners from the sea of potential buyers/users. Like camera shoot-outs or technical bake-o√s, these events sometimes include contests to produce ‘‘the best’’ original video spots using equipment from specific manufacturers. As incentives, such companies offer cash and new equipment prizes along with a public showcase for screening the winning productions at the convention. These projects are not, then, preproduced or canned sales or demo tapes, but are in essence semiimprovational demonstration or ‘‘spec’’ art projects made by independent practitioners for the manufacturer. As with television fans, any interactivity with television production workers can be profitable for a manufacturing company. The genius of equipment competitions is that manufacturers woo and ‘‘draft’’ potential users to hype commercial products without paying them, thus circumventing the reality that technical buyers are usually highly discriminating, cost-conscious product skeptics. One spec-demo winner at nab 1995 produced a spot depicting life in the edit suite that through rapid montage loaded up layers of inane audio comments by management and pretentious producers (‘‘I’m thinking of something organic ’’ . . . ‘‘What about—cactus ?’’ . . . ‘‘No, the other way’’ . . . ‘‘We can’t use it’’ . . . ‘‘No’’ . . . ‘‘How long is this going to take?’’ . . . ). These clichés are shouted by shallow/callous hangers-on (producers, directors, clients) who live (apparently) to harass postproduction workers. The spot ends by showing a cynical editor saying ‘‘done’’ after smirking through the harangues from the above-the-line folks who can only retort in the face of the worker’s surprising accomplishment: ‘‘That’s impossible.’’ An editor’s self-fantasy of wizardry plays out here; a resilient motif deployed by technical workers since the earliest days of silent cinema, mechanical invention, and Méliès. Here, however, the pose also clearly stands as a form of cynical

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commentary and symbolic resistance aimed at the typically overpaid and vacuous media company boss. Manufacturer solicitation rituals like this look like opportunities for free thinking and artistic experimentation. But such initiatives also work to identify master artists trying to shed their lowly technician identities with pieces of otherwise anonymous, proprietary, and costly production equipment. Even manufacturers, therefore, have figured out how to find and make vanguard cultural ‘‘edginess’’ a part of their new technical products. While demos and spec reels by artisans establish hiring worthiness, technical companies’ equipment demos face an additional task: they must humanize processes that are otherwise deemed merely mechanical. As one technical company head stated: ‘‘We’ve never relied on the technology, because the bottom line is that we are there to sell ‘creative solutions’ and animation. We would rather tell the tools what to do, than to have the tools tell us what to do.’’≤≠ This motto—telling the tools what to do rather than vice versa—serves as a widespread premise in technical demos. Demos are more than just technical or engineering user guides. Most equipment demos emphasize human agency and creative control rather than the technology itself. Such demos are, therefore, less about ‘‘selling the sizzle rather than the steak’’ than they are about staging imagined, narrative worlds where user/buyers can ‘‘insert’’ themselves as hypothetical characters and users, and so ponder the prospects that might follow purchase. Finally, production software demos are sometimes more explicit in theorizing the film/video task than are either personal demo reels or hardware demos. In many ways, software has replaced hardware at the center of the production worker’s vocational task. Today, one is as likely to find that the ability to use o√-the-shelf software is as important as experience with specific film/video production machines in job descriptions on hiring sites like Craigslist.com. Many entry jobs now specify the need for competency in Photoshop, Adobe After E√ects, Final Cut Pro (fcp), Pro Tools, and dvd Studio. Software is by nature designed and programmed conceptually rather than hard wired. Understanding the hundreds of layers of interrelated tasks embedded in software typically requires demos and training tapes that provide concise theoretical analysis and summaries. Final Draft’s Dramatica Pro, one of several professional screenwriting software packages, lays out its logic with framing metaphors and paradigms reminiscent of classical film theory: Dramatica acts like a cross between ‘‘a Rubic’s Cube

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of story’’ and ‘‘a periodic table of story elements.’’≤∞ Self-analysis like this also shows that software demos are not bashful about claiming their own proprietary ‘‘theory’’—in this case one based on the company’s patented story engine: ‘‘As such, it has a story engine built in, that has all of the relationships between story, theme, character, and genre that Dramatica Theory has found. It allows you to twist things up. By allowing you to make dramatic choices about the impact you ultimately want to have on the audience.’’≤≤ Demos like those by Dramatica and fcp therefore do not just tell potential buyers how to use the product but also establish novel theoretical framing paradigms from which the complicated actions of the software proper can be explained and understood. The lengthy theorization that follows in each package has both a pedagogical and a marketing function. ‘‘Dramatica Theory’’ or ‘‘fcp theory’’ implies that some distinctive creativity goes hand in hand with product name recognition. According to these demos, one does not just buy a di√erent product but also a di√erent way of thinking: a systematically engineered theoretical perspective. SELF-PORTRAITS (OF IMAGINED COMMUNITIES)

Trade imagery regularly includes self-representations of the trade group or the workers comprising the trade group. Even when trade imagery emphasizes trade-specific technical processes, it also implicitly presupposes a human or institutional subject from which those expressions come. A recent account by Benjamin Bergery about how cinematographers work includes the following introductory passage: ‘‘Tutorials are accompanied by detailed photos, and diagrams that guide us e√ortlessly through the sometimescomplex alchemy itself. Stephen Burum, asc . . . uses the analogy of a Renaissance master: ‘Don’t you think the great fresco painters of the Sistine chapel knew when the plaster was exactly right, and when it wasn’t?’ He compares the technique of mixing pigments and plaster to the systematic exposure of multi-layered color film emulsions made by the cinematographer before beginning a new project. His metaphor is only the first of dozens of allusions to painting.’’≤≥ Bergery’s explanation of film work invokes a range of theoretical metaphors. The passage introduces the book’s pedagogical function for camera operators by using allegories that redefine filmmaking: first, as an alchemical

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mastering of wet, curing plaster; and second, as in the tactility of a mortarand-pestle crushing pigments. Whereas Dramatica Pro’s demo likens the writer’s process to anonymous paradigms (like a ‘‘story engine’’ and a ‘‘periodic table’’), cinematographers favor paradigms that are identifiably human and tactile (Renaissance fresco painting). This contrast suggests that software demo ‘‘theories’’ derive from ai assumptions (the independently functioning intelligent machine that writes, invisibly, for the technologically challenged screenwriter). Cinematography does just the opposite (the technologically sophisticated cameraperson sensitively touches and senses his or her way to expressive brilliance). For the screenwriter, the technology must disappear. For the cameraperson, the technology and artifacts of a production must be touched and transformed into their personal ‘‘expressions.’’ While this tendency to cultivate trade identities via figurative and cultural analogies pervades the trades, more explicit autobiographical representations are also common. The cinematographer James L. Carter talks about his first experience visiting the asc ‘‘clubhouse’’ as a young man: ‘‘I was fascinated by the discussions of Bell & Howell vs. Mitchell cameras, film stocks, soft-focus lenses and the art of cinematography. It seemed like the cinema equivalent of the French Impressionist painters meeting at their favorite café to discuss brushes, paints and imagery—a central place to talk about important issues of the day. I envied their togetherness.’’≤∂ Whereas Bergery and Bailey situate cinematography within Renaissance painting practices, Carter likens the community of cinematographers in the contemporary socio-professional setting of the asc to the vanguard camaraderie of Left Bank French painters in the late nineteenth century. The adg seeks to grant even greater cultural legitimacy and import to production designers when it explains, in quasi-genetic terms, that ‘‘designers like Eugenio Zanetti are descendents of the whole history of painting, sculpture and architecture. . . . First and foremost, Zanetti is an artist.’’≤∑ The overdetermined way in which cinematographers, camerapersons, designers, and set decorators establish and reestablish their identities—not simply as artists but as art historical phenomena—suggests just how valuable cultural references can be in a town that historically deems as mere ‘‘technicians’’ the people who make films and television series. In a competitive production market, explanations about workers’ cultural significance can mean the di√erence between low-ball jobs and more-prestige productions. Cultural self-portraits and assertions by trade groups have economic

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consequences. They also enhance stature among the industry’s many other groups. But such assertions about identity are extremely important within a trade group or production company as well. Michael Beiber reflects on how volatile and unwieldy digital e√ects workers in the company can be if they are not ‘‘on the same page’’ in terms of their self-perceptions, interests, and inclinations: ‘‘As a practical matter, will your people want to work on a [newly bidded] project? They might not be excited about it. They might find the content o√ensive. In some cases, they’ve just finished working on something just like it. The point is, you have to pay attention to the desires of your talent pool.’’≤∏ According to this view, bad managers ignore worker di√erences within their departments (thereby losing profits), while good managers constantly monitor the shifting interests and sensibilities of group members and adjust the company’s bidding strategies accordingly. John Fleet, an e√ects supervisor at the digital production company Available Light, goes beyond mere monitoring to tell how he cooperates in the creation of an imagined community in his company. In the following comments he describes the digital artists’ community as a brotherhood of artists against all; a ‘‘tribe’’ bound together by integrity that has a healthy skepticism about technology: I would say that our company is kind of a ‘‘tribal’’ thing. Once you are in, and get the secret tattoos—we’re then in there as a family operation. . . . The core group that we have is intensely loyal. When work is slow, they’ll come in anyway. And we’ll find ’em working on the computers, or screwing around on the stu√. They’re there because they want to be. It’s not just a paycheck issue. I’m old school. You just gotta love the work. And one of the bad things that happened when everything went digital was suddenly—compared to the old days—there were enormous sums of money thrown around. This attracted a lot of people who wouldn’t normally be in the e√ects business. They are a frustrated bunch of people, because all they want to talk about is . . . ‘‘how much am I going to make o√ of it?’’ When this Hollywood cycle goes bust, we’ll see a lot of these folks go away. And the nerds like us will still be there— doing the work.≤π

Here Fleet touches on a number of recurring motifs. The ‘‘tribe,’’ marked by ‘‘secret tattoos,’’ is the operative ideal here. Available Light cultivates the sense that the company is a humane benefactor whose managers function as empathic life and career coaches. By keeping the scale of their company

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relatively small (with scores rather than hundreds of e√ects artists employed at any one time), Fleet creates a work-world family of artists who ostensibly labor for the right motives: for the love of the art, not for the money. This cultivated moral identity is placed in opposition to ambitious job seekers who lack integrity, and in opposition to the alienating work environments of the ‘‘big giants’’ that Available Light has to bid against for each job. Fleet terms these giant digital e√ects and animation companies ‘‘Wal-Mart production houses.’’ He describes such big-box digital companies as nightmares for creativity and employment given their pursuit of mindless monotony. Trade imagery—involving self-representations and cultural assertions— provides symbolic means through which the community-building described above takes place. To vie for practitioner attention, many production company promotions in the trades showcase critical-interpretive icons or visual puzzles. Such icons challenge the artistic knowledge of readers in a game-like fashion by asking them to do an interpretation, or a ‘‘critical reading’’ as it were, of some posed stylistic enigma. This preoccupation with deciphering stylistic codes and art historical conventions within published trade imagery mirrors the general tendency of film/video workers to build stylistic code games into the big screen projects they make as well. One designer in a trade demo unlocks the iconic code built into Blade Runner : ‘‘The densely layered film is a catalog of in-jokes and homage. Keying in to art and architecture from around the world: the fascist architecture of Albert Speer at the Tyrell corporation. The organic work of Spaniard Gaudi at Deckerd’s womb-like apartment, and neon pop signage from modern Tokyo. As well as local influences, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Innis Brown House. And the Bradbury building.’’≤∫ Through ‘‘guess-the-style’’ reference games like this, craft groups and companies ask trade readers to break the visual code in their promotions as well. Under an array of eight stills, for example, the equipment manufacturer Encore asks readers: ‘‘Can you spot the impostor?’’≤Ω The ad plays on the company’s boast that it can emulate almost any stylistic look, then it isolates a classical Renaissance painting as the lone ‘‘fake’’ (it is, significantly, the only one not produced by Encore). Encore essentially asks that readers (potential clients) ‘‘give us your best shot’’ in production graphics—if it matters when awards season comes around. Manufacturer Tekniche also invites the knowing professional into the stylistic guessing game, but in a di√erent way. The company sells digital ‘‘converters and interfaces’’ but represents its technologies in a Dali-esque world of surrealist morphing and

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(in a direct reference to the standards nightmare of video conversion) incongruent juxtaposition. Trade ads by other companies create interpretive games based on art history. Roland House solicits clients, by asking them to appreciate the significance of the nineteenth-century daguerreotype or the fantasy engraving of a baroque-era visionary in Roland’s printed promos.≥≠ Above-the-line personalities, by contrast, favor less complicated icons that cleanly showcase an author’s human dimension.≥∞ Video production companies like Roland House that restage Eadweard Muybridge sequences and surrealist tableaus as promotional marquees are asking practitioners to do more than simply consider the artistic nature of Roland’s e√ects work: they are also asking the reader to ‘‘fill in the dots’’; to solve some critical problem posed when aesthetic icons are closely associated with specific technologies. Image G does not promote its stable of moving camera devices, mounts, jib arms, and cranes with a catalogue listing rental items or with helpful written exposition or description.≥≤ Instead, the company sells its work-a-day jib arms in a futurist tableau and in a cyborg, sci-fi guise. The dark apocalyptic haze that they paint arround their product shots suggests that these machines are not just camera mounts but rather descendants and extensions of landmark works that revolutionized production style in films like Blade Runner and Aliens. These kinds of examples reconfirm to the production community that the business of the community is interpretation; the ability to ‘‘do a reading’’ that is simultaneously technical and aesthetic. The techno-stylistic lexicon—put into play by the exchange of enigmatic promotional icons—stands as a favored corporate mark and a form of territorial boundary marking in the technical culture. These practices also show how central the process of deep-textual interpretation— decryption—is within production culture. Why take demo tapes, comp reels, and visual self-representation in the trades seriously? The tapes and icons referred to thus far all promote critical decipherment as a key to understanding new production technologies as exclusive corporate options. This shared commitment to ‘‘figuration’’ and ‘‘decipherment’’ as communication strategies in promotion and marketing makes it important to consider the specific content, motifs, and genres favored in reflexive, technical depictions.≥≥ One general motif in below-theline iconography, for example, is the sense of technically induced spatial disorientation. Several iconic schemes promise to bu√er the malaise and quarter the threat of industrial disorientation. Both ‘‘expedition’’ and ‘‘safari’’ image schemes reflect attempts to confront the spatial threat of new

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technology by figuratively conquering and mastering it. For example, nec has hawked their digital technologies as a form of mountaineering. Centered by a precision compass, two tired but satisfied nec users pause for the trophy prize of trekkers, the summit photo, in their Himalayan mountain ascent.≥∂ Lightwave Communications boasts that practitioners can operate their sgi graphics workstations from any distance via remote.≥∑ In this case, the remote is held by a mountaineer laden with climbing gear at the pinnacle of a remote peak. In a bizarre transformation of spatial logic, the local and isolated practices of desktop media become a form of mountainous dominance via ascent. For some media corporations, the lone heroism of individual climbing seems less compelling than the charms that come with promoting the production world as a form of blood sport. The company ixs led its promotion with a freeze frame taken the split second before a charging African carnivore attacks and eats a far less nimble four-legged mammal.≥∏ The caption is simply redundant: ‘‘You cannot a√ord to lose’’; kill or be killed; eat or be eaten. Sony furthered this genre by running in the trades two-page spreads built entirely on the ‘‘safari’’ trope. Their copy said it all: ‘‘Braving extreme conditions and ravenous packs of wild hyenas. . . . The broadcaster’s journey to digital being slightly more treacherous.’’≥π The television industry plains are wild and untamed, but the prize goes to the hunter/ broadcast engineer who is well equipped (by Sony). Avid, the biggest supplier of nonlinear postproduction equipment in film and television, based its space-conquering promotional campaign for Illusion on an agricultural metaphysics.≥∫ As granny holds the lightning rod in a farmscape, intending to capture a bolt of creative power (or a jolt of lightning), an old man (grandpa) holds the glowing video art that they’ve captured from the skies in large glass canning jars. For Avid, this surreal representation of art, earth, and electrical storms evokes the notion that ‘‘state of the art’’ in film and video is actually akin to ‘‘canning’’ a dangerous harvest of creative inspiration and an alternative to electrocution. These coded trade figures—especially the expedition and safari tropes— share several tendencies. The threatening world of production competition and technical obsolescence (in the first example) is to be overcome by ‘‘going in’’ or ‘‘mounting it’’ and (in the second example) by ‘‘killing o√ the weaker prey.’’ Promotional trade copy suggests that these heroic tactics are available through purchase order to visionary equipment engineers

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and technical users. Production equipment corporations stand ready as helpful guides for the precision orienteering needed by anyone hoping to ‘‘make the journey to digital’’ alive. It is odd to find these recurring themes in the technical culture. For all the futuristic trade talk about a new digital, high-tech millennium, these icons and narratives invoke an anachronistic geography of nostalgia, reminiscent of Darwinian natural law and nineteenth-century colonial conquest. Iconographically, the electronic media landscape is a threatening space that disorients management and manufacturers. Yet it is also lucrative territory to be exploited by forwardthinking claims-makers in the technical and managerial cadres—especially given the need to survive in a white-knuckles world of market competition and standards obsolescence. THE MILITARY-IDENTITY COMPLEX

Historical precedence and contemporary production methods both suggest that Hollywood film/television production is in someway ‘‘militaristic’’ as when adg President Jackson DeGovia states: ‘‘Artistic activity is totally ruthless. Everything is sacrificed to get the shot. Or making the picture. Or making a point.’’ The marshaling of crew and cast on soundstage or location by autocratic directors, at least since Eric von Stroheim, has been a legendary part of hype on Hollywood. Consider the ways that the production industry continues to militarize its professional rituals and identities. For example, location shooting literally involves rapid mobilization and the occupation of territories in submissive neighborhoods. Security guards cordon o√ highsecurity production areas. Studio and soundstage film and television carries their own warlike semiotic, housed as they are behind fortresslike walls with sentries. Even the vertical structure of labor relations suggests a command and control scheme used to discipline creative personnel and manage belowthe-line craftsmen. John Hughes, director of human relations at Rhythm and Hues Studios, targets the military management model as a killer of creativity and morale: ‘‘There are some departments that are very hierarchical, that are ‘command-and-control’ type departments. Now I’m trying to change that. But I’m not going to change that by fiat. But slowly, over time, I am trying to change that by talking to and collaborating.’’≥Ω Despite e√orts such as these, most film/video shoots still re-create highly stratified militarist hierarchies with a command structure at top. One direc-

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tor describes examples of how this system is cultivated and sanctioned: ‘‘A culture of division also pervades the set despite e√orts by the dp and other crewmembers to stave it o√. . . . Joel makes his announcements over walkietalkie, calling for ‘private rehearsals’ and ‘Department Heads only’ to report to set. After a certain point, he begins physically guarding the staircase when the crew is upstairs, thus making it di≈cult for others who are not on ‘the first team’ to be a part of the learning process.’’∂≠ This account of life on the set suggests that production militarism works, in part, by ‘‘keeping others stupid’’ on the set. Lower-level workers are continually reminded of their lack of power through the ways that meetings are called, information is withheld, important areas are marked o√, and access is controlled for anyone who wants to approach the director, department heads, or ‘‘the first team.’’ Knowledge and ignorance—not about film/video in general but about the particular production on which one is working—underscore any worker’s rank in this scheme. Location production units work on a ‘‘need-to-know’’ basis. And most below-the-line workers don’t need to know. But militarism is not always viewed as a negative force in production work. Some workers actually celebrate the militarist spirit of insurgency as a form of espirit de corps. Some value the ‘‘hit-and-run’’ method typical of many independent contractors (rather than salaried employees) as a key to working faster, better, and cheaper. As one e√ects company head noted: ‘‘I’m simply not in a position to set up 100 workstations or to have 100 employees. I want to do some of the work myself. So the model that worked for us is still ‘the hit squad.’ Early on, when we’d come into a place like Disney, we’d get a percentage of some project, and finish well before the inside [Disney] guys. And they’d say to us: ‘what are you guys, the hit squad?’ Because we’d come in and do it for 1/3 the cost. We try to keep the administrative nightmare out of it.’’∂∞ Pride in one’s ‘‘hit squad’’ methods apparently instills productivity in the worker insurgents who come and go. As this statement suggests, however, insurgency can also terrorize the ‘‘inside’’ guys who fear losing their higher salaries, benefits, and security once their lack of productivity is exposed. The militarist paradigm functions to a≈rm other worker practices as well. The rhetoric of those within the studio or network hierarchy, for example, tends to suggest hardened sacrifice: dps talk proudly of ‘‘coming up through the ranks,’’ and evidence of ‘‘war-footing’’ symbolism is everywhere. Militarist production allegories serve to sanction production’s claim on

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Militarist metaphors rule the men working in the crew trenches. (Clockwise from top) technicians assemble the big iron needed for large zoom lenses at Birns and Sawyer in the 1960s; ENG cameraman reeling in pursuit of catastrophe in a Sony Betacam ad; a stunt double is blown skyward by the incendiary blast equivalent of Quantum’s nonlinear video hard drives. (Top, Birns and Sawyer calendar; lower right, Sony brochure; lower right, Quantum brochure.)

physical and cultural space. Such allegories define the production enterprise and they help give rationality to the production process. Militarizing a production defines the space and enterprise in way that assigns specific, unambiguous roles to all production workers. Militarizing production culture also draws out clear contrasts between the production cadres inside the unit and those civilians outside of the unit looking on from afar. Initially forced to view the set through security barriers, then provided only glimpses on televised showbiz reports, these civilians will also ultimately determine the fate of the production once the film or series is completed. Given this tenuous relationship between the cultures of production and the audience’s culture, therefore, command-and-control schemes provide valuable tactics for managing incursions of one form or another. This symbolic posturing and control of space is encased in machines and invoked in a wide range of secondary promotional texts as well. For Panavision, one of the leading suppliers of motion picture technology for prime-

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Sony Video says it all in lingua franca of field production workers: advanced video gear is synonymous with militarism and war footing. (Sony marketing brochure.)

time television and film, production is war. Panavision marketed its prowess starting in 1993 by making reference to the bloody Iwo Jima flag raising in World War II.∂≤ The production struggle in this widely recognized icon is staged in a completely homosocial space by anonymous hardened bodies who succeed only through sacrificial teamwork. Camera origination on Panavision evokes cinematic widescreen and prime time. By self-consciously representing the Panavision ‘‘way’’ as the way of marine assault troops, the company underscores the fact that quality film/tv production requires dedicated team struggle by a highly competent technical cadre doing it the ‘‘hard way.’’ By branding itself this way, Panavision flags cinematic programming above other, more mundane video forms. Even for non-Panavision crews and operators viewing this corporate marquee ( journeymen and assistants in camera departments everywhere) the imagery aims to stroke a sense of professional pride in the production group. In an age of reality television, nonunion labor, and runaway production this textual icon poses as a battle cry for quality: semper fi Panavision. Compared to the regimental discipline embodied in the Iwo Jima trope, field production and remote or electronic news gathering stand more like

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search and destroy missions since they o√er smaller tactical possibilities than that of 35mm film origination. Yet video equipment manufacturers still sell the process, and the practitioners, on the use of ‘‘heavy armor.’’ Sony launched its Betacam sx marketing campaign, for example, with explicit linkage to military field armor when it boasted that Sony o√ered ‘‘the best weapon in the field’’ over a picture of the Betacam sx field editing system mounted in medium close-up on treads and steel armor of a tank. The text on the next page laid out this video system’s tactical logic in no uncertain terms: ‘‘Some of the most advanced equipment in the field isn’t issued by the military.’’∂≥ High-technology video electronics here in the age of smart weaponry are o√ered with the go-anywhere portability of all-terrain warfare. ‘‘Firepower’’ tropes extend from production field tactics to the bunkered world of the postproduction suite as well. Quantum marketed its heavyweight hard drives (actually very small metal boxes used in nonlinear editing systems) with the imagery of large-scale incendiary explosions.∂∂ Quantum’s pictorial tableau (clearly a conceptual stretch for the corporate technical communities) is infused by both big screen production values of the action-pic and the (crash-prone/disk-error) iconography of violent carnage. Quantum, beneath its breath, seems to be intoning: ‘‘We are far from the lightweight keepers of digital data that we seem to be.’’ Wescam is a diversified company that packages the variants of its ‘‘projectile eye’’ for features, for prime time, for reality shows, and for local news. It markets its gyroscopically controlled airborne cameras with self-conscious tropes more typical of an airborne military assault than simply descriptions of X and Y axis movements and ‘‘coverage.’’ Consider the supposedly helpful—but clearly dystopian—moral rhetoric in Wescam’s video demo tape narration: ‘‘The city . . . at night . . . exciting . . . a dark haven for criminals . . . . [and now] infrared surveillance from 3,000 meters above earth.’’∂∑ The demo then shows how Wescam can track and ‘‘lock-on’’ to even the body heat of criminals or actors lurking below. With noirish voice-over, and a dark edge evocative of Blade Runner, Wescam markets what it considers to be the ultimate militaristic and law enforcement device for broadcasters and production personnel who feel they need omnipresence and omniscience. In contrast to the symbolic construction of industry as a Darwinian landscape to be mastered and mounted is the explicit, unabashed call to arms of those who rent and sell worker tools and weapons. Militarism still, apparently, serves as one time-honored trigger to corporate media advantage and

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Some companies, like Wescam (the designers and makers of high-tech aerial camera mounts), literally work for and supply Hollywood, broadcasting, and the U.S. military. Here, Wescam’s video demo sells its fluid, vibrationless helicopter mount as a way to regain control of the shooting situation, notably with the command-and-control, search-and-destroy rhetoric of ‘‘air-toground surveillance’’ apparently needed by modern filmmakers. (Wescam VHS demo case.)

studio reputation. This symbolism—of exclusive masculine/military enclaves—raises issues of gender in the technical culture. Reflexive imagery in the technical culture typically treats the figures of men and women di√erently in promotional schemes. Unlike the cropped, closely shot, objectified and fetishized figures that Laura Mulvey targeted in classical Hollywood cinema, production women in the digital age seem to be stylized in three other recurrent ways. First, many women figures in the technical and production trade literature since the 1980s serve as little more than three-dimensional surfaces for graphical ‘‘texture mapping.’’ Women as texture maps regularly appear as ‘‘demonstrations’’ of a product’s graphical capability. Second, many industrial texts represent a wide range of women figures that seem, in simple terms, to be ‘‘submerged.’’ This genre utilizes figures of women—many with come-hither looks aimed at the reader practitioner—who float under water, in hazes, through smoke, behind panels, and look out past screens of one sort or another.∂∏ Third, some deep texts in cgi and animation demos have hardened digital women into the Laura Croft/Tomb Raider type. These ‘‘virtual babes’’ demos tend to present semi-rigid, digitalized female figures with reflective surfaces. Some—for example, Foundation Imaging’s ‘‘Robo Babe,’’ a ‘‘synthetic avatar—can be

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While unions and craft workers circulate idealized trade images of themselves as ‘‘imagined communities,’’ production manufacturers appeal to the same workers with commercial icons of ‘‘represented communities.’’ Here, a huge digital screen announces the new Alias/Wavefront software by using a standard trope of the trades: namely, women behind screens, submerged, or cropped who constantly gaze back at the isolated and bunkered male artisan. Las Vegas, 2001. Photo © J. Caldwell.

licensed and exported as digital files in order to work in syndication for other production companies.∂π While the cyber surfaces of plastic-textured girls and virtual babes may reflect an adolescent male penchant in computer animation culture, it is more di≈cult to account for why the representations of many other women are submerged digitally or buried graphically. Spatially, these production girls appear to be looking in from the outside at digital male workers who are locked in their digital production suites (or locker rooms). Feminism appears to have made few inroads in the gender consciousness of those who design for the digital practitioner trades. By the late 1990s, by contrast, many technical manufacturers utilized simple environmental portraits in order to conflate their products with the figure of an exemplary production man. In some cases, production stills in the technical trades showed this composite figure as a hardened, trustworthy ‘‘shooter’’ with eng camera at side, ready to attack. Sony’s variant of this strike-force loner depicted a Betacam sx operator reeling around to take on a

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tornado—all with the pose and stylistics of the French painter Delacroix.∂∫ Other stills in the camera union’s publication International Photographer simply posed weary but satiated dps alongside their trusty Arriflex cameras. Kino-Flow posed a bald ‘‘stud-like’’ man—without expression—alongside its lighting instrument. Other companies underscored male ecstasies of heavyweight shipping cases, dark and evocative sets, and the tactile, intimate manly pleasures of picking up and touching sprocketed filmstock. This environmental portraiture circumvents entirely the need to explain anything about the technical process. Unlike the production landscape and artenigma genres—which critically quiz readers for interpretation—no enigmas are apparently even needed here. Knowing technical readers are simply served the romance of the craft as the simple pleasures of satiated, sensitive touching-men. Technical icons of ‘‘coupling’’—that is, representations depicting two human figures in close contact—seem to o√er explicit industrial conceptualizations about work relationships, gender, and di√erence on the set and in the studio. Icons of male-female coupling are relatively absent in the technical literature. When they do appear they downplay the tactile qualities of the human touch, even as they exploit optical qualities in techno-depictions of arousal. Silicon Graphics (sgi) posed its hetero trade-couple in a dyad reminiscent of Lifetime’s production studio promotional campaign launched the same year.∂Ω Yet while Lifetime studios based its retro image of niche ‘‘sentiment’’ based on the soft chiaroscuro lighting and glamour stills from the classical Hollywood era, sgi ‘‘coupled’’ its vision of the cyber arts with a hardsheened, plastic girl.∑≠ A computer geek’s goggles dominate the woman’s body visually, posing her as a virtual babe both of his creation and of the viewer-reader’s positioned fantasy. The graphics equipment heavyweight Abekas taunted its techno-readers with headlines to ‘‘Get a life and keep it.’’∑∞ Male and female figures in the Abekas image float autonomously—without contact or awareness of each other of any sort—in the close proximity of an aquamarine-colored pool. Abekas’s spaced-out video-production boy floats on top of the water while a bikini-clad female apparition glides past underwater through the (now) generic optical haze. In the technical literature male-male couplings are far more pervasive than male-female ones. And while M/F coupling exploits the opticality of hardened surfaces, M/M coupling exploits touch, tactility, and male bonding to symbolize productivity and industrial advantage. The pervasive

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Ironically, many of the ‘‘boutiques’’ that sprang up to perform sophisticated, nuanced graphics, effects, and postproduction work launched identifying image campaigns that transformed the sensitive, personalized niche sensibility of the boutique into the visceral, muscular material identity of the factory and foundry, as noted here in ads by WPA and Horizons. (WPA brochure; Horizons brochure.)

homosociality recurrent in the technical iconography is worth considering.∑≤ Many production stills pose male teams next to hardware, as if to say ‘‘It takes 2 (men) to handle that big zoom lens.’’∑≥ Tektronix taps into the obligatory physical teamwork required in apocalyptic fire-fighting to symbolize the di≈cult engineering requirements of modern electronic post and broadcast. An anonymous trio of soot- and sweat-covered production workers simultaneously grab ‘‘the big hose’’ (a corollary of Panavision’s cooperatively handled Iwo Jima flagsta√ ) together in its promotional icon depicting dedicated teamwork in an inferno.∑∂ The touch-and-feel magic of the homosocial iconography in production stills, the Tektronix ad, and the Panavision flag-raising campaign help to showcase what looks to be a newfound sensitivity to interpersonal relations on the part of the production cadre. Some trades now even devote full two-page spreads and articles to select ‘‘rooms of the week,’’ which are featured in commercial production boutiques.∑∑ Such accounts forego concerns with technology entirely in order to o√er lifestyle instructions on how to e√ectively, and expressively,

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use the space or work. These technical representations are discourses about male homosocial ‘‘lifestyle’’—that is, primers codifying the proper environment for workplace socialization, coupling, and teamwork. Explicit representations of work in video demos and trade iconographies provide critical metacommentaries on what practitioners see at heart of the business of production. In some ways this genre—self-representations of production work—can be construed profitably as theorizations in the trenches. They exemplify, in some ways, Dudley Andrew’s third category of classical film theory: namely, aesthetic questions about how form is put together and/or structured. The very consciousness inherent in self-representations of production work by practitioners merits this kind of consideration. Some demo tapes build their appeals directly upon ease-of-use capacities for their product. The Z-Jib training tape demo, for example, seems to ignore one obvious irony: although the demo argues that the Z-Jib does not involve a lot of preparatory work before using, the tape’s frenetic time-lapse footage showing sweating men by poolside throwing iron around in order to assemble the product provides ample evidence that undercuts this explicit hype.∑∏ Just setting up the Z-Jib is obviously an extremely demanding task. The demo for another device, the Shotmaker, starts with an array of footage showing the sweeping camera moves now possible in products with names like the ‘‘Ubangi.’’∑π The now-we’ll-show-you-how-it’s-done portion that follows on the demo shows a cadre of dedicated technicians calmly setting up the Ubangi that will render those complex e√ects. A sense of pride in the physical work process pervades many demos. Oddly, there is also clearly a public investment in celebrating working bodies and class identities, even in the logos and brands of media corporations. Schneider Lenses encases its demonstration model in precision glass and steel.∑∫ The Image Bank literally wraps its stressed male model in stock footage.∑Ω Production trade accounts extrapolate from industrial rhetoric and technological ‘‘evolution’’ that the technical community is now, somehow, ‘‘breaking the speed limit.’’∏≠ Such contemporary accounts return to a favored trope: that the age of digital and the cyber-production artist is also, somehow, like the industrial age of the manual worker.∏∞ An array of corporate production logos—from the Film Worker’s Club, Serious Robots, and Horizons—all utilize the same rock-chiseled primitive e√ect: the chunky, muscle-bound working man outlined in geometric form.∏≤ The Horizons company brands itself, for example, as chiseled man holding a planet.∏≥ The

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Here the sensitive sophistication of digital production workers is posed as the physical strength of construction iron workers and raging skyscraper-crashing giant apes. (Modern Digital brochure; Center City brochure.)

Modern Digital company leaves no doubt as to the implications of this iconographic trend. In its corporate promotion, computer imaging is symbolized via the (apparently) allied task of 1930s-era steel construction workers.∏∂ The wpa stock footage company also goes retro. It represents itself in Stalinistinspired social realism as a well-muscled foundry worker pounding steel with a sledge and anvil.∏∑ The Center City Film and Video company uses a similar 1930s graphic to show itself as King Kong–like: that is, as technically strong, physically dominating, and (somehow) ‘‘sensitive.’’∏∏ Other trades show video e√ects editors locked into headgear (á la Clockwork Orange ) as slaved worker-machines.∏π The digital audio company Sonic Foundry, in both its logos and trade promotions, builds its corporate image around what must surely be the opposite of digital image and sound precision: the primordial molten magma and flying sparks of a steel mill and forge.∏∫ What traits and tendencies do these trade and brand icons share? They all demonstrate a tremendous urge to physicalize a creative task (electronic and digital media production) that has become essentially cerebral. But why is this urge to physicalize so pervasive in these delicate digital work worlds? There is, I would argue, a persistent conceptual compensation at work in

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High-end computer graphics work masquerades as steel robotics manufacturing, while a globesupporting Atlas brands other film production workers. (Serious Robots brochure; Film Workers brochure.)

this imagery and in many deep texts, especially since the actual task of pushing buttons or moving a stylus is far from physically demanding. It is somewhat ironic that the fantasies of concrete productivity that are so evident and consistent in these self-representations occur in a world that largely produces only ‘‘symbolic’’ or entertainment capital (rather than actual products or commodities). These practices also evidence, at least implicitly, a desperate a≈rmation and an attempt to legitimize the work of media practitioners. Even if their final product is purely visual or fleeting (as forms of symbolic capital), entertainment is nevertheless produced by real human labor. And these deep texts continuously rea≈rm this fact. We cannot avoid broader social and economic influences when seeking to understand the imagery and iconography of below-the-line cultures. Competition among the many digital and postproduction boutiques in the Los Angeles area is intense; capitalization costs for equipment and infrastructure are high; and profit margins always seem at risk. With consolidation and takeover in the wind, the hundreds of companies in the area comprise a hypercompetitive, lowest-bidder marketplace. Antagonisms between companies sometimes spill over in ways they did not in the classical era of a

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handful of major studios and three networks. In the following passage, John Hughes comments on how his visual e√ects company, Rhythm and Hues Studios, refuses to deploy the warfare logic of worker ‘‘raiding’’ in the digital production marketplace: ‘‘There were some facilities in recent years—in order to get talent—that did a lot of very aggressive recruiting of talent at other facilities. That’s not something that r+h would do. We haven’t done it in the past. That’s not on our agenda now. We do get a lot of criticism within r+h for this approach. But my feeling is that we make it obvious that we are hiring. We place ads; we put ads on the web that we’re hiring. But we don’t do aggressive hiring away from other companies.’’∏Ω By 1997 Rhythm and Hues had made humane conditions for digital workers part of their company’s public goals and policy. Hughes’s comment above distances his company from the then common practice of raiding talent and workers from competing companies. But Rhythm and Hues was an exception that proved the rule that the general market situation was one of partisan aggression between competitors. Other companies in the same competitive marketplace took a very di√erent tack, sometimes using military tactics as explicit models for how they would balance bureaucracy and creative e√ort. John Fleet, from Available Light, draws on his own experience in the military and explains how he organizes his visual e√ects workers and animators ‘‘to get the job done’’: ‘‘To keep the (production) bureaucracy from taking over? The military was a big influence on how I did things. The Air Force could move thousands of people around the globe, yes. But e≈ciency was horrible especially when they wanted to get a simple task done. When they ‘really’ wanted to get something done, they’d get five or six guys in black pajamas, and say: ‘go take care of this’—and they would. They’d come back, no fuss, no muss. That’s a hell of a way to do stu√.’’π≠ Fleet also describes the small but manageable size of his operation: ‘‘We’re comfortable with only fifteen people on average’’ and ‘‘fifteen to twenty e√ects shots of medium complexity on any given job.’’ This he contrasts both to the large, oversta√ed digital animation departments of the studios and to ilm (with over one thousand employees, which was ‘‘one of the few to make the transition to digital well’’). Dedicated to the counterinsurgency production model outlined above, Fleet justifies its tactics as a way to gut administrative bureaucracy and cultivate creative vision: ‘‘The way we work internally is this. When we started we said: ‘let’s cut out the bull, so we can make art.’ ’’ For many large companies, the traditional militarist model promotes

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As multiple threats—runaway production, nonunion work, and reality TV—push workers away from traditional union affiliation, the Editors Guild displays the benefits of membership, while the camera Local 600 hosts ‘‘family night’’ at Dodger Stadium. Both groups continuously reimagine their communities and their legitimacy. Los Angeles 2002. Photo © J. Caldwell.

e≈ciencies based on regimented tasks and top-down ‘‘command-andcontrol’’ structures that oversee order within the company and its units. For small production companies, however, the militarist strategy is as likely to follow the ‘‘special ops’’ ethos deployed at Available Light. The chief benefit of the latter tactic lies in its ability to defeat industrial inertia by moving quickly and spurring unorthodox forms of innovation. Even when trade iconography is not explicitly militarist, a general context of partisan conflict in film/video inflects otherwise benign trade images of film/video workers. CONCLUSION: REPRESENTED COMMUNITIES AND HUMAN DATABASES

Each below-the-line trade group in Hollywood engages in visual workrelated cultural activities that unfold alongside technical specialization. In addition to traditional printed trade magazine accounts and news, trade iconography circulates in a variety of forms and artifacts: personal reels, spec tapes, technical demos, mediated user manuals, how-to vhs tapes and dvds on production software, production company composite reels, and promos. Such artifacts do not simply persuade individuals to buy and use products but also, invariably, serve two other functions. First, they operate

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The flexibility that comes with the unsettling, migratory churn of skilled labor also has a downside, even for the corporations that facilitate the churn. Since sophisticated knowledge continuously exits companies along with the workers, managers have initiated professional development opportunities to help the group maintain employee ‘‘knowledge databases.’’ As Disney did in the 1930s, animation companies and associations mentor artistry (and figure drawing) in retreat-like settings apart from the normal technical instruction (top). Trade groups, like the ASC and ICG, also provide ‘‘film studies’’ opportunities for their members and for many camera aspirants, in the form of ‘‘live’’ theater hookups showing the crew of NBC’s Scrubs, so that practitioners can gain ‘‘behind-the-scenes’’ knowledge from other practitioners. Los Angeles 2003. Photo © J. Caldwell.

as symbolic exchanges and collective self-representations that constantly work to define the craft specialization as an imagined community that is both discrete and significant to the industry at large. Second, such artifacts also serve clear pedagogical functions. They teach practitioners about new technologies, new techniques, and (more significantly in a cultural sense) new ways of thinking and conceptualizing production. Demo artifacts are seldom shy about the process, either. The current importance of visual below-the-line trade artifacts that circulate among film/video workers can be traced to broader institutional changes. In the unionized system of the studio era, knowledge and cultural

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The equipment company Snell and Wilcox cultivates worker anxiety in display and interior design schemes like this one, which surround individuals with images of stripped, masculine severity. (Snell and Wilcox). 2001. Photo © J. Caldwell.

attitudes about one’s trade specialty were regulated through a complicated and lengthy set of apprenticeships and assistantships. The vertical hierarchy at work in this era regimented the distribution of trade knowledge across a (sometimes) life-long sequence of advancements in rank. The experiential and theoretical knowledge of older workers was passed down to younger workers in a rational and graduated way. In the current post-studio, postnetwork age of contracted independent production, however, the horizontal structure and high salaries of the digital production era have displaced the vertical hierarchy and the controlled, graduated progressions in rank. In the present highly competitive and volatile market for digital e√ects artists and animators, for example, twenty-five-year-old workers can potentially make as much or more in pay than those who are forty-five years old (if their skills justify it and the market can bear it). Companies compete with each other not only for bids or contracts but also for the most skilled creative workers in an acutely transient labor market. With short employee tenure and little company loyalty, this new horizontal system of ‘‘independent’’ work creates organizational problems that go beyond employee churn. New systems for transferring critical trade knowledge from old workers to new workers have been developed simply to reduce

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the chaos and ine≈ciency that inevitably results when two workers who have been trained di√erently try to work together. Some companies have formalized postmortem seminars after jobs to gauge and cultivate ‘‘knowledge transfer’’ between workers. As Hughes notes: ‘‘We have a continuing education program. [It] amounts to about two to three hours per week. When projects finish up we try to have a little seminar to explain everything to everyone [in which we ask] ‘what are the technological breakthroughs?’ Or, ‘How was it done?’ That’s a very di≈cult thing to manage.’’π∞ Critical reflexivity, therefore, is not simply a property limited to the demo tapes and trade iconographies examined in this chapter, or to the making-ofs and bonus tracks that I examine in chapter 7. Group reflections on aesthetic and technical breakthroughs have become formalized interpersonal work rituals within companies as well. The director of human relations at Rhythm and Hues explains the logic of scheduling gatherings involving collective critical analysis: ‘‘It really is our kind of ‘knowledge database.’ I don’t think anyone does it very well. But we’re trying it and investigating various ways to do it better. . . . Knowledge transfer is also important for ilm and the other companies . . . because that knowledge from experience is all in the hands of the senior people. You know, how do you transfer that knowledge to the newer people? That’s a problem we haven’t solved. But we are trying to.’’π≤ By formulating the idea of (and cultivating) a production company’s ‘‘knowledge database’’ Hughes has managed collective critical analysis as a valuable form of distributed cognition within the company.π≥ The collective deliberations and self-reflections evident in the trade iconography and demo reels examined in this chapter—on the nature of the trade task, the identities of the trade worker, and the significance of the trade activity—now align with human resource activities within the companies as well. In each of the chapters heretofore I have discussed, in some way, how trade discourses and representations serve both intragroup and intergroup functions. As such, trade iconography and self-theorization also ‘‘leak’’ out from narrow below-the-line sectors of the industry. Critical pedagogy by visual e√ects workers is not just directed at other visual e√ects workers. John Fleet, for example, describes how the self-theorization in demos must occasionally be deployed to ‘‘teach’’ ignorant directors and clients: ‘‘The toughest issue is cranky clients. . . . Most clients don’t even know what they want when they come in. That’s frustrating. They’ll say: ‘Can I see another version of that? There’s a menu, right?’ And I say, ‘No,

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Traditionalized assisting and mentoring create a collective knowledge database and industry standards for craft work. Here, prepping a Panavision camera for a shoot. Photos © J. Caldwell.

that’s ten shots.’ And they’ll say: ‘No, it’s the same shot. I just want to see the menu.’ And I say, ‘No.’ It’s an education process, and it’s tough. A lot of time, because of where we live in the budget chain, or food chain, we get a lot of first time directors. . . . They haven’t been educated. Once they start to learn [from us], the funny and sad thing about these guys, is that when they get another show with more money, they’ll say: ‘Well, now that I’ve got more money . . . I can do my film at a WalMart E√ects house.’ It makes you kind of nuts. But that’s what we deal with.’’π∂ In being forced to teach potential clients and directors about the aesthetic and stylistic possibilities of their technologies in order to get business, Fleet’s company opens up the imagined community of its e√ects workers and makes this largely coded and symbolic trade-thinking available to outsiders who need to a≈liate with the company for commercial reasons. In

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this way, conventionalized, internal self-reflections are indeed transportable. They become valuable ways in which outside clients learn to theorize and envision their own proposed films and series in line with the perspective of another specialized craft group that will render and complete the project for them. The task of successfully integrating disparate, independent trade units within a much larger film production/television enterprise is facilitated by imagining how each trade specialty first envisions itself. In these ways contract negotiations involve critical and theoretical dialogue about technique to close the deal. Trade imagery and worker self-reflections constantly color and value the kinds of deals that are made and what they mean culturally.

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Film artists tell stories first with their minds, not their gear. However, even though people know that, they still make gear-based distinctions, because gear does matter. One of the most important things about gear is that it can define who can and who cannot compete on the production, and increasingly on the distribution side of media. —Cynthia Wisehart, editor, Millimeter1

Chapter 4

Trade Machines and Manufactured Identities (Below the Line)

I would like in this chapter to pursue the issue of ‘‘gear-based distinctions’’ in order to ask the question ‘‘How do machines mean?’’ This is an entirely di√erent question from the standard one of ‘‘How do machines make meaning?’’ Instrumental theories of technology have dominated much of our thinking about new media and new technologies. In this view, machines serve as a means to achieve some other end. Filmmakers and producers use film/video production machines to make some other phenomenon, product, or e√ect: entertainment, pleasure, ideology, violent behavior, emotional salving, or psychological catharsis. This orientation empties film/video machines themselves of any innate significance. Machines, quite simply, are a means to an end. This low view of machines perhaps made sense during the industrial age, when industry standardized machines so that each one would produce uniform results wherever used. The development of machine tools underscored the sense that the true significance of the manufacturing exercise was always somewhere else, even as the objective of manufacturing was the production of yet another material object. This paradigm of predetermination perpetuated the long-standing bias of Newtonian physics and the deism that informed it. Ours was (and still is to some) a ‘‘clockwork-like’’ universe.

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Yet the advent and development of the computer and cybernetics after World War II gradually displaced the instrumental theory of machines. In its place theories of ‘‘artificial intelligence’’ (ai) were proposed that explored how computational machines could mimic human intelligence processes even as they aimed eventually at reflective and evaluative capacities approaching those traditionally associated with human cognition and subjectivity. The field of ai is an extensive one that is far beyond the scope of this chapter, but I do want to take ai’s premise and at least consider it in relationship to film/video production machines. Many film/video production shoots today use what are essentially nineteenth-century technologies, including gear-driven mechanical cameras, C-stands, tungsten lights, cranes, gas-powered generators, and the table saws and skill saws of set builders. These mechanical tools are being used instrumentally to achieve some subsequent and more valuable end. Yet I would argue here that these same machines are as ‘‘intelligent’’ as pcs, at least in the ways they are designed and cooperatively used. At the same time, many other film/video shoots today use an extensive array of computer-assisted devices such as digital cameras, digital recorders, digital audio workstations, digital e√ects, and digital processing devices. Yet all of these computerized applications continue to be used instrumentally to achieve standardized century-old work tasks.≤ That is, computer processing and assistance are still being used as a means to get to some other very basic end, in this case the desired look and sound of a film or television program. My point in this chapter is not to argue that one generation of technology has either more or less intelligence than another, but rather that all of these tools—whether analog or digital, mechanical or computerized—express and facilitate intelligence through their design and cooperative use. There are at least three ways that film/video production tools operate beyond instrumentalism: in machine design, in systems of use, and as coded cultural performances on a set. First, contemporary cameras are designed and built based on over one hundred years of engineering precedents. The result is a tool that embeds into its use a wide range of image-making tendencies and dispositions—and, if we apply the theories of Phil Agre and Tarleton Gillespie, it is a tool that favors certain uses and technical metaphors and aesthetic ideas over others.≥ Second, as part of a collective and interactive production process many film/video tools animate what might be termed networks of ‘‘distributed’’ or ‘‘situated’’ cognition. William Clancey (far from his ai roots in logic, computation, and interpretive routines)

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Technologies also function as cultural performances and expressions. The Panavision brand brings its historic Academy-sanctioned widescreen distinction to bear, even among workers who toil in the lesser, more transitory, small-format worlds of portable video. Panavision sales display at Showbiz Expo, Los Angeles, 2001. Photo © J. Caldwell.

argues that cognition itself is situated and can only be understood as ‘‘a dynamic, transactional view of expertise and tools’’; a notion illustrated in this chapter by the ways that users and technologies interact as distributed, cognitive phenomena.∂ Even 35mm cameras, that is, function as smart ‘‘agents’’ in a cognitive ‘‘network’’ comprised of specialists who operate, frame, pull focus, load, and move according to sometimes elaborate blocking schemes. Bruno Latour’s ‘‘actor-network theory’’ underscores both the agency of machines and the ways that our social delegation of competencies to these manufactured ‘‘lieutenants’’ (or ‘‘retinue of delegated characters’’) continually returns to prescribe our present social relations.∑ Like camera design, cooperative use on a set is a product of incremental changes over a hundred years or more. The ways that tools ‘‘think’’ are historical even as their design and operator-interfaces function according to sociological conventions. Finally, production tools serve as cultural performances. The Steadicam, jib-arms, cranes, 35mm negative film mags, hmi ‘‘daylight’’ lamps, and Panavision lenses all connote certain cultural assumptions on and o√ the set: namely, big-screen production value, fluid movement, controlled performance, and the sense that the human workers on the set are there to

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follow and assist machines as the machines do their work, rather than vice versa. Meanwhile, lipstick cams, low-light/low-resolution dv formats, infrared night-vision lenses, existing lighting, and handheld shots connote di√erent cultural codes: that is, an unfolding documentary-like reality, frantic attempts to catch up with and see performances, and the sense that human workers and operators on the set are choreographed while machines are in place mostly to follow and record the interaction of operators and performers. These two modes are di√erent not only in the ways that audiences see or interpret the final on-screen products once the respective shoots are over, but also in the ways that technologies on the set are used to establish, cultivate, and reinforce cultural ideas about the function and agency of the crew members there. While the more traditional cinematic mode assigns great agency and autonomy to the visioning technologies, the manic digital video mode assigns greater agency to the camera operators who help drive the scene through their extended reactions within it. The big-screen mode both exploits and depends upon the highly stratified labor and craft structure of the classical system. The manic handheld video mode, however, levels these hierarchies so that many of the traditional di√erences between, say, the dp, the camera operator, the focus puller, the second ac, and the loader have become far less meaningful. This is especially the case on a dv shoot where a single cinematographer may light, hand hold, compose, frame, pull focus, and seldom need to reload since he or she shoots with hour-long tapes or dispenses with tape or film entirely and records with mounted computer hard drives. The work task, worker status, worker interrelationships, and the cultural significance of work all change depending on how production technologies are used and why. Answering these questions means looking at technology design, trade explanations and representations of technologies, and the broader economic, cultural, and industrials contexts in which technologies are used. While in the previous chapter I raised some of these issues by looking at demo tapes and trade iconographies, in this chapter I will consider workertechnology issues through six specific frameworks: contract labor and outsourcing (how tools downsize the workforce); digital sweatshops and the freelance bidding environment (how tools externalize risk by o√-loading creative task and artisanal anxiety); immersive cameras and eye probes (how proto-digital/virtual tools give prestige on-screen content distribution legs); speed shooting and hyperproduction (how tools disperse creative respon-

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sibility to innovate via desperation); metadata and collapsed labor hierarchies (how digital tools break workflow order, divert stylistic authority from dps to producers, and collapse traditional distinctions between production and postproduction); and, finally, s&m and sabbaticals (how task e≈ciency in the tool environment is maintained via therapeutic practice). One consistent theme emerges through each of these sections: new production technologies function not merely as stimuli for or symptoms of industrial change but rather as heightened moments of institutional realignment and opportunities for industrial advantage (over workforce, costs, competitors, and market). Critical self-theorizing by workers about new technologies and their aesthetic dimensions invariably animates and marks the duration and intensity of these conflicts and realignments, especially during the current widespread collapse of traditional production/postproduction craft boundaries. CONTRACT LABOR AND OUTSOURCING: NEW TOOLS AND WORKFORCE DOWNSIZING EXAMPLE: BETACAM AND DESKTOP GRAPHICS / EDITING

‘‘Downsizing’’ frequently expresses a macroscopic corporate or policy perspective, depending on whether one sees downsizing as a business solution or as a societal problem. Mergers and hostile takeovers frequently precipitate downsizing and ‘‘outsourcing’’ activities. Yet, executive consolidation survivors typically describe such activities as ‘‘right-sizing’’—a sunnier term that proves far more resonant with stockholders. Corporations justify downsizing as a way to realize greater e≈ciencies in the organization by eliminating dead wood, functional redundancies, union entitlements, or obsolete manufacturing processes. Some media corporations unabashedly promote outsourcing as their primary business plan.∏ For policymakers or politicians, however, downsizings are frequently criticized as self-serving ways to lay o√ workers and exploit more cost-e√ective productions ‘‘o√shore.’’ Downsizing has since 1990 played a fundamental role in film/video production cultures in Southern California. I am particularly interested here in how downsizing strategies fuel the popularization of ‘‘contract labor’’ and ‘‘outsourcing,’’ which in turn alter the material conditions and cultural significance of technical work within film/video production.

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While the use of contract labor increased in Hollywood after the breakup of the old studio system, the pace of this process has accelerated in the last two decades for at least three reasons. First, nonunion labor became an increasingly viable alternative starting in the 1980s, with greater numbers of workers immigrating to prime-time television and feature film from nonunion backgrounds in commercials and music videos. Second, new technologies generally decreased the number of workers needed to operate film/video technologies, even as they made some traditional technical tasks obsolete. Third, the di≈culty and complexity of newer (and increasingly digital) picture and sound technologies placed expertise and capitalization costs beyond the reach of conservative-minded business executives at the major studios. Especially in the area of digital visual e√ects and digital animation, dependence on contracts with independent workers and small companies greatly increased during the period. Consider, for example, how one animator and e√ects artist described the shift toward what he terms ‘‘migrant filmwork’’: ‘‘I became one of . . . the migrant filmworkers. I would go freelance . . . and move from shop to shop with my toolbox. I’d figure out how to do shots and I’d basically be selling my creative input. . . . The toolbox got bigger and bigger. And we put a building around it. That’s how Available Light got started.’’π The picture here is of a lone freelance ‘‘journeyman’’ forced to go from shop to shop to sell his skills/wares. Creativity thus becomes transportable and transferable in this formulation, and job security nonexistent, since both issues are no longer constrained or guaranteed by long-term employee relationships. This situation is a far cry from the nostalgic descriptions of a golden age when studios cultivated both inhouse technical accomplishment and a sense of interpersonal cohesion through the notion of ‘‘a close-knit colony of artists.’’∫ Such comments reveal the a√ective dimensions lost in the shift to a system where most ‘‘employees’’ are actually ‘‘independent contractors’’ or, by irs definition, individuals functioning as small businesses. Along with the loss of the ‘‘close-knit’’ communities came the abrogation of many traditional labor policies and protections. Although in many cases wages went up, so did the number of hours worked per week—a problem that was accompanied by the loss of any structural sense of responsibility for workers by management at many firms. Postproduction managers in the new environment complained of how di≈cult it was to keep any semblance of a unified employee front when negotiating for jobs.Ω Studios, networks, and

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The old, stable systems of production included broadcasting, in which large networks of local affiliate stations used salaried employees to operate heavy technologies that anchored and stabilized command-and-control centers. Here, a heavy truck-mounted studio camera is used in the field with simultaneous satellite and microwave transmission back to a control room housed in steel and concrete. Photo © J. Caldwell.

major production companies sometimes ask for specific colorists, e√ects artists, editors, sound designers, or animators when negotiating a job. Actually committing specific individuals became increasingly hard for independent companies to do in negotiations, so organizations found other ways, through longer contracts, to protect themselves from volatility. If companies did not at least address the importance of worker issues and conditions, they risked losing the best or most sought-after workers. As one company manager noted: ‘‘Part-time workers were another big issue for us. . . . We use a lot of people who are free-lance, but they are really freelance almost exclusively for us. They’ll work for a couple of weeks. Then . . . be o√ a couple of weeks. Then . . . work for a couple of weeks again. This is just the nature of commercial production. These . . . workers were really a part of our ‘family.’ But insurance companies wouldn’t cover them with a ten-foot pole. We couldn’t get them insured.’’∞≠ While some companies like this one figured out ways to protect their new ‘‘independent’’ workers with at least a safety net of self-insurance, most did not. Contract labor and downsizing were direct outgrowths of the new and more flexible post-Fordist industrial economy that had emerged in Hollywood. Whereas the rationalized Taylorist e≈ciencies of the classical studio or network assembly line safeguarded profits, the new world of contract production sought profits through greater forms of corporate ‘‘flexibility.’’ Film/video workers served a key role in allowing the industry greater profits

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through increasing flexibilities in production. Sometimes worker incentives were technology driven. The ever-increasing shrinkage of postproduction and graphics workstations to a pc /desktop scale in the 1990s, for example, lowered the barriers for entry into the editing, animation, and e√ects trades for many new workers. One independent e√ects worker in 1998 boasted of how Macintosh and Avid ‘‘insurgents’’ brought down the big boys in postwork: ‘‘Desktop? What isn’t desktop any more? Five years ago, when Harry and Kaleidescope were the graphics post status quo and we struggled to produce work on Mac IIcis and 386s, desktop meant small bands of rebel insurgents. But what does it mean now that Macs and pcs can humble large unix machines, and Avid rules the editing roost?’’∞∞ Such David-and-Goliath taunts, while inspiring many younger workers and aspirants, suggested a quagmire to many companies that had been successful before the onslaught of the desktop warriors. As one company head noted: ‘‘I tell them, when making a bid, that I’ll put more of their dollars on the screen than anyone else. I just tell them, ‘you’re not going to get the lowest bid from me. So if that’s what you want, go elsewhere. I’m sure that there’s some guy out there who’s going to give you some greasy figure, and rape you later. And we don’t do that.’ ’’∞≤ Likening the indie-technologist newcomers to ‘‘greasy’’ low bidders who ‘‘rape’’ clients shows just how contentious the contract e√ects market had become by the late 1990s. In 2003, the Academy Award winner Walter Murch edited the Oscar-nominated feature film Cold Mountain on Apple’s Final Cut Pro. The trades focused considerable attention on the possibilities and implications, as noted here, for example, by a writer for Millimeter : ‘‘If fcp is good enough for Walter Murch, it’s good enough for all the aspirants. Conversely, they seem to hope, if Walter Murch can make it on fcp, then we can too. They imagine themselves beholden to no one, with a system they can a√ord to buy with cash and run without an assistant or much of an infrastructure—on their laptops, if they like.’’∞≥ Newcomers celebrated this ‘‘liberation,’’ while established companies anxiously tried to figure out how to deal with competitors who no longer necessarily needed expensive company infrastructure (o≈ces, buildings, assistants) to pull o√ contracted work. As a result of this continuing trend—ever-miniaturizing technologies and disappearing infrastructure —profit margins are almost always in perpetual doubt. Changing labor relations and downsizing altered post-production, but such forces were at work in production as well. The history of Betacam

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The new modes of production, including DVcam, DVCPro, and HDV, continue to shrink the location crew footprint and the corresponding increase in mobility begun by Sony’s Betacam in the 1980s. Here in 2002 Panasonic flogs its primetime aura and technical Emmy awards from ATAS as cultural bait to sell lesser gear to industrial and event videographers who use the exchange as marks of ‘‘professionalism.’’ Las Vegas, 2002. Photo © J. Caldwell.

provides an instructive example of how film/video production technologies participate in broad-scale industrial changes. After its introduction in 1981, Betacam became the standard professional field camera for location video work. Its adoption on a wide scale was no small accomplishment given the brutal competition of the ‘‘format wars’’ in television equipment manufacturing—a high-stakes, capital-intensive struggle that produced in less than a decade a wide range of competing/incompatible high-end recording formats. The Panasonic Recam, Bosch QuarterCam, and rca Hawkeye ‘‘alternatives’’ all proved to be costly losers to Sony in the race to be the first successful broadcast-quality ‘‘camcorder’’ (a single unit containing both camera and videocassette recorder). After emerging as the dominant eng camera system worldwide over the decade, Sony’s Betacam began to face challenges from even smaller-format alternatives. Network news divisions in the 1991 Gulf War occasionally used palm-held Hi8mm camcorders. Betacam’s portability was partly responsible for the success of reality television’s first wave in 1988–90. But even smaller formats (dv /dvCam/dvPro) ushered in a bigger secondwave of ‘‘reality television’’ beginning in the late 1990s. None of these competing formats were superior in image quality to the analog Betacam. Yet technical quality

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is seldom the guarantor of survival in the format wars. The end may have finally come when the cable news channel cnn (a long-time supporter and influential user of Betacam) announced in May 2001 that it would no longer purchase $35,000 Betacam sx camcorders as replacements for its eng crews. In opting instead for Sony’s $3,500 ‘‘industrial’’ dsr150/dvCam cameras, cnn announced plans to shift from three-person crews to two-person crews helmed by new ‘‘multitalented’’ journalists who would somehow be able to shoot images in first-person as well as report. Cynics of cnn’s pr noted that the minicamcorders also brought immense cost savings—a much-needed measure at cnn in the fiscal crisis following the aol /Time-Warner merger, after which cnn laid o√ four hundred employees. In advocating for their professional constituencies the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (nabet) and other labor representatives publicly condemned cnn’s move because of the way its new eng method undercut heretofore-standard working methods and crew size. Despite these protests, it was clear that the dv technologies o√ered compelling e≈ciencies and had a cost-saving logic in television’s new industrial-economic order. Public trade fighting over digital formats was not limited to the field of electronic news gathering. Whereas news operations opted for ‘‘lower’’ digital alternatives, prime-time dramas shifted away from Betacam to higherresolution alternatives—namely hdcam and ‘‘1080i’’ (1,080 lines interlaced)—to meet the new standards mandated for ‘‘digital television’’ by the fcc. Complicating matters further, an entirely di√erent production culture (the film origination community in Hollywood) argued for the adoption of its almost century-old frame rate (24fps). With no agreement between the other two dominant production cultures (news production and prime time), Hollywood producers and studios began shifting productions from film to digital ‘‘24phd’’ in 2000–2001. Betacam’s lower resolution was eclipsed by hdtv, and a groundswell of support for 24fps digital by the ‘‘creative’’ production sector in Los Angeles has almost completed the obsolescence of 29.97fps Betacam. In retrospect, Betacam played an important role in television’s technological history because of its integral role in altering aesthetic practices and standardizing production methods for more than two decades. Betacam’s rise and fall as a dominant technology worldwide provides an opportunity to consider how technologies alter labor relations. Facing the widespread adoption of new digital formats, Sony finally discontinued

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manufacturing Betacam sp camcorders in fall 2001, but only after having sold 450,000 units internationally. This market reach and longevity stand as anomalies in an industry defined by technical incompatibilities and rapid obsolescence. Even as Betacam disrupted the ways that eng workers performed in the early 1980s, Betacam itself was finally made obsolete by new digital video standards—an event that further disrupted traditional methods of employment and location shooting. These disruptions generated considerable attention and anxiety among the below-the-line trade communities. Even technical standardization is a cultural negotiation. In this case, the Hollywood, news, and prime-time broadcasting communities—three very di√erent cultures of production—each helped negotiate Betacam as the dominant efp (electronic field production) standard in the 1980s, and then facilitated Betacam’s demise in the face of new digital standards in 2001. DIGITAL SWEATSHOPS: HOW TOOLS EXTERNALIZE RISK, OFF-LOAD CREATIVE TASKS, AND CULTIVATE ARTISANAL ANXIETY EXAMPLE: THE POST / FX BOUTIQUE AND FREELANCE BIDDING ENVIRONMENT

It may be di≈cult for those outside of film/video production to imagine how a heavily capitalized high-end digital postproduction or e√ects house could function as a ‘‘digital sweatshop.’’ Yet the term has circulated in trade accounts since 1997 when everyone in Los Angeles was scrambling to set up new, cutting-edge postproduction, animation, and e√ects departments. As one producer noted: ‘‘In today’s production environment, many companies have already developed reputations as having a ‘sweatshop’ mentality. In many instances, there are no alternatives as release dates loom. Often this is passed o√ as: ‘Oh well, that’s production.’ ’’∞∂ As discussed earlier, the highly specialized skills of cgi and digital postproduction demanded a di√erent kind of commitment and infrastructure than the major studios or networks were willing to provide. As a result ‘‘digital boutiques’’ sprang up in the 1980s to provide ‘‘niche’’ production services not included within larger and more comprehensive production studios or companies. Studio producers or directors would simply contract out the specialized e√ects scenes to such boutiques, and then reincorporate those shots or scenes within the film or television program after they had

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Anxious lives toiling in the ‘‘digital sweatshop.’’ ‘‘Doing animation with StudioBoss . . . is like sending 2,000 volts of creative juices directly to your brain,’’ says one digital provider, whose marketing campaign evoked either psychiatric electrical shock therapy or self-inflicted execution: digital work as death row. Above, the torquing and spasmodic body of an incongruously clad geek using Avid’s Express editing software. (Top, Avid brochure; bottom, Transoft brochure.)

been rendered digitally. The trade term ‘‘boutique’’ connotes specialized competence, high quality, and personal attention. Some e√ects artists contrast the individualized boutique approach to the mindless, predictable clichés produced by big studio ‘‘WalMarts.’’ One animator likened the sluggishness of the big studios as follows: ‘‘I started at ilm in the 1970s and it grew from fifty to two hundred people, then [I] went to Disney, where visual e√ects supervision was like moving or producing a glacier.’’∞∑ Yet how can ‘‘boutiques’’ of this stature function as ‘‘sweatshops’’? Emerging largely outside of the iatse union structure, the new boutiques did not have to deal with the constraints of limited workday hours, overtime, and benefits of the sort that a union worker would expect by contract. In some companies, digital workers would average seventy hours per week or more.∞∏ The pay was high but so was employee burnout. Many animators and e√ects artists in their twenties and thirties would eat and sleep at work in order to meet pressing deadlines. Some workers compared the digital production craze to a stress inducing land rush or a ‘‘digital Tsunami.’’ Harriet Ching of

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Universal Studios complained about the aggressive attempts by many companies to enter the boutique fx bidding fray based on a mindless obsession with equipment that they had merely ‘‘hodge-podged together’’ in order to place ‘‘low-ball’’ bids.∞π The visual e√ects supervisor John Fleet mocks the technology-driven approaches of the time by describing how the human dimension tends to get flattened at the big operations that operate top-down: ‘‘All over town—especially at the studios, where administrators wanted to setup their own facilities so that they could produce the Terminator—they said: ‘Well, let’s see. ilm’s got a bunch of sgis, so I guess we’ll buy a bunch of sgis.’ And guess what? A number of these places went out and bought these workstations for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. And guess what? Arnold didn’t come out the other side! And there was this slow dawning: ‘Hey, we gotta have artists behind these things.’ ’’∞∫ Here Fleet describes a common problem at the time. Few digital companies had learned how to e√ectively balance the three basic labor functions operative within each studio or boutique (artists, technologists, and administrators). Fleet continues by stating, ‘‘The biggest disaster is when any of these three groups stop talking. . . . Especially since the digital wave came, we’ve seen more money spent on mistakes.’’ Initially, the power of boutiques was due to their small size and flexible methods. As firms got bigger, however, overheads and bureaucratic business policies expanded disproportionately. Worse still, the technical cadre at each company (computer programmers, computer engineers, software developers) began to assume quasi-autonomous roles over and above those of the artists who had typically founded the company. As Fleet states: ‘‘When the switch (to digital) came, suddenly the technologists became gods. Suddenly there was nothing they said that was challenged. Every time we turned around, they’d say: ‘To solve this problem, we need the CrayFish 3000 supercomputer and a sta√ of ninety.’ But when the CrayFish 3000 and the sta√ of ninety with lab coats and clipboards showed up, they’d say: ‘Oh, you want the e√ect this week?’ They went crazy for a while. But it has sort of evened out.’’ To survive and maintain their edge, some boutiques resisted growth and limited their employee base to between fifteen and thirty people. Supporting humane artistry became a policy goal at Rhythm and Hues and at Available Light. These operations attempted to establish working conditions and worker relations that would allow the artists employed to engage their colleagues as a professional ‘‘family.’’ Digital workers in larger, more

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The payoff for all-nighters and limitless work hours in outsourced digital production is the promise of earning recognition via one of two resilient cultural-industrial tropes: the geek-artist as an acrobatic high-wire act (operating without a net) or as a sequestered magician who marshals magic tricks for awestruck clients. Here, MetaCreation’s Poser4 software suite. Photo © J. Caldwell.

anonymous studios were more likely to refer to their deadline-driven tasks and stress-inducing workspaces as digital sweatshops. As discussed in chapter 3, companies like Chiat/Day overhauled their working spaces in order to replace them with more-nuanced worker ‘‘nests,’’ while Electronic Arts engineered recreational activities into the workspace. The cattle-herding metaphors used to describe worker cubicles at the Nickelodeon animation studio, however, would be more symptomatic of worker conditions at many large digital studios. Meanwhile business plans were constantly adjusted to lessen the risk and volatility inherent in the industry. Paul Siblow, an animator, e√ects supervisor, and president of Resonate studios, underscored his concern about economic survival: ‘‘This industry is . . . like a roller-coaster ride for most of these projects. Some are three-month jobs, some are two weeks. Each job is almost like a business in and of itself. It’s a huge skillet to be in. I don’t really want to have to compete like all the others in this market. I’d rather have something with more predictability. I’d rather have an intelligent risk strategy, where only 20 to 30 percent of my business is out there for risk.’’∞Ω Almost all of the business for some other small studios, however, was out there for risk; a situation that made the string of sobering analogies named above—digital tsunami, frying skillet, roller coaster, cattle pens, and sweatshops—well suited for the stressed world of the new digital production worker. Editing and postproduction houses contribute to the sweatshop reputa-

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tion, but they do so in ways that di√er from those of the digital e√ects and animation houses. By shrinking the editing task to desktop scale, Mac and personal computer based postproduction workstations today allow and encourage the user to cross all sorts of previously sacred and well-guarded trade boundaries. Avid or Final Cut Pro editors today do not just cut shots together but also mix sound, cut dialogue, compose graphics, design and incorporate special e√ects, and maintain the engineering and technical quality of the image and sound they are cutting. This constant multitasking contrasts with the highly segregated cutting and prepping tasks that once defined a Moviola-based studio editing department. In addition, the userinterface designs of these nonlinear workstations actively promote the use of the cross-categorical functions in real time. Cross-media editor multitasking like this inspires some independent artists and filmmakers, but others are sobered by the development since it potentially discards the segregated allocation of postproduction tasks under the traditional unionized system. In this way, the artistic convergence operative on contemporary nonlinear computers can also be viewed as a form of (perhaps unintended) ‘‘downsizing.’’ The history of nonlinear editing usually places Avid at the top of the heap. Yet even as Avid’s systems were standard in high-resolution online work, a range of new technologies and standards undercut Avid’s market share in the late 1990s. Sony’s dvCam format and Apple’s ‘‘firewire’’ protocol (both with 4:1:1 compression), while marketed initially as ‘‘industrial’’ and ‘‘nonbroadcast’’ technologies, provided cost-e√ective alternatives for image processing and data storage. Editing systems utilizing these standards rapidly spread in popularity. Sensing the corporate decline of its formal ally in Cupertino, Avid rebu√ed the very partner (Apple) that had made Avid synonymous with nonlinear work, by announcing that it would discontinue Macintosh support and make systems only for nt platforms in 1997–98. Bad decision. Determined one day to ‘‘own’’ digital editing by itself (both hardware and software), Apple got the last laugh. In 1999 Steve Jobs announced the launch of Final Cut Pro, an inexpensive editing program for Macintoshes that was built to exploit the new dv compression scheme and firewire. Today fcp makes filmmaking available to any consumer, even as it is widely utilized in professional postproduction. Even online editors use fcp outside of online suites. Initially denigrated by high-end Avid editors, fcp systems now are widely available with ‘‘uncompressed’’ and ‘‘high-definition’’ boards man-

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ufactured by Pinnacle and others. This development further complicates the film/television industry’s institutional tendency to segregate primetime/high-definition work from industrial/consumer applications. Many of the new prime-time reality shows of the early 2000s, such as Temptation Island, employed fcp since the thousands of ‘‘unplanned’’ hours of voyeuristic dvCam footage now had to be waded through by gangs of low-wage production assistants before they could ever be assembled by the show’s o≈cial editors.≤≠ Even the cheaper reality shows, like Blind Date (2002), seemed to dispense with cinematographers and editors entirely because the inexpensive nonlinear systems allowed their cohort of very young associate producers to assemble the show without the drag of dealing with actual union editors or dps. As a result of this new and accelerating over-production of mindless footage and the excessively high shooting ratios required by reality tv, a new labor category displaced ‘‘production assistant’’ as the dominant entry level production job in Los Angeles: ‘‘videotape logger.’’ If working as a pa was demoralizing, working as a logger is now even worse. At least pas can hold onto the fantasy that they may some day move up, while loggers never will, even after years spent in videotape logging sweatshops.≤∞ Like the digital studio struggle in the 1990s where artists were eclipsed by computer technologists, technical breakthroughs in editing today, like fcp, tempt smaller production companies to dispense with the higher cost of ‘‘real’’ editors. In these ways, digital production and nonlinear postproduction have followed the prescription for success outlined in Robert Altman’s The Player. Film and television would run along smoothly if it weren’t for the obstacles dragged into the process by screenwriters, real artists, and professional editors. In these ways, downsizing and outsourcing have had a profound and anxious e√ect on postproduction culture. Accordingly, editing is posed as a sweatshop activity in many self-representations of below-the-line work. Various demo tapes cultivate the perception that the postproduction artisan labors alone, in the darkness, and in anonymity—cut o√ from human contact and driven to anxiety by long hours of desperation. A number of demo tapes bring to life this spatial ‘‘selfportrait’’ (of the digital artist/editor as a bunkered, solitary figure). A flashing emergency light in the image, explosive e√ects on a synthesizer track, and ‘‘Do Not Enter’’ warning signs cue the viewer of ‘‘ProMax’s’’ Final Cut Pro equipment demo as a handheld camera races through a security door

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‘‘Magic DaVE,’’ by Snell and Wilcox, rips open his skull to expose the creatively composited visions waiting to be birthed from his brain. Photo © J. Caldwell.

into a basement-like room that houses a meager pile of computer hardware. A sign, framed in close-up, shouts what can only be a fantasy for the daylight-challenged worker in this subterranean work world: ‘‘Warning: Extreme Editing Ahead.’’ The frenetic but low-budget production values of the tape, however, show this in no way to evoke espn’s The X-Games. The ‘‘vip’’ demo by Lightworks goes one step further by equating the frantic, shouting world of the aggravated male editor with anxieties over bladder control and urinary function. A rapid-fire succession of voice-over lines— ‘‘Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go’’—hound a deadline-traumatized editor shot in fish-eye lens. His predicament? ‘‘Next time go Lightworks vip.’’ The nonlinear manufacturer of Blue (a high-end ‘‘format-independent’’ postproduction system) furthers the myth of the editor as alienated man and tortured artist. In low-key, blue-tinted nocturnal lighting, a lone man in an edit suite paces nervously under the repetitive chop of an overhead ceiling fan. An empathic male narrator steps through a litany of ulcerinducing pitfalls that haunt the user, including threats of standards incompatibility, equipment obsolescence, and the crushing loan arrangements needed to keep pace with the competitors that hound the post-house manager. Lingering shots of the sweating, twisted body of the (now) T-shirt clad editor—shown tangled in endless cables as he troubleshoots—builds eventually to a crisis and major plot point. ‘‘How do you know that you’re not going to encounter time-consuming and annoying problems?’’ the narrator intones. The viewer confronts a tortured male face á la Edvard Munch’s The Scream as the voice-over prophet builds to a climax: ‘‘How do you know you’re not going to encounter non-linear nightmare ?’’ The demo then quickly cuts to a sunny room, accompanied by upbeat techno-music, where

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a smiling young woman e√ortlessly works the editing controls that manipulate the freeze-frame of the manic-man-with-nightmare. The not-so-subtle message of the tape: ‘‘It’s so easy to use—even a girl can do it.’’ Demo tapes and visual trade texts like these regularly create pictures of alienated, isolated male trauma. These anxious trade self-portraits typically emerge inside lightless postproduction bunkers in compositions depicting work-world captivity from which video editors (apparently) need to be freed. In these video portraits, the quasi-private workspace of professional artisan-technicians is dramatized as a place of forced labor. The recurring motif of sweating masculine anxiety is then circulated to the broader public sphere of professionals who exchange and evaluate vhs and dvd demo tapes on a regular basis. IMMERSIVE CAMERAS AND EYE PROBES: HOW PROTO-VIRTUAL MECHANICAL TOOLS GIVE DISTRIBUTION ‘‘LEGS’’ TO PRESTIGE ONSCREEN CONTENT EXAMPLE: WESCAM, STEADICAM, AND PROBE LENSES

A third set of technical practices demonstrates an ‘‘immersive urge’’ in production worker self-representations, technical design, and onscreen style. A desire to move deeply into the image is evident in a range of machines designed to mount and move motion picture and video cameras fluidly through space. Since the early 1990s, the virtual reality (vr) ideals that have been so central to computer graphic imaging (cgi) and visualization have been extensively theorized. This pursuit of virtual, immersive space is manifest in numerous digital and videographic e√ects. Yet immersive tendencies are also found in a very di√erent (and certainly less virtual) production mode—namely, optical-mechanical cinema/television production. Gear-driven cameras and dollies achieve immersive forms of spatial experience, but they do so by mechanistic rather than virtual-electronic means. This appetite for immersion has stimulated research and development in contemporary camera design. Probe technologies demonstrate a predilection for invasive entering and movement within the deep space of the seen, and they can be understood as proto-vr tendencies. Two technical developments helped fuel the penchant for immersive

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production styles: the ‘‘video assist’’ and the Steadicam. Made possible by the fiber optics that displaced the optical viewfinder image outside of the film camera proper (and into a tiny ccd video camera and then video screen), the video assist was one of the key technologies that enabled cameras to detach from the human eye of the operator. Traditionally, a camera operator had to accompany or ride with a camera in order to see through and operate it. Now, however, the operator can focus and frame the film camera with the aid of a video monitor. With video assist now allowing the operator to frame and focus remotely, he or she can now send the camera far away from his or her body—while the camera is running. This changing relationship (or disconnection) between operator eye and camera eye may have seemed rather inconsequential to video producers, yet it proved highly instrumental in a number of stylistic changes. A newly mobilized camera was now available that film/television cinematographers no longer had to physically ride, handle, or hold. Video assists now enable cameras to slide rapidly through space and rotate on the Z axis. In many ways production now grants the camera eye considerable autonomy. The Cinema Products (cp) ‘‘Steadicam’’ is regarded as an essential stylistic option in contemporary film/television production. Steadicam is a counterbalanced device that works by shifting the center of gravity outside of the camera body and onto the operator’s body via a movable arm and a patented three-axis gimble. The operator’s vertical and horizontal movements are isolated from the camera by a spring and hinged arm attached to a special vest. As the cinematographer Eric Fletcher notes, ‘‘This arrangement of springs is much like a drafting table lamp designed to provide a calibrated amount of lift to make the camera and sled float in space.’’≤≤ Steadicam passively decouples the camera’s rotation from the camera support, and this design makes the device extremely simple, and therefore reliable, from a mechanical point of view. Most striking is the nearly unrestricted mobility and movement of the camera, which allows for 360 degrees of tilt and 270 degrees of pan at heights from four inches to six feet above the ground. A Steadicam demo tape distributed in 1992 theorizes the tool’s function (as it sells the product) but not just in spatial terms. The demo also argues that Steadicam is the best way ‘‘to put the most production value up on the screen.’’≤≥ By running into space, or hanging cameras o√ of mobile mounts, Steadicam’s demo boasts that it can quantify production value (as if production value is raw material that can be bulk loaded into films/videos through increasingly mobile camera movement). The demo also states that one key

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Two technologies, more than any other, enabled the camera to shift from human-scale subjectivity to a rich variety of disembodied, highly mobile, autonomous, aerial camera-eye configurations: the ‘‘video assist’’ (see video monitor fed by fiber-optic tap in camera), and the ‘‘remote’’ head or control (here, the operator uses both devices to send hundreds of pounds of camera airborne in virtuoso flight. Photo © J. Caldwell.

to Steadicam’s success is the apparent ‘‘ease’’ with which it can be used.≤∂ The demo suggests that users can move up professional registers in the production culture’s caste system by using the Steadicam. That is, even if one works with meager budgets (in industrials or music videos) one can emulate the big boys from feature film by creating the immersive aesthetics that Steadicam has made possible on the wide screen. Although Steadicam has a distinct stylistic function, many practitioners in the early 1980s embraced the technology for more pragmatic reasons— namely, it is a cost-e√ective substitute for dolly or crane shots. Not only can the device preempt expensive crane and dolly rentals and cut the time needed to lay track across a set or location, it challenges the stratified labor equation that producers imported to prime time from Hollywood. On scenes employing Steadicam, the director of photography, the ‘‘A’’ camera operator, the focus puller, and one or more assistants may merely stand aside as a single Steadicam operator executes lengthy moves that might approximate dozens of conventional shots and camera sets-ups. Thus, Steadicam provided not just a stylistic edge—it also o√ered concrete production economies. Steadicam (like Betacam and Avid/fcp described above) changed both the ways that crew members work and interrelate with each other and the reasoning and logic behind handheld shots in the culture of film/video production. Immersive machines are designed according to at least four di√erent

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Manufacturers begin to humanize the new autonomous and highly mobile camera eyes as ‘‘Jimmy Jib III,’’ and the ‘‘Power Pod’’ (both capable of 360 degree movements on X, Y, and Z axes). At center is the Kenworthy/Nettmann immersive probe or snorkel lense mounted on traditional dolly track. (Left, brochures from Stanton Video; center, Kenworthy-Nettmann; right, Roy Isaia.)

variations or technical metaphors: namely, camera probes as optical arms, finger-eyes, inverted appendages, and optical projectiles (quasi-flying eyeballs). While conventional cranes allowed operators to ride along with cameras, newer technologies like the ‘‘Flight Head’’ enable cameras to float and spin over highways and alongside fast-moving automobiles. The ‘‘Power Pod,’’ marketed by Roy Isaia, utilizes motor-driven gearing to robotically move heavy 35mm cameras through the air.≤∑ Victor Duncan, boasting ‘‘We’ve got all the angles covered,’’ demonstrates the camera mount’s mobility that will enable users of its products to achieve omnipresent coverage on production shoots.≤∏ While the Weaver-Steadman company’s robotlike cranes and heads cast expressionistic shadows in their demo stills, other companies anthropomorphize their camera mounts and motion appendages with a√ectionate names like ‘‘Jimmy Jib III.’’≤π All of these immersive optical arms—which make possible camera/scene ‘‘fly throughs’’—require handheld remote controls so that cinematographers can operate from a distance. Preston Cinema Systems promises that its remote technology will give the operator all of the necessary muscle (all of ‘‘the brains and brawn that your remote head’’ needs) using only the palm of one hand.≤∫ Such claims underscore the increasing inversion of force now at work, when operators use sensitive lightweight remotes with hands-o√ control, to muscle and fly through the air hundreds of pounds of steel camera heads, film magazines, and support arms.

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Whereas optical jib arms swing leaden camera rigs through scenes, another genus of immersive technology—the probe—thrusts the camera’s seeing eye like a finger into cinematic and televisual space. Innovision, a leading manufacturer of specialty lenses, invites operators to ‘‘shoot under, around, or through’’ tight sets in order to ‘‘discover the new Probe lens point-of-view.’’≤Ω Other illustrations from the optic/lens company betray the spatial scale of the probe. Unlike the aerial sweep of cast-steel jib arms and robotic mounts, the Probe lens, by sweeping through microspaces, immerses viewers in a topography of table-top proportions. Intel flaunted the ability of the Probe lens to fly through the cramped internal orifices and spaces of pcs in the mid 1990s.≥≠ Drive mechanisms on some of the other probing and pushing optical systems tend to liberate the camera from the need to level frame lines with horizon. One product demonstration showed a heavy, high-end video camera spinning endlessly on its Z-axis (in a manner far more acute and contextless than merely a ‘‘Dutch’’ angle, as defined in classical cinema).≥∞ Such devices help to completely disembody the probing camera eye. By 1997, Panavision was marketing an articulated snorkel lens for 35mm cinematographers. Trade show attendees witnessed the ability of the lens to traverse and focus within millimeters of a fully chromed Harley-Davidson and a leather-clad female mannequin.≥≤ Notions of cameras and mounts that probe and push into space extend across a range of inventive applications and come from a range of very di√erent companies.≥≥ Innovision marketed what it termed the ‘‘Rad-cam’’ with working floor demos that showed the possibilities of what seemed, at least to the sales rep, to be every director’s ideal: a ‘‘dog’s eye view of the action.’’ The Rad-cam, a camera mount attached to a miniature remote-controlled car, functioned as a probe on two levels: it filled the need for free-roaming robotic camera eyes and it achieved the status of a kind of ‘‘boy’s toy’’ in the camera department.≥∂ The company’s demo documents the o√beat Coen brothers, directing The Big Lebowski, and staging a Z-axis tracking shot (with Rad-cam) through the outspread legs of twenty chorus girls. Later, the demo captures an informal moment of reflection by a bemused camera operator who chuckles about the invasive pleasures of the moving mount. He explains to the demo interviewer (after running a 35mm camera through an obstruction on the ground): ‘‘We can get into places we’ve never been before!’’ While some immersive technologies fly through interpersonal space, and others probe microspaces, another order of camera probes look like and

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Cameras now ‘‘get into places we could never get into before,’’ says Innovision, a probe lens manufacturer. Here, a car-mounted ‘‘flight head’’ for selfcinematography (above), and Kenworthy/Nettmann’s snorkel lens inserted into hole in vehicle traveling at high speed. (Kenworthy-Nettmann brochure.)

function as inverted appendages. The ‘‘Auto-Robot Crane’’ for example, can be mounted (like a giant praying mantis) on the top of the very vehicle in which actors perform while being filmed driving.≥∑ Locked together with a large steel appendage and arm above, the actor’s space in the car simultaneously doubles as a camera vehicle and support. Other technologies, like the seventy-six-foot Traveling Cascade Crane, provide for vistalike visual sweeps with a talent-dwarfing apparatus dominated by the appendage.≥∏ Another variation of the attached but free-swinging mount was featured in a production sketch detailing the design of what is termed the ‘‘teeter-totter camera mount.’’≥π This contraption includes a shaft that is attached on one end to an actor’s waist and at the other end to a camera that points back at the actor being locked onto the shaft. When the actor moves the camera pivots around (on top of a dolly-mounted support) on the opposite end of the pole.≥∫ The swiveling mount provides an operatorless imagemaking device geared directly, and responsively, to every move of the actor’s body. What is only latent in optical arms, probe lenses, and camera appendages is made explicit in a final type of technologies that completely separate the camera eye from the operator as well as from any mechanical connection to

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terra firma. The ‘‘Space-cam’’ (reminiscent in design of an orbiting satellite) is designed to hover far above the earth in various airborne configurations.≥Ω Its manufacturer promotes the ability of the ocular device to rotate freely in all directions and in ways impossible for its human cranial cohort to achieve. Wescam, the preeminent manufacturer of airborne surveillance camera mounts, shows o√ the variety of ways that ‘‘the sky is not the limit.’’∂≠ Wescam can be flown overhead in helicopters, but it can also be launched by ship; driven at high speed over rough terrain; and propelled projectilelike across vast public spaces on motorized rails—all of which allow the rig to ‘‘fly’’ on the ground as well. Gyroscopic guidance eliminates any vibration or jerkiness, thus creating a projectile eye that flies across space. Other manufacturers like ‘‘Flying-Cam’’ deliver airborne drones— that is, pilotless flying mounts that can buzz low-lying areas with the use of remote control. All of these camera movement and mounting devices encase specific stylistic and cultural tendencies into the machine itself. Such devices show that the probing and autonomous camera eye—capable even of flight as a robotic projectile—is a driving figure and preoccupation in the design of immersive production technologies. SPEED SHOOTING AND HYPERPRODUCTION: HOW TOOLS DISPERSE CREATIVE TASKS TO INNOVATE VIA DESPERATION EXAMPLE: HANDHELD MULTI-CAMERA FILMED PRIMETIME ENSEMBLE DRAMA

The new economic and labor realities in film/television a√ect the ways that the static spaces of postproduction and e√ects work are designed and maintained. The same forces have in other ways a√ected location shooting and field production outside of the studios and soundstages. Whereas sitcom writers and producers have always complained about the five days allotted for production of their half-hour genre, hour-long dramas shot on film or in film style for prime-time production face even more formidable scheduling constraints. Crew members now complain about the almost impossible task of having to film scores of location scenes within the seven days budgeted for location shoots. Episodes in series like Fox’s 24, the fx Network’s channel’s The Shield, and nbc’s Boomtown are each filmed as if they were onehour movies. They are shot like film, with the same technologies and by the

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same types of crews. But unlike feature films, which may be shot over six weeks or even six months, most long-form television must be shot and finished in seven to eight days. Despite similarities in mode of production, television’s budget-induced scheduling pressure creates working conditions in hour-long prime-time dramas that are far more manic and intense than feature film shoots. While smaller budgets can be blamed for this general distinction, stylistic expectations for hour-long dramas have also conspired to speed up production even further. The Shield and 24, in particular, both utilize a hyperactive camera and editing style that synthesizes the rapid pace of music videos with the restless and disorienting handheld cinematography of the shows’ stylistic predecessors: NYPD Blue and Homicide. To illuminate how crew members feel about the hyperactive style that results, consider how the actor Catherine Dent of The Shield describes filming: We’ve been handheld the entire two and a half seasons. [In one scene the space was] literally about two feet wide. There was a wall . . . [that] I fell up against, with these thorny wild bushes beside me. I’m running fast, and [dp] Billy is running ahead of me—backward with a Steadicam—jumping over rocks. . . . While I’m running forward, he’s running backward with a seventy-eightpound Steadicam. The camerawork is just astounding. As an actor, creatively, it absolutely forces you to do your job. . . . There’s no thinking about ‘‘Is the camera on me?’’; ‘‘Where’s the camera?’’; ‘‘Should I go this way so that you can get me?’’ You can’t even think about what the camera is doing because, fortunately, the camera will follow us. It just frees-up the performances. . . . It makes for great ensemble acting. Because none of us are worried about where the camera is. We’re just working one on one, and moment to moment.∂∞

In Dent’s experience there is no stopping for multiple takes of dialogue lines and no stopping to readjust lights as one would traditionally do. Instead, the acting ensemble on The Shield frequently plays out scenes for five minutes or more without stopping, or until the camera operator’s magazines need to be reloaded. This approach has a hit-and-run feel to it. Unlike traditional hour-long dramatic production in say, the 1960s or 1970s, the camera never stops rolling, tripods are seldom used, the camera operator never stops running and moving, and the actors create kinetic interactive scenes never knowing where the camera is actually framing. The director Scott Brazil explains how each shoot is organized, how this

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new mode of production is very di√erent from traditional film and television shoots, and what e√ect this frantic approach has on the actors’ performances: ‘‘It’s so totally di√erent than traditional television and motion pictures, where often you’ll ‘save’ your best performance for a close-up. On certain shows, I talk to an actor or an actress and say—I know it’s a very emotional scene: do you want to do your close-up first, or do you want to save it for last. And build up to it. When Catherine and the other actors come on stage, we light so quickly. It’s quasi-documentary style. We shoot so quickly and we print take one—regularly. You’re on, the moment you are on. . . . So you can’t dog it. . . . You’ve got to come ready. . . . Catherine says ‘You can’t fake it.’ I think that’s . . . liberating.’’∂≤ In this comment, Brazil explains why the frantic approach spurs better performances from the talent: actors are always kept o√ balance and unaware of the director or shot choices. In a sense the desperation of the technical crew cultivates a desperation and edginess on the part of the actors. But Brazil goes on to admit to an economic and budgetary logic as well: ‘‘This sort of approach for us, from a story-telling point of view, was to try and make it feel like a ride-along, a police ride-along. That’s where it began. No time. No money. Handheld.’’∂≥ Produced for the basic cable network fx, The Shield has a smaller budget than does 24 or Boomtown. Brazil justifies the frantic one-shot approach for aesthetic reasons, but he admits that the approach is almost the only one possible given the budgets and shortened schedule allowed for each episode. The director Jon Cassar of the series 24 further explains the logic behind this kind of hyperactive coverage and speed shooting. He describes in more detail the tools and their e√ects on the Fox series: ‘‘To accomplish this required two cameras rolling at all times. . . . By breaking all of those rules it starts getting very uncomfortable for the audience to watch. And 24 is that kind of show. It . . . involves you in the show. By the way [the camera operator] shoots it: the uncomfortableness of hand-held; always behind things; always feeling like you are watching. That’s where it came from for 24. ’’∂∂ Many current production workers, whether above the line or below the line, got their earliest trade experiences working on independent documentaries. This usually required dealing with sometimes endless shooting, extremely long takes, and poor shot coverage. Typically, documentary editors lack enough usable cutaways and reverse-angle shots, and have too many breaks in spatial continuity and screen direction. Ironically, this has become

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the intended mode of production on prime-time filmed dramas like 24 and The Shield. To achieve a usable narrative from this method, two cameras are rolling at all times, since one camera operator is seldom fully aware of what the other operator is doing. Double shooting allows the editor to cover over breaks in continuity—or simply to create dynamic montages via the unorthodox juxtaposition of images. Shooting on 16mm, printing the first takes, and limiting the number of lighting setups all make speed shooting and hyperproduction cost e√ective as well as anxiety producing. Even the elderly sitcom mode of production has been influenced by this trend. Normally shot ‘‘3-camera’’ or ‘‘4-camera’’ style on bounded, prelit, and controlled soundstages, the sitcom has always been viewed as a writers’ genre and not a cinematographer or editor’s showcase. This status began to change in the late 1990s with the increasing commercial success of half-hour sitcoms shot on location in film style, such as Malcolm in the Middle. Rapidly cut, dynamically shot, and expressively lit, Malcolm soon began to feature episodes that experimented with split screen and unorthodox narrative construction. Arrested Development continued this penchant for speeding up the blocking and staging within the half-hour sitcom/drama during its premiere season on Fox in 2003–2004. Produced by Imagine Television, the producers of Arrested Development based the show’s look on the frenetic cinematography and cutting of documentaries and reality television. The show’s director explained the logic of pursuing this look: ‘‘Initially we were going to shoot it on handheld Panasonic that you can buy at Best Buy. . . . They wanted something . . . which would get us o√ the production stage and out into the world. So that we could get forty to fifty pages in six or seven days. The hope was that we would go . . . quickly in production since the lighting requirements were minimal, and with that extra time we would rehearse. . . . But we didn’t actually [end up] doing that. . . . The savings . . . was in tape, and we would often use fifteen to sixteen tapes [a day], which is where comedy often lives—playing with the steps and improvising.’’∂∑ Oddly, Imagine wanted more ‘‘production value’’ in its new style, even though the company chose video cameras and tape to achieve this ‘‘location’’ film look. The real eye-opener in this comment, however, is that the fast-and-loose method of shooting allows the show to get forty to fifty pages of script done in six to seven days. This is remarkably accelerated since both half-hour dramas typically have no more than thirty script pages for a mere twenty-four minutes of screen time. Like The Shield and 24, Arrested De-

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The new speed shooting and hyperproduction mode: Houdini advertises its product by showing seminude artisans (its users?) being tied into maiming, bone-breaking knots. Sound Forge hypes its digital sound design technique by launching its implied user through the plaster and brick wall of the user’s studio wall. (Left, Side Effects brochure; right, Sound Forge brochure.)

velopment uses this hyperactive production mode to achieve a documentary feel, while the many long takes involved allow the acting ensemble to ‘‘improvise.’’ Imagine Television’s press kits promoted Arrested Development for its supposedly distinctive look, film-like location shooting, and documentary sensibility. What Imagine had actually done, however, was to take the speed production process of quality hour-long primetime dramas like Homicide, 24, and The Shield and make it even cheaper and faster. Dispensing with film stock entirely in favor of the smaller format of videotape brought the series both the look and financial savings of the now-pervasive ‘‘reality television.’’ Saving money by eliminating film negative costs, dollies and cranes, extra lighting setups, and traditional shot coverage allows the producers to emphasize the strengths of the ensemble’s performance. Consider how Imagine’s stylistic ‘‘innovation’’ is actually a throwback to the downand-dirty style of coverage popularized for a decade in shows like mtv’s Real World. The show’s supervising editor, Glenn Morgan, describe to me the quality of the show’s camera operators in surprising terms: ‘‘[Instead of ] ten takes of the same thing, we have one take—that’s horrible—usually. [Primetime dramas] rave about their camera operators—and our guys suck for the most part. . . . It’s a grueling job. They’re shooting with that camera on their shoulder for ten hours a day . . . and they don’t know when the good stu√ is

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happening. At least those guys know when they are shooting a scene that will be in their show. We may have one shot a day that makes it into the show . . . at three in the morning. It’s so ironic. Those guys are striving to make their stu√ look like ours, while we’re striving hard to make our stu√ look like television.’’∂∏ These are not flattering words for Morgan’s crew. The always-fatigued camera operators ‘‘suck,’’ and their role is reduced to recording continuously all day and all night. Morgan assumes the operators have no clear sense of what many cinematographers place at the heart of the craft: previsualization. The reality efp mode, therefore, makes camera operation physically demanding, fatiguing, and quasi-mindless. The unmotivated nature of the resulting footage means that producers and editors must wade through miles of videotape in order to find rare nuggets for each episode. In mtv’s formulation, speed production location methods are analogous to the anxious monotony of the digital postproduction sweatshop. Their down-and-dirty method of shooting (no tripods, handheld cameras continuously moving, and the use of existing light with few lighting setups) produces scriptless mountains of raw footage that can neither be preassembled or rough cut according to some preexisting screenplay or shot sequence. The editor’s task in this reality series is as mind numbing as the camera operator’s task is physically grueling. Both sides of this mode-ofproduction model, however, have proven cost benefits for producers. In all three genres examined here (prime-time hour dramas, half-hour filmed sitcoms, and reality shows), that is, the down-and-dirty approach is also, finally, cheaper. Even Avid now quotes practitioners theorizing about ‘‘speed production’’ to explain how its machines can help achieve manic performance: ‘‘The pros know: time is everything. The Avid ds Nitris is absolutely essential for finishing complex, fast-paced shows like 24. It’s about more than the power to handle hd, sd, and 2K files: it’s also about staying focused on finishing while executing every nuance of the oΔine editor’s creative vision with complete confidence . . . [and] no missed deadlines.’’∂π While practitioners justify speed production in trade talk, equipment manufacturers are quick to encase the new aesthetic into their machines.

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METADATA AND THE DI, COLLAPSED HIERARCHIES, AND WORKFLOW DISORDER: HOW DIGITAL TOOLS BREAK WORKER RELATIONS AND CONFUSE STYLISTIC AUTHORITY EXAMPLE: THE DIGITAL INTERMEDIATE, DPs, & TIMERS

By 2005, the introduction of new digital forms of mastering and ‘‘metadata’’ threw a big wrench into the neat, linear production workflow that had been standardized over the course of eight decades in Hollywood. Traditionally, all of production and postproduction was geared to producing an optimum ‘‘dupe neg’’ (duplicate negative) from which hundreds of answer prints could be struck for theatrical exhibition. Essentially, the negative that the cinematographer shot in the field was cut (or ‘‘conformed’’) long after editing was completed, and a dupe neg was struck from this in order to protect the original conformed negative from overuse and damage in high-volume distribution printing. Because the original camera negative, the conformed negative, the interpositive, and the dupe negative were each made at the same lab with the same timers and the same system of timing lights, the oversight of the entire process could be achieved and the dps enjoyed enormous control over the look of the image from the start of a project to the final printing. Many times dps asked for specific timers who knew, almost intuitively, the exacting look, color, or contrast that the dp wanted. For the past few years, however, this conventionalized linear workflow and system of quality control by cinematographers has collapsed as studios and production companies shifted to use ‘‘digital intermediates’’ or ‘‘dis’’ (from which distribution prints are now struck) and hd cameras. Rather than printing work-print film ‘‘dailies’’ timed per the instruction of the dp, productions now use ‘‘digital dailies’’ made, usually anonymously, without any systematic or intelligible system to monitor and control color correction. In addition, rather than retiming the original negative, productions now transfer original footage to high-resolution digital masters, from which color correction is made. Since industrywide timing-light adjustments are no longer possible with digital, the postproduction industry is attempting to shift to a scheme that distinguishes ‘‘data’’ (the film/television image) from ‘‘metadata’’ (the accompanying technical information that tells any display device how to render and re-create the original image). This shift to

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The shift from the 35mm ‘‘dupe neg’’ to the ‘‘DI’’ is only one of many examples of how new technologies have collapsed traditional workflow sequences and craft responsibilities. What used to be a purely postproduction process now has seeped not only into production but into preproduction as well. Here, high-end online editing and digital effects corresponds with selfmutilation (the artisan as aboriginal driving nails into his skull to get relief). (Autodesk brochure)

the management of ‘‘metadata’’ is ideally supposed to accompany the footage and tell users in each successive production phase and each distribution format how and when to make exposure, color, and contrast adjustments. Unfortunately, no standardization exists for metadata. As a result, some production workers criticize ‘‘postproduction workers who fall in love with their data’’ even though that look isn’t what the dp wanted and cannot even be reproduced accurately in a distribution print. Other cinematographers consider this misuse of metadata ‘‘a mess.’’∂∫ While celebrated by producers and some directors as the future of cinema (usually for financial reasons), the success of digital cameras and the di /metadata process has wreaked havoc in numerous ways. First, dps have lost control of the timing both of electronic dailies and of the final negative for release printing. In the old days, a dp might ask the lab to print the secondary/primary colors in the dailies 25–25–25 or ‘‘straight across’’ so that the elaborate lighting schemes invariably established on a set would appear exactly as planned without any subsequent readjustment or attempted correction at the lab.∂Ω The remainder of the production process would then have an accurate benchmark from which to work. Josh Pines of Technicolor explains one downside of the newer minimum-wage approach to electronic dailies: ‘‘Now the kid on the night-shift at 4 a.m. goes ‘Oh, this

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looks a little soft, let me sharpen it a bit.’ And then, ‘Oh this is really underexposed, let me adjust it. . . . So all of a sudden this thing comes out . . . that winds up setting the look of the film that the director, and editors, and producers expect. The dp feels disenfranchized.’’∑≠ Digital cinematography now makes color and exposure control a matter of ongoing, even if implicit, interworker negotiation. The cinematographer Yuri Neyman, asc, relays his shock about having color control hijacked when he states: ‘‘The director asked me if I’d seen a film and liked it. He said ‘I did it—not the dp, not the colorist. Literally, on the last day, I put the color in it, I created it.’ This is the biggest challenge.’’∑∞ Neyman warns other dps to watch out for ‘‘directors [who] . . . now ask dps to give them a ‘flat negative, with no adjustments and color added later’ ’’—a sure sign that directors arrogantly plan to do the cinematography themselves through electronic manipulations at the end of the film. The veteran colorist Price Pethel tells a similarly cautionary tale: ‘‘A dp was down explaining the look [he wanted], and next to me a producer said ‘this is exactly why you don’t want a dp in the post-production process.’ ’’∑≤ While technologists sell the ecstasies of digital to move product and standardize proprietary standards, directors and producers demean the dps by cynically modifying Robert Altman’s mantra in The Player: ‘‘Who needs cinematographers?’’ Second, because digital imaging is now done on the set, a whole new type of production worker has appeared (to monitor, safeguard, and enhance the image on the set). Labeled by some as ‘‘data wranglers,’’ ‘‘digital intermediate technicians’’ (dits), or ‘‘digital technologists,’’ and by still others, like nabet Local 695, as ‘‘Digital Film Capture,’’ these new authorities on the set have usurped some of the tasks of the dp, the camera operator, and the assistant camera workers. John Galt of Panavision explains the resentment over dits on the set and the economic pressures that cause the dits to ‘‘invent’’ things to do: ‘‘When a producer learns someone is on the set, they expect them to do something [rather than stand around]. But [the dit’s] job is to be a fireman, in the corner with an axe, waiting to do something. But [because of employment pressures from producers] dits now do things they shouldn’t.’’∑≥ Others, like Josh Pines, reserve their cynicism for many spineless dps who acquiesce to the new directors’ fad of excessive stylization in the camera: ‘‘Other dps say ‘Who cares about printing lights [in the lab]? I’ve got a saturation knob! I’m like a kid in a candy store.’ ’’∑∂ Whereas color technologists used to be confined to the telecine or Rank-Cintel room in post-

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production wannabes are now ‘‘playing ground’’ with, as Neyman notes, telecine post-production’s ‘‘Da Vinci knobs available on the set.’’ About this increasing confusion over work roles on the set, a weary Neyman reflects: ‘‘Everybody’s looking for this harmony; begging for this [conflict] to end.’’∑∑ Third, because the di process has made production itself a digital procedure, specializations normally reserved for postproduction, like visual effects, now regularly make appearances during shooting. In e√ect, the traditional walls between production and postproduction have been broken down. Now, chaos is always a possibility, with dps, production designers, and directors of visual e√ects all struggling up front to control the creation of the image and the film’s color system before and during shooting. With at least three individuals now competing for visual control of color in preproduction (the production designer, the dp, and the visual e√ects [vfx] supervisor), designer Bill Sandell remarks that: ‘‘The good part for a production designer is that I’m there early . . . usually I’m on before the cinematographer is on.’’∑∏ Allen Lasky, of Dalsa Digital Cinema, justifies the new role of visual e√ects workers in preproduction based on the geometric increase in e√ects shots in features: ‘‘While two hundred e√ects shots were considered huge at Digital Domain in 1992, now features have fifteen hundred to two thousand e√ects shots.’’∑π The vfx supervisor Rob Legato hopefully describes the new team approach to setting the visual look of a film as ‘‘remarkably collaborative,’’ where ‘‘nobody’s ego superceded their job.’’ Yet Legato illustrates this status by explaining how he salved Marty Scorsese’s ‘‘bitching and moaning about the dailies,’’ which he repeatedly sent ‘‘back to the colorist [because] it came out like crap every time.’’∑∫ Legato’s solution was to link an fcp editing system directly to the projector in Scorsese’s personal screening room, thereby allowing the director to ‘‘really get close to what [he] want[s] the film to look like . . . in the privacy of your own living room.’’ What Legato did not (conveniently) acknowledge, however, was that the dailies were now being ‘‘timed’’ by a vfx supervisor plus director duo rather than the traditional dp plus lab timer duo. Legato does convey the downside of moving all of these tasks up to the preproduction and early production phases: ‘‘The hard part is getting that [previsualization] process funded. It’s [now] sort of backwards from the way we normally do it; where the production designer does the design and then we copy it.’’ Fourth, metadata and the di have also drastically altered the ‘‘back end’’ of production. An entirely di√erent industry (the electronic postproduction sector, which has supported television production for a half century) has

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intervened to take on many of the tasks traditionally handled by a film lab. The new dominance of electronic ‘‘colorists’’ (a television tradition) over ‘‘timers’’ (from film labs) is but one example of this shift. Responding to film workers who castigate colorists as disruptive, the FilmLight production engineer Neil Robinson admits that ‘‘colorists are usually people with extreme opinions,’’ but then he carefully defends the di√erences between film and tv: ‘‘The high-end colorists come from a completely di√erent ethos and a completely di√erent industry. And they are just as respected in their industry [tv] as timers are in this industry [film]. That’s why you’ve got so much contention. That’s why I say you’ve got two cooks in the kitchen.’’∑Ω The television tradition brings to hdtv and film/television convergence its facility with in-the-camera image manipulation, whereas film traditionally deferred and sequestered exposure, color, and contrast readjustments until after-the-camera very late in the postproduction/printing process. Editing film electronically now means that film editors have the same kind of ‘‘real-time’’ image manipulation tools on their Avids that video editors have almost always had. Many more hands are therefore tangled up in ‘‘cooking’’ the film image before it ever sees the light of a projected print. Pethel complains that younger dps who have immigrated to Hollywood from tv /advertising fuel the problem: ‘‘Most dps since the 80s and 90s have never seen what a negative looks like. Because colorists have all messed with it. So when directors came from tv /commercials they tried—but realized they couldn’t—bring that look to [feature] film; the chocolate, sepia, clipped blacks popularized in ads. They couldn’t do it with a negative.’’∏≠ Now, however, with hd cameras and the di, these immigrants to film from tv commercials can tinker with extreme looks both in the back end and the front end of production. Larry Cherno√, of Cherno√ Touber Associates, says in no uncertain terms: ‘‘Television has ruined film. There’s now so much technique you can pile into the image. It’s kind of like a wild horse that’s broken out of the barn and nobody can get a rope on it.’’∏∞ One immediate result of overwhelming shooting with too many stylistic options is that crews now sometimes naively cook up acute styles in the camera that can never, finally, be approximated on the 35mm release prints required at the end of the process for theaters. Relative to film negative, electronic cameras simply have di√erent (some would say inferior) contrast ranges (gamma) and color systems. A more fundamental result is that distinctions have been leveled, workflow is no longer linear and lock-step

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(with discrete, successive stages), and artistic responsibility has been redelegated and dispersed across the porous boundaries that once defined the production and postproduction process. Much like the way that the nonlinear mode made (potentially) every oΔine editor an online editor in early 1990s, Pethel complains that with metadata ‘‘the decision process has been distributed over a large period of time in a bigger environment.’’∏≤ Rather than simply a ‘‘technical’’ problem, the various current ‘‘metadata’’ initiatives to ‘‘fix’’ this chaos can be seen as a campaign by the film industry to reinstate its traditional aesthetic/methodological control scheme onto a production process of which they have already largely lost control. By contrast, television’s technical work world (which involved image manipulation in all phases from the start) exploited the emergence of digital production to take over and redefine (some would say hijack) the film process. In this sense, campaigns to achieve standardized metadata control procedures represent a counterattack and a way to do digital production ‘‘the film way’’ (i.e., by segregating the image/data from its processing/metadata throughout the entire process). The institutional scramble to regain control both of job descriptions and of delivery of services (postproduction, production design fx, and printing work) has been marked by contentious debates over authority in the production trades, in industry panels, and in tensions on the set. Most of the groups involved in the current free-for-all deploy one tried and true method for gaining control of the volatility in a way that will benefit them: they meet, write, and theorize about how and why the process works or doesn’t work; and how and why changes must be made to insure the health of their craft and the production world as a whole (which they ostensibly represent). Technical progress inevitably comes alongside worker anxiety and trade power struggles, usually under a cloud of intense critical reconceptualizations of the production process itself. S&M AND SABBATICALS: HOW TASK EFFICIENCY IN THE TOOL ENVIRONMENT IS MAINTAINED VIA THERAPEUTIC PRACTICE

Production technologies carry physical risks for workers and operators, including problems ranging from common slips and falls to spinal injuries and electrocution. As one report noted in the case of the cameraman David Lee: ‘‘In recent years, some camera operators have turned to alternative

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medicine as well as mainstream medicine for relief of work-related injuries. After years of holding a camera on his shoulders, Lee’s back problems became so severe that one day in 1997 he woke in agonizing pain that was impossible to ignore. With a ruptured disk pressing up against his spinal cord, he could hardly sleep, let alone work.’’∏≥ In the same report the camera operator Jim Lunsford describes why deafness is a job risk: ‘‘Hearing loss may develop from the constant drone in . . . headsets. In one ear I can hear people talking in the background, but with the other ear, I need people to talk right into the microphone.’’ Such consequences may be almost inevitable since film/video location production involves physically demanding work for many crew members. But physical trauma represents only one form of trauma in production. The cramped quarters and long hours of the digital sweatshop, for example, are not the only factors cultivating emotional stress and anxiety. Stress also follows from the industrial trends toward contract labor, outsourcing, downsizing, and runaway production. The cinematographer George Spiro Dibie, national president of the International Cinematographers Guild, tackles the issue of runaway production in the following appeal. His explanation taps into emotional anxieties as much as it informs: ‘‘The bad news is that . . . runaway production is draining jobs out of our country . . . because foreign governments provide seductive tax and financial incentives. Generally, runaway production hasn’t hurt the top cinematographers, directors, and actors. However, the next generation, including camera crews, and supporting cast, are systematically being denied work permits and are often excluded from working on American films in foreign countries. American labs, post facilities, and many other specialties that support the production community are also su√ering.’’∏∂ Unstable economic and employment conditions have had a persistent e√ect on the ways crews operate and film/video labor groups organize. While runaway production is a fairly abstract notion (since o√shore coproductions are largely invisible), local threats to hiring and employment provide far more e√ective means of knotting the stomachs of below-the-line workers. The trades continually document corporate demise and personnel layo√s in bloodletting terms. As Daily Variety described the collapse of Dreamworks’s Pop.com and the firing of its seventy-five workers: ‘‘By the end of the year, the bloodbath forced the animation and game site Shockwave.com to merge with short film netcaster AtomFilms.com, portending what many believe will be a wholesale consolidation of the dot-com biz.’’∏∑

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Textosterone3 sells itself as a way to pump and maintain the well-stressed digital production body. Above, DV-to-film transferred couched as cranialspinal surgery. (Bottom, Corel brochure; top, Heavy Light Digital)

The Hollywood Reporter warned readers that ‘‘the World’s largest media, entertainment and Internet company would eliminate 2,400 jobs and seek deep cuts in operating expenses as it attempts to exploit synergies in the wake of the merger of America Online and Time Warner. . . . wmg has been mandated to cut 600 jobs, about 5% of its sta√ . . . and has sent out more than 600 ‘optional early retirement’ packages to employees who are over 50.’’∏∏ Ageism is widespread in Hollywood, and this ‘‘merger’’ campaign publicity exploits ageism anxieties in trade readers. For every announced threat, there are turns of phrase in the trades that give the brutal practices of downsizing and ageism a dramatic arc befitting showbiz. The Hollywood Reporter ’s business section transforms sordid personnel realities into a catchy pitch: ‘‘The entertainment sector behaved like a Chow Yun-Fat movie last week as workers found they had to fight like ancient warriors to keep their jobs, while companies trimmed the fat.’’∏π A more sobering indication of the human stakes involved is found in

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communications among below-the-line workers. The cinematographer Michael Negrin makes the following earnest appeal to colleagues in an online posting titled ‘‘Protecting the Role of the Camera Operator’’: Quite a few dps from the independent feature, commercial and music video worlds have probably always operated their own shots. They can’t imagine allowing some ‘‘third party’’ [a union operator] looking through their viewfinder during the production. Surely, they think, that’s an intrusion into their domain and an interference of their artistic prerogative. When the opportunity finally arises for one of these hypothetical cinematographers to work on a union shoot . . . it is required that he/she hire an operator, first assistant, and second assistant. . . . But because it is a rule that the operator is hired, some dps tell the operator ‘‘Thanks, but no thanks, I will handle the camera operating. . . .’’ Sooner or later the producer may surmise, ‘‘Who needs this operator or sta√ ?’’ When contract negotiation time comes around, they feel justified in proposing to the unions that the camera operator’s position be considered optional or eliminated altogether.∏∫

Union busting, therefore, is not simply a matter of competition from o√shore international operations or from conglomerate downsizing. One of the biggest threats to job security comes ‘‘from the inside.’’ That is, nonunion workers form a steady stream of new entrants into the already wellstocked supply of union technicians available for any shoot. Typically, these immigrants come in the form of new film festival discoveries or directors/ dps who have made names for themselves in nonunion work (indie film, commercials, music videos). Such figures are not brought in by the union but instead by the producers. As such, existing crews are sometimes ‘‘stuck’’ with pushy, arty ‘‘outsiders’’ who insist on ignoring the standard delegation of camera department duties to several di√erent workers, and instead try to operate all by themselves. The operator’s cynicism cited above intends to educate these future dps (coming from the outside) on how their actions on a set will hurt those alongside of whom they work. He ends by warning that continuing to ignore these issues may free producers themselves to stop hiring full crews. These internal tensions within a trade group are not quite as contentious as the historical threat from ‘‘scab’’ labor. Yet much is at stake as camera groups dance around internal issues that can potentially sink long-term labor protections. Negrin’s statement is not about technology threats or corporate collusion. It is, rather, cultural dialogue intended to persuade members of the benefits of consensus and common cause.

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The desperate attempt to a≈rm digital work for hire as concrete and productive (as somehow involving sweat and sinew) has a darker side as well. A whole series of current production images suggest that this iconography is produced for an ‘‘anxious’’ industry—one fueled by masculine worries. In the want ads in the technical trades, for example, multinational Sony hawks its ideal of the brand’s engineer of the future: a Caucasian cyberman lost in angst-meditation.∏Ω In another want ad icon Sony targets the hip, streetsmart African American martial artist/engineer.π≠ The type of multinational engineering environment Sony has in mind seems to be an organizational structure involving Y-generation nihilism and edgy hip hop. Other technical illustrations depict single male figures pulling and twisting frames; or— under headlines that bark ‘‘Get Real’’—being propelled through space at speeds high enough to make their eyelids peel back.π∞ One postproduction house boasts ‘‘We can do anything’’; a capacity ironically illustrated by a classical engraving of a man locked into a Rube Goldbergesque torture contraption.π≤ The Bogen company launched the marketing campaign for its ‘‘Avenger Grip Equipment’’ using photos of men raging on steroids who exert extreme physical pressure in an attempt to destroy the very product being promoted.π≥ Other companies exploit Eadweard Muybridge’s sequence of photographic studies to draw analogies between their performance as media artisans and the seminude men trapped in Muybridge’s experimental cages. The fat and traumatized bodies of men populate other technical ads. One shows a ‘‘before’’ picture of a grotesque, fleshy, male body, followed by an ironic, hand-washing, company ‘‘after’’ text: ‘‘We won’t promise you, (but) . . .’’π∂ Isolation, stress, and sometimes rage pervade explicit trade representations of production work and machines. Contemporary industrial iconography is not, however, limited to masculine physical anxieties and mental stress. Another genre in the technical trades exploits masochism and mutilation in order to explain the production task. Since all of the icons, images, and discourses that I examine here are forms of institutional self-representation, this tendency to circulate images of symbolic self-mutilation is worth considering in more detail. Violence and bodily pain are strange marquees for corporate promotion. Digital Video featured articles mouthing fairly common clichés from production trade shows: ‘‘Serial Ports on Steroids.’’π∑ Such references to production gear and testosterone are illustrated with editorial images celebrating sadomasochism: hooded men in cable-choked bondage with pectorals and jugular

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Production work is regularly symbolized and explained as technologies ‘‘on steroids.’’ Here, the use of hard drives in editing is likened to bound, gagged, and headless studs in an S&M moment. (www.dv.com, October 1997)

veins bulging.π∏ This s&m genre runs a gamut of variations, with strapped down and tortured production boys loaded to the gills with logistical paraphernalia and technology.ππ The Toronto Film Commission lures work north of the border with the torqued body and pavement-placed head of a wannabe-director scouting locations.π∫ Micropolis hawks its products by showcasing a trapped geekboy. Qualcomm marketed itself in 1997–98 with huge dismembered and distorted eyeballs.πΩ Nonlinear giant Avid marketed its new Xpress with the promise ‘‘Xpress yourself ’’—against which young male bodies (in mismatched primary-colored plaids) torque and twist in airborne trauma.∫≠ Sound Forge further developed the ‘‘launched’’ male body trope by thrusting its model man through the plastered walls of its illustrated masonry studio.∫∞ While the projectile bodies of Avid and Sound Forge evoke extreme, deadly pain, other corporations celebrate and extend the trope as torture. Copy for Houdini, for example, touted its ‘‘flexibility’’ but showed o√ this prowess by twisting the legs and arms of its user into impossible (and dislocating) configurations behind his head and back.∫≤ Boss Studios made sure the torture/mutilation genre delivered its own explicit critical interpretation. Their user-artist holds high-voltage electrodes to either side of his balding and aging skull, thereby promising to ‘‘jump start’’ the creative process through suicide by electrocution.∫≥ An editorial illustration in Digital Magic cracked open the male scull even

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Technology-enabled postproduction work is explained and sold to users as a cranial lobotomy, involving do-ityourself brain surgery and selfmutilation. (Viewpoint Datalabs brochure)

farther to show creative shots (applications) exiting the brain’s gray matter into the bloodless world of the atmosphere.∫∂ Performance anxieties, compulsive work habits, and stress pervade the lower levels of the technical iconography. Strangely, male masochism and bodily mutilation now apparently stand as accepted public symbols of technical creativity and corporate advantage. While the trade images described above symbolize how practitioners internalize the new unsettling labor conditions (from below), the o≈cial corporate management practices (from above) leave no doubt that industrial anxiety packs a punch. Companies like ilm claim they are swimming against the tide of deleterious working conditions, which their enlightened artist colony remedies. Indeed, ilm argues that compared to the Oscar they’d won, ‘‘the most important award is the respect and admiration they get from their employees.’’∫∑ As an antidote to the traditionless volatility of the new digital work worlds, other digital boutique companies establish long-term gestation periods to allow new workers to get up to speed via carefully planned mentoring periods. Rhythm and Hues allocates thirteen weeks at their facility to train classical animators on computer imaging, ‘‘Because we can’t train animators from scratch. That’s a three to four year process. We don’t have that kind of money. But we can do three to four months to teach them how to ply their wares on our computers.’’∫∏ While training of some sort has always been a necessity in technical work, these

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companies now take the task upon themselves rather than waiting for others to do it. Rhythm and Hues gained notoriety for two additional business policies geared to improving the worker’s state of mind (and thus work). As Hughes states: ‘‘We operate in a very competitive, capitalistic society. By definition, insurance companies are not looking out for our employees. They are looking out for their profits. . . . [They] felt that they were doing us a favor by denying the claims of our employees. We would get quite frustrated with this. . . . So, by going self-insured we could insure domestic partners long before anyone else was, providing preventative medicine, holistic medicine, chiropractic.’’∫π The company’s overt ‘‘anticapitalist’’ pose against the insurance industry (via self-indemnification), enabled it to provide ‘‘loyal’’ workers with protection from catastrophic illnesses, aids, and cancer. Perhaps the most remarkable attempt to redress the suspect conditions of digital workers came in the company’s policy of providing career ‘‘sabbaticals’’ for their burned-out twenty-five-year-old animation and e√ects workers. Denigrated in the business world as archaic entitlements given to unproductive professors in sheltered universities, industrial sabbaticals suggest the extent of the poor quality of conditions as well as the flexibility of some companies in attending to personal development issues: ‘‘We give . . . sabbatical[s]. . . . We are in an industry that seems to be populated by a lot of young people. . . . [In our] digital artists group the average age is twenty-eight. . . . We just want to make sure that they get three months o√, five years into employment—so that they can think about their careers. So that they can think about whether they want to be in Los Angeles. And whether they want to be in this industry.’’∫∫ The vanguard reputations of the new digital companies, therefore, did not simply result from technically sophisticated approaches to matters of on-screen style and content. To stem the tide of labor volatility, competitor raiding, job conflicts, and career burnout for twentysomething workers, digital boutiques adopted ‘‘therapeutic’’ management styles and cultivated the notion that they were artists’ colonies benignly directed by modern-day Medicis. This e√ect was achieved through human relations programs that could dull the pain of the new manic work conditions.

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Technology-driven production work is depicted as anatomical self-loathing and stress-induced tissue fatigue; here, a Telenium trade ad for postproduction work. (Telenium brochure)

CONCLUSION

The six cases examined in this chapter—contract outsourcing, the digital sweatshop, immersive camera technologies, speed shooting and hyperproduction, digital metadata management, and technical workforce therapy—all demonstrate three principles. First, new tools emerge at, and as, unruly moments involving the realignment of worker relationships and entitlements. Tools, that is, must be understood within worker labor practices and cultural formations. The reflexive celebration by workers of their creative tasks as forms of alienated physical labor, for example, can arguably be seen as a symbolic compensation for two growing tendencies: the cerebralization and physical isolation of the electronic production task in the digital era. The reduction in scale of many film/tv production tasks to the pc workstation has come alongside the emergence of a set of discourses stating that even in the cybernetic age, media artists and practitioners are ‘‘heavy lifters.’’ The iconic preoccupation with physical pain and psychological stress can be viewed as logical responses to the growth of the digital sweatshop. Although current salaries are high for digital and cgi artists, labor conditions have worsened to make this return possible. Ageism is also a part of the threat. Many digital companies now have workforces where the average age is in the mid-twenties. There was such a shortage of well-trained digital artists in the 1990s that several Los Angeles studios resorted to re-

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Old-style production labor and century-old workhorse technologies face uncertain futures and employment prospects. When executives and above-the-line creatives boast that Hollywood will never die in the context of globalization, they really mean that above-the-line expertise will never disappear, unlike all of the working-class gaffers, grips, carpenters, and painters who used to make Hollywood efficient and distinctive. Photo © J. Caldwell.

cruiting directly from high schools. New media is apparently not a hospitable world for seasoned professionals over thirty. And while this youth movement is typically described by employers as a cutting-edge key to lure the hip demographic, it is as equally true that twenty-five year olds apparently are more willing to work long hours with fewer benefits and less security than is the older, more traditional workforce of salaried artisans. The rollercoaster nature of corporate coproduction synergies in Hollywood is now mirrored by the crash-and-burn nature of careers (for hire) among Hollywood’s digital artisans. The sweatshop designation has less to do with a lack of air-conditioning than with vocational volatility and impermanence. In exchange for gross incomes that can start (right out of school) at $70,000 per year and then double a few years later, this workforce also gives up to the corporation claims of o≈cial authorship and seniority for the lucrative impermanence of contract labor. Second, new tools emerge in multifaceted industrial environments in which competitors scramble to rea≈liate, partner, and woo end users in order to achieve market and standards advantage. New tools, that is, work to break the closed nature of production markets that tend to be locked down by long-term technical standardization (via smpte, ntsc, asc) and

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labor agreements (via iatse, nabet, mpaa). Cycles of standards obsolescence create short-term openings in which new corporate technology interests can enter the fray and promote alternatives. Ironically, having gained access new participants seek further standardization in order to protect their proprietary interests and a≈liations within the market. For example, the anxiety evident in many reflexive, deep-textual practices can be traced to the volatility of the electronic production world and the impending obsolescence of all technologies used today. The collapse and demise of Boss film studios in Los Angeles in August 1997 is exemplary in this regard, for it sent shock waves through an industry that had seen no limits to the growth of digital imaging before Boss’s bankruptcy. Scores of digital workstations were now on the auction block as a result of the closure. No longer as profitable in a large company, the legions of younger artisans who had mastered imaging on sgi, Macintosh, and nt workstations could from their own o≈ces and studios provide the same e√ects for less money. The decentralization that once sent feature and prime-time special e√ects work outside of the major film studios to powerful ‘‘boutiques’’ like Boss in the 1980s, was now intensifying given the much-lower overhead and the more widely available competencies of individual artists. Finally, the unruly moments occasioned by new production tools generates considerable artistic debate within worker communities. In this way, the arrival of new tools can be seen as collective conceptual and aesthetic deliberations and not just corporate business activities. The depictions and technical practices examined in this chapter enable practitioners to critically reflect on and negotiate their identities.∫Ω From one perspective, an aesthetic of force defines contemporary production practice. Probe technologies, identified with cinematic features, emerged out of what some still deem the ‘‘old-boys network’’ of Hollywood production. In this sector, bankable production value continues to be discursively associated with high-resolution widescreen aesthetics involving forceful stylistics and invasive imagery. This critical predilection is typically manifested in real locations and soundstages as well, where manic stylistic virtuosity is materially produced by groups of production workers who labor in dedicated, hierarchical teams on location. Digital media and videographic television, by contrast, is typically posited in trade talk as a kind of ‘‘new-boys network.’’ Digital media self-representations, for example, cultivate the myth of the isolated male artist locked to his computer imaging workstation—regardless of the fact that he may work

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for a giant multinational conglomerate. Reflexive trade imagery visualizes the digital worker’s anxiety and physical pain as both a symptom of his isolation and a key to his creativity. The trope of the long-su√ering male artist finds in reflexive trade artifacts of the digital age an update: the surging, torquing, sometimes self-loathing artist on technology’s cutting edge.Ω≠ Cinematic practitioners find in the fragmented media world of contemporary consumer culture a cluttered and competitive arena. The highly fluid, disembodied optical style examined earlier evokes cultural prestige over lowlier forms of programming (reality programming, syndicated series, talk shows) in the trades. Cinematic probe technologies are justified as a way to maximize production value and stimulate international distribution potential. According to this critical trade scheme, feature films and prime-time dramas still ‘‘travel’’ well. Video and reality television, on the other hand, have di≈culty leaving domestic markets and studio vaults.Ω∞ Understanding ‘‘how tools mean’’ in the below-the-line sectors, therefore, means understanding how new tools invariably animate and upset three interrelated registers: labor relations, corporate alignments, and aesthetic practices. Throughout this book I argue that one of the best ways to understand political-economic issues is to understand screen content and labor practice. Many production workers understand this connection as well. One veteran colorist easily explained the metadata aesthetic shakedown described earlier (and the displacement of the dp /timer by anonymous nightshift workers) with economic analysis: ‘‘It’s [now] a volume package deal . . . You don’t really have a choice about who’s going to control your image. It’s because the dailies process is now [bid as] a loss leader, just so the lab can get your final printing business.’’ He then goes on to provide a prescient analysis of how the need for metadata management is tied to repurposing practices in the new corporate conglomerates: ‘‘The dvd process is done by completely di√erent people, on completely di√erent equipment . . . [but] the film has already been ‘baked’ into a look. By the time the dvd guy gets it, he already has a ‘stepped-on’ image. But he doesn’t really have the raw data to give a full expression to that data. . . . And the dvd is a bigger revenue stream than mainline film production. . . . It’s gonna have all these paths. When the film is released, it’s gonna be released everywhere. Including your cell phone. . . . We need to think of the color environment as something that lives with the image in its raw state, and is never expressed until it comes to its [various] output devices.’’Ω≤

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In explaining in economic terms how conglomerates now repurpose and simultaneously release in multiple platforms, colorists argue that they should be allowed to maintain the integrity of the metadata (managed apart from the image data) throughout the entire production and postproduction process. The consensus-seeking carrot o√ered to the corporation in this proposal by a craft worker will thus enable both the colorist and the conglomerate to individuate and re-create the originally intended look on everything from feature films, cable, and dvds to cell phones. Through technical worker negotiations like these, production technology functions as an integral nexus between the institutional and stylistic registers in film and television. Tools and trade talk about tools comprise a critical apparatus that constantly seeks to make sense of both industry and its on-screen forms.

There’s very little incentive, although there’s a desire, to nurture an idea, because the opportunity to own it, or to make a substantial living from it, makes nurturing an idea very difficult to determine. We felt that, across the board—in these large networks and these growing entities—that the producer is seen as obsolete. And that the [network] executive can serve that function. —Meryl Marshall, producer, Two Oceans Entertainment1 It’s the same reason I like to invite friends to the set. It exposes the amazing . . . emotional theater that’s involved in making films of this type. —Bryan Singer, ‘‘director’s blog’’ while on location2

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Industrial Auteur Theory (Above the Line/Creative)

In the epigraphs above, Bryan Singer’s daily online ‘‘director’s blog’’ openly ‘‘theatricalizes’’ his authorial vision to the world while filming on location, whereas the producer Meryl Marshall is far more troubled by the growing restrictions on authorship in film/television. Marshall targets two current industrial constraints on creativity: first, the corporate inability to let a creative idea develop and mature over time; and second, the increasing scale of the new media conglomerates that have actively attempted to replace the producer with the studio or network executive as the key ‘‘author’’ or artist behind a film/television production. Such a comment might be written o√ as evidence of personal bitterness or resentment about networks, but Marshall was speaking as the president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (atas) as well as a producer. Such sniping between the ‘‘creatives’’ and the ‘‘suits’’ has had a long history as Hollywood commentary both on and o√ the record. Such sentiments, for instance, come to a boil in The Larry Sanders Show, when Larry’s apoplectic producer fumes about meddling by the network: ‘‘There should be a law against people from the network using the word ‘creative.’ They see it in their job description and

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then begin believing it!’’≥ Among other things Larry’s producer is angry about network meddling in the form of notes given to producers asking for show changes, and the fact that network personnel insist on being on the set during taping to guide the show to greater success. Later in this chapter I examine in more depth aesthetic status metaphors, the place of idea theft, the rituals of writing by committee, practices of note giving, and the relationship between mentoring and mystification; and in the next chapter (on above-the-line business practices) I consider the pervasive ways that executives and management personnel from the business end of film and television have commandeered creative functions. Later in this chapter I focus on an irony related to the world of collective authorship: namely, the positive economic implications of the ‘‘reckless’’ authorial shooting styles used in the series 24 and The Shield. Here, however, I want to more fully consider the emerging model of creativity and authorship that circulates in contemporary film/television. ‘‘Auteurism,’’ a theory of film authorship imported from the French, played a seminal role in the development and growth of film theory in the postwar decades. For the American critic Andrew Sarris, certain directors elevated films to ‘‘pantheon’’ status by maintaining artistic control of all elements of the filmmaking process without studio intervention.∂ Films that ceded control over to studios seldom achieved canonical status. For the French Cahier du Cinema critics, however, actual personalities were not as important as a set of complex ‘‘signature’’ codes suggesting both authorial and cultural significance that existed across a body of feature films produced within the studio factories. The model of an autonomous artist was not needed in the French formulation of auteurism. From these two critical traditions came the still-dominant popular view that individual, artistic directors stand at the center of the creative enterprise in film. Critics, distributors, agents, and film bu√s still swarm to festivals in Sundance, Cannes, and Toronto each year to discover the ‘‘next’’ Gen-X or Gen-Y film auteur. The auteur myth still very much lives on. Yet this focus on the individual director as the site of creativity has been challenged on many fronts since the 1970s. The film historian Thomas Schatz showed how the personalities of each of the studios in the classical era were written into the films produced at each company because of the controlling oversight of studio bosses.∑ Furthermore, specific production modes distinguished each studio. Since films in each factory utilized a ‘‘house’’ mode of production,

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they also shared ‘‘house styles’’ with other films on the lot. David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger further deemphasized individual directors as auteurs by detailing how the classical Hollywood mode of production superceded both directors and genres as defining, structuring influences in film.∏ Television challenged auteurism in other ways. Even though directors have always been employed in prime-time production, producers have had much more influence over the look and life of a series. Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley argued that television was a ‘‘producer’s medium’’ (not a director’s), and they showed how the ‘‘writer-producer’’ function in television had far more influence than the many journeyman directors who merely come and go over the life of a series.π Others have updated this theory by showing the fundamental role that executive producers, now called ‘‘showrunners,’’ play in television.∫ I argue, however, that negotiated and collective authorship is an almost unavoidable and determining reality in contemporary film/television.Ω Studio and network publicity departments still frequently hype supposed auteurs in marketing campaigns. Directors and showrunners are frequently anointed with the status. Yet the industry negotiates authorship di√erently than it did during the studio era or the three-network era. To consider these di√erences, I have organized the discussion that follows around three issues: relative control, status metaphors, and idea theft. A systematic struggle over control still very much determines authorship, in some ways evoking the studio era. Art directors, for example, like Sarris before them, still judge authorship based on the level of control. As a documentary by the Art Directors Guild states: ‘‘The first designer to really seize control of the artistic vision of a motion picture was William Cameron Menzies. . . . The idea was to capture a world, all the way down to the tiniest details. And Menzies was the man who did it.’’∞≠ Evidence for this controller-as-author status comes from David Selznick’s own writing: ‘‘I feel we need a man of Menzies talent, and of enormous experience on the sets of this picture . . . and on its physical production. I hope to have Gone With the Wind produced down to the smallest camera angle before we start shooting. Because on this picture, really thorough preparation will save hundreds of thousands of dollars.’’∞∞ Yet this trade perspective fails to acknowledge how Menzies’s emergence can also be explained very di√erently in terms of production from the perspective of the corporation. That is, filmmakers, production designers, and critics praise Menzies as a central artist in Gone With the

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Here, a professional-public ‘‘table-read’’ of a script by the producers and cast of Imagine Entertainment’s Arrested Development. Struggling for buzz and for series renewal on Fox after its first season, the production staged this dramatization of the actors’ typical prep day to create more recognition in public. Themes of collectivity ruled the design of the presentation as well as the discussions that followed on the show’s writers’ room. Los Angeles, 2004. Photo © J. Caldwell.

Wind but ignore the fact that Selznick hired and fired four di√erent directors on the film, each of whom, as a result, became largely anonymous and secondary. By enjoining Menzies to storyboard, paint, and predesign each scene as a close partner and adjunct to executive producer Selznick (rather than merely ‘‘assisting’’ the directors), the studio boss essentially reduced the role of successive directors to ‘‘rendering’’ someone else’s vision (not just of the script but of each frame as well). In e√ect, Selznick ‘‘seized’’ artistic control for Menzies and claimed to have coined the term ‘‘production designer’’ to reflect this newly achieved, heightened status. A more skeptical interpretation could be that Selznick altered the power structure by lowering the extent of directorial influence. In the Selznick/Menzies scheme even an unremarkable director could, ostensibly, render a feature film. Similar trade praise is bestowed on Alfred Hitchcock and Ridley Scott (both former art directors) because of how they precontrol production by storyboarding each scene in their films.∞≤ In essence, Selznick broke the director’s longstanding control of authorship by bringing control of scene-by-scene design for the entire film into his executive suite. This is not unlike how showrunners in television have brought control of

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The ‘‘creative family’’ of Arrested Development is feted by Imagine and ATAS in a lavish spread intended to help Brian Grazer’s self-proclaimed, but poorly rated, ‘‘cult series’’ win an Emmy, which it did, after its first season. When in doubt or in cancellation purgatory, smart producers take their dog-and-pony shows on the road (which also gives them additional background material for the ultimate viral marketing device: the series DVD ‘‘extras’’). Los Angeles, 2004. Photo © J. Caldwell.

series-long shot-by-shot choices into their o≈ces. Group writing and conceptualization processes over several months or years are kept extremely close to the executive, while directors and crews mostly just render these schemes at arms length in frantic shooting schedules of six to seven days (per hour-long episode). Phil Rosenthal, the executive producer of Everybody Loves Raymond, describes the keep-your-authors-close methodology: ‘‘Be prepared. Utilize the preproduction time. We have every story broken for the season in July, except for maybe one or two. We were ahead last year, and so we had ten drafts when we started preproduction last year.’’∞≥ The ‘‘institutional’’ (rather than personal or biographical) logic of authorship in production is the key here. Viewing television as an industrial—rather than merely artistic—practice shows television authorship to be inherently protracted, collective, and contested. Forever reflecting back on itself, production culture pays considerable attention in trade analysis on how and why television gets made the way it does. In this chapter I show how aesthetic status metaphors, idea-theft, ‘‘writing by committee,’’ network ‘‘note giving,’’ and ‘‘mentoring’’ serve as mechanisms through which authorial control is gained or ceded. Considering the status of aesthetic metaphors helps explain the linkage between these rituals and authorship.

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AESTHETIC STATUS METAPHORS

Producers, directors, and screenwriters will seldom articulate an overarching ‘‘theory’’ of authorship in production work. Yet informal comments by the same individuals frequently presuppose just such models. These include a range of divergent paradigms for television as an art of big tents, empty walls, care and feeding, critical commentary, lone-wolf artistry, and idea theft. Sometimes, aesthetic paradigms dramatically undercut aesthetic pretense. From a corporate point of view, for example, programming is regularly described in circus-spectacle terms, with the five networks as ‘‘big tents’’ to fill and with ‘‘prestige’’ prime-time ‘‘events’’ as ‘‘tent-pole’’ phenomena that can raise the network’s lesser fare to greater prominence. Interestingly, even executive producers can have similarly down-to-earth models that lessen, rather than raise, significance. Bruce Helford, the highly regarded showrunner of Roseanne and other successful series spells out this anti-aesthetic aesthetic: ‘‘Television is a really bad art. It’s like someone going into a museum and saying, ‘We have a lot of blank walls, let’s make some paintings to fill them up.’ That’s what tv is—space trying to be filled.’’∞∂ If one believes Helford, producing television is less like artistic expression than it is like buying decorative wall coverings from Home Depot by the square yard. Of course, Helford’s personal contract negotiations seldom cultivate the idea that he makes ‘‘bad,’’ ‘‘empty,’’ or parochial art. Producers who represent collective rather than individual above-the-line interests, however, usually talk using metaphors that raise rather than lessen significance. Meryl Marshall, past chairman of atas, discusses production in horticultural terms: ‘‘I think there’s a lack of understanding about how a new and fresh idea can work its way through that process. A good idea doesn’t normally arise in its first iteration. It takes a lot of time and nurture, and give and take, in an unthreatening environment. And in this present circumstance it’s di≈cult to encourage, financially, anyone to make that kind of investment.’’∞∑ In rhetoric reminiscent of Being There, good television is like the care and nurturing of delicate plants. It takes time, sensitivity, and careful cultivation over an extended period of time. This metaphor stands opposite the forces that Marshall and atas rail against: the ‘‘machines’’ of corporate conglomeration and forms of network control that place tremendous pressures on producers to create fast food rather than slow-cooked gourmet meals that can gradually develop over time. Higher

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up the food chain, creative producers sometimes publicly explain production in even more demanding and conceptual terms. Mitch Hurwitz describes Arrested Development ’s production strategy in terms of cross-genre critical and cultural analyses by stating how his show critically engages and hybridizes television genre.∞∏ His ‘‘sitcom’’ is shot like a ‘‘documentary’’ that critiques ‘‘reality television.’’ The writing and producing sta√ structure the show so that audiences ‘‘feel’’ each comic situation building (by referencing genre conventions). But the directors and actors on the set understate everything: cameras cut away on punchlines, actors play against dramatic builds by ‘‘throwing away’’ lines, and there is no laugh track to insult viewers about when to laugh. Hurwitz’s aesthetic scheme approaches television production as neither empty space filling or bad art. The show works (at least critically) because the show makers give the series the reflexivity and intertextuality that many viewers themselves now use to read shows. Hurwitz goes on to give an example of how the producers and writers critically dialogue with viewers of the show. A question is posed: ‘‘Why does the mysterious box with evidence have engraved on its side ‘S/H’?’’ Hurwitz replies: ‘‘You can figure it out, by the end of season, the big revelation was that they were building houses for Saddam Hussein, model houses. So that was like treason . . . That was George’s clever way of writing (about foreign policy) in the final episode.’’ Such comments demonstrate that show making does not only reflect upon the show, genre, or styles, but also it is an interactive critical game with viewers, who are invited to decipher the show’s weekly narrative clues in a give-and-take with the producers. By acknowledging that inside information (like the Saddam Hussein joke above) and planted interpretative elements are part of the show’s design, Hurwitz demonstrates that producers are very aware of and involved in fantype cultural minutiae and critical dialogue. Marshall and Hurwitz both o√er conscious explanations about how and why television works aesthetically in the way that it does. Many trade accounts are more subtle and their aesthetic status might come in the form of basic biographical descriptions. Trade descriptions of producers, for example, frequently underscore a recurrent cultural motif of the showrunner: the producer as an eclectic, culturally tormented, and frequently sleepless lone wolf. Consider the descriptive tableaus of the artist as lone wolf that follow. Larry Charles, former writer on Seinfeld and writer-producer on Mad About You, defends his reputation for wearing pajamas all day during

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Industrial auteur theory: before a panel discussion detailing collectivity and mentoring in the show’s production and ‘‘writers’ room,’’ executive producer Mitch Hurwitz takes credit for a ‘‘hit series’’ in a cross-promotional photo-op with Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton and Arrested Development star Jason Bateman. Photo © J. Caldwell.

production work: ‘‘Yeah, I don’t want to be a walking cliché. I was working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. I’m looking for simplicity, and it’s so much easier just to put on a pair of pajamas than to decide what I’m going to wear with what.’’∞π The general themes in the model are evoked here: social misfit disoriented by endless work schedule creates great art. The journalist David Wild furthers the model with a much more detailed cultural tableau of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of the culthit South Park: ‘‘Parker and Stone are sitting on the floor of The Pagoda, their shared faux Japanese teahouse of an o≈ce in beachy Marina Del Rey. Ground zero of South Park—cheerfully dubbed Casa Bonita—is a fairly conventional industrial building. Inside, Parker and Stone’s own space has lost its Zen-like calm and now resembles a Japanese frat house during final exams. Papers, pictures, and cds lie scattered everywhere. Parker sits crosslegged just a few feet from the crumpled sleeping bag where he has spent the last few nights while cramming to finish the episode that will air tonight.’’∞∫ Obsessed by some peculiar vision (like Charles), Parker and Stone either don’t sleep or sleep in sleeping bags at work. Their artistry is cultivated by lengthy visual descriptions of chaotic cultural mixage. The tableau here mixes lone-wolf independence with adolescent frat-house trash. The result is a visual mess—but a creativity-inducing mess nevertheless. Wild’s de-

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scription of the executive producer Paul Simms is similarly eclectic, invoking an even richer range of cultural bs and class pretension as bio-tableau: Paul Simms [is] the Harvard-educated Wunderkind who moved from that school’s famed Lampoon magazine work to David Letterman’s writing sta√ to Larry Sanders to running his own sitcom. . . . It is a slightly older, more restrained Simms sitting, playing his beloved Fender Bass in his dark o≈ce at Renmar Studios, a small Hollywood production facility now home to both NewsRadio and OverSeas, a new midseason replacement Simms is developing for nbc. The man in charge of this eccentric empire sits behind a Taco Bell-littered desk, the top of which is a huge slab of unfinished wood that he repeatedly pokes at with a pocket knife. On a nearby bookshelf Les Miserables is stacked next to Howard Stern A-Z, Erasmus’ Praise of Folly next to an Allman Brothers songbook. To hear associates tell it, it’s remarkable to see Simms at all while the sun is out, since his vaguely vampire-ish late night schedule—primetime writing eleven p.m. to whenever—is fairly legendary among sitcom writers.∞Ω

Recognizable iconic themes are evident here. This highly paid producer is nocturnal and vampire-ish; a bad-boy locked in a bunker surrounded by male teenage memorabilia, rock-and-roll pretense, and an impressively odd intellectual pedigree formed by combinations of high culture, low culture, prestige, and kitsch. Such a tableau ostensibly explains both Simms’s artistic and commercial success. Such a trade picture, however, should not be taken simply as an objective description recorded by an observer. Even if journalists do not invent such things as voyeuristic hooks for readers, producers and directors actively organize their professional spaces as presentational tableaus for public consumption in these ways. What results are o≈ce selfexpressions capable of triggering favored cultural and psychological associations. In this way, the construction of a producer’s aura functions as a conscious form of ‘‘personal branding’’; very much related to the theories and practices of corporate branding that I outline in the next chapter. The Harvard University/Lampoon alumni pedigree invoked above is a tired way that creative workers across town have publicly solicited distinction in order to leverage new work. Such a reputation served well the aspirations of newcomers at the Late Night with David Letterman show, the Late Night with Conan O’Brien show, and The Simpsons—all of which used the Ivy League angle to assert cultural distinction in the 1980s and 1990s. But strange and acute reversals of economic and cultural class are also at

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work here. In e√ect, ‘‘low-culture’’ Hollywood embraces ‘‘high-culture’’ Ivies via artist-alums who practice ‘‘downward cultural mobility’’ in order to get and leverage series work in ‘‘mainstream’’ Los Angeles. Here I am less interested in the actual networks of individuals that manage these workers than I am in the symbolic ways that workers flaunt cultural mixage and class to establish and maintain economic value. Many trade interviews emphasize elite private university origins to set up the creative sensibilities of producers before discussing their work. But such citations are not simply references to the Wall Street legacy of the Ivies, since program creators typically dismiss such trappings to act out the life of the edgy bohemian. The higher up a male producer is on the industry food chain, the more slack a company will give him to act out bad-boy and vanguard pretensions as part of the company’s business habit. So it is not that producers are sought after as ‘‘creators’’ because they have come from Harvard, Yale, Brandeis, Brown, or Johns Hopkins. It is, arguably, because they have publicly renounced such pedigrees, and the artistic pretension of those classed worlds, that marks them as valuable ‘‘creators.’’ To return to the issue of branding broached earlier, ‘‘creatives’’ can spike the value of their own personal brands by mocking or dismissing the prestige institutional brands that launched their careers. In this way, creator brands frequently pose as institutional antibrands. The culturally coded trade tableaus described above resonate with institutional practices at other companies as well. The frat-house cultural excesses of the above-the-line creators Parker, Stone, Charles, and Simms fit comfortably within a world where studios like Dreamworks house their below-the-line creative workers on what it terms ‘‘the campus.’’ Large shared kitchens, on-site recreational activities, and end-of-week happy hours funded by various production companies further impose college-like expectations on the young, flexible, primarily male production workforce in Los Angeles. In these ways, the frat-house excesses of above-the-line male producers fit well with the twenty-something male anxieties playing out in various digital production ‘‘campuses.’’ IDEA THEFT AND OWNERSHIP

If trade descriptions of producers like those above provide cultural tableaus that dramatically embody aesthetic assumptions, then interpersonal conversations between writers, directors, and producers can suggest another im-

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plicit model for artistry: production as stealing. While the idea of art as theft has had little currency art historically, the premise frequently surfaces in a work world defined by a vast oversupply of creative workers. Usually such eruptions occur o√ the record and in private or semiprivate settings. But occasionally the art-as-stealing motif takes center stage, as it did during the July 2004 critics meetings in Century City in which heated accusations were made by network executives that Fox was stealing every other network’s reality television concepts in order to rush them to their screens first. This interchange was largely corporate and impersonal, since the accusations occurred between executives from nbc, cbs, and Fox. Other times the artas-stealing motif stings relationships between individual creative workers. One example of interpersonal-professional conflict based on accusations of idea theft was an exchange between the writer-producers Judd Apatow and Mark Brazill. The contentious dialogue that ensued burned over who first came up with a creative idea for a production. Copies of this exchange were subsequently posted on the Internet and went, in part, like this: Judd [Apatow]: I had a pilot at mtv called ‘‘Yard Dogs’’ about a rock band living in Hollywood. I told you about it and you proceeded to completely rip it o√, storyline and all, for the Ben Stiller Show. You called it ‘‘Grungies.’’ mtv and uta were working on an overall deal (mtv’s idea) with me, based on that pilot. When it turned up on your show everything went away overnight. I had just had my son Jack and I had no job, no money, nothing. There’s a saying, ‘‘I forgive but I don’t forget. And I don’t forgive.’’ Mark Mark [Brazill], I truly don’t remember anything you are talking about. Je√ Kahn wrote The Grungies sketch, a parody where we did Seattle bands as The Monkies. . . . Ben and I would get fifty sketches a week from the writers and then we’d pick the ones that we thought were funny. I never connected the two. Even now they don’t seem similar. Ours was a goofy over-the-top parody, not a situation comedy about musicians in LA. Nobody watched our show so I don’t see how that could be the reason your pilot died. That sketch aired once up against 60 Minutes, so it didn’t have any impact in town. I am sorry you are upset. I am not a thief of ideas. Judd Apatow≤≠

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Brazill accuses Apatow of taking a pitch from him, but then developing the idea independently of Brazill for one of Apatow’s shows. Brazill is incensed that Apatow did this without crediting, acknowledging, or paying him. The assignment of credits has regularly been nasty business in Hollywood, but this exchange shows just how ‘‘open’’ and participatory is the development process for creative ideas within the industry. That is, shows seldom start from a lone or autonomous idea, which then makes its way in a linear fashion from a single writer to a producer to the screen. Instead, story ideas are pitched in an environment that churns with a hundred pitches. This process continues day in and day out with a large number of participants continually contributing ideas. In the Apatow-Brazill exchange, Apatow finally counterattacks with a philosophical argument. Intending to show that nothing is truly original, he argues that all show ideas are composites or reincarnations of ideas that came before: Mark, I have no interest in talking with you on the phone any more. I know you are very successful and think that gives you the right to judge people and berate them regardless of the facts, but I have had enough of you for one day. I know it’s hard to believe that your rock band tv idea, which every writer in this town has thought of at one point, was not on my mind half a year after you told it to me. Yes, you thought of breaking the fourth wall. Groucho and George Burns stole it from you. Maybe you should sue Bernie Mac. Why don’t you sue the guys who have that new show How to Be a Rock Star on the wb. I must have told them your idea. Nobody has ever goofed on rock bands, not Spinal Tap or The Rutles or 800 Saturday Night Live sketches. I should have told everyone on the show, no rock band sketches, that’s Brazill’s area. So hold on to your hate and rage, even though it makes no sense. I’ll go back to my life of thievery and leaching. As for the cancer, I’ll wait till you get it and then steal it from you. By the way, that joke was one of my writer’s, Rodney Rothman (see I credited him). See, I have no original thoughts. Sorry I bothered to figure this out. Judd Judd, How appropriate that you had to use someone else’s joke to take a swipe at me. I told you my idea. You did it two weeks later, verbatim. Spew revisionist shit all you want. Everyone knows you’re a hack. Also, everyone knows how you fucked over Paul Feig on the new show. All your press mentions ‘‘your’’ bril-

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liant Freaks and Geeks, as if Feig didn’t even do the series. It must have killed you when the true genius behind it got nominated for an Emmy. Is your wife still livid about someone in the neighborhood building a house just like hers? Tell her I know how she feels. The reason I called was to tell you to piss o√. We’ll never be ‘‘friends,’’ regardless of the pussy whining from your last e-mail. I respect you zero. See ya at the upfronts, bitch! Well . . . unless you get canceled before that. Until then, die in a fiery accident and taste your own blood. (Is that too angry?) Love, Brazill

Brazill will have none of Apatow’s philosophical reasoning, and he goes for the jugular. Personal intention and awareness are still issues in Brazill’s scheme. Apatow, by contrast, sees television more broadly, as a shared expression of culture in which individuals simply relay existing forms of knowledge. Given the nasty and personal nature of the interchange, it is remarkable that the communications were then posted publicly on the Internet, arguably as a way for Brazill to ‘‘out’’ Apatow. Both the content of the exchange and its ‘‘outing’’ prove just how contested authorship can be among creators within a single above-the-line sector. It would be wrong to view the Brazill/Apatow bloodletting as merely an interpersonal phenomenon between professional competitors rather than a provocative case study in authorship, ownership, and property. The conflict between ownership and authorship has a long and ugly history in Hollywood. Part of the problem is that unlike the writer’s world of publishing, the producer’s world of Hollywood has never given copyright to their authors (aka screenwriters) but instead reserves it for the studio or production company. This makes the actual writing of a film or television show, at least in a legal sense, little more than work-for-hire day labor. Many ‘‘legitimate’’ writers (e.g., Brecht, Steinbeck) learned this lesson the hard way (as in the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink ) and left town. Other big-name publishing outsiders (e.g., Art Buchwald) who were mystified by both Hollywood’s authorship and impenetrable accounting practices sought financial remedies in court. The fact that intellectual property rights are now exclusively defined as corporate property rights has skewed the vast human workforce that collectively authors film/tv. Specifically, a widespread creative culture has developed based on feigned ‘‘mutual trust’’ (put in play during oral pitches and group brainstorming). But this publicly practiced posture of group trust

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is accompanied by deep-seated forms of ‘‘mistrust,’’ resignation, and suspicions about ‘‘who is stealing from whom.’’ Even film-producing graduate students who I interviewed for this book complained that their celebrity instructors/executives teaching in academia had made them sign ‘‘nondisclosure agreements’’ in class, ostensibly to prevent leaks of tightly held studio/network ‘‘secrets.’’ But since the courses actually consisted of endless pitches and proposals for feedback—by the students to the executives, not vice versa—most protested that it was the executives and not the students who should have been forced to sign o√ on nondisclosure. Welcome to the world of Hollywood content creation: ‘‘You share. We’ll get back to you.’’ The o≈cial version of Hollywood’s intellectual property rights that the public normally hears about involves the mpaa’s public relations diatribes against Chinese video piracy and rogue online downloading. Below this o≈cial industry soapbox at the top, however, exists a massive system of content generation at the bottom. Although never highlighted in press conferences, this lower property rights system runs o√ the systematic cultivation of idea theft, primarily based on two factors: the excessive generation and overproduction of story ideas; and the porous, loose, and largely oral ways that ideas are broached and bartered in pitch sessions and in writers’ rooms. In these ways, authorship in Hollywood cannot be separated from preemptive legal constraints on copyright and the excessively porous ways that creative ideas are vetted and circulated among the creative populace. The Brazill/Apatow exchange probably did not surprise the Internet surfers who viewed it, for this contestation over creative control now surfaces in the on-screen viewing experiences of mass audiences as well. Consider the following exchange between the character Scully and a screenwriter character on a 2000 episode of The X-Files in which Scully’s and Mulder’s lives are ‘‘adapted’’ for use in a ‘‘major motion picture’’ release. Scully questions the logic of a search scene as it unfolds: ‘‘We should have a warrant to do this.’’ The visiting on-screen ‘‘screenwriter’’ replies cynically: ‘‘No warrant. No research. You’re just like studio executives with guns.’’ Coded here—for prime-time mass-audience consumption—are the hallmarks of production authorship described above. Production creativity is contextless, it cuts corners, and it is always contested. In the following sections (on writing by committee and note giving) I show how the struggle between network executives and creators can be as contentious as the conflict between writers like Apatow and Brazill.

Industrial Auteur Theory

WRITING BY COMMITTEE (COLLECTIVE AND DISPOSABLE AUTHORSHIP)

The industrial performance art of pitching that I discussed in chapter 2 inculcates production culture with a clockwork-like dependence on endless variation/replication and generic aggregation. This helps explain the wealth of televisual forms across the multichannel spectrum. But another industrial ritual—‘‘writing by committee’’—stands as a countervailing performance that works to contain the stylistic volatility of the pitch aesthetic. Most showrunners (producer-creators) in U.S. television have backgrounds as writers, and many others broadly deem such producers as the true authors of television.≤∞ It is the showrunner’s defining vision of a series, according to this view, that stamps the series as distinctive. But the sheer magnitude of the narrative universe needed to support a full season of half-hour or hourlong shows in tv (versus film) means that actual authorship must fall to a sometimes very large team of writers over a year of production. Without the relatively leisurely pace of feature film production, television writers must crank out thirty- and sixty-minute scripts at a much faster rate, and they usually do this in teams. The film industry has traditionally denigrated television for writing by committee, while assuming ownership for itself of the traditional creative marker of quality: sole authorship. Yet the ‘‘writers room’’ has for decades served an important role. Phil Rosenthal, the executive producer of Eveybody Loves Raymond, goes back to the 1960s to describe the logic of successful team writing: ‘‘Carl Reiner ran The Dick Van Dyke Show by having everyone go around the room and say what happened at his or her house the previous weekend. You talk and all of a sudden there’s an episode. We laugh now because we can’t believe we get to put our wives’ horrible habits on television.’’≤≤ Originally, the writing team consisted of collegial, good-humored turn-takers who directly related onscreen content to their personal lives and families at home. Today, writing teams and writers’ rooms function as intense, strategic pressure points in the development of a television program. Although writing by committee has been a fundamental part of the sitcom genre since the start, Arrested Development producer Hurwitz directly links the writing team formula to the ever more frantic pace of contemporary production: The show is very much group written. . . . We have eleven total, six at the producer level . . . and then four or five lower-level new writers. . . . We sit in a

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room and write and I drive the narrative a little bit. Facing each other. So often in shows, writers sit in a little cubicle and write, and someone comes around, and puts part A and part B and all of the ideas together. Sometimes we’ll send out a writer to write a draft, and then we’ll bring the draft back and we’ll all rewrite it. But the truth is, that you are so up against things . . . you have basically three days of post, and five days of shooting and really only four days to write a script—all within one week. You fall behind. So I just started skipping the steps of people just going o√ to write. Sometimes I will generate an idea and pitch it in . . . we’ll all just pitch things in. There are really a lot of voices in the scripts.≤≥

Notice how budget and schedule pressures make ‘‘going o√ to write’’ a luxury. Instead television scripts now frequently develop in real time, with everyone in the room tossing in ideas and refining ideas that others have tossed in. In fact, Hurwitz likens this process to a group exercise in cumulative ‘‘pitching,’’ where the story emerges only through the persistent interaction of numerous voices. Named authorship becomes less possible in this aggregating mode, since ‘‘a lot of voices’’ produce these scripts and the showrunner herds all of the ideas into a unified form. Writing by committee allowed production companies in the network era to industrially rationalize writing activities by bringing the process of narrative development inside the company in a systematic on-going way. Historically, writing teams were a staple of early live television. The extremely short turnaround times for each live weekly show and the dual roles many had as both writers and performers meant that there was no real time to go away and write. Rehearsals and skit changes necessitated having a writer available for script revisions at all times. This practice (writers on set during production) continues today in the five-day process of sitcom production. After the live era, many television screenwriters learned their craft by writing stand-up comedy. This lineage is logical since both comedy writing and sitcom writing are somewhat fragmented, joke-based exercises. By contrast, writing a movie of the week is more like film writing and is amenable to more solitary writing methods. That is, the extended narrative arc of a movie of the week makes team writing more complicated than the punchin-the-joke methodology favored in the sitcom ‘‘writers’ room.’’ The success of the writing team in tv has allowed the committee method to invade the world of feature film production as well. The industry trades and tabloids often told of the behind-the-scenes creative soap opera preced-

Industrial Auteur Theory

ing the 2000 release of Charlie’s Angels. The press gagged at the thought that scores of successively teamed screenwriters had been enjoined to write and rewrite the film’s script.≤∂ While executives argued that this form of musical chairs helped ‘‘punch up’’ the scenes, the industry moral was fairly transparent. Even features had become excessively formulaic, with writers now only needed to fill in the missing chunks and pieces of the narrative blueprint. The big-budget, big-screen action pic had thus apparently learned the e≈ciencies of television’s network practice. Working (significantly) from a television series original, feature films like Charlie’s Angels dutifully mastered tv’s stabilizing, authorial mode via the large writing committee. Writing by committee assumes that a show’s main story arcs are well known and established, usually in a written document called the show’s ‘‘bible.’’ Any necessary backstory is thereby codified to ensure continuity in all future scripts. Screenwriters who build a show and script from such a bible end up functioning more like ‘‘assemblers’’ who punch in a range of possible options—for the joke, new character, new situation—from a ‘‘menu’’ of narrative choices. The anonymity of writing by committee alarms ‘‘real’’ authors, but the actual practice has the more deadly e√ect of constraining the original volatility of the pitch aesthetic into a fairly rigid matrix of obligatory structural forms. Any variation allowed or required is simply the punchline or character action wedged into an established structural slot. Stylistic volatility encouraged by the pitch meets a di√erent ritualized textual force: the e≈cient and redundant menu-driven writing by committee. Writing by committee now gives feature film producers more control over the production process, even as it has traditionally done for television producers. As the writing-team method evolved from its roots in live tv and comedy to sitcoms and feature films, the ideological and cultural significance of the team experience also changed. Consider Carl Reiner’s writing-bycommittee process in The Dick Van Dyke Show as a kind of ‘‘golden age’’ for the method. Participation, cooperation, and consensus building seem to be at the heart of Reiner’s group enterprise. The show itself, furthermore, was frequently about the writing process since a writing/producing team was at the center of the series’ plots. The Dick Van Dyke Show was one of the first highly successful shows that depicted a ‘‘workplace family.’’ In each episode, Dick’s harmonious nuclear family always mirrors Dick’s wacky workplace/ show-business family. Both fictional families, at least according to Rosenthal, mirrored the ‘‘real’’ writing team—and their ‘‘real’’ families and wives —who together created the cbs show. This overdetermined, optimistic

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four-part model of the cohesive and supportive family in the 1960s (fictional nuclear family, fictional workplace writing-family, real writing-team/workplace family, and the real nuclear families of the writers at home), bears little resemblance to modern writing teams and television. Although earnest producers and executives still invoke the standby metaphor of the production company as a ‘‘family,’’ tense conditions in the writers’ rooms seldom reinforce this overly optimistic communal view. Diane English, the executive producer of Murphy Brown, characterizes the team-writing process and the writers’ room today in dark terms that one might not expect from an A-list production company: ‘‘You take on a bunker mentality, definitely. When you’ve been sitting in the same room with no ventilation for twelve hours and you can smell your dinner rotting in the trash can and just want to get in your car and go home, thank goodness for that person who said something or draws something that cracks everyone up. You get a rush of adrenaline and you can go on.’’≤∑ This visceral, dystopian account (fatigue, rotten smells and adrenalin) bears more resemblance to the nonunion digital sweatshops of below-the-line workers than it does to the upbeat above-the-line model of team writing from Reiner’s network era. David Crane, the executive producer of Friends, pushes beyond both English and Rosenthal. He explains the logic of the contemporary team-writing group in overt, polymorphous sexual terms that would ill fit the ‘‘house-wife’’ anecdotes of Reiner’s team: ‘‘[It’s] kind of like sex, whatever works for you. If you like a lot of people there, more power to you. If you have fun with just you and another person, or if you like to do it alone, fine. My feeling is that you’ve hired a bunch of these really talented writers—they’re funny, smart people. Utilize them. I understand the pejorative of ‘Wow, everything’s homogenized when it’s gang written.’ I don’t think that’s the case. Frankly, I think that helps give a show consistency, so that week after week you’re turning out the same show.’’≤∏ While provocative, Crane’s sexualized rationale for his show’s authoring method proved unfortunate when subsequent legal actions against Friends by a former writers’ assistant accused Crane’s company of ‘‘hostile workplace environment’’ and sexual harassment in the show’s writers’ room. Once the details of the suit became widely available in 1999, the nature and activities of writers’ rooms and teams were widely discussed by film/tv workers online, inside of work, and o√ the lot. In recounting the legal depositions and charges in the case, Christopher Noxon quotes another

Industrial Auteur Theory

writers’ assistant on Friends who explains the o√-color team-writing tendencies: ‘‘It starts when a writer is like, ‘Uh-oh, I haven’t gotten a joke in the script for fifteen minutes.’ The easiest way to get a laugh is to make a masturbation joke or ask how many dead babies can you cram into a glove compartment.’’≤π Court records show that highly sexualized banter through the late hours of writing was a regular—and expected—part of work on Friends. Once the Friends enterprise was hauled into court by this suit, producers and writers throughout the industry clamored in Crane’s and Bright’s defense. Supporters argued that such banter was both constitutionally protected and essential to e√ective and expansive comedy writing. Legal harassment experts, however, questioned why Hollywood producers and writers should get a ‘‘pass’’ if no other labor sector in the entire country is allowed to circumvent hostile-workplace laws by sanctioning sexualized trade talk. The writer Chris Kelly provides a tactical explanation of how the process actually works: ‘‘A dirty bit can take forever. Not only in the telling, but then it has to be topped (by another writer in the room). And then someone has to jump on the Internet to find something that’s worse.’’≤∫ Writing-by-committee sex talk, therefore, is really a game of masculine ‘‘one-upmanship.’’ Critics claimed that the writing by committee model itself is prone to sexism against women. Women make up only a small minority of working tv writers, and many of the writer-producers presiding over writers’ rooms are younger men who tend to favor unorthodox thinking and sophomoric sexual themes. Kelly rejects the idea that the writers’ room discriminates against all women: ‘‘It doesn’t just marginalize women. It marginalizes older writers who just want to go home.’’ Ageism is a widespread problem in Hollywood, and it cuts across and excludes potential writing-team members as well. Some younger women writers throw bawdy rhetoric back in the face of male writers to survive. But the real issue is that all of these writers—like below-the-line workers—are expected to work eighty-hour weeks and late nights if needed. Freewheeling thought supposedly makes group conceptualizing and narrative creation more stimulating and productive. But the process can also function like a sophomoric, collective Rorschach test—an unrestrained ‘‘projective test’’ that loads the writers’ room with alienating and marginalizing sex talk along with an assortment of ostensibly witty concepts and potential episode fragments. Writing by committee functions as a lab for creativity focused on free-

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form speculation, critical dialogue, personal contestation, and professional one-upmanship. This method cultivates anxiety and stress in workers, just like the aesthetic models discussed earlier (authorship as stealing, networks as overseers, the digital sweatshop, speed production). Another conventionalized trade practice—‘‘note-giving’’—furthers the industrial goal of cultivating anxiety among above-the-line workers. GIVING NOTES (AND TAKING ARTISTIC CONTROL)

The solicitation, networking, and negotiation rituals that I described in chapter 2 all build consensus, solidarity, and a sense of commonality among film/video workers. By so doing, such activities work to cover over anxieties about external threats to productive corporate relations between competitors. Writing by committee achieves similar goals inside of a production company, since it allows producers to ride herd on and manage competitiveness within a creative unit. Other industrial rituals, however, work differently by producing and instilling anxiety in the community of production professionals. The process of ‘‘giving notes’’ occurs when an executive or producer sends suggestions to directors or writers about how to ‘‘improve’’ the direction of a production or series. While such incursions by ‘‘the suits’’ into the aesthetic domain rankle most directors, the process has a far more fundamental function. The ubiquitous ritual of giving notes underscores the sense that the proprietary and private world of the studio and soundstage is actually very much in doubt—monitored as it is daily by an amorphous but ever expanding ensemble of seldom seen but always present producers, executives, and their assistants. Production personnel internalize this sense of being watched, much as the prisoners of Bentham’s ‘‘panopticon’’ are disciplined by the continual threat (real or imagined) of always being under surveillance.≤Ω Above-the-line creative workers recognize that they are being monitored when notes are given, even as inmates internalize their own surveillance. Curse the notes if you will, but you are being watched and evaluated nevertheless. Giving notes, like writing by committee, is another way that the production enterprise critically engages with and reflects upon itself. Considering the meager term ‘‘notes’’ as a form of industrial critical analysis strips such communications of the abstractions traditionally associated with critical analysis or aesthetics. The term notes suggests direct person-to-person com-

Industrial Auteur Theory

munication rather than intellectual pretension, even though a note is in fact a corporate communiqué based on some artistic and economic ideal about how film/television should work. Notes are seldom lengthy or abstract since they function as orders about who to cast, how to modify scripts, how to deal with quality of performance, how to recut a scene, or how to revise endings. Even if notes are not handed down to producers and writers about aesthetic or stylistic issues, executives almost always issue them when questionable language and/or ostensibly lewd scenes come under the scrutiny of network ‘‘standards and practices’’ departments. Showrunners and writers love to complain about such shortsighted incursions from management. A behind-the-scenes look at the making of a Peabody award-winning episode of Homicide shows the series producer Jim Yashimura being given notes at three points: first, when the series and episode are considered by nbc executives at the ‘‘network preseason meetings’’ (where any show must be ‘‘blessed’’ by the programming executives); second, during episode script development (when the network makes suggestions to the showrunner about possible story solutions and stars to cast); and third, after the script is completed but before production actually begins (by network standards and practices departments that isolate dialogue or actions that must be censored or modified before production can commence).≥≠ In the documentary about Homicide, Warren Littlefield is concerned but ‘‘intrigued’’ by the edginess of the concept but nevertheless gives the green light during the first phase. The Homicide showrunner Tom Fontana considers network notes that recommend making the episode ‘‘less dark’’ at the second phase, but then he turns around and tells his writer Yashimura to go ahead as planned, since ‘‘we can only survive [as a series] if we push the envelope.’’ The biggest flurry of notes comes down from on high during the third phase, telling Yashimura to delete or change seventeen expletives and unacceptably o√color words in the dialogue. Yashimura cynically makes these changes using odd and enigmatic substitutions from a thesaurus, which he barks out to a female writing assistant who types them then makes copies for the cast and crew. Not all productions in all genres or networks receive the same scrutiny from above in the form of notes. Glenn Morgan, the series producer and editor of The Real World, sketches out a much less claustrophobic relationship with mtv for his series: ‘‘We don’t ever get a note for style—and we always get notes for story. I’ve cut several features. And cutting this show is

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much more like cutting features than like cutting music videos.≥∞ Unlike nbc, mtv does not have to worry about broadcast content standards (or censorship). And more so than the drama Homicide, the reality series The Real World is shot documentary style and thus cannot have extensive, sceneby-scene network preinvolvement via notes (apart from concept and casting decisions), until after the footage is actually shot and sent to postproduction. Note giving can intensify in unorthodox shows for which network support is tenuous but crucial in actually launching the series. Arrested Development ’s Hurwitz describes the interactive brinkmanship in which notes were used to negotiate the form of his series even as the form and novel narrative concept was evolving: ‘‘We couldn’t [cast] Jessica’s part and I remember Sandy Grushow saying ‘This is how pilots fall apart’—a very threatening thing to say at the time, because he’d said the [network] was very supportive of this pilot. We had a casting session and we didn’t have the part and we were supposed to shoot on Monday. . . . Then they told us, ‘we have just the person for this in New York. We already put this audition on tape.’ But we didn’t know it—and she held it o√ until the last minute. It was a crazy game of poker.’’≥≤ Hurwitz likens the note-giving ritual to a form of ‘‘poker’’ in which both sides (network and production company) under deadline pressures blu√ each other to get what they want in the series. In this case, the network exploited time pressures and a casting quandary in order to impose their choice of an actress (who had already made a casting tape in New York) ‘‘at the last minute.’’ In return, Imagine Entertainment ‘‘snuck’’ the dysfunctional series patriarch character onto the show as a mere cameo in the premiere. ‘‘I thought I was pushing the boundaries to add so many characters at this point. . . . So we wrote him in as a cameo . . . he’d go to prison, then disappear. No doubt in my mind that this show would not work without Je√rey. . . . He did us a favor, the day of shooting, when we brought him to work on the boat scene. . . . The network’s immediate reaction when they saw this was that if we could get Je√rey and David C. full time on this thing, then we would have a big, big chance of getting this show picked up.’’≥≥ In order to push for an unusually large ensemble cast (with its budgetary demands) in a half-hour show, Imagine added the patriarch as a stealth character. Once the network saw his surprising cameo, Imagine earned further last-minute endorsement to air the show from Fox executives. While note giving in the more formulaic sitcom genre follows a conventional

Industrial Auteur Theory

pattern, the incremental, ‘‘real-time’’ development of edgier forms makes constant interaction and negotiation with the network (via notes, blu√s, and surprises) even more central. Once a network has made the commitment to air multiple episodes of a show, network oversight and notes follow a more predictable pattern. On the five-day shooting process for the sitcom Friends, a ‘‘table read’’ by the cast on day one is followed by a rehearsal and run-through on day two. On day three of each production week a rehearsal and run-through are staged for Warner Bros. and nbc executives. Notes given at this point steer further script revisions before the show is finally taped on day five. Creative producers and writers typically view network notes as either a nagging curse or a necessary evil. Many producers protest the lack of logic and the doublespeak that frequently come with notes. Bruce Helford, for example, comments on the contradictions found in his notes from cbs on his pending series The L Word: ‘‘It was probably the best pilot I’ve ever done. The young girl was becoming a lesbian—even at age eleven she was realizing it. We shot the pilot for cbs and Je√ Sagansky sat me down and said, ‘‘This is maybe the best pilot I’ve ever seen but there’s no way I can put it on the air.’’≥∂ Far from walking away from the business for such doublespeak, the A-list producer Helford (Family Ties, Roseanne, Anything But Love, and The Drew Carey Show ) accepts—and justifies—the cold realities in pragmatic, common-sense terms: ‘‘I’ve always said ‘tell me your problems, I’m the only guy that can fix it.’ I’m one of the most collaborative guys in the business. I don’t lock out the network. I won’t say: ‘you’re a bunch of schmucks.’ They’re smart people, they’re my partners, and it’s their ballpark I’m playing in. I’m not a fool who says ‘fuck you and go away.’ They’re the client, I’m trying to please them, that’s the relationship. But when they try to make the fixes themselves, that’s not what they do for a living, that’s why they hired me.’’≥∑ Such a≈rmations profitably benefit Helford’s reputation and his company in Hollywood. Note giving is a process by which every party involved in a production ostensibly ‘‘gets on the same page’’ regarding the logic and aesthetic form of a film/series. Yet note giving is more than just an industrial critical dialogue. It is also one index of the extent to which production companies, studios, and networks share the logic and financial prospects of each other’s business plans.≥∏ While the cultivation rituals I discussed in chapter 2 extend the private executive sphere out into a semipublic space for a≈liate relationship build-

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ing, monitoring rituals (team writing, note giving, production meetings) tend to make long-term relationships always uncertain. The complicated network of authorial labor defining Hollywood knows from these regularized incursions just how precarious practitioner futures will be. One result of this system is that the human targets of workplace stress frequently take out their animosities on anyone who works below them in the food chain. This behavior tends to make the human subjects in the production enterprise as suspect as the systemic industrial conditions that create the stress in the first place. One independent film director discusses this ugly process, as she witnessed it on the set of another indie director’s shoot, as follows: ‘‘Despite all the trappings of financial success, his new bmw, his new home on the Westside, his dga membership, Todd seems to be disempowered creatively and not very satisfied with life. . . . Spending inordinate amounts of time scheduling other people’s films, standing next to directors and actors who are making a movie that’s not yours has got to be frustrating. I begin to wonder if he has taken on this film to throw his weight around, shit on other people who are less experienced because he’s been shit on so many times before. His constant trumpeting of his a≈liations, and his need to collect credits indicates an insecurity about his own achievements.’’≥π The pervasive presence of this downward animosity among creators predisposes above-the-line workers to fall back on various cultural defense mechanisms to make the industrial work world tolerable. Together with the nasty fights over authorship and credits, the contentious one-upmanship of writers’ rooms, and the brutally direct commands from above through executive notes, this downward animosity among alienated workers on the set creates a situation in which psychotherapy for the industrially wounded is very much warranted. Kristina Sauerwein poignantly accounts for one such trade intervention, directed at the ‘‘walking wounded’’ among screenwriters: ‘‘Some speakers advised [screen]writers to seek therapy and, in Stuart Smalley fashion, to recite positive a≈rmations in the mirror. They encouraged writers to confront their internal bullies, accept struggle as part of the creative process and reject those who spew negative energy. One cheerleading moderator ordered audience members . . . to rise from their seats, flail their arms and chant, ‘I’m letting go,’ and ‘I feel great.’ ‘Say it even if you have to lie,’ shouted Paul Ryan, a tv game and talk show host.’’≥∫ Fed up with rejection and harassment by executives, producers, agents, and each other, screenwriters paid several hundred dollars to participate in this

Industrial Auteur Theory

staged career ‘‘healing’’ event. Despite the evidence of hostile working conditions in the industry, the presence of so many support groups and therapeutic interventions suggests just how deep-seated the antagonistic human fallout over authorship is in Hollywood. Understanding this self-conscious trade ‘‘pain’’ means better understanding the argumentation and emotional appeals made in the struggles between superiors and workers, executives and creative types. The note giving and other industrial monitoring rituals, for example, sometimes function industrially as an aggressive missive over who gets to speak for the audience. That is, Littlefield’s notes on Homicide described earlier presuppose that Littlefield and nbc know more about why and how the audience watches than do the creators Fontana and Yashimura at Levinson’s production company. Notes are in fact ‘‘orders’’ given from ostensible superiors to clients in the production chain. But the artistic suggestions contained in such orders are almost always based on some implicit theory of the audience. A Beautiful Mind ’s art director Wynn Thomas bases his aesthetic choices on the viewer’s interpretive and sensory abilities: ‘‘As a designer, the thing that is important to me is how an environment feels. Because that is what the audience is going to take away when it watches the film. Either on a subconscious or conscious level.’’≥Ω The art director Dean Tavoularis’s model of reception is more causal than that held by Thomas: ‘‘The genius of those films was to take all of those images and iconize them. . . . They became eternal, as images for all times. . . . That’s an imaginary world that has just drilled itself into our consciousness.’’∂≠ Thomas designs films based on how viewers feel; Tavoularis designs films that create consciousness in viewers. Thomas defines audience in sensory terms and Tavoularis defines audiences deterministically, but others are more cynical about audience abilities. Hurwitz both deprecates and exploits the ignorant participants who have enough idle time to participate in ‘‘test screenings’’ before broadcasts: ‘‘Why . . . does every preview for next week’s episode [of Arrested Development ] say: ‘And now for scenes you will never see on next week’s episode’? That’s the kind of a cheesy thing that we did at first because they test each pilot. That’s the bane of these sorts of shows. They bring in fifty people who are willing to watch tv in the middle of the afternoon and . . . they know they’re being watched through two-way mirrors, and one of the questions they ask is would you watch another episode? That’s a huge question when you are making a sitcom. . . . I guess they think ‘I really have

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to [watch].’ ’’∂∞ In fairness, Hurwitz does not simply question the intelligence of test audiences but also criticizes the network’s insistence that audience response be scientifically measured. As a result the show’s producers actually built scenes into the test screening and pending broadcast versions that mocked the fact that the network would never allow the scenes (‘‘that follow’’) to be aired. Not all ‘‘audience theories’’ from producers are as cynical as that described by Hurwitz, however. Some producers and directors assert that far more agency and sophistication exists in viewing than many production people and critics are willing to admit. Di√erences in genre may impact the relative complexity of audience activities allowed in industrial theories of reception. While Hurwitz describes the limited abilities in sample sitcom audiences, John Cassar describes much more audience competence in cognitively grasping the rapidly cut hour-long action/suspense dramas in prime time like 24 : ‘‘I think the audience is actually used to being bombarded by that kind of visual [split screen, rapid montage] now anyway. I mean, I can’t watch cnn anymore without constantly reading that bottom scroll. It drives me crazy. And you have to do it. While I’m on the Internet. And while I’m cutting my show. So I think everyone is used to that bombardment. I don’t think anyone has a problem absorbing the [split-screen] boxes that we present. . . . We deal with real time. And we constantly have to move people from A to B. And they are in a car. If we want them to go to the door we can’t just say ‘cut to the door’ and they’ll get there. We have to see them get there. We have to keep them in the story. And to keep them in the story we have them on cell phones talking. . . . It was borne again from a ‘problem,’ something that needed to be fixed, and that was what fixed it.’’∂≤ Cassar has a ‘‘high’’ view of audience perceptual and cognitive abilities. According to this view, visual-aural ‘‘bombardment’’ is the norm in the current sound-bitten, multitasking cnn mode. As a result, 24 solicits a dramatic experience that engages those new sound-image abilities and registers directly. It may be that producer/‘‘filmmakers’’ like Cassar are di√erent from producer/‘‘writers’’ like Hurwitz because they tra≈c in the complex visual layers of cinematic sequences and sounds more so than in verbal plot information. Writing by committee and note giving both involve control of authorship. However, participants in both activities regularly invoke models of audience behavior and competence to justify proposed directions in show

Industrial Auteur Theory

creation. This use of an imagined audience for authorial justification has a long history in both Hollywood and broadcasting. Aaron Spelling, in reponse to criticism about violence and sexually explicit prime-time content in 1972, defended his choices on two fronts: ‘‘We try to anticipate what the audience wants to see. Eventually we’ll do what the networks want to buy.’’∂≥ Examining this dilemma, abc news turned its cameras on itself to educate the audience at home about the true ‘‘facts behind the scene.’’ The special program Primetime tv : The Decision Makers provided ‘‘exclusive,’’ ‘‘behind the scenes’’ looks at executive decisionmaking and the ‘‘extensive’’ audience research and testing that now supposedly forms the basis of all network decisions. One on-camera network executive summed up the truism that reappears in almost every issue of Broadcasting and Cable today: ‘‘Ratings equal popular democracy, in which (choices) are being voted on 360 days per year.’’∂∂ According to these views, neither the studios nor the broadcasters are responsible for authoring television—instead, the audience is. While we might expect this defensive hand-washing from corporations defending themselves against popular dissent, it is more surprising to see the audience straw-man lauded as the force behind production’s creative decisionmaking. Ingrained as an institutional ideology in film/television, audience ‘‘theorizing’’ is also used to leverage control in writers’ meetings and through note giving, thus constantly altering authorship. MENTORING (AND MYSTIFYING AUTHORSHIP)

As I discussed in chapters 2 and 3, mentoring and apprenticeships in the below-the-line sectors have been an important part of the traditional guild system of labor since the start. Learning cinematography means moving up the ranks, with years spent as a camera loader, focus puller, second ac, first ac, camera operator, and finally (if one is lucky enough to live that long) director of photography. Accomplished art directors like Richard Sylbert similarly credited their long working apprenticeships with master designers like William Cameron Menzies as a fundamental reason for their subsequent career success. Outside of the regimented career progressions o√ered by the traditional guilds and unions under the signatory agreements, mentorship for above-the-line producers and writers is as important but is far less coordinated. Screenwriters almost by definition live a solitary life—at least until they are employed in television’s writer’s rooms. Determining

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what it takes to function as a high-level producer is even harder to discern. This is because producers come from many di√erent backgrounds and take so many career paths to achieve their status. Some come up the ranks in television, typically starting as writers’ assistants and then writers. Others may have served as production managers and assistant directors, a very di√erent pedigree tied to production logistics, budgeting, and scheduling. Others come from the business end, if they can leverage successful financing activities into creative credits. Still others come from law school, since deal making is fundamental for all producers. De facto mentoring takes place in the o≈ces of independent producers across the Los Angeles area. Although part of the ‘‘unregulated’’ work sectors described in chapter 1, independent production company o≈ces have conventionalized advancement via a series of loosely hierarchical levels. Medium- to large-size independent producer companies usually sta√, from bottom to top, unpaid interns, assistants, researchers, and producer’s assistants. These lower-level employees and trainees serve and assist the associate producers and producers who develop content that the company can then bring to the studios or the networks for big-screen or small-screen development. Many successful producers came up through these ranks. Some begin learning the craft of producing as interns and poorly paid production assistants, since one of their key tasks is usually to write ‘‘coverage’’ (short prose summary reports and evaluations) of scripts and treatments submitted to the company for consideration. Advancing (and surviving) even to the producer’s assistant level provides aspirants valuable views of the nuances of producing. Such training is simply not available in academic settings (although educational training is available in the below-the-line production specializations of many film schools). Getting to the producer’s assistant level, however, can be highly competitive and cutthroat. Many companies institutionalized this contention by keeping multiple producer-track chains of assistants working within the same o≈ces or buildings. As a result, no one ever seems to fully understand how and why certain scripts get considered after being sent forward with recommendations, while other recommendations are ignored or tabled. The relative status of the producer that one assists or researches for is a factor. While such a workplace looks open and participatory, it is actually governed by a set of conventions and protocols about who gets to have ‘‘face time’’ with higher-ups in the assistant and producing chains, and who does not. Credibility depends on supervisor

Industrial Auteur Theory

status, and coverage by interns or recommendations by researchers or assistants on a submitted script are always constrained by an individual’s internal political status within the company. Rules for referrals and chains of personal contacts allow some projects to go to the top, and others to languish in anonymity in the netherworld of an assistant’s or researcher’s desk. Most o≈ce workers are kept in the dark, whenever possible, about such rules. For all the ‘‘reflexivity’’ examined in this book, producer’s o≈ces are notorious for doing the opposite: namely, mystifying the rules/conventions that govern the movements of their lower level employees. While disclosures about such conventions and rules would be easy enough to detail, they would also have the e√ect of reducing the anxiety that perpetually defines such spaces. Anxious assistants and o≈ce workers kept o√ balance in this way create a disaggregated situation with which labor solidarities will never be formidable enough to force company executives to deal or to negotiate. Anxious workers also make good personal assistants when they are plucked up from the lower levels of o≈ce functionaries. Grateful to finally be at a level in which seemingly real decisions are made, such assistants are frequently willing to work the seventy-hour weeks that producers expect of them. Failing to perform selflessly enough in this way usually sabotages the career prospects of assistants within a company. Mentoring involves disclosing crucial bits of critical and practical knowledge about a production craft or specialization. Its antithesis—mystification —is about clouding the logic of a production enterprise and o≈ce. Yet this concept works well by granting producers greater selectivity and control in harvesting the right kind of talent from the large o≈ce pool. Throughout the production sectors, practitioners regularly theorize about production. But practitioners also habitually hide or mystify their theorization and logic. Although few would admit to it, ‘‘Keeping people stupid’’ in this way does three things: it enhances the producer’s status above the minions; it disaggregates workers from each other; and it cultivates the kind of stressed anxiety among assistants in the producer chain that has proven so valuable in the otherwise very di√erent work worlds of the writers’ room and the digital sweatshop. Mentoring and the informal insider tracks and relationships that regulate it are guarded in other ways as well. Many job aspirants from cultures that are di√erent from the producer’s culture racially, ethnically, and classwise, for example, find themselves barred from the enabling possibilities and

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prospects of mentoring. Trying to figure out the rules of advancement once one has become an assistant is one thing; trying to gain employment as an assistant in the first place is an entirely di√erent matter. In describing how the system of mentoring both helps and excludes, Felix Sanchez of the National Hispanic Federation for the Arts comments: ‘‘I think the hardest part that people have in understanding this process, is how [to do it] if you are not in the loop, if you are not in the network—because this is about a networking game. . . . There is no job posting announcing that ‘on Monday we are going to be receiving pitches for a dramatic series.’ There’s no central way in which individuals can connect to the industry unless you are in the loop in some way.’’∂∑ Sanchez describes how token hires at lower levels usually never result in advancement for minorities to higher levels in a film/television company. His advocacy group tries to pressure large corporations to establish diversity hiring commitments at all levels of the company, so that minority employees can actually advance even if they are not hand groomed and culled from the producer’s o≈ce pool by higher-ups. From this perspective, the flexible, informal mentoring/networking function helps certain workers advance, even as other applicants can’t break into the closed loop in the first place. By 2000 the naacp began pressuring the film and television industries to open up their process and to diversify. After delivering a blistering attack on the racially exclusive practices of the television industry, the naacp chairman Kweise Mfume made the following comments to a ‘‘liberal’’ agent attending the natpe market who expresses his ‘‘concern’’ about how others had thwarted his e√orts to diversify in casting: ‘‘Less than three percent of all of the agents in this country are people of color—only three percent of all of the agents in this country! And if I go into one more agency, and see another person of color who is only the secretary, or the ‘‘greeter,’’ or the co√ee maker, I think I’m going to blow my stack. Because I think that it is not enough to point fingers at the networks. This is a multifaceted industry so if we’re going to talk about diversity, let’s all talk about it together.’’∂∏ Public pressure like this demonstrates that mentoring/networking is crucial in determining who gets in and who moves up. The economic genius of the mentoring system is that it gives production companies great flexibilities in hiring and promotion practices. In this scheme, labor will never be a consolidated force, and the assistants within each caste are perpetually disaggregated and competitive. Designed and justified as an enabling career process,

Industrial Auteur Theory

the mentoring system also tends to exclude those who do not share the cultural identities of the company culture in question. In addition, the tendency to mystify the rules of producing also camouflages the routes one might take to advance up the chain of assistantships. An institutional form of mentoring occurs when production companies lock down a show’s look based on some benchmark of stylistic performance or production. In this scheme, personal knowledge and wisdom are not handed down person to person or mentor to mentee. Rather, an act of individual production performance establishes a model that the rest of the crew performs over the life of a filmed series. Typically, a director or cinematographer will establish a defining look for a filmed pilot, then all of the subsequent journeyman directors and cinematographers hired for each episode will emulate that look. Scott Brazil explains the stylistic benchmark of the fx series The Shield : ’’It goes to Clark Johnson who directed our pilot. A lot of stylistic choices . . . were born out of the fact that we had: (1) no time, (2) no money, and (3) Clark’s experience with Homicide. There he learned to direct that way. And they directed handheld [with] 16mm cameras. This sort of approach for us—from a storytelling point of view—was to try and make it feel like . . . a police ride-along. That’s where it began. No time, no money. Handheld.’’∂π The supervising producer of Fox’s series 24 takes a very similar approach to explaining stylistic influence. Both producers take pains to identify with a specific person the original look of each series. And, notably, both directors are identified with either a higher production caste (Hopkins came from feature film directing) or with critically acclaimed television precedent (the award-winning series Homicide ).∂∫ As Cassar states: ‘‘I have to [give credit for the look] to Stephen Hopkins. Steven had never done television. He was a feature film director. He did the pilot. He had done Lost in Space and a few other films. When he first came on, he just couldn’t understand how you could possibly do all you had to do in such a short time. So he had two cameras rolling at all times. And he put them wherever he could. And if they crossed the line? So be it. That’s where they were going to be. That was part of where it started for him, and for 24. And we’ve just taken it from there.’’∂Ω The more elaborate production mode and larger budgets a√orded to pilots may predispose the series based on that pilot (once picked up) to repeat the distinctive, now conventionalized look as a cost-e√ective option. The seven-and-half day rapid turnaround time for the production of each

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weekly episode of both 24 and The Shield may preempt extensive further experimentation. CONCLUSION: AFFIRMING COLLECTIVITY BUT CLAIMING AUTONOMY

Consider the various forms of logic behind collectivity in production authorship. The first involves interpersonal gratifications and worker productivity. Writing by committee, note giving, and mentoring all exemplify how cooperative and collective creation stands at the center of film/television. In certain contexts and venues, workers will celebrate and a≈rm this collectivity. But in other public arenas the individual in the room with the highest status or rank in the production company/network food chain will claim authorship. On some shoots this tension and maxim (to a≈rm collectivity but claim autonomous responsibility) forms a central tenet of the production strategy. The production designer Wynn Thomas describes both sides of the collectivity/autonomy fence: ‘‘The great thing is that [Spike Lee] lets the people working for him interpret those scripts. He gave me a lot of freedom. . . . The joy of working . . . is the collaborative process. . . . talking and communicating and working with all of those people to give definition to what we are trying to do.’’∑≠ Celebrating decentralized deference to the various production department heads helps stimulate creativity and productivity on the shoot. But then Thomas ‘‘trumps’’ the other departments by claiming that production design provides the overarching determining scheme for the entire shoot: ‘‘Production designers . . . provide the visual boundaries that everyone else is working within.’’ Hurwitz makes a similarly conflicted celebration of collective creativity on Arrested Development. Hurwitz and the show’s star Jason Bateman walk a thin line between giving credit to one creator and claiming responsibility for the group: You said it last week: ‘‘The writer’s job is to make these characters as despicable as possible, and our job, as actors, is to make them as likable as possible.’’ HURWITZ: Yes . . . but as soon as you get . . . a cast as talented as this one—the writers can’t help but follow them. Sometimes it’s based on the words that are spoken, but often times it is because of the personas that the actors bring with them to the role.∑∞ BATEMAN:

Industrial Auteur Theory

Such rationales demonstrate ethical standing, awareness, and concern for the production cohort. Showrunners who do not at least talk this way among workers earn self-serving reputations that undercut the value of their services in the future. The logic of collectivity goes beyond conflicted interpersonal exchanges and public a≈rmations. The speed production mode in prime time today has made the ‘‘ensemble’’ a defining paradigm, not just for the cast but for the crew as well. Viewing—and organizing—the crew as an ensemble frequently collapses a number of traditional on-set distinctions. Cassar explains this in terms of the impact of handheld multicamera production: ‘‘You don’t save one shot for the one line. . . . Here’s the three pages, and we do that scene from the beginning to the end. . . . It plays like a theater piece. . . . You don’t have to think about it as cut-by-cut-by-cut. . . . This puts a lot more importance on your cameraman and your editor, because you’re shooting so much more film. You’re doing everything top to bottom . . . unlike traditional style, where you’ve got your master, medium, and close-up and the editor moves in. Now . . . he becomes a part of the process. He needs to find that feeling for you because you’ve given him so much footage. The operator and editor have become a huge part of making this all work. They’re bigger than . . . ever before.’’∑≤ I described this method earlier as speed shooting and hyperproduction. Cassar’s explanation shows that something more fundamental than speed is at work. By shooting entire scenes in one take, actors revert to spontaneous interaction having little to do with shot-by-shot directorial choices or scripted camera instructions. Directors in this manic mode have far less control over specific shots, since this directorial function has been implicitly delegated to Steadicam operators who chase actors throughout long unfolding scenes. Some dp functions have also been delegated, since lighting is preset to generally accommodate a variety of di√erent actions within single lighting set-ups. Finally, even the editors in this scheme are given a more quasi-directorial role in shot choice because everything is being printed. Thus many directorial choices are necessarily made in postproduction rather than in production. The Shield, like 24, systematically pursues what producer/director Brazil terms ‘‘reckless,’’ ‘‘fast,’’ location-driven spontaneity that needs to be ‘‘captured’’ rather than directorially predetermined. This manic mode with its handheld continuously reframed takes let the ensemble cast move dynamically and spontaneously.∑≥ Again, the director cedes many shot choices to

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the Steadicam operator. Area locations predetermine design choices. Production lights inadvertently appear in shots but are ignored in the visual frenzy. Like 24, The Shield places directorial demands on its editors. Significantly, both 24 ’s Cassar and The Shield ’s Brazil learned their directorial craft vis-à-vis the camera. In commercial ad production, where Brazil started, directing has always focused as much on the cinematographic image as on acting. Primetime television, however, has historically split the dp /director functions. In some newer prime-time styles, however, that segregation has collapsed. Cassar himself was an acclaimed Steadicam operator on many films and series before directing/producing for television. This cinematographer’s pedigree very much shows through as the defining directorial style on both 24 and The Shield. What is the institutional logic behind blurring craft distinctions on these shows? Incredibly, this dense image making and frantic cutting is actually cheaper than traditional dramatic filming. As Cassar states: ‘‘If you start with a camera that’s on wide, then zooms in, then goes over, then goes into close-up, then comes back here, and goes into an over [the shoulder], and then gets the [actors’ ] exit over here—that’s really about eight [camera] setups—although it is actually only one lighting set-up. . . . We always have one camera hand held, and one camera on a dolly. . . . [They’ll] change frame sizes so much, that you will have twenty to thirty setups in one simple scene . . . [and] only two lighting setups: one this way, and one that way. It gives you the ability to have a lot of shots, in essence good coverage. It is di√erent.’’∑∂ In addition to collapsing and blurring craft distinctions, then, the manic method is also pursued as a cost-saving strategy of sorts. Interestingly, the crew is shooting significantly more footage—but actually saving money by greatly reducing the number of lighting/crew setups. Brazil describes a similar economic logic on his series: ‘‘We shoot a ton of film. . . . We’ll [accidentally] shoot 360 degrees all the time. We’ll shoot our movie lights [in a shot]. . . . It doesn’t matter. It’s just a bright light in the scene. I directed something else this year, and printed twenty to thirty minutes of dailies each day. On The Shield . . . [it’s] two hours every day. We print almost everything we shoot. . . . This is where the pressure is enormous in editing . . . to cull through all of that for the true gems. And really just cherry pick every little beat.’’∑∑ Only a cost-conscious production manager could fully appreciate the manic production logic on The Shield and 24. Both series shoot considerably more footage and get considerably more shot coverage than do traditional series,

Industrial Auteur Theory

but they accomplish this with far fewer camera takes and lighting set-ups. Since setting up lights traditionally controls the pace at which a location crew can shoot, considerable cost savings result: more scenes can be shot each day. Vis-à-vis production value, this manic mode provides a much greater bang for the buck than traditional film-style shooting. Increasingly blurred authorial responsibilities within once rigidly segregated production units make this stylishness—and its economic e≈ciencies —possible. These sorts of collapsing/blurring labor distinctions now also typify reality tv production.∑∏ In a fiercely competitive media market defined by technological uncertainties, companies succeed by institutionalizing greater flexibility and stylistic e≈ciency. The changing labor/authorial relations and speedy improvisational methods provide just this sort of stylejustified industrial flexibility. Below-the-line distinctions are blurred, while above-the-line authorship is highlighted. Meryl Marshall’s warning about authorship, at the opening of this chapter, argues that corporate conglomeration is killing creativity. Marshall is pessimistic: ‘‘There are very few independent producers who will be able to make a living. Maybe the Internet will provide some of these opportunities, but in the long term it’s going to be very di≈cult. The aol-tw merger means something else: the repurposing of all kinds of content and [then] feeding that into the Internet in dramatic ways. This may again squeeze out an original idea that might otherwise have had an opportunity to grow in that environment.’’∑π According to this view, the golden age of independent producing is already over or is in decline due to changing business conditions. Marshall directly accuses the corporate appetite to ‘‘repurpose’’ and repackage content as a fundamental threat to the traditional methods of film/television authorship. Being displaced, therefore, is the patient development of original content from the ground up. Marshall’s formulation is less clear on how the newer, manic modes of production examined in this chapter (with their blurring craft distinctions and accelerated shooting methods) will stack up in the new environment of conglomeration. Do the Cassars and Brazils of production represent a survival of Marshall’s traditional mode of prime-time film auteurism? Or do they represent, even unintentionally, the very forms of speed and ‘‘flexibility’’ that will kill o√ patient authorship in the industry? In the remaining chapters I will examine the business conditions targeted by Marshall to better understand their impact on the industry’s creation and theorization about film/television.

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WHITE MAN: Have you ever heard of mind-shifting? BLACK WOMAN: Do you mean the new way of thinking about syndication? That it really means distribution of content across every available platform and device? That it’s the way we’ll monetize programming in the digital universe? WHITE MAN: How did you become so smart? —NATPE advertisement1

Chapter 6

Industrial Identity Theory (Above the Line/Business)

An oft-repeated adage is that ‘‘all screenplays are also business plans.’’ I would add to this that all screenplays are also branding opportunities. A screenplay, that is, does not simply include fictional characters and dramatic arcs. Because film and television are so capital intensive, a script also functions as a financial prospectus, a detailed investment opportunity, and a corporate proposal. The acknowledgment that all screenplays are also business plans can send aspiring writers with intellectual ideals or avant-garde and literary pretensions running for cover. Yet the assertion also underscores a fundamental, perhaps defining, characteristic of film/television: the forced marriage of art and commerce. Specifically, any screenplay or project developed in primetime television or feature film today generates considerable attention and involvement at the earliest story sessions and producers’ meetings by personnel from the firm’s financing, marketing, coproduction, distribution, merchandizing, and new media departments or divisions. Such discussions and analysis seek to ensure that any new film or series will create incomeproducing properties (reiterations of the original concept) that can be consumed via as many di√erent human sensory channels as possible. That is, at the pitch and script stages, story ideas will be developed as diversified

Industrial Identity Theory

entertainment properties that can be seen (as cinema, television, and pay per view), heard (as soundtracks, cds, and downloads), played (as video games), interacted with (as linked online sites), ridden (as theme park attractions), touched (cell phones/pod casting), and worn (as merchandize). Nothing gets ‘‘green-lighted’’ unless there are compelling prospects for financial success in several of these (now integrated) market areas. A systematic ‘‘story economy’’ characterizes both the front end (preproduction and production phases) and back end (distribution and exhibition phases) of any film or television project. On the front end, each scene (characters, settings, and actions) written presupposes very specific material resources, logistical needs, and budgetary resources. Production managers then step in to systematically ‘‘break down’’ scripts and scenes into coste√ective shooting schedules (usually with scenes shot out of order to minimize the number of locations and actor calls needed). Script breakdowns also result in a line-item budget allocation for labor, technologies, material costs, and locations. Mainstream screenwriters, however, are restricted in formatting to spare storytelling and simple descriptions only, and few producers will even read scripts that include anything more than this spare format, which should never include directorial comments, thematic interpretations, or camera instructions. Only ‘‘amateurs’’ add those elements. Instead, an elaborate boilerplate form of economic analysis greets each script considered by a major studio, production company, or network. O√the-shelf software now makes this process of calculation (script breakdown, budgeting, and scheduling) a rote task. At the back end of the story economy, each scene presupposes very specific end uses that can be tied to the economic prospects of di√erent demographic markets, multimedia versions of the content, and simultaneous or sequential distribution ‘‘windows.’’ These twin economic scenarios—the front end and back end of a production—are both considered and calculated early on during screenwriting/ development (long before shooting ever begins). In a sense, the company or network that analyzes and revises pitch and story ideas weaves the ‘‘imagined narrative world’’ of the screenwriter as author together with an ‘‘imagined financial world’’ of the screenwriter as entrepreneur. In feature film and in prime time, at least from the buyer or studio’s point of view, a fictional scenario is always tied to and considered alongside an economic one. Despite the long-standing industry sanction of these practices, media studies in the humanities have concentrated almost entirely on narrative

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texts, which somehow stand in for psychological and cultural dimensions, while business practices and the ‘‘economic texts’’ of films or series are typically ignored or relegated to the lesser world of industry. This exclusionary positioning has created an odd form of mutual ‘‘othering’’ where critical theory stands as the marginalized ‘‘other’’ in industrial analysis, and where business functions as the marginalized ‘‘other’’ in critical theory. Yet one regime cannot be convincingly understood without considering the other regime. Many industry executives grasp this linkage and seldom shy away from weighing in on economic and aesthetic value. Many academics feel far less comfortable crossing the textual-economic divide in any patient manner. The screenplay-as-business-plan principle raises questions about how corporations generate film/television content. Yet the principle represents only one way that corporations work to author screen content through business activities. In chapter 5 I examined how individuals in the abovethe-line sectors claim ‘‘creator’’ status. Widespread labor collectivity makes personal creativity largely an illusion—yet personal creativity nevertheless remains an important illusion in workforce and trade discourses. My focus in this chapter is not on cultural constructions of individual authorial autonomy and personal agency but rather on how business practices generate on-screen forms through marketing strategies, creative anonymity, and organizational identity activities. That is, while ‘‘creative’’ producers like Stephen Bochco, David Kelley, Mitch Hurwitz, John Cassar, Scott Brazil and others serve as profitable, ‘‘signature’’ focal points for companies seeking profits via critical distinction/awards, significantly larger but less prestigious forms of institutional authorship unfold anonymously as part of studio/network marketing practice. I refer here especially to the current branding and syndication practices that have emerged as central business strategies. Ironically, while it is almost impossible to determine the personal identities of the employees who create branding and syndication texts inside of nbc, hbo, the wb, or Viacom, the very branding and syndication texts they create have as their primary function the construction and cultivation of corporate or network identity. Branding initiatives, in particular, attempt to establish a consciousness of quality and corporate individuation within the ever-growing clutter of programming and stifling multichannel market competition. Understood this way, one can profitably view branding, syndication, and marketing theory as forms of ‘‘industrial identity theory.’’ Modern corporations market media products and build brands explicitly

Industrial Identity Theory

around notions of cultivated ‘‘di√erence.’’ Their branding, syndication, and marketing initiatives succeed or fail by constantly monitoring and mirroring once-marginal cultural shifts and lifestyle trends. One legacy of cultural studies is that the concept of identity has shifted from hardened ostensibly self-evident categories once associated with identity politics to something more slippery and transitory involving cultural performance.≤ Media scholarship has been slow to recognize that media’s approach to corporate identity can be similarly as contingent, slippery, volatile, changing, tactical, and theatricalized as the resistant human subject favored in cultural studies. Contemporary media conglomerates have, in e√ect, commercially ‘‘mainstreamed’’ di√erence, hijacking the very issue around which critical scholars once developed feminist or race studies as progressive, culturally resistant forms of identity-based criticism and activism. This trend is sobering given the consumerist (rather than truly resistant) goals of the modern conglomerates. It is therefore important to recognize the fundamental ways in which the new flexible conglomerates have been indexed to and triggered by constant permutations of identity as part of their brand posture. As Richard Florida has said of the new creative economy: ‘‘Everything interesting happens at the margins.’’≥ As my research on multichannel market strategies has shown elsewhere, the new corporate conglomerates prosper by internalizing and mastering a regime of di√erence in the form of corporate, multicultural tiering, since the de facto goal of each is to have within the walls of its extended corporate family a programming niche for many taste cultures and social identities.∂ One of my goals in this chapter is to move beyond the now tired antithesis between political economies (which view media through frameworks of industrial control, cultural imperialism, or media flows) and cultural studies (which made issues of social identity central in its formulations of cultural consumption and resistance). The sociologist David Hesmondhalgh deems such a split a ‘‘myth’’ based ‘‘on a false political dichotomy,’’ and I would add that leaving issues of ‘‘identity’’ at the level of audience also ignores the strategic importance that identity activities now play in modern media corporations.∑ By referring to the practices discussed below as identity theories, I am not importing variants of the term from the disciplines of social psychology (where ‘‘social identity theory’’ was originally developed to understand intergroup discrimination, levels of self, and in-group membership), psychology (a paradigm of ‘‘cultural identity theory’’ utilized in coun-

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Networks and brands spend considerable energy inventing and performing cultural identities. Here, Margaret Cho’s edgy, ethnic, ‘‘lesbian and gay’’ stand-up comedy plus CheMarxism equals the Sundance Channel identity; while the traditionally conservative History Channel (which built its 24/7 basic cable programming around free military, government, and corporate industrial footage) celebrates CheMarxism to spin off of Motorcycle Diaries and tap into its new niche channel ‘‘en Espanol.’’ Discovery quickly learned how to extend its brand identity out and ‘‘onto’’ loyal audience members through enabling and educational (aka commercial) merchandizing. Photo © J. Caldwell.

seling and psychotherapy), or philosophy (a theory of the mind and mental states in analytical philosophy).∏ Management studies developing out of sociologies of work have, in some ways, informed the study that follows.π In fact, I would like to update here Everett Cherrington Hughes’s proposal for an ‘‘economics of self-conception’’ as a way to understand corporate ‘‘selfconceptions’’ in film and television today.∫ Erving Go√man’s pioneering work on ‘‘the presentation of everyday life’’ reveals much about the interactive rituals that I examined in chapter 2 and the ‘‘self-performance’’ of workers discussed in chapters 1 and 5 (something I referred to as ‘‘personal branding’’). I have also found Arlie Hochschild’s study of the ‘‘commercialization of human feeling’’ to be particularly useful in understanding the studies that follow how emotions are managed as part of executive posturing.Ω What I hope to do here, however, is push beyond the idea that social presentation, self-concept, and identity performance are limited to the activities and relationships of workers in order to show that they are also at work at a level on a higher order—specifically in the marketing and business strategies of the companies that employ those workers. To do this, I will

Industrial Identity Theory Table 2

237 PERFORMING INDUSTRIAL IDENTITIES (branding guises)

practice

institutions / identity appeals

metaphor

economic goal

Credit abduction

Managers as ‘‘artists’’

Executive intuition

Corporate personality/ portfolio careers

Brand makeover

Networks as personalities

Emotional relationships

User loyalty to delivery niche

Syndication

Studio series as durable goods

Repurposing experience

Endless ancillary afterlife/ cobranding

Franchising

Film properties as sequel events

Reiterating moments

Economic strip mining, amortizing

Retreats

Corporations as democracies

Group therapy/ sharing

Employee idea strip mining

examine a range of current corporate activities: credit control controversies, network branding initiatives, studio or production company syndication strategies, and corporate or organizational retreats and retrospectives. While such things have their own literature in management studies and in the business trades, I want to ask di√erent questions of each of these practices. Specifically, how do organizational identity goals drive these activities; what kinds of cultural metaphors and tropes are deployed to achieve these ends; and, finally, what kind of economic logic does each identity activity fulfill in film and television? Table 2 introduces and outlines the individual studies that follow in this chapter. In some ways, all five of these activities can be understood as variants of branding. Each one cultivates organizational identity in di√erent registers and industrial sectors: credits contestation (drives personal branding); brand makeover (adds value to networks by showcasing identity within program-

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ming clutter); syndication (provides limitless cobranding opportunities for indie companies and broadcasters); franchising (allows studios to amortize costs over time and mine value from a high-concept feature property); and retreats (facilitate interpersonal workforce branding and organizational identity). Throughout this book I have argued that one of the best ways to understand political-economic and industrial practice is to understand the texts and content that the media industries produce; and one of the best ways to understand the texts and content produced by industry is to understand the political-economic and industrial practices of those same industries. In this chapter I follow the same logic, initially, by considering how all screenplays (films and television shows) are also business plans and financial prospectuses, and then by examining how the identity-based cultural activities we associate with audiences are also analogous to the identity-based industrial activities that media conglomerates now employ. Recent work by John Hartley on ‘‘creative industries research’’ makes a related point in arguing that the new, global creative industries are somehow linked to issues of both cultural identity and ‘‘identity politics.’’∞≠ I would like to push harder on this point to understand such a linkage with more historical specificity and institutional precision in the context of Los Angeles. As the pages that follow will show, current crediting, branding, syndication, franchising, and corporate therapeutic activities provide just such an opportunity. CREDIT COMMANDEERING: CONSTRUCTING AN EDGY CORPORATION PERSONA

Historically, film/television has made a fairly clear distinction between those who worked in the business end versus the creative end of the industry. The ‘‘creatives’’ were responsible for onscreen content, while the ‘‘suits’’ made management decisions above them. Yet, this division has over time been blurred considerably. Traditionally, ‘‘above the line’’ referred only to the creative executives (producers, directors) or department heads (directors of photography, art directors) who physically worked on a film/series, and not to the business, accounting, and legal types that worked for the studios or networks.∞∞ Today, however, this split between business and creative has been severely compromised and has done so on many levels. Crossover activities are extensive today, and many of those who participate and/or

Industrial Identity Theory

‘‘meddle’’ in script development, casting, and production are in fact nonproduction employees and executives from the company’s business sector.∞≤ Although business and legal areas are usually deemed noncreative, they regularly adopt above-the-line postures—either legally or implicitly. Beyond the screenplay-as-business-plan orientation discussed earlier, business ‘‘encroaches’’ into the creative sectors in several other ways, including credit inflation, credit misnomers, creative commandeering, and creative posturing. All of these practices make it increasingly di≈cult to separate individual careers from corporate personas. Credit Proliferation

Three examples suggest just how pervasive artistic hijacking has become among business types who assume above-the-line poses. First, the past decade has witnessed a proliferation of producer credits on both feature films and prime-time series. At times there seems to be a giant sucking sound at the top levels of film/television production, a realm in which creative credit is broached liberally and bartered freely. Feature films, for example, have been regularly submitted for Oscar consideration with numerous producer credits. In reality, many names listed are seldom or never seen on the set, and many have no discernable day-to-day role in actually producing the film. Sometimes, studio executives will grant themselves a ‘‘produced by’’ credit, which then qualifies them for an Academy award. Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein exploited this status when he commandeered the stage at the Academy Awards in 1999 for Shakespeare in Love, much to the consternation of the ‘‘real’’ producers in the audience. Other executives have imposed themselves as producers in prime time, as Imagine’s Brian Grazer did on Sports Night. Studio/network executives have always intervened in series development, but this intervention historically was done from a distance—as a network or studio employee. More questionable still are instances where agents and managers are given producer credits, as was Keanu Reeves’s manager Erwin Sto√ for his role in delivering Reeves to the 2004 film Constantine. Kim Masters notes Sto√ ’s defensiveness in justifying his credit: ‘‘Everything I have ever done, was either my project from its inception or I was asked to come on by the studio.’’∞≥ Sto√ then goes on to explain the contradictory roles that result: ‘‘Am I still doing my job as a manager or am I now overlapping with a producer’s responsibilities? Now I’m interviewing directors and giving script notes. That’s how the drift starts.’’ Rights holders represent a third category of producer-

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(Top) Chief executive and owner Sumner Redstone takes credit for the success of Viacom’s programming at a 2001 NAB keynote address. (Bottom) Women television and cable executives discuss the pluses and minuses of gender politics and identity in their personal careers and corporate lives at enabling panel sponsored by TVB. Photo © J. Caldwell.

poseurs. If a property is hot enough—a best-selling novel, a cult comic book, or a hit director, for example—rights holders will regularly get ‘‘kissed on’’ to a project as producer. This generosity by studios and networks to ‘‘pay’’ business types in the form of creative credit has rankled many ‘‘legitimate’’ creative producers. In response, the Producer’s Guild of America launched its ‘‘Truth in Credits’’ campaign to clean up the duplicitous studio culture that enables and fuels the practice. As a result of the guild’s public relations and legal interventions, credits have been withdrawn on feature films like Gladiator, even as Grazer was denied his largely symbolic ‘‘produced by’’ credit for Sports Night. Masters suggests just how ingrained is what I would term this ‘‘credit economy’’ when she cites one anonymous A-list producer: ‘‘In order to get Tom Cruise, if I have to give his bartender a credit, I’ll give his bartender a [producer] credit.’’∞∂ Credit Camouflage

The organization of labor in certain programming genres has also helped strip creative identity away from any easily recognizable personal identity in order to deliver it to the corporation. For example, game shows that air extensively on the major networks seldom list screenwriter credits, even

Industrial Identity Theory

though each and every episode of game shows are in fact scripted and written. Some producer’s employees have labored as de facto screenwriters in this fashion for decades without getting either the recognition or financial benefits that come with Writers Guild of America (wga) membership; benefits that production companies down the hall might give to their employers who work in and write for other genres. Similarly, new genres like ‘‘reality television’’ have greatly complicated the assignment of individual writer’s credits. At first some reality shows in the later 1990s and early 2000s appeared writerless, even though producer sta√s were writing the needed narration and dialogue. Later, non-wga ‘‘consultants’’ or ‘‘story producers’’ in various show-related topic areas were brought in to write for reality television episodes. In another context, animation studios like Dreamworks —much to the consternation of the guild—extensively used what the studio termed mere ‘‘story editors’’ to essentially write and revise the drafts of screenplays and the constituent scenes needed on feature-length animated films. In each of these specific genres—game shows, reality television, and animation—new forms of organization and divisions of labor allowed the various genres to look authorless. This process underscored and cultivated a sense of the production company’s brand rather than an awareness of an individual director’s or writer’s identity. In this way, creative depersonalization provides an e√ective mechanism with which to promote the corporation as creator. Creative Commandeering

Other labor practices at animation studios provide a third example of the novel ways that creative credits are deployed freely in negotiations and production management. In a head-to-head battle with Pixar, and to a lesser extent Disney, Dreamworks launched its highly heralded animation division in Los Angeles to produce critically acclaimed features. But each successive release and counterrelease (Pixar’s Finding Nemo, followed by Dreamwork’s A Shark’s Tail, etc.) makes it increasingly apparent that there is no guiding artistic master at the top of Dreamworks’ animation like there is at Pixar, which is helmed by the acclaimed animator John Lassiter. Instead, Je√rey Katzenberg—Dreamworks’s ceo —insists on providing ‘‘creative leadership’’ over the massive production process and over the development of screenplays. This pose places the studio’s business executive in a role far more appropriate for a seasoned screenwriter and/or a director-producer. Even though the Producer’s Guild ‘‘Truth in Credits’’ inquiry described above

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ultimately sanctioned and allowed the award of a ‘‘produced by’’ credit to Katzenberg for the studio’s film Shrek, the widely recognized artistic unevenness in subsequent films by Dreamworks show just how counterproductive it may be to have high-level business executives posing (and sometimes functioning) as self-styled ‘‘creators.’’ Creative Posturing

Finally, business professionals frequently lapse into creative-speak when they discuss business among themselves in professional settings. The ceos Katzenberg and Grazer actually adopt the mantle of, and act in the workplace as, creative artists for profitable ends. Other executives, like Mira Veesman of Film Scouts LLC, veer o√ into utopian talk about how executives and management can transform themselves into creative ‘‘visionaries.’’ In spoken comments at the National Association of Broadcaster’s meeting, Veesman o√ered a clarion call to the managerial cadre to move themselves into the position of artists: ‘‘I will accept [the] mantle of visionary. . . . We are going to talk about a very specific future. What will the future look like, what will people be watching. As a child, I used to watch The Jetsons and think wow, that’s the future. But now, guys, suddenly we are the future. At this point, I’d like to challenge the audience. We need to open our mind about the possibilities among us . . . [and] look at current technologies to maximize. . . . . With all previous technologies, creative people have been at the crux of new technologies. And today, we must put ourselves at the crux of the new technology.’’∞∑ Veesman here functions as an evangelist to business executives, rousing them with calls that say, essentially, ‘‘You too can be an artist. Place yourself at the crux of new technology and entertainment— as ‘artists’ have always done before you.’’ In this scenario, the chaos and uncertainty of new media business provides an opportunity for executives to take over an artistic function in corporations. Other executives talk the talk of the creatives as well. At another business gathering Scott Carlin (former vice president at Lorimar and Warner Bros. Television, and now president of Digital Convergence, Inc.) describes how his career shift to new media induced a creative epiphany and a career rebirth. I guess I’m kind of like the fresh old media road-kill here. . . . Lifestyle-wise, it can be a radical transformation. Intellectually, and opportunistically, it’s very seductive. And it’s very satisfying to be operating without a net—compared to

Industrial Identity Theory

operating in a big company, where the risk of failure, and the consequences of failure, or having a disaster of some kind, is something everybody can pretty much survive. When you go out there and start something that is new, and play in an arena that is volatile, and as fast moving as the new media world today, you never know what’s going to happen. It’s riddled with a little more anxiety, and a few more sleepless nights. But at the end of the day, you find yourself, as I am, incredibly energized and overwhelmed with passion and a sense of achieving the impossible.∞∏

Carlin sets up these comments with a personal story recounting his comfortable life as a highly paid former studio/television executive. His descent into the innovations of new media leads to sleepless nights, overwork, and constant anxiety. But compared to the staid security of ‘‘old media’’ entertainment concerns, the tough love and faith required in vanguard start-up media companies leads to managerial career rebirth expressed in spiritual terms. Like Veesman, Carlin a≈rms that executives need and benefit from personal conversion via visionary thinking outside the corporate box. Executive headhunters in film/television also draw out such assumptions and make creative disposition and ‘‘vision’’ a valued hr (human resources) skill set. As Fran Pomerantz, president of Pomerantz Group, recounts: ‘‘People sometimes come to my o≈ce, and I ask them why they are interested in the new media business. And the first thing I say is to establish your passion. Are you a builder or a manager? What is it besides the fact that it’s a digital gold rush that makes you interested in it?’’∞π The below-the-line crafts workers that I examined in chapters 3 and 4 consistently talk of their personal ‘‘passion’’ to light, compose, or edit as a defining force in their careers. Pomerantz suggests that most management personnel, by contrast, know about money but have little sense of personal passion and mission in life. Those who can find and sustain creative inspiration are, according to this executive placement scheme, able to continue with dynamic careers. Whereas Veesman urges executives to take on the role of artists in their companies, and Carlin urges executives to transform themselves into inspired creators and leaders through hardship and uncertainty, Pomerantz guards the gate to executive placement in industry by deploying a litmus test that signals the rare presence of creative vision and passion in management types. Some executives, with enough clout, actually take over creative functions within film/television companies. Others simply cultivate artistic talk and thinking as part of their personal brands and leadership styles in

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the trade sphere. In various ways, the ‘‘suits’’ in film/television continue to find ways to emulate the ‘‘creatives’’ in Los Angeles’s entertainment work worlds. Many ‘‘suits’’ now do so to achieve personal business objectives and career advancement. In one way, this helps strengthen and adds value to what Angela McRobbie and John Hartley have termed the ‘‘portfolio careers’’ of professionals in the new cultural economy who are no longer tied down by long-term employer commitments.∞∫ McRobbie and Hartley base this view on the idea that the current generation is more mobile and largely ‘‘disembedded’’ from its traditional attachments, and thus more closely aligned with professional work as a fulfilling, creative life-consuming activity. I would add that such careers also have a clear corporate rationale as well as a personal logic. At least in the film and television companies in Los Angeles, usurping creative credits hijacks visionary intuition for executives, gives production companies buzz, and showcases executive charisma and touch that trumps the need to spend precious time and resources in actual market research or content creation. Regardless of how frequently executives cycle through, film/television companies mark(et) executive poseurs to create a profitably ‘‘edgy’’ corporate persona. Each of the examples outlined above—screenplays as business plans, producer credit inflation, camouflaged writing and credit misnomers that are genre-specific, actual creative commandeering by business executives, and, finally, creative talk by management and vanguard posturing in the executive sector—points to the need to more fully understand film and television business and marketing if one is to adequately understand even the art of film and television today. The first four of these practices make the viewer’s on-screen experience fairly anonymous in the traditional sense of the word. As a result, the companies that produce such films and shows (Imagine Entertainment, Mark Burnett Productions, Dreamworks, etc.) rather than the creative employees that work at each company reap any public recognition and notoriety that may result. Such spotlighted corporate notoriety is key to contemporary branding and marketing. Both practices, branding and marketing, are fundamental forces in the creation of much that circulates on screen in film/television today, as I indicate in the next section.

Industrial Identity Theory

BRANDING: NETWORK PERSONALITIES AND ORGANIZATIONAL AFFECT

Branding has emerged as a central concern of the film and television industries in the age of digital convergence and as one of the chief means through which marketing identity is engineered. Referring not simply to product or company names, titles, or the trademark designations created by marketers and advertisers, the ideal brand expresses a more holistic identity to viewers and consumers. ‘‘Brand builders,’’ as they are now called, aspire to bring to client corporations a set of recurrent goals and market ideals: a widely and easily recognizable image, a distinct personality among competitors, a consistency wherever the brand is encountered, and a confidence in the quality of the branded product. In what some term the ‘‘old economy’’ (which utilized market research to characterize its ‘‘average’’ customer), industries created brands by providing a level of quality and uniqueness for goods and services that would attract buyers to a product. Once a brand like CocaCola or Ford was established it could be e≈ciently franchised across a large market in order to exploit ‘‘economies of scale.’’ The current mediascape no longer follows the once-trusted laws of or ‘‘rationality’’ of Fordist-era industry, where appropriate pricing and (sometimes) heavy-handed advertising simply persuaded mass-market buyers to use a product by changing their minds.∞Ω Now, instead, a number of brand builders enjoin corporations in the ‘‘information age’’ of niche economies to shift from an older emphasis on product and pricing to carefully targeted emotional, therapeutic, and ‘‘relationship’’ branding strategies. For example, some argue that branding is now no longer ‘‘about market share when it is really about mind and emotions share,’’ while others propose branding models based on intimate, interpersonal paradigms of ‘‘codependency.’’≤≠ Television and cable networks deploy branding (nbc’s ‘‘peacock’’ in the 1960s), rebranding (nbc’s ‘‘must see tv’’ in the early 1990s), and cobranding (nbc and Microsoft’s current cable news network msnbc) strategies to di√erentiate their programming fare from competitors. Television/cable branding typically includes three components: the consistent use of logos and other on-screen components; signature shows; and ‘‘compatible’’ reruns.≤∞ The programming and marketing departments of cable and television networks today typically have formal branding policies and preferences in each of these three areas. But this was not always the case. In stark

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contrast to the early years of television, for example, a far greater share of the average programming hour today is comprised of ‘‘self-promotions’’ produced and aired by the network or channel brand. This increasing promotional reflexivity is partly due to broad-based e√orts to raise a network’s programming above the clutter, and partly to a fundamental shift in the ways that brands were talked about in relation to television. Some experts, however, challenge the view that mere promotional messages, advertising, and reflexivity can build e√ective brands. They point instead to online media companies like Napster as a model, where interactivity (file sharing, free music, and a large and committed fan base) builds loyal brand users through participation.≤≤ In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many studios and networks embarked on digital interactivity for precisely these reasons. Other networks, like espn, provide di√erent brand-building models. Lee Ann Daly, espn’s senior vice president of consumer marketing, describes her network’s brand strategy: ‘‘espn doesn’t consider itself to be a huge network. espn considers itself to be a huge sports fan—period.’’≤≥ To achieve this ‘‘fan’’ identity, espn requires an oral litmus test for all new employee applicants, with open-ended questions used to determine the depth of the applicant’s love, enthusiasm, and knowledge—not of television production but of sports in general. By these means management works to engineer espn’s work force as a mirror image that reflects its target demographic. In this model, an emotional and psychological congruence— between the 110-plus production assistants working around the clock at espn and the fans that view the network 24/7—is cultivated so that the demographic tastes of production workers resonate with the demographic tastes of the audience. Successful branding in this scheme somehow works by osmosis—or latent telepathy. Television branding was not always so metaphysical and psychologistic, or unrelated to the third party good and services being advertised.≤∂ With the current proliferation of programming choices and the expansion of channel competition during the digital era, branding has shifted from its status as an o√-screen concern of marketing personnel and ad agency research to a self-conscious form of promotional reflexivity that has also altered the very look and sound of contemporary television. The venerable ‘‘eye’’ of ti√any network cbs and the once proud ‘‘peacock’’ of nbc easily ruled the roost of public consciousness as corporate symbols that stood above all sorts of lesser fare in the high-network era of the 1960s and 1970s.≤∑ Yet, by

Industrial Identity Theory

247 In the 1980s and 1990s Viacom’s MTV set the standard for branding that all other networks would eventually try to follow. In this sample, of IDs, the MTV logo cycles through the entire history of Western art. In some ways, it was the brand and not the short music videos that became a fundamental part of the viewing experience. In 1994–95 NBC bragged of having ‘‘invented’’ the first ‘‘network personality’’ for itself, but its rebranding was clearly an attempt to mimic MTV’s avant-garde edginess. Composite photo from video stills, J. Caldwell.

the mid 1990s, a large array of multichannel competitors had taken away the very viewership base that made the eye and the peacock almost universally recognized symbols in households across America. A few years earlier this decline in viewership and brand identity forced a boardroom shakeup at cbs, a takeover by ge of nbc, and a takeover by Capital Cities of abc. A few years later a second wave of takeovers and mergers followed when the same networks were the takeover targets of Viacom (cbs) and Disney (abc). With upstarts like hbo, mtv, cnn, espn, Fox, wb, and upn ‘‘cluttering’’ up corporate identities along with program choices in viewer living rooms, the major tv networks all embarked on public campaigns to ‘‘rebrand’’ themselves. The simple, stable, historic marquees of ‘‘quality’’ of cbs and nbc no longer seemed (to use Brandon Tartiko√ ’s terms) to bring acceptable numbers of viewers ‘‘into the network tent.’’ Of course, branding has been for many years an obligatory marketing staple of corporate business strategies outside of broadcasting, as any mba student can attest. And while nbc once had the brand identity and loyalty of, say, Coca-Cola, by the early 1990s this was no longer the case. The lion’s share of critical and public attention for branding was garnered by abc in its ‘‘yellow campaign’’ starting in 1997. No longer even an issue of typography

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and logo, abc simply plastered the color yellow on every promo in print, broadcast, and billboard, along with ironic and knowing taglines that mocked everything from the moronic priorities of ‘‘couch potatoes’’ (‘‘You can talk to your wife anytime’’) to claims of mental decline (‘‘8 hours a day, that’s all we ask’’), intellectual values (‘‘Books are overrated’’), and moral disinterest (‘‘Let someone else save the whales’’)—essentially promoting attitudes that ‘‘concerned’’ advocates and liberal watchdogs typically have used to attack tv.≤∏ True postmodern irony might be the well-earned reputation of actual programs on and by mtv, vh1, and sctv, but even if it did not have comparably hip programs, the abc corporation could still front itself as postmodern by making irony and pastiche a part of every institutional and promotional self-reference. Indeed, abc put itself front and center by making the network packagers (rather than the production community) the authoring source of irony, and it signaled this new and very visible ever-presence with a branded Pavlovian-yellow promotional hue. While abc’s yellow campaign scored notoriety and endless news hits for rebranding—in everything from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to Entertainment Tonight and the tabloids—a comparably comprehensive on-screen overhaul of a network began in 1994 by nbc with its ‘‘nbc 2000’’ campaign (a campaign that set the standard for the subsequent rebranding initiatives at both cbs and abc).≤π The campaign by nbc involved far more than color and ironic taglines. The smug confidence of the networks about their initial prowess in the multichannel flow had eroded to the point of crisis by the mid-1990s. With their drastic loss in market share, the three major networks now needed a way to make not just audiences but also industry members aware of the power and benefits that came with the network ‘‘family.’’ The networks, that is, were in a state of crisis, with prognostications of demise or merger forming a steady rhetorical flow in the trades. In 1994 and 1995 nbc counterattacked by borrowing the former president Bush’s much maligned ‘‘thousand points of light’’ mythos. Research showed that the traditional four-letter station call letters were simply too complicated for most viewers to remember. The response? Local stations owned by the national network were to drop the ‘‘Ks’’ and ‘‘Ws’’ nationally (as in ‘‘knbc, Burbank’’), and adopt the nbc plus channel number (‘‘nbc-4, Burbank’’) as a simpler designation and common logo. These nationally aired station/network ids that focused on local a≈liate stations, however,

Industrial Identity Theory

show the full extent to which anxiety about the network’s future ruled the corporate enterprise. As the camera scans a graphic map of the country in one set of nbc’s spots, hundreds of points of light mark the network’s ‘‘214 a≈liates nationwide, including kjrh-2 Tulsa, Oklahoma.’’ This campaign, not illogically, followed soon after the much-publicized ‘‘abandonment’’ of cbs by a number of long-time a≈liate stations—the network-a≈liate ‘‘traitors’’ as it were—who opted for the rising fortunes and hipper programming of the newer fourth network, Fox. The celebration and symbolic construction by nbc of a network ‘‘family,’’ then, can be seen as a kind of preemptive corporate strike. It was, in essence, industry damage control aimed at vigorously reasserting the aura of network authority and quality. Not since the 1950s had the networks had to work this hard to teach viewers and stations about the benefits of national network a≈liation. These kinds of mediating video texts, then, also function as shorthand corporate reports for anxious a≈liate stations that may have considered jumping ship. The topdown model of prestige programming—which includes Hollywood television and network news—has always promised to guarantee the welfare of the a≈liate family members broadcasting out in the provinces. The kind of aggressive and heavy-handed damage control evident in these spots came as part of a broader range of marketing ‘‘innovations.’’ Indeed, nbc had also induced consent on the part of program producers to include the nbc logo ‘‘inside’’ scenes from aired programs themselves. This gambit amounted to a very clever sort of blackmail, since program producers for years have complained that license fees from networks were never fair (that is, the fees never paid for the actual cost of program production). These costs were ultimately only covered through later syndication revenues that went directly to the producers companies. Here nbc was subtly coercing its partners to erect televised billboards inside episodes that nbc had not fully paid for. Apparently, the long-term financial prospects of nbc were both significant and enough in jeopardy that program providers realized that their fates were ultimately a√ected by the ‘‘health’’ of the network that first launched them. By eliminating commercial breaks between shows, and by asking for network ids within diegetic scenes, the network could promise greater viewer carry over from show to show. Program providers could certainly appreciate this—if the networks ‘‘hammocked’’ them between strong, proven shows. But the real lesson of these programming moves lies in public consciousness that the fates of program producers, the network,

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In 1994, NBC hired what it termed the ‘‘biggest and baddest names’’ in animation and music video to produce a smorgasbord of new, edgier logos to express the network’s updated identity (their ‘‘psychedelic meatloaf in motion’’ option is shown middle-left). Numerous showbiz reports ran with stories about the rebranding, and the Today Show allowed viewers to ‘‘interactively’’ vote (á la emerging Internet fashion) to determine the new vanguard look of the network. Composite photo from video stills, J. Caldwell.

and the a≈liate stations were all very much intertwined. Both the network ‘‘family-of-stations’’ id campaign and the tactic of intradiegetic branding with logos stand as very public ways that television mediates and negotiates changes, even as it mollifies insecurities in the industry. In feigned nonpartisanship, the Today Show host Katie Couric announced in 1994 that viewers were about to see the network’s ‘‘most dramatic makeover ever.’’ Visual evidence that something had changed in the aesthetic ways that the major networks did business came in the segment that followed, which summarized nbc’s 1994 campaign to overhaul its corporate logo and identity. The makeover also initiated a proliferation of intermediary video forms, all designed to drive home and publicly ‘‘manage’’ the overhaul in the audience’s mind. That is, nbc’s marketing machine simultaneously flooded the programming world with intermediary texts that both legitimized and analyzed their ‘‘new’’ look and ‘‘attitude.’’ The once staid and venerable nbc ‘‘commissioned’’ cutting-edge ‘‘postmodern’’ artists—what they described as the ‘‘biggest and baddest names in design and animation’’—to draft, engineer, sculpt, and animate the avant-garde

Industrial Identity Theory

look that expressed its newfound nbc attitude. Mark Malmberg, the computer-artist guru behind the cyberfilm Lawnmower Man, fused the network with Grateful Dead electronics. David Daniels—‘‘bad-boy’’ artist to perky host Katie Couric and A-list director of music videos and claymation spots for Honda—touted his network o√ering, or what he called ‘‘psychedelic meatloaf in motion.’’ The resurrected 1960s pop-art casto√ Peter Max repeatedly grooved about the ‘‘free reign’’ that enlightened nbc had given him to express himself. The painter Joan Gratz in turn stepped forward to render the network’s logo monograph with electronic ‘‘impressionism.’’ The darker side of postmodern identity came in full force as well, in the form of J. Sedelmeier and John Kricfalusi. Sedelmeier spun his logo from the brain-numbed animated ‘‘slacker’’ aesthetic of Beavis and Butthead. Kricfalusi, originator of the Ren and Stimpy flatulent aesthetic in cartoons, toyed with the interviewer even as he explained to the network audience his vision of the network peacock: ‘‘colorful things come out of his butt.’’ To bring the bad-boy, cutting-edge, master code of the corporate makeover full circle, nbc awarded a broadcast exhibit to two nonprofessional artists who pushed the envelope with computer graphics cranked out on their Macintosh computers at home. The lesson was clear. The audience was ‘‘bad,’’ but the Fortune-100 nbc corporation was ‘‘badder’’ still. Even as Kricfalusi confessed disingenuously that ‘‘I don’t know what hip is’’ (yet another update of Andy Warhol’s ‘‘I don’t care’’ aesthetic) nbc was showing that it was now in fact the empire of the hip. No self-doubt was even needed. In essence, nbc had finally stopped ignoring its cable competitors and now earnestly emulated Viacom/mtv’s house style—an approach that featured its ever-mutating brand logo as a persistent part of each day’s programming. The imperative to rebrand was fueled in great measure by the growing sense that there now was simply not enough of an audience to go around; that is, not enough to share (profitably) with all of the competition. Branding was the first of many tactics that exploited the instability of the televisual form in the age of digital. It continues to be the central focus as tv.com initiatives compete above the clutter on the Internet.≤∫ The majors (nbc, abc, cbs), thus consented not to the old-line goal of a stable corporate ‘‘brand,’’ but to the importance of something more volatile and lucrative—of ‘‘rebranding’’ as a mutating genre of institutional ‘‘content,’’ a defining index of changing network personality and identity, and a media event in its own right. The growing sense that there now was not

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enough of an audience to go around (at least not enough to share profitably with the competition), fueled the rebranding imperative. Although some critics counter that quality content (rather than a preoccupation with brands) will ultimately bring audiences back to the tv networks, the ratings and profits of the majors continue to decline.≤Ω Others argue that new digital technologies will endlessly splinter audiences, and that innovative approaches to brand building must necessarily be a central focus.≥≠ Interactive-tv and dot-com startups continue to compete not just for viewers lost in the clutter but for discrete ‘‘eyeballs’’ and ‘‘click-throughs’’ on the Internet as well. With no viable ‘‘metric’’ or credible economic model (advertising, sponsorship, membership, subscriptions) for profitability in interactive media, several related trends have worked to counter the splintering. Corporate reconglomeration, content multipurposing, and the possibilities of endless syndication have created new corporate aggregates (like Time-Warner-hboTurner- cnn, and Viacom-cbs-Paramount-upn). These groups have essentially become ‘‘superbrands.’’ Such entities no longer attempt to standardize viewer-user taste into a mass demographic brand but rather work to reaggregate potentially endless niche tastes into branded tiers within the same conglomerate. In what some have termed the ‘‘postnetwork’’ age of television, innovative rebranding strategies stand at the center of current attempts to profitably ‘‘renetwork’’ companies through mergers. These new networks intend to maintain (and capitalize on) heterogeneous audiences and cultural identities, but mostly within a single newly branded conglomerate. As brand theorists argue, advertising (marketing that you have to pay for) is less e√ective in asserting di√erence than ‘‘publicity’’ (marketing that you don’t have to pay for).≥∞ This is why films and series that examine other films and series work so well: they posit some filmic/televisual phenomenon as a late-breaking event or news-making trend. Without ‘‘paid’’ advertising’s negative association with arm-twisting and hard sell, trade ‘‘news’’ churns through the industry with the specter of sponsor partisanship stripped o√. In this way, films and series about films and series can be continually embraced and recycled by many players in a market because of the benign and quasi-‘‘educational’’ qualities that now define the genre. Studios and networks succeed as brands relative to the extent of their name recognition in consumer culture. Yet those same brands typically achieve broad name recognition in popular culture only after they have first been ‘‘discovered,’’ dissected, and explained as news in the trade sector.≥≤

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The network HBO makes prestige cinematic series like The Sopranos the centerpiece of the niche economy of scope business plan—and immersive brand—by camouflaging its actual industry status: ‘‘It’s not television. It’s HBO.’’ Photo © J. Caldwell.

Accordingly, even the successful distribution of consumer entertainment now benefits by e√ectively establishing a consciousness of the film/television industry trades in public as well. The trade press imagines that it circulates news. Yet this news is almost always generated by corporate pr. Films and series about films and series serve as perfect vehicles in this process of trade news fabrication. Such forms ‘‘examine’’ prepackaged filmic or televisual phenomena for trade press gatekeepers, and they do so in ways that seem far less manipulative than the conventional printed press release or ad. Granting glimpses of the otherwise well-guarded ‘‘special’’ worlds behind film/television, making-ofs, behind-the-scenes docs, press junkets, and epks almost guarantees that popular coverage as industry ‘‘news’’ and ‘‘analysis’’ will follow. Transposing publicity into reusable chunks of supposedly ‘‘neutral’’ on-screen content makes this possible. These economic/marketing shifts have strongly impacted film, television, and cable. The holistic nature of branding is evident in the business strategies of Resonate, a Los Angeles firm specializing in brand building. Resonate started as a traditional visual e√ects/production company, but

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soon began providing a wider set of comprehensive client services. Rather than simply ‘‘rendering’’ specific e√ects/spots for its clients, Resonate began o√ering a ‘‘research’’ component that analyzed trends, demographics, and new technologies in terms of their suitability for the client as a whole rather than for a specific production. Four branding themes underscore the executive Paul Siblow’s explanation of Resonate’s branding strategies. First, branding involves demographic research, and this entails not just age, gender and race categories but also research into psychological profiling or psychographic orientation. Siblow stresses this nonproduction approach: ‘‘How can we build (Fox’s) demographic? What are the image systems that will attract them? What kinds of associations are there beyond just computer graphics, etc.?’’≥≥ Second, branding involves strategic planning, which requires systematically refining the overall corporate mission statement and objectives (to achieve consistency of message and tone), and not just the particular spot or fx package. This strategic ‘‘proactivity’’ pushes Siblow above the postproduction suite ‘‘to work with ceo’s . . . so that we can design around client need.’’≥∂ Third, brand building requires long-term relationship building—both with the client and between the client and its customers/viewers. Arguing that they are ‘‘in the relationship business,’’ Resonate assumes that every company it now approaches is in the media business in some way, and that every company is going to have a media relations department that o√ers rebranding infrastructure.≥∑ Fourth, branding, for Resonate, entails creating ‘‘modular perception engines,’’ which it views as transportable ‘‘association’’ packages that can be deployed and/or transposed in many multimedia or technology settings. This flexibility— malleable marketing in multiple media environments—led the company to focus on demographic ‘‘image systems’’ based on the perceived emotional and psychological personality of a given company.≥∏ Based on demographics research, strategic planning, and client relationship building, Resonate develops what it terms ‘‘perception engines’’ to cultivate the brand’s consumer relationships. These perception engines can be reiterated in many di√erent media settings. Branding experts, in this scheme, do not focus narrowly on the sell or the spot but on long-term corporate personality building. Specific spots and technologies are secondary to and supportive of this concern. Even though Resonate fulfills its original basic function as a postproduction e√ects house (creating digital graphics packages for Fox Sports and cbs), their overall mission now is to create an ‘‘immersive’’ brand environ-

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ment in the mind of the viewer/consumer, not just client-funded shot sequences. While broadcast bumpers, ids, and promos are essentially twodimensional phenomena on one level, Resonate incorporates them within a three-dimensional consumer model of ‘‘immersion.’’ Resonate’s aim is to ‘‘surround’’ the viewer with a totalizing sensory/consumption experience of the kind that Nike or Disney engineered for its many merchandizing outlets. As Siblow explains: ‘‘We’ll work to create immersive brands, like Niketown, that give people the total experience of being inside that company— not an inconsequential aspiration.’’ Resonate fulfills a set of organizational identity principles outlined by the branding innovator Don Schultz, who pioneered the concept that ‘‘integrated marketing techniques could actually drive business and shareholder value.’’ Schultz’s approach to corporate identity was to work across the normally segregated divisions between advertising, public relations, sales promotion, and direct marketing in order to make ‘‘integrated communications’’ a direct, consistent extension of the firm’s distinctive management profile. Schultz and others established the importance of research and analysis, institutional integration, and relationship building that inform contemporary firms like Resonate. Such activities have also frustrated traditional ad agencies whose centrality is declining in the face of specialized brand builders. Regarding future directions, Schultz underscores branding’s humanistic, interpersonal goals: ‘‘We’re trying to move away from working with data to working more with people. We are in the process of putting together a program on people performance and measurement to look at employee motivation and the impact of an employee on the success of a firm.’’≥π This latter scenario helps explain the employee-demographic engineering methods of espn as well as the research and branding activities of Resonate. Schultz’s theory that branding can drive up the financial value of a company explains the inordinate amounts corporate capital thrown at dot-com media branding in the late 1990s. Morphing into a combination production company, e√ects house, ad agency, and marketing consultancy, Resonate sought and cultivated a limited number of long-term client relationships rather than bidding on a large number of shorter-term jobs. ‘‘We pick only two to three clients to work with,’’ Siblow states. ‘‘Then mold everything around the client’s needs. Which is very di√erent than most digital production companies. We think we can have more predictable outcomes this way, and only pitch to clients

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that have deep pockets and can grow.’’ Their approach to limited bidding and narrow but deep client relations (or cherry picking) brings with it several advantages. First, client exclusivity allows the relatively small firm to externalize some capital risk that comes with new technologies and everobsolescent digital tools. ‘‘We look for clients who can let us grow with them into new markets, especially by codeveloping new technologies,’’ Siblow reasons. The bidding market for digital e√ects contracts is cutthroat, with ever-lower profit margins, many competitors, and high capitalization costs. Resonate’s makeover as a comprehensive branding consultancy thus helps tame the financial rollercoaster caused by uneven revenue streams at traditional e√ects houses. Their makeover bu√ers the company from a rapid succession of short-term clients with little loyalty. Essentially, Resonate’s semiexclusive, brand-building posture serves to counter the volatility of a production world that is increasingly outsourced. Brand building is tied to broader-scale economic and industrial changes (semiexclusivity as an antidote to increased outsourcing), even as the value of branding has spiked due to widespread industrial changes since the 1980s (branding as antidote to increasing on-screen clutter). SYNDICATION: REPURPOSABLE AFFILIATION AND COBRANDING OPPORTUNITIES

In television one industrial identity problem from the start has been that viewers tend to associate programs with the networks that initially ‘‘license’’ and air them (abc, cbs, nbc), rather than with the production companies that own, produce, and distribute them in perpetuity after network airings (King World, Warner Bros., Columbia Tri-Star, etc.). Mastering the syndication business means successfully redefining on-screen content as transportable, repurposeable, and easily identifiable as a nonnetwork enterprise. Syndicated programming faces a task that network airings do not: to simply create and maintain an identity that viewers can find and relocate in the clutter of the multichannel flow. Regulatory change and new technologies have triggered industrial anxieties and threatened the central tenets that made film/television profitable over several decades, including tv’s historic cash cow: syndication. Most historians, with a few important exceptions like Derek Kompare, focus primarily on network television and thus ignore the central role that sales of independently produced series have played in

Industrial Identity Theory

the medium’s history.≥∫ Syndication includes two di√erent types of series: ‘‘first-run’’ syndicated series, which are produced and sold directly to independent and a≈liate stations without an initial and exclusive network run; and ‘‘second-run’’ series, which follow exclusive network broadcasts with ‘‘reruns’’ bought directly by independent broadcast stations. The popular press typically conflates syndication with reruns of network shows (like Seinfeld or Drew Carey, which are usually ‘‘stripped’’ five nights a week in the early evening or late at night). This characterization overlooks the vast number of series sold directly (like Bay Watch, Xena, and the Jerry Springer Show, usually for o√-prime-time airings) in both domestic and international markets. As programming strategies, syndicated series di√er from first-run network series. Edward Bleier, president of the pay cable division of Warner Bros., explains the di√erences between network and syndication in terms of cultural pretense: ‘‘[Syndication] is like convenience television. It’s like going to McDonalds. You know exactly what you are going to get.’’≥Ω Whereas network series aim for ‘‘appointment television’’ status through concerted marketing and event-focused promotion, stripped syndicated series aim to sequester the viewer with something more familiar and habitual but with little cultural pretense. Despite this modest cultural status, syndication rights (guaranteeing distribution revenues for production participants) have for many years stood as central deal makers or breakers in television negotiations and development deals. Cable channel proliferation (and increased viewer choice) in the 1980s and 1990s created great demand for syndicated content, but the flood of studio and network libraries thrown into the gap to meet this need had a deadening e√ect. Faced with extensive competition hardly any syndicated shows could generate what marketers call the ‘‘noise’’ needed to attract the casual or aimless channel-surfing viewer. Just as dealers had shifted their description of ‘‘used cars’’ to ‘‘preowned’’ vehicles, cable networks began a similar subterfuge by referring to ‘‘reruns’’ as ‘‘encore’’ presentations. Howard Rosenberg described television marketing’s new desperation as a consequence of clutter, and he criticized abc’s misrepresentations of a twopart documentary as ‘‘tvs first reality miniseries’’ and its tortured flogging of the series Boston 24/7 as ‘‘so much reality it’s unreal.’’∂≠ In addition to marketing changes, four other shifts are apparent in the new business practices and trade rhetoric that media corporations use to describe syndicated programming. These changes have also stimulated formal innovations in-

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tended to facilitate the long-term reiteration of syndicated programs. First, the ‘‘shelf life’’ of a series became increasingly important to program owners and networks in deciding which shows to develop. Syndication possibilities and foreign distribution are now always on the minds of producers and executives, so much so that such perspectives encourage a ‘‘collage’’ approach to series development (a penchant for aggregating ensembles of actors and story lines capable of traveling easily across national boundaries). In this way, first-run syndicated shows like Acapulco Heat mixed elements of Baywatch, James Bond, Latin America, and an international ensemble of European and American stars to give the series ‘‘legs’’ in international distribution. Meanwhile, Pamela Anderson’s V.I.P. mixed elements of Baywatch, James Bond, Charlie’s Angels, and soft core to cut across restrictive demographic segments in the domestic market. Second, studios and companies now began to publicly refer to their archives as ‘‘legacy’’ holdings. No longer simply backlot warehouses of old program masters, prints, tapes, and dupe negs, studios like Universal and Columbia hired professional archivists even as they remastered everything in the vaults for the new ancillary uses. Third, after the fcc relaxed the financial-syndication rules that had placed strict limits on the number of syndicated shows a network could own since the 1970s (rules that had once protected syndication rights for independent producers), the networks now used their position as the gatekeepers of broadcast to leverage more and more ownership over the syndication rights of programs. By the late 1990s independent program producers without ‘‘sweetheart deals’’ complained that the networks were favoring their own in-house productions (over independently produced programs) when it came time to make the tough decisions about how, when, and what series to green-light, schedule, promote, or cancel. The advent of multichannel cable competition, digital technologies, online use, and the proliferation of pvrs (personal video recorders like TiVo) continues to threaten the function of syndication rights in the industry. While the trades devoted considerable hand-wringing speculation on the impact of Web ‘‘surfing’’ and ‘‘browsing’’ on advertising and sponsorship (which, in turn, impacted the form that convergence has taken in television), less attention has been paid to the impact that those same user behaviors have had on syndication. Products/services like Octopus.com, for example, enable users to download software that allows them to click-and-compile the sites and site fragments that they wish to view on a regular basis. This, in

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Television syndication has, since 1948, provided the template for the current ‘‘repurposing’’ strategies in the multimedia conglomerates. Studio and syndication companies with ample libraries of films/series have also helped fuel the rush to cross-media conglomeration since the 1980s. Photo © J. Caldwell.

essence, automatically rips image/sound/data ‘‘content’’ from numerous commercially sponsored, proprietary, and advertised sites, and compiles the gleaned material daily (without ad banners, buttons, or secondary matter) as a personalized site/document that can be distributed and forwarded at will by the octopus compiler. The impact of this kind of counter- or ‘‘metabrowsing’’ is not lost on commercial developers and dot-com investors worldwide: even the best laid Web-design e-strategies, subscriptions, and e-commerce schemes are worthless if one’s proprietary content ends up ‘‘republished’’ on the screen of any user who wishes to reconfigure and ‘‘syndicate it.’’ Owners lose control of revenue streams, user tracking, headlines, and ad impressions as users (now) automatically edit, personalize, and distribute content. Nervous Web developers and content owners ponder whether to counterattack metabrowsing themselves, as they did for Napster and Scour for their ‘‘infringements.’’ Portals that contractually promise their clients exclusivity and control of the context in which their content is seen, for example, can now no longer guarantee that the same content will not appear alongside their competitor’s content.∂∞ Unlike ‘‘unruly’’ first-generation analog users—who threatened ad rates with vcr time-shifting and remote-control surfing— digital metabrowsing means not only that editorial control is in the hands of users but that it is also immediately and widely distributable by others. The syndication industry will again have to reinvent itself to insure profitability, even as advertisers have had to reinvent strategies in the face of personalized ‘‘bots’’ that aggregate and individuate content automatically for viewer-users. Given this dynamic, new modes of media delivery and television-Internet

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convergence will also impact television’s textual forms and the ways viewers relate to television itself. After being taken over, for example, upn a≈liate station group owners fought back attempts by their new takeover owners, Viacom (and cbs), to use the sixth and weakest network (upn) as a junkyard for syndicated and repurposed content, like mtv’s recycled series Celebrity Deathmatch. Trade coverage underscored the dark side of syndication—‘‘dumping.’’ As Joe Schlosser notes: ‘‘upn’s fate is still in the air, but for the time being, the network’s a≈liate body isn’t interested in becoming a dumping ground for rehashed Viacom and cbs programming.’’∂≤ In stressing the need to maintain its brand even after takeover, upn’s president Dean Valentine stated, ‘‘Re-purposing clearly doesn’t work toward that end.’’∂≥ The prospects of an endlessly expanding multichannel market in the 1980s and 1990s changed the way studios and production companies thought about their film/television product. During the high-network era of the 1960s and 1970s, tv shows aired, reran, and came and went in a descending temporal sequence defined by their initial air date hyped by a major network. Reruns and second-run syndication deals simply allowed program owners to collect the remaining surplus value of series in the less prestigious worlds of distribution outside of both prime time and the networks. But then cable television in the 1980s and the Internet in the 1990s demonstrated—far more dramatically than the networks would have liked—that the real programming game in town was not going to be about initial air dates but about syndication rights. With the flurry of studio/network dot-com activity in the late 1990s, a syndication lesson was underscored: an endless ‘‘ancillary afterlife’’ was now possible for all shows, if not outside of prime time then in digital form; if not on or with the parent corporation then with a subsidiary corporation.∂∂ Cross-ownership and consolidation have made the question of who buys and who sells syndicated television problematic. This is because production companies and studios that traditionally have produced syndicated content are now invariably part of conglomerates that also include broadcast networks, station groups, and cable systems (the traditional buyers of syndicated content). Now syndication buyers and sellers function inside the same companies (Viacom/Paramount, Disney/abc, Newscorp/Fox), and independent program executives complain about being ‘‘shut out’’ by the conglomerates that own their own ‘‘station groups.’’ In 2001, Bob Cook, president of Twentieth Century Fox Television, confidently refused to introduce

Industrial Identity Theory

any new show at the syndication markets. Cook boasted that vertical integration ‘‘allows us to be our own launch mechanism. We are the creator and the gatekeeper at the same time.’’∂∑ As one of the only conglomerates without a broadcast/cable system ‘‘inside,’’ Sony hypes that independent producers, talent, and agencies will always get ‘‘fairer deals’’ from them, because there will be no inside dealing with ‘‘sister companies.’’ Such an assertion presupposes that ‘‘creative accounting’’ and structural revenueskimming does happen elsewhere. Andy Kaplan, executive vice president at Columbia Tri-Star Television Group/Sony, explains how Sony is the exception that proves the rule: ‘‘It certainly is a tough environment, as tough as we’ve ever seen it. . . . Arguably from a talent standpoint, we’re the best place to come for fair accounting. Because there’s no [sharing] imputation . . . or ‘games’ played like licensing to sister companies. When we’re in the business with talent, and the networks want that talent, we are in a powerful position.’’∂∏ Rather than building the syndication process inside of the conglomerate (with Columbia producers selling to Sony buyers on a nonlevel playing field), Sony/Columbia decided instead to use their close, long-standing relations to Hollywood talent to leverage lucrative syndication deals for their series outside of Sony. Despite deficit financing, increasing production costs and higher program licensing fees means network buyers place tremendous pressure on studios to ‘‘share’’ downstream syndication revenues. Some studios have continued to fight back, as program suppliers, by leveraging the proprietary mystique of Hollywood talent. As Kaplan further notes: ‘‘Most . . . networks do want to be your partner. In terms of ownership, distribution. Our goal is to fight it. . . . To own content, and distribute it around the world. . . . Let’s say I have a deal with Tom Cruise and he wanted to do a tv series, I could walk into any network and develop that project. On the other hand, if I develop a show with less experienced writers, less talent attached, or when the network has a deal with a writer they want attached, then you have to find a compromise. . . . It’s always about leverage.’’∂π In 2001, Sony’s Columbia Tri-Star Television dropped out of the network television production business entirely, while keeping their cable and syndication divisions. Sony executives complained that consolidation and network pressures (on costs, revenues, and control) means that ‘‘the traditional network business model doesn’t make economic sense any more for independent suppliers.’’ President Steve Mosko vowed that Columbia was still open to certain network deals in the future, but only if his

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Three of the many arms of the new Universal/ GE/NBC/NBC Productions/Bravo/Telemundo media conglomerate. Although the new diversified corporations justify this kind of consolidation based on the proven financial prospects of syndication and repurposing, mergers and cross-ownership arrangements like these have led to criticisms of coproduction favoritism and ‘‘inside dealing’’ as unfair trade practices that restrict access for other, independent companies. Photo © J. Caldwell.

company could be ‘‘involved in an opportunistic basis.’’∂∫ This roughly translates as ‘‘Only if we can control long-term syndication revenues.’’ In addition to pressures for sharing syndication revenues from the networks, consolidation has also limited the number of company buyers now in the market who can bid on shows. With the relaxation of cross-ownership limits, large, regional station groups (like Sinclair or Tribune Broadcasting) can now buy series en masse for their extensive systems of local stations. This constriction in buyers has meant that large markets like natpe now no longer serve the same function that they did ten years ago. As one Los Angeles studio executive stated when asked about the future of the large syndicated program-selling markets: ‘‘In the old days, you had to clear [make sales to] 60 percent of the markets while you were there to be successful. But now we can have 80 percent of the deals done before we ever go to [natpe].’’ Yet the same executive explained why his studio still participated in such markets: ‘‘So we meet in hotel suites [instead of the market floor]. The idea of natpe is still ok, but probably just as a forum for discussing industry trends in the field. We’d help subsidize the convention

Industrial Identity Theory

and the market if we had to, just to keep it going.’’∂Ω For studios, then, markets in the consolidation era are still symbolically worth going to; mostly in order to renew personal contacts through face time and longstanding business relations. Such markets, that is, are now more about working to ‘‘maintain’’ distribution relationships than to create or amass new ones. Syndication’s current crisis also changes the ways deals are made and the amount of ‘‘back-end’’ revenues that can be promised up front to talent and profit-participants. Sony/Columbia’s Kaplan explains the current revenue crisis and fall out from syndication changes: ‘‘After twenty years in the syndication market Hollywood has gotten accustomed to big back-ends—and having [its] talent participate in it. We’re living in a world where that’s going to happen less . . . a real paradigm shift for the talent world. . . . Talent is going to try to extract up-front money instead. And that will cause an economic shift for all of the programs and buyers.’’∑≠ The traditional revenue scheme based on the systematic control of distribution windows and ancillary markets for film/television has fattened many program suppliers. Hollywood talent has greatly benefited from this scheme. However, now that companies are losing control over the sequential order and nature of distribution, everyone, including talent, will have to adapt. Kaplan suggests that blackmail will result, wherein talent will demand funds up front to make up for their disappearing back-end revenues. Such demands will also force studios to consider other economies and genres, since disappearing revenue streams will a√ect a company’s ability to produce new programs of comparable quality. Kaplan sidesteps additional factors clouding syndication’s future. Newer genres, like reality tv, threaten traditional syndication schemes in other ways. First, reality tv’s shift to nonprofessional actors cuts out the need to negotiate many back-end talent deals (thus considerably reducing production budgets). This would seem to enhance the prospects of reality tv’s long-term survival, yet as a genre reality television has not demonstrated an ability to retain viewer interest and economic value in syndication. Unlike syndication’s historic bread-and-butter genres—sitcoms like Seinfeld and/or first-run dramas like Bay Watch—reality tv hypes real-time observation and discovery, bounded in a specific time and space.∑∞ Once a reality series winner is chosen or a survivor crowned, such shows become ‘‘old news’’ with little value as reruns or repurposed digital media, and less potential for cobranding opportunities with local broadcasters and buyers.

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FRANCHISING: BRANDED CONCEPTS, SEQUELS, AND RESIDUALS STRIP MINING

Major studios maintain as central goals the development and exploitation of ‘‘franchise’’ pictures. Unlike syndicated fare franchise pictures are typically high-concept, big-budget, and/or blockbuster films that aim for ‘‘marquee’’ status in a studio’s annual marketing campaigns. Because of the large financial risk involved, such pictures tend to be excessively formulaic and are frequently developed from widely recognized big-hit tv, publishing, or comic book properties. The most important goal of a franchise is to set in motion a series of lucrative ‘‘sequels.’’ Whereas corporate branding cultivates a ‘‘personal identity’’ for networks and large content delivery gateways, and retreats cultivate a common group identity or ethos for an otherwise contentious local workforce, franchises shift the focus away from the identity of either the bigger corporation (studio or network) or the workforce (that produces the franchise) in order to cultivate, overproduce, and perform the identity of marquee signature behind the blockbuster (Stan Lee for the Spiderman and X-Men sequels; J. R. R. Tolkien/Peter Jackson for the Lord of the Rings franchise). There is, therefore, both a systematic denial of certain fundamental identities (the corporations, networks, or workers that make the franchise) in order to spotlight an identity that is institutionally transcendent, transportable, and event oriented. The metaphor driving the performance of franchise identity is the special moment and the possibility of revisiting a charged experiential or emotional event memorialized in time. The economic logic of this kind of identity performance, however, is rather less heightened or charged. Sequels allow studios to ‘‘amortize’’ high production costs more systematically over time and therefore minimize risk. The best example of this was the simultaneous production of all three installments of the Lord of the Rings films, even though the films themselves were released over several years. Once a signature-driven marquee event succeeds, each successive sequel can mine these capital costs over time. Whereas syndications depend upon regularizing a niche economy of scope, franchises are based on a mass strategy of market scale. The genius of a successful franchise is that it allows the studio to ‘‘strip mine’’ revenues by flogging sequels until the franchise dies. Succeeding at this means integrally linking the identity of an institutionally transcendent, event-status screen property with a viewing moment and experience that can be memorialized as part of a

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Creating a ‘‘franchise’’ now stands as one pervasive goal in both film and television. Television excels at establishing value for screen content through first-run airings, but the real goal is to set up possibilities for the endless ‘‘reiteration’’ and therefore financial strip-mining of the original concept. Photo © J. Caldwell.

consumer’s personal identity.∑≤ Marketing is the key to this linkage of identities, while sequels allow the studio to bleed the franchise of profit until it is obsolete. As the next section indicates, very di√erent kinds of organizational identity performance, however, are needed to referee the contentious workforces that actually produce franchises and repurposable, syndicated properties: retreats, retrospectives, and corporate therapeutic exercises. RETREATS AND RETROSPECTIVES: INTERNAL WORKFORCE BRANDING

While branding aims to publicly cultivate and individualize a network/ studio’s niche identity (as a loyalty-generating personality), syndication gives second-tier networks and broadcasters opportunities to appropriate content (to remake or customize their more localized identities), and franchising focuses on reiterating marquee events as sequels (thus enabling studios to strip mine economic revenues and amortize production costs), a fourth and ‘‘softer’’ group of business activities—retreats and retrospectives—cultivates identity within a single production organization. These activities have emerged as e√ective ways by which media companies and professional organizations try to get all of their personnel (depending on the metaphor) ‘‘on the same page’’ or ‘‘pulling in the same direction.’’ Retreats and retrospectives

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can be viewed as forms of internal brand building—as attempts to create consensus, group identity, or uniform commitment within a company or trade organization. Given the workplace tensions that I discussed earlier in this book, production-anxious companies provide a range of antidotes to help contain threats to managerial control and cohesiveness. After the sexual harassment lawsuit against Friends and Warner Bros. Studios was widely publicized in the trades, for example, employee sexual harassment workshops became a common yearly practice at many other companies. Other factors—contract labor abuses, long hours, technical obsolescence, alienation, and ageism have indicted traditional management practices as well. As a result, new business consultants have brought ‘‘therapeutic’’ activities into companies. Concerns about human and career development have increased in importance, at least for some companies. Retreats, team-building workshops, and even sabbaticals have emerged on the radar of management experts, although many workers might echo the jaded sentiment expressed by John Travolta’s character in Come On, Trust Us : ‘‘I’m not sure what a retreat is. . . . I think it’s a religious thing.’’ The Las Vegas ‘‘shoot-out’’ described in chapter 3 included a ‘‘retreat’’ where cinematographers across the country were brought together to mix and mingle in a rugged wilderness setting sponsored by multinational Sony. Retreats are o√ered not only for technicians but also for executives, and they are sponsored not only by thirdparty equipment vendors but also by corporate employers. From a structural and conceptual point of view, retreats promise to abovethe-line and producer personnel the chance to ‘‘escape’’ the claustrophobic confines of their o≈ces and executive suites in Los Angeles and Century City for the group sessions, mud baths, and clear air of, say, Palm Springs. Retreats typically strategize about how media professionals can ‘‘step outside of the box,’’ to ‘‘brainstorm’’ and ‘‘innovate.’’ Such activities transpose psychological concepts like ‘‘finding ones inner child’’ into industrial terms. A less obvious goal is that retreats (synonymous with ‘‘team-building exercises’’) also provide an ostensible escape from the contentious division of labor that undergirds studios and soundstages. By turning a cadre of o≈ce-bound executives and producers into enablers in a group therapy session, corporations also intend to create an industrial opportunity for relationship mending and career rebirth. Retreats are far less sinister in appearance than is the surveillance inherent in monitoring rituals (like note giving). While note giving and monitoring rituals constantly underscore the presence of surveillance by higher-ups, therapeutic rituals appear more benign.

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Trade meetings and retreats function as ‘‘liminal’’ opportunities for professionals who normally compete against each other to regroup, reconsider, and imagine their distinctive identities together. While retreats function to get everyone in the organization ‘‘on the same page,’’ such rituals are also therapeutic responses to the twin pressures of professionalism and physical stress. Photo © J. Caldwell.

Yet while a retreat’s o≈cial demeanor is enabling, the brainstorming that takes place there proceeds under e√aced forms of surveillance and documentation. After most participants retired to their resort rooms at day’s end at a high-level Disney retreat, Michael Eisner sobered a smaller group of fellow executives that remained around him having drinks: ‘‘The keys to this company’s success are sitting around this table. Every one of those [other] guys could leave Disney tomorrow and we’d be even better.’’∑≥ Peter Bart quoted one retreat participant as interpreting this to mean that ‘‘if everyone left tomorrow except Michael Eisner, the company would do even better’’—a comment that reinforced a view shared among Disney executives that Eisner made people feel expendable. Retreats are by definition focused on collective brainstorming, innovation, and consensus building. But Disney’s variant of the retreat included veiled threats to Disney’s management team after the day’s group therapy had concluded. The therapeutic spaces of retreats look more benign than the conventional practices of note giving. Yet both interactions occur within the constraints of the corporation’s gaze and/or its sponsorship.∑∂ Oddly, some corporate retreats, like Disney’s, also cultivate a sense of instability and unspoken turbulence—emotional states that must under some weird management logic be enabling to the corporation as a whole. In general, the logic of the new corporate retreats that I have examined flies in the face of some of Braverman’s classic formulations about how thought (or ‘‘the mind of work’’) travels up the new corporate hier-

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archies.∑∑ That is, while ‘‘de-skilling’’ supposedly travels down the labor ranks in late capitalism, retreats and democratic sharing in contemporary film and television also seem to allow and solicit employee input from many of the once-hierarchical middle levels within a media company. Yet, as Andrew Ross’s recent book has shown, these same sorts of democratic, progressive, anti-institutional poses in the dot-com world actually turned out to be traumatic ways that the same corporations instilled anxiety and colonized most of the workers’ ‘‘free time,’’ which led to career burnout.∑∏ Professional associations face a variety of pressures but also regularly work to reforge the organization’s mission and goals; or at least to underscore them among the membership. Sometimes organizations cultivate legitimacy by constructing an institutional history based upon a largely imagined cultural pedigree. Associations, for example, regularly stage imagined ancestral trade relations via the ‘‘homage’’ or ‘‘retrospective memorial.’’ At the natpe 2000 meeting, the ‘‘golden-age’’ patriarch Sid Caeser was feted as the meeting’s morning keynote. With an elaborately edited, large-screen montage, testimonials, and, finally, a standing ovation, the association pitched Sid as the single most important figure in tv history. Immediately following this quasi-religious homage to the visionary patriarch, the organizers called out (and thus linked him to) what natpe apparently considered to be today’s ‘‘front-line’’ players in contemporary television: Bill Maher, host of Politically Incorrect, Robin Givens, Jerry Springer, and a host of also-rans from the very margins of early prime-time and daytime television. This group was then marshaled on stage to discuss the current state of television. But in updating the audience as to how television had changed since tv’s golden age, one thing became painfully clear: with Springer and Givens ostensibly carrying on Sid’s golden-age tradition, the state of American television programming is, obviously, in big trouble. Institutions regularly ‘‘perform’’ history as a way to establish credibility and legitimacy. The ‘‘straight-faced’’ exhibitionist history performed here worked clumsily to ‘‘overproduce’’ the association’s significance.∑π By retrospectively attaching and glomming the troubled syndication association onto an earlier period marked by high consensus and prestige, the organization was actually revealing its weakness and instability. By 2000 the American television syndication business was in trouble. To counter such troubles, the institutions that represent professional media cultures work hard to establish their own, distinctive ‘‘genesis narratives.’’ Intended to

Industrial Identity Theory

boost member morale and justify present directions, however, this particular re-creation of the history of syndication’s genesis (including Sid Caesar’s disoriented early morning talk, after his red-eye flight from Los Angeles), made it painfully clear just how far syndication had fallen from live anthology drama, and how far the syndicated sellers of Bay Watch, Jerry Springer, and Judge Judy, gathered in Louisiana, were from New York or Los Angeles. As part of internal branding activities, film/video companies also deploy team-building management policies, brand-specific architecture, and workplace amenities. Rhythm and Hues systematically attempts to break down the normal divide that separates management from creative workers by emphasizing constant cross-departmental communication and team-building exercises. As one company executive, John Hughes, explained: ‘‘The thing that is unique . . . is [our] management style. It’s . . . a social contract between management and employee. Not a written contract. We . . . try to do everything in a team-based style . . . we seek out the advice and opinion of the employee. . . . Because it’s such a rapidly changing business . . . because it’s very di≈cult for those of us a bit removed from the production cycle to really know how to do things well . . . we try to listen to what they say . . . to create teams . . . to encourage cooperation. . . . That’s the way I try to run it. [As] a collaborative business, I can’t order my managers to ‘run’ their departments.’’∑∫ Here management implies that nonhierarchical interaction is essential because of the nature of the digital production business. Company knowledge does not have a long shelflife. Therefore, managers cannot fully know how artisans work since technologies change yearly. In this approach, business managers systematically form ‘‘teams’’ with digital artists on each project. The firm also strategizes that building design functions as a focal point for company employee identity. As Hughes stated: ‘‘Architecture is a part of that as well. You can go out to the new digital facility that Disney created in the Valley. It’s just an architectural triumph. It’s a beautiful facility. We can’t do anything like that, but we can bring in an architect who can design an environment for the employee. We do it.’’ The company also measures its identity against competitors in terms of workplace amenities: ‘‘The welfare of employees is important. For example, we have a kitchen. It doesn’t even begin to rival the kitchen that Dreamworks has, which is a very nice benefit they provide. But we’ve provided soft drinks and water and they can make their own breakfasts and lunch in our kitchen —all paid for by the company.’’ A therapeutic approach to human resources

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management emerges here, one tied to the company’s individual style and reputation. Notoriety about workplace benefits provides valuable notoriety around town where demand outpaces the supply of expert labor. Scott Carlin, president of Digital Convergence’s Media Group, boils down the logic of this team-building, boundary-e√acing internal management style in almost mystical terms: ‘‘You have to be in love with the idea. You have to be in love with the people. Because these are the people you are going to live, eat, and breathe with for a long time . . . in some of the most intimate, intense situations you’ve probably ever experienced in your life. So you’d better be drawn to the people and the ideas.’’∑Ω The working condition idealized at Digital Convergence and at Rhythm and Hues involves cultivating corporate devotion among workers in a repressed hierarchy. Both companies presuppose that film/video production involves intense and extended forms of ‘‘intimacy.’’ ‘‘Industrial therapy’’ paradigms that fuel the popularity of retreats, team-building management policies, buried worker hierarchies, and design and amenities based on shared company ‘‘personalities’’ can be viewed as outgrowths of broader industrial conditions. The new film/video work worlds outside of the network/studio/union signatory agreements are characterized by labor fluidity, technical instabilities, and economic uncertainty. Company life typically involves a rapid succession of short-term tasks and constant external and internal negotiation. One producer, Eric Miller, underscores the rapidity of negotiation needed: ‘‘Most people look for a job every five to seven years. In this business it can be ten to twenty times per year. The way the system works is through extreme networking. And it’s built in that everybody is using each other. . . . The network hums—encouraging everything from strategic alliances to casual serial a√airs.’’∏≠ This churn of internal and external negotiation and lack of tenure places a premium on ‘‘a√ective’’ and symbolic dimensions provided by corporate therapy. In this sense, therapeutic management approaches that internally organize workers around a common company personality and identity are as crucial to company success as external brand-building is for company survival in the market at large. CONCLUSION: CORPORATE IDENTITY POLITICS

The centrality of corporate branding, syndicated marketing, and team building in contemporary film/television demonstrates how management’s identity-focused activities impact both onscreen content and the workers

Industrial Identity Theory

that make it. In some ways, the various practices examined in this chapter can be viewed as corporate ‘‘control measures’’ intended to manage programming uncertainties. Other executive practices, like television’s corporate boardroom game of executive musical chairs, also serve as corporate ‘‘control measures’’ that are useful in managing the outcome uncertainties of genres and styles. The U.S. networks typically announce their fall schedules in May. A number of television executive heads regularly roll in the months that follow, and new studio/network chiefs are brought in after the firings to clean up the ‘‘mess’’ of those ousted. With their own career moves under scrutiny, and inevitably short tenures ahead, newcomer executives frequently let risky shows die on the vine. Brian Lowry claims this happens because new executives get no credit for the shows/deals of their predecessors.∏∞ With the most to lose in the increasingly competitive multichannel market, the majors (cbs, nbc, abc) are particularly susceptible to the conservative inertia and dulling insecurities of the ‘‘executive revolving door’’ trend. In many cases trade spokespersons explain hirings/firings via a corporate allegory of courting, marriage, and divorce. In remarks such as the ‘‘honeymoon is over in the alliance of Ovitz, Burkle . . . funny how a little thing can drive a wedge into a match made in heaven,’’∏≤ analysts show how the industry rationalizes corporate decisions (and exit strategies) in the emotional language of interpersonal passion and betrayal. Unlike the institutional identity issues involved in branding, marketing, and syndication, personal identity issues are foregrounded to explain what actually gets programmed, and cancelled, during endless executive succession.∏≥ Whereas screenplays function as business plans, management practices can also function aesthetically. The executive revolving door is but one way that management decisions encroach on the creative process. Management jobs in general have had ever-shorter tenures, and executive search firms in film/television, like Korn-Ferry International, coach new clients to psychologically prepare for perpetual career volatility and change: ‘‘Failure has been no boundary for anyone in the entertainment industry. It’s a prerequisite. . . . It doesn’t matter if you’ve had multiple jobs.’’∏∂ The film/television executive headhunter Bill Simon here describes a tenureless ‘‘migrant future’’ that many film/television executives now experience. Another executive, Fran Pomerantz, underscores the migrancy mode alluded to here and describes how executives must cultivate personal identities and mission statements that can transcend individual corporate positions: ‘‘The notion that you have a one-way ticket does not exist. There’s not that . . . kind of

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rigidity to the career path or the same kind of career path.’’∏∑ Film/television management consultants like these coach clients to be career focused and not project or employer focused. In this milieu, a succession of career changes can actually establish corporate value in the entertainment industry. This perspective cultivates the ideal that one’s ‘‘personal brand’’ must be highly ‘‘transportable.’’ Simon describes an industrial situation where the traditional tables are turned. That is, media production firms now must pitch themselves and woo executive employees rather than vice versa: ‘‘What’s the value added that these companies provide for the applicant from a career point of view. These companies have to sell potential hires on why they should come in.’’∏∏ Unlike many traditional industries, ideal production company executives are also ‘‘produced.’’ Like creative workers, management types must publicly exploit and master flexibility and creative deal making to move from one company to others. And they must actively cultivate a ‘‘personal brand’’ befitting their career business plan. Simon, interestingly, describes executives with the same terms used by corporate branding experts. Executives, that is, should create situations where companies can be exploited to ‘‘add value’’ to their personal careers. Like creative talent, managers with enough ‘‘buzz’’ and career capital can move from firm to firm. Management in film/television rarely strong-arms uniformity upon executives, but rather exploits career contestation within the institution for organizational e≈ciency. In writing o√ fears about incestuousness and inside dealing within conglomerates, Peggy Binzel, a Fox/News Corp. executive, suggests how a cutthroat career model benefits the new consolidated corporate ‘‘monoliths’’: ‘‘Inside this company, at business meetings where various heads of the divisions talk about their activities, I guarantee . . . that each one of them cares [only] about their own bottom line. They couldn’t care less that some other part of the company has a product to sell. We may make the decision to put a project on fx. But . . . fx is going to pay for that product. That’s just the way the internal dynamics of a company works. Our station group is certainly not going to take a product from Twentieth Century-Fox Television that it doesn’t think will produce results. It’s a pretty cutthroat world within the company—forget about outside of the company.’’∏π Conglomeration, by definition, reduces competition and incorporates normally segregated market activities in order to re-create economies of scale. According to Binzel’s description, however, Newscorp cultivates con-

Industrial Identity Theory

tention between division executives—even when consolidation ostensibly alleviated those forms of contestation. Newscorp’s internal divisiveness is di≈cult to explain in the traditional way: as a result of market competition or as the result of external, competitive, Darwinian struggles for viewers. More credible, instead, is the possibility that cultivated managerial contestation within companies like Fox makes internal components of the conglomerate dynamic and partisan and thus more cost e√ective. This scenario suggests that corporate media management today sanctions internal status struggles over career/divisional identities as a tactic systematically promoting cost e≈ciencies that benefit the conglomerate as a whole.∏∫ Oddly, while management structures facilitate internal contestation between divisions, corporate team-building activities ostensibly do the opposite for workers within each division. One of the lies told by film/television executives is that the industrial status quo is a logical result of natural selection, audience responsiveness, and viewer democracy. Business executives claim only to ‘‘give the public what the public wants,’’ and they use statistical measures, box o≈ce, and ratings to ‘‘prove’’ this adage. This management house rule allows executives to e√ectively deflect social criticisms.∏Ω Yet the business practices examined in this chapter—branding, syndicated marketing, team building, retreats, and the executive revolving door—suggest just the opposite. They show just how carefully both corporate and employee identities are constructed, managed, and solidified in management practice. The result of this obsession with external and internal branding is that the studios/networks roll out the same sorts of films/series that they have always rolled out.π≠ Such a charge lays bare a messier, and perhaps unintended, side e√ect of branding. In the pursuit of ever more diverse programming niches, brand building and employee development have actually created rather homogeneous executive workforces. An insular subculture of network and studio decisionmakers has resulted, thereby creating a situation where diversity of thought is a rare commodity indeed. Regrettably, this executive insularity has made the industry far less diverse than what is reflected in U.S. demographic trends overall. Both diversity of thought and diversity of personnel frequently fade or disappear when labor hierarchies are buried as part of employee consensus building, identity initiatives, and corporate brandbuilding makeovers.

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A search engine. It’s a reputation management system. By enhancing transparency, companies can manage their images as never before. —Clive Thompson1 Secrecy won’t be dead. It will simply hide in plain sight. The hyperconnectivity and transparency of this kind of world accelerates the flow of information, creating incentives to hijack the process to push particular memes, including disinformation. The techniques for manipulating information flows will only become more sophisticated over time as the world becomes increasingly connected. —Mark Safranski2

Chapter 7

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

One recurring tension in the preceding chapters involves relations between o√-screen industrial activities and on-screen stylistic tendencies. In this chapter I examine an area in which these two poles (industry political economy on the one hand and formal on-screen practices on the other) consistently intersect. Specifically, I examine multimedia ‘‘viral marketing’’ (sometimes known as ‘‘opt-in’’ or ‘‘under-the-radar’’ marketing) within the context of repurposing, traditional marketing methods (like the epk and the making-of ), new delivery technologies, and the dvd. Conglomerate profitability today increasingly depends upon the e√ectiveness of two broad strategies: finding new ways to ‘‘externalize risk’’ (thus making the massive conglomerate more flexible); and ‘‘disciplining’’ potentially disruptive new media technologies that threaten established revenue streams. Marketing— viewed as a quintessential form of industrial self-representation—now stands as a crucial arena in which corporations can succeed or fail in working through these strategies. Marketing that poses as primary entertainment content, for example, proves to be a cost-e√ective means to achieve flexibility, externalize risk, and discipline new technology. In general, the cor-

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porate pursuit of these goals now regularly involves at least seven broad strategies: cross-promotion, multimedia repurposing, merchandizing, new technology development, domestic coproduction (via deficit financing), international coproduction, and new, cheaper, and more flexible labor arrangements. Although I have discussed the latter four strategies elsewhere,≥ three of these marketing-rich strategies—cross-promotion, repurposing, and merchandising—directly involve and reward innovative uses of onscreen and o√-screen reflexivity and are worth examining more closely here. First, cross-promotion occurs when major studios or conglomerates acquire television, cable networks, and new media sites to advertise and promote their own feature films and television programs on other platforms within the conglomerate (Universal/nbc Productions/msnbc or Fox Searchlight/Twentieth Century Television/Fox News). Most producers generally agree that the single biggest factor a√ecting the success of a feature film upon release is still television advertising. Owning a broadcast or cable network, local stations, or an extensive Internet presence gives the studio in this enviable position several advantages. First, the studio can negotiate (essentially with itself ) to buy and place spots in the most desirable and highly rated programming segments (with the heaviest barrage slated in the week leading up to the release). Second, studio or networks can create and encourage (well in advance of the release) intertextual references to released films or their stars within existing dramatic or entertainment series (since most studios have both film and television production arms). Third, the network can produce and program ‘‘specials’’ timed to spike buzz during the week of the release of a given film (much like the special program X-Files: The Movie examined later in this chapter). Fourth, the network can air—in contiguous slots throughout the week of the release—previous films by the actors or director of a forthcoming or released film (for example, in the case where Born on the Fourth of July or Days of Thunder are broadcast during the week that Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai is released). Finally, the conglomerate can evaluate, review, and laud its new releases during the half-hour early-prime-time showbiz reports and entertainment news series that the conglomerate’s stations and networks air nightly. Broadcast and cable, therefore, o√er the studio and the conglomerate a marketing executive’s dream—a complete package of promotional and marketing opportunities, before, during, and after a film’s release. Although such tactics may look just like old-fashion, incestuous flogging, the process also shifts much of the

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Intermedia relationship-building—between film/TV, network/syndicated programming, and entertainment series/showbiz reports—can function as effective forms of ‘‘cross-promotion.’’ As viral, or opt-in, forms of marketing, they give the new conglomerates greater flexibility in ‘‘adding value’’ to existing properties without significant new expenditures. Composite photo of Survivor and Insider posters, J. Caldwell.

studio’s risk and the costs of a large film marketing campaign onto the shoulders of a≈liate networks and stations within the conglomerate. The conglomerate’s broadcast and cable networks also initiate many of the crosspromotional forms as part of their own internal programming and promotional budgets (again, taking risk away from the studios). Second, flexibility and decreased risk ensues when studios and conglomerates develop and launch multipurpose multimedia content through several distribution windows simultaneously. The trades and financial columns have paid particular attention to this method for externalizing risk, since it closely mirrors the ideals of synergy celebrated in the industry since the late 1980s.∂ To compete critically and for ratings with the growing programming success of hbo in 2003, for example, nbc coproduced and broadcast the costly limited-run series Kingpin (a stylish and violent Sopranos clone about Mexican drug cartels and their Latino-American families). Hyped as ‘‘must see tv,’’ the miniseries was also simultaneously broadcast with Spanish dialogue on nbc’s Telemundo network, immediately repeated on nbc’s ‘‘arts’’ cable network Bravo, distributed on nbc’s Latin American cable network Mun2, and almost immediately available on dvd as a prefabricated ‘‘cult classic.’’ In

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

addition, bits and pieces of the multimedia event were cross-promoted: on nbc a≈liate stations like knbc-Burbank (which ran ‘‘special reports’’ on ‘‘the real’’ Mexican drug cartels and the confrontations that knbc’s own tv reporters have had with them); on numerous nbc a≈liates that aired firstrun syndicated showbiz report series like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood with stories on the cast and producers of the miniseries); and on the online nbci (which provided running visual and textual commentary on the show). In this way, each of Vivendi-nbc’s corporate arms were taking on the expensive Kingpin initiative, and the financial risks that came with it, as their own. Nowadays, conglomerates no longer bounce on-screen content sequentially down the line of the company’s successive media platforms, but rather develop that content for roughly simultaneous release on as many of those platforms as it can. If nbc had shouldered the costs of the Kingpin project alone, ad sales in broadcast would never have paid for the steep costs of this supposedly ‘‘prestige’’ production. Repurposing blurs the distinction between marketing and entertainment, since some forms of film and television can fulfill both functions. Third, product placement and ancillary markets allow producers to recoup income downstream from the primary film or series in the form of merchandizing. Although many in the self-styled ‘‘creative community’’ of Hollywood still like to imagine that a recognizably artistic mission is at the heart of their enterprise, screen-related merchandize has become a comparably important but seldom celebrated prerequisite consideration for feature film and prime-time development today. Video games, which can be thought of as either multimedia content or merchandise, depending on the user, have far surpassed the total box o≈ce receipts of the feature film industry since 1988. Miranda Banks has demonstrated how integral inexpensive toys and action figures have become in the development and success of scores of television shows on and o√ of prime time. In 2000, Turner’s half-hour animated Powerpu√ Girls series on the Cartoon Network—which was never intended to initiate Emmy talk, high ratings, or critical buzz— generated $300 million from show-related merchandizing in a single year alone.∑ In essence, tv-related dolls from a marginally rated ‘‘basic cable’’ channel dwarf the box o≈ce receipts of most feature films. Yet critics, journalists, and academic scholars—obsessed with the higher cultural ‘‘prestige’’ of cinema—seldom acknowledge the determining power of merchandizing in making films and series possible. Powerpu√ Girls and Bu√y the

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Viacom/Paramount made their brand an immersive experience for multitasking viewers/fans/consumers in the form of theme park attractions in Las Vegas. The Discovery Channel markets to its viewers by encouraging them to ‘‘buy into’’ the brand by purchasing, wearing, holding, and listening to extratextual extensions of its brand in diverse ancillary markets. Photo © J. Caldwell.

Vampire Slayer can be thought of as quintessential narrowcast or niche program forms, and are therefore part of the risky post-Fordist, specialized economy of scope equation. However, the extensive flood of low-cost, show-related, mass-marketed merchandize allows the same shows’ respective production companies to spread the risk around and harvest large profits by simultaneously following a more stable Fordist mass economy of scale business model. In this hybrid marketing scheme, edgy on-screen narratives are niched while their o√-screen merchandise is mass produced. The very volatility and uncertainty of the contemporary multimedia economy means that contemporary media conglomerates place considerable emphasis on these strategies along with others aimed at externalizing risk.∏ The industry has responded to the economic risk of increasingly uncertain outcomes in film/television by deploying a range of tactics designed to displace the financial risk and marketing task onto the shoulders of suppliers, workers, a≈liates, and buyers rather than squarely on the conglomerate or its stockholders. This displacement or outsourcing of risk is typically explained and rationalized industrially through a variety of what I term on-screen ‘‘viral marketing’’ tactics. The audience consumes these opt-in marketing experiences as primary entertainment and commodity forms. In the present environment of convergence, these viral tactics cannot

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

be usefully separated from the new technologies that both constrain and enable them. MULTIDIRECTIONAL DIGITAL FLOW AND ‘‘SECOND SHIFT’’ PROGRAMMING

The shift to digital technologies has created tremendous anxieties, a series of abortive new media responses by studios and broadcasters, and, finally, experimentation with various ‘‘under-the-radar’’ marketing schemes. Digitalization threatened many of the most central tenets that had made the industry profitable over the course of several decades, including the place and value of syndication rights in the industry (as I discussed in chapter 6). It also threw a big wrench into the machines and strategies of network ‘‘programming.’’ Historically, programming departments based their chief task—deciding which programs to air, when to schedule, and how to do both profitably—on generally accepted theories of audience viewing. The remote control and then the Internet forced programmers to find ways to keep an audience either viewing the same network throughout a given evening’s schedule, or (if that were not possible), returning to the same show week after week. The writer and producer Ayelet Sela announced an innovative solution to this problem in 1999 by creating integral tie-ins between the tv series Homicide and the Web site Homicide.com: ‘‘The show will flow back and forth between the Web and tv. We’re going to be laying some new ground [with Homicide.com].’’ The buzz about the experiment was extensive. Microsoft (a participant in the experiment) promoted its Windows Media Player as the best means to witness nbc’s ‘‘award-winning’’ convergence of the series Homicide: Life on the Streets, the Web site ‘‘Homicide: The Second Shift,’’ and a special online ‘‘Homicide.com episode,’’ when it bragged: ‘‘The much-heralded Internet series [Homicide.com] has amassed numerous awards, including two Inovision Awards for Story/ Script and Web Design, and a prestigious 1998 id Magazine Media Design Review.’’π In passages like this, both new and old media trade publications continue to invoke modernist notions of ‘‘cutting-edge’’ originality, innovation, and radicality to promote progress in their respective industries. The February 1999 Homicide.com sweeps week stunt, for example, served as curatorial bait for an eclectic phalanx of trade writers and vested interests intent on

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promoting the expansion of the digital and dot-com worlds. This event, many surmised, represented the ultimate integration and seamless convergence of old and new media. Since 1997, the Web site Homicide: The Second Shift had depicted life on the ‘‘flip side’’ of the show. That is, as the prime-time stars left their one-hour broadcast ‘‘shift,’’ Web surfers could watch the precinct and replacement personnel on the Internet during the other ‘‘twenty-three hours’’ of the day. The acclaimed sweeps stunt began with second-shift detectives investigating Web-cast crimes committed on Wednesday and Thursday of the week. On Friday night, the ‘‘first-shift’’ detectives on nbc’s televised series continued the same investigation and sought to solve the ritualistic murders that had earlier been Web-cast. This search involved a descent into the suspicious and dark world of Internet culture, with producers and consultants bragging that there would be eighty scenes in this special episode rather than the normal forty to sixty.∫ This broadcast cyberworld included fake e-mail solicitations, chat rooms, and frequent hacker interventions. To solve the murders the on-screen detectives eventually enjoined all members of the composite precinct to help solve the crime online, even as the characters themselves were shown between the episode’s acts playing a computer arcade game featuring a Laura Croft–like female figure blasting away at her animated prey. As the show built to its cli√hanger, nbc ended the hour by advertising the Web site where the narrative would continue after the tv show ended. Homicide.com then showed the second-shift detectives continuing the investigation, by sifting through video fragments that had earlier been Web-cast (before) or broadcast (after) the first crime had been committed. The site also enabled Web users at home to sift through audio and video clips of the evidence itself, to interview the suspects, and to play an online version of the very arcade computer game that detectives of both shifts had played in the analog and digital worlds. Frenetic Web use now pervaded each register of reality available in the integrated convergent stunt. The televised cast, the Web-cast cast, and the actual Web users all now logged-on, chatted, threatened, downloaded, and played the same digitized video and audio clips and computer games and sifted through the same clues. The result was an ostensibly synergistic ecstasy of digital euphoria that completely blurred distinctions between cross-promotion, marketing, new media technologies, and entertainment.Ω Sifting through the various technical and economic interests involved in

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Adult graphic novels (aka comic books) help keep viewers and fans in the ‘‘second shift’’ occupied and loyal during the twenty-three hours and six days between prime-time airings of The Shield and 24. Composite photo, ∫ J. Caldwell.

the Homicide.com stunt suggests that institutional relationships and industrial leveraging may have been far more important than the aesthetic forms that comprised the event. ‘‘Authorship’’ for the show was explicitly claimed by many involved in the e√ort: nbc (which aired the series), nbc Digital Productions (which produced the integrated project), nbc.com (which promoted the show’s site on the Web), the Homicide.com Internet producer Ayelet Sela (who pitched and then cowrote the televised script), and Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana’s production company (which produces and owns the show in syndication). Authorship of this screen-Web stunt was also claimed by the coalition of business partners that created the event, including zdtv (an Internet programming and consulting firm), Internet piracy consultants from the Web series ‘‘CyberCrimetv’’ (the lawyers Alex Wellen and Luke Reiter), and the Microsoft corporation.∞≠ Each partner leveraged the tv /dot-com stunt to increase market share in its own industrial sector. The firm zdtv (an ‘‘Internet technology publisher whose Web site covers tales of hacking [and] electronic eavesdropping’’) hyped its own marginally rated Web-cast programming.∞∞ The consultant

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Wellen used the experience to create a segment for his own Net series.∞≤ Internet personnel at Homicide.com earned a prime-time television screenwriting credit via the stunt. But Microsoft worked and spun the event with as much intensity as any of the other players. With a summary of the event’s aesthetic features as mere icing on its lengthy press release, Microsoft proceeded to promote not just its Windows Media Player as the way to access the synergy but also devoted considerable copy describing the wide-ranging extent and nature of Microsoft’s contractual business relationships throughout the digital and electronic media industry, including partnerships with eleven other corporations and corporate divisions in addition to nbc.∞≥ Furthermore, executives at nbc hyped Homicide.com as if it were akin to media’s second coming: ‘‘More than a simple tie-in between a Web site and a television show: it is an actual convergence of entertainment media.’’∞∂ Microsoft, however, more deftly deconstructed the subtext of this convergent art form via the (now essential) financial market lexicon: ‘‘Founded in 1975, Microsoft (is listed on) Nasdaq as ‘msft.’ ’’∞∑ Like a predatory male marking its turf, Microsoft’s publicity invoked an endless series of proprietary, brand-related trademarks. And, like an all-knowing conglomerate, Microsoft sketched the outline of a networked empire so broad that the sun might never stop shining on its endlessly conglomerating parts. Like a boardroom sage turned earnest financial advisor Microsoft discreetly shared an insider’s critically valuable stock-investment tip: ‘‘msft.’’ The not-sosubtle message? Call your stockbroker to get in on nasdaq’s ‘‘ground floor.’’ As this complex example suggests, cutting-edge accomplishment in digital aesthetics frequently provides pressure points and lucrative contact zones where a broad set of new institutional practices and proprietary strategies interact. This sort of quintessential marketing phenomenon begs the question of whether film studies can continue to talk productively about texts, aesthetics, ideology, and identity in new media (all standby analytical perspectives in the field of film studies) without also talking about the industrial landscape and marketing practices that animate and fuel new media development on a wide scale. Answering such a question, I would argue, unsettles a number of recurrent assumptions and critical tendencies, as I hope to show in the pages that follow, including several about ‘‘behind-thescenes’’ programming.∞∏

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A feeding frenzy erupted between ‘‘new media’’ startups and ‘‘old media’’ Hollywood in attempts to master multipurposing and viral marketing focused on the viewer’s secong shift. This interindustry mating dance occurred in two distinct waves: the 1997–2000 dot-com boom/ NASDAQ bust; and the 2005–2006 launch and proliferation of podcasting, mobile-privatized entertainment delivery, and ‘‘third-screen’’ media consumption. Here, Microsoft and Microcast go after television executives with an open bar. Photo © J. Caldwell.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Behind-the-scenes programming has emerged as a highly visible genre in contemporary film/television. The growing presence of and desire for behind-the-scenes knowledge may result from how multichannel market forces have created conditions for its popularity; or how digital technology allowed for multiplexing backstage information in the dvd format. This book, in fact, devotes considerable attention to how behind-the-scenes and making-of knowledge are tied to changing economic and technological conditions. Yet, behind-the-scenes and making-of genres are not necessarily new media phenomenon. Rather, they follow from a broad tradition in predigital Hollywood that has now greatly expanded due to recent economic, technological, and industrial changes. Since its launch in the 1940s, television programming has regularly focused on how television was bringing film/television to the viewer. Behind-the-scenes looks predated even Disney’s making-ofs and repurposing on the popular series The Wonderful World of Disney in 1954. We can trace various impulses before this time as well: the calculated, controlled release of studio information on stars in the 1920s and 1930s; the posturing of early camera operators and filmmakers as ‘‘magicians’’ who occasionally revealed their secrets to fans; weekly doses of movie news in newsreels of the 1930s; and the development

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of semipublic craft trades like American Cinematographer starting in the silent era. This long-standing fascination with ‘‘realities’’ behind the scenes functions like the premise of the Wizard of Oz, where anxious characters are confronted by the knowledge that somebody, a tech wizard, is behind the screen pulling strings and creating the illusions that audiences fall for. Industry has never been shy about underscoring the craft expertise behind the illusions and emotional experiences that everyone experiences. Broad behind-the-scenes themes (the industry as a visionary and technically savvy artists colony) have been around almost since Hollywood started. What digital technology brought to the making-of prototype are the ideal conditions under which the genre can be exploited as a dominant on-screen form. Digital technology allows the endless repurposing of content, and the multichannel media market has made the making-of and behind-the-scenes genres extremely valuable and e≈cient ways to ‘‘add value’’ to a studio or network’s existing properties. Films and series about films and series are not, therefore, new. Yet now they have become valuable forms that allow studios and networks to exploit artistic buzz and spike economic profits for their conglomerates and mother brands. This phenomenon is less about a genre’s ‘‘coming of age’’ than it is about industry finding more e≈cient and profitable ways to participate in popular culture, especially in ways that cost less per minute of screen time. For example, the 2003 program by amc titled Gay Hollywood—a rather sophisticated yet problematic behind-the-scenes show—examines the lives of five young gay men who aspire to ‘‘make it’’ in the film/television industry in Los Angeles.∞π While the story of making it in showbiz is an old one, the explicit queering of the story in primetime is rather new. The special starts with a sensationalistic montage comprised of Hollywood stock shots, testy interview sound bites, and a story of one aspirant’s first encounter on the road to success: an uninspired sexual hookup with a nobody who perfunctorily hands over a screenplay after sex then asks for film work in the future if it ever opens up. After the titles, each contestant introduces himself to the camera in close-up direct address as the other four aspirants mock and dis them verbally on camera from the background. Posed implicitly as a representative sample, the group is actually very white, style conscious, and aΔuent enough to be able to hang out for years in Hollywood (without

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

jobs) ‘‘until they make it.’’ Class and race immediately become issues that are only nominally engaged by the participants or producers. One aspiring thirty-something actor, after struggling ‘‘for ten years’’ in Hollywood, resists his mom’s on-screen suggestion to find work as an extra, since it would be a step backward. He describes instead how his family sends him money and then states: ‘‘I am an investment; and I’m going to pay back.’’ Other aspirants in the ensemble, however, question his commitment since unlike them he has never known the true meaning of ‘‘struggle.’’ Yet the other showbiz wannabes in the reality ensemble have similarly suspect cultural and economic backgrounds. One aspiring director is so poor that he only has $700 left in his bank account, which he proves to the camera by flashing his just-dispensed atm receipt. His kitchenless apartment is so small that he washes his plastic dishes—from his liquid-only diet—in his bathtub. Yet this scene is contradicted by a brief graphic block that indicates that his short film premiered at Sundance and was featured or won awards in 150 film festivals. Another aspirant ‘‘can’t get anyone to read his scripts,’’ yet he has an mfa degree in film from usc (which, as the top private graduate film school worldwide, and nearly impossible to get into, many consider to be the surest way to get a start in the industry). Graphics indicate that other aspirants are the products of elite private universities like Stanford or have had several prominent prime-time network acting credits, yet they too cannot find work. While their edgy, privileged cultural capital may give them favorable odds held by few others, we watch them selfdestructing on camera. One wannabe writer goes down in flames when he naively ‘‘takes a meeting’’ he is clearly not prepared for. Another insensitively insults on camera an indie studio executive who o√ers him a directing gig, since the soft-core nature of the direct-to-video release would not ‘‘advance his career.’’ But at least it’s not ‘‘real pornography,’’ he conjectures, which would ruin his career prospects, viewers are told. Still another aspirant idly tacks three-by-five-inch cards onto his bare apartment walls with handwritten words—‘‘compete,’’ ‘‘get work,’’ ‘‘believe’’—intended as therapeutic self-coaching. This is all very pathetic stu√. ‘‘Five blonde guys’’ naively grovel in Hollywood, ostensibly in poverty, even as they boost their egos by buying ‘‘Gucci shoes and designer labels.’’ Hollywood has always ground up aspirants. Yet in true reality tv fashion here, each aspirant takes turns remorsefully con-

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Gay Hollywood: a cautionary, film studies/tabloidlike making-it-in-Hollywood tale. Even if you have degrees from elite private universities and top film schools, prime-time acting credits, and a premiere at Sundance and showings at 150 other film festivals, you’re still nobody in this town, and you are destined to wash your dishes in the bathtub near your toilet before you ever make it. Lesson to the heartland: everybody starts at the bottom and humiliation marks the endless, alienating journey. (AMC, 2003) Composite photo from video stills, J. Caldwell.

fiding to the camera about what they did ‘‘wrong’’ when given their extraordinary on-screen chance. This behind-the-scenes special thus exploits the joining of two normally separate discourses: Hollywood’s need to demonstrate how hard it is to get in, with reality television’s obligatory scenes of self-flagellation and humiliation. This is far di√erent from Disney studio’s ‘‘helpful’’ behind-the-scenes educational posture on television in the 1950s. Instead, this contemporary special functions as both a sensationalistic cautionary tale and a de facto promotion for other reality television series and queer-themed series airing on both the amc network and Bravo and on competing networks. Whether Gay Hollywood stereotypes or a≈rms gays (via exploitative or positive representations), or whether it depicts Hollywood discriminating against or favoring gays (as in, ‘‘See, the industry humiliates them just like everyone else’’), the series fulfills an important industrial function. Vigilant, e√usive reflections on the anxious, sometimes tormented lives behind the scenes promotes and adds value to another genre dominant on amc, Bravo, Fox Movie Classics, and Turner Classic Movies: the airing of Hollywood films.

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

MAKING-OFS

Another reflexive behind-the-scenes programming genre—the making-of— is today an obligatory part of almost all feature film and television development and marketing projects. Whereas behind-the-scenes docs reflect topically on production knowledge, lives, and behavior o√ camera, making-ofs usually document a specific film/television production from start to finish. Some making-ofs o√er freestanding theatrical experiences, like Chris Marker’s film AK about legendary director Akira Kurosawa. Others, like hbo / Miramax’s Project Greenlight, are programmed for viewers in weekly primetime installments as ‘‘appointment television.’’ Still others, like the makingofs by Pixar, Dreamworks, or Lucasfilm, provide niche-appropriate content for cable networks like the Sci-Fi Channel or Tech-tv. As a dominant variant of the ‘‘bonus track,’’ making-ofs are also prerequisite budget categories in dvd production. Making-ofs, however, are not simply relegated to niche cable nets or dvds as background material. Making-ofs are also regularly programmed as ‘‘specials’’ on network television. Two examples in particular underscore systematic relations between making-ofs and marketing. The 1998 pbs special Anatomy of a Homicide provides one of the best and most complete records of the production of a prime-time dramatic series episode.∞∫ Anatomy is useful to consider since it is not an ‘‘in-house’’ makingof produced by a studio to promote its own film or series. The network nbc is wholly independent of both Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana’s company (which produced the series) and the pbs network (which broadcast the documentary). In one way, public television’s noncommercial charter to educate in the public interest would justify such distance. Accordingly, Anatomy carefully breaks down a Homicide episode into sequential segments following the production process itself (with labels like ‘‘August 17th, the first day of postproduction’’). Time-space information, along with concise realtime descriptions in the voice-over, gives the show a Frontline air of scientific documentation. Omniscient narration also provides a useful précis of television aesthetic ideas associated with those of the show: genre (‘‘A rare genre: attention television’’); narrative structure (‘‘character-driven stories that traverse the minefield of . . .’’); series pitch or concept (‘‘this is the story of risk, ambition, and creativity under pressure’’); racial representation (the show’s ‘‘strength and number of African American characters’’); division of labor (dps and actors brag about how arrogant directors from feature film have

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to humbly ‘‘adjust’’ to the greater demands of television); and social ideology (‘‘life on the streets’’ realism ‘‘interested in the demythification’’ of police work). Alongside this litany of facts, however, Anatomy also betrays a lessscientific form of ‘‘concerned’’ cultural partisanship, recognizable as critical advocacy (‘‘this is the best show that viewers are not watching’’). Anatomy ’s surgical camera finds at the core of Homicide the heroic ‘‘struggle’’ to insure that the ‘‘best-written and best-acted show’’ on television ‘‘can . . . survive without dumbing down.’’ Much like Frontline ’s ‘‘exposé’’ The Monster that Ate Hollywood, pbs takes shots at its long-standing nemesis: big capitalism, commercial media, and mindless entertainment. But unlike The Monster that Ate Hollywood, the pbs special finds impassioned and innovative risk takers struggling to breathe life-support into television creations marked by intelligence and moral standing. Anatomy ’s writer-producer Jim Yashimura goes where ‘‘no writer-producer’’ has gone before. The executive producer Tom Fontana struggles to protect Yashimura from callous and indiscriminate network executives whose mission (apparently) is to pester and torture prime-time artists who actually have integrity. By structuring the documentary (‘‘Will the series survive the ratings war?’’) like the fictional episode’s story ‘‘A-line’’ (‘‘Will the man crushed by the subway survive?’’), Anatomy hijacks the very Hollywood edge that it critiques. Anatomy’s ‘‘documentary’’ invents stock heroes and villains, artists and money grubbers, and good and evil to score its points. A recognizable cultural politics is at work here: pbs essentially colonizes Homicide as a solitary bastion of enlightened liberal humanism of the sort that informs the documentary’s producers. In essence, Anatomy claims Homicide as its own—as a spiritual sibling of pbs and of those at Frontline, wgbh Boston, and cpb who ‘‘still’’ care that America is not thrown to the commercial dogs of Hollywood. Making-ofs rarely trot out romantic nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetics so explicitly to describe how a movie or series is made. The second example, Fox’s making-of program X-Files: The Movie, pitches itself as important, breaking movie news, but it also displays an industrial incestuousness and self-dealing that pbs works so hard to conceal in its making-of. Broadcast on June 15, 1998, X-Files: The Movie posed as a making-of about the feature film The X-Files, which was scheduled to premiere worldwide a few days later. Yet the actual content of the hour-long special proved that it was far more than a mere making-of program. The

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

special included extensive footage of production sets, studios, stunts, problems, and interactions between cast and crew, along with repetitious footage of the stars running, falling, reacting, and emoting. Intercut throughout X-Files: The Movie ’s field footage are interviews with all of the chief figures: executive producer Chris Carter, stars Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, director Rob Bowman, writer and coexecutive producer Frank Spotnitz, and others. Like most making-ofs, this one betrays a sense of its own self-importance. Using the movie to help relaunch his stalled career, the on-camera host Martin Landau somberly asks ‘‘big’’ intellectual questions at the start of each segment of the special (‘‘What are the basic human fears that audiences relate to in The X-Files ?’’). The special then loads up the hour with an extensive list of ‘‘scientific’’ and quasi-scientific experts to explain altered-state phenomenon. Dr. Peter Panzarino, ‘‘chairman of psychiatry at Cedars-Sinai’’ explains the basis for the show: ‘‘If you look at the history of paranoid psychopathology, you will find the newest technological advances to be a part of paranoia.’’ The ‘‘psychotherapist’’ Steven Zucker describes how we are ‘‘alienated from ourselves’’ then explains the existence of ‘‘aliens within us.’’ Whitley Streiber and Matt Roush, public intellectuals and authors, weigh in on the supposedly ‘‘universal’’ importance to humanity of The X-File themes. The cyber-punk patriarch William Gibson defines paranoia and emulates the series’ anxiety when he asserts: ‘‘What we are worried about now, is that we are becoming posthuman. We are the aliens.’’ This primetime posture of onscreen intellectualism is answered by a long list of pop culture celebrities who appear on camera ‘‘because they love the show,’’ including Cher, Melissa Etheridge, nhl hockey star Luc Robataille, rock star Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, LA Dodger first-baseman Eric Karros, and many others. The best-selling novelist Stephen King sums up the sentiments of the group on camera: ‘‘I loved the show so much, I got in touch with them. ’’ Another segment includes a clip montage of ‘‘dubbed’’ foreign-language versions of the film (in Spanish, Japanese, French, German) along with actor interviews describing The X-Files as a cult hit (in England and Milan). Apparently, the entire world is somehow drawn to The X-Files ‘‘phenomenon’’ and waits desperately for the pending release of the feature film. Yet the special’s overearnest e√orts to discuss many important o√-screen issues ultimately raises suspicions that this making-of is neither fully about the film being made nor about the intellectual ideas and social themes that

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inform the show. Landau states ‘‘I can o√er this exclusive clip’’ and then shows a leaked movie scene days before the public will ‘‘get’’ to see it on the widescreen. Yet the film’s making-of ends up being more about marketing the television series and X-Files brand as a whole rather than promoting a singular cinema ‘‘event.’’ Numerous interviewees talk about information from the television series that the viewer will either know or not need to know to appreciate the film. Practitioners theorize extensively about how this film production experience compares to their years of X-Files tv production. Commercial breaks include Fox network promos previewing upcoming episodes of the current season’s The X-Files television series, along with local a≈liate promos for Fox News at 10 pm that promise ‘‘secrets revealed about The X-Files . . . at 10.’’ The special includes a segment (now obligatory in making-ofs) about how the film’s special e√ects were created. But the special’s segment on the film’s music betrays a much broader set of institutional forces at work. The musical score making-of segment celebrates the lone synthesizer/composer Mark Snow crossing over to conduct an eighty-five-piece orchestra as it greatly expands The X-Files sound experience. The segment, however, also extensively describes The X-Files cd — which is to be simultaneously released with the movie and includes ‘‘original interpretations’’ of The X-Files theme music by dozens of famous rock bands and musicians, including Tonic, Foo Fighters, Better Than Ezra, X, Ray Manzarek of the Doors, Björk, and Sting, among others. By the end of the hour-long making-of broadcast, it is clear that well over half of the international stars who appeared on-camera as ‘‘fans of the show’’ are also financial beneficiaries in the multimedia release of X-Files: The Movie or in the franchise as a whole. Most of the e√usive rock-star interviews were filmed when the musicians simply showed up to record their tracks for The X-Files cd. The tv special also includes a music video making-of produced for cable for one of The X-File songs and a staged rendition ‘‘from England’’ of Sting’s performance-based music video. Even the intellects behind the franchise—William Gibson and Stephen King—doubly function not just as devoted fans but as screenwriters for episodes of The X-Files (although this admission of ‘‘commercial interest’’ is never disclosed to viewers). Thus The X-Files: The Movie making-of functions as a full-blown multimedia exercise in incestuous cross-promotion. The film’s release and making-of were less about film than they were about marketing television, music, and the financial fortunes of The X-Files franchise and brand as a whole.

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

EPKS: ELECTRONIC PRESS KITS

Whether through shameless multimedia cross-promotion (Fox’s X-Files: The Movie) or via humanistic curatorial-advocacy (pbs’s Anatomy of a Homicide ), making-ofs almost invariably play a part in—or mimic—the epk (or ‘‘electronic press kit’’). The epk is a descendent of the traditional press kit, through which public relations o≈cers, publicists, and marketers traditionally provided ‘‘useful’’ background and backstory about films and television programs. Traditional press kits usually include cast and crew bios, predigested angles for stories in short, double-spaced, one- or twopage ‘‘press releases,’’ and illustrations intended for republication in the trade and journalistic press. While print reviewers and magazine critics still mostly need hard-copy photographs and preview ‘‘screeners’’ (one-half-inch vhs tapes or dvds), broadcast and cable reviewers and on-screen showbiz reports need the higher ‘‘broadcast-quality’’ moving images and sounds that are preedited onto epks (usually in Betasp or DigiBeta formats) since they have much higher resolution than vhs screeners. In the last two decades, press kits have evolved from the earlier hard-copy paper formats to include video or electronic images (usually black-and-white photographs or color transparencies). Since then they have become fully digital (first as cds then as dvds) as many are now. Structurally, epks provide a fundamental connection and means of communication between the industry’s producing cultures and the audience’s consuming cultures. This arrangement usually places the publicist-reviewer relationship at the center of the transaction. In this sense, video or digital epks can be understood as institutionally coded artifacts used to ‘‘negotiate’’ critical reception in the culture at large. Fully understanding epks would entail more closely studying the day-to-day ways that publicists, journalists, and editors interact to make collective value judgments and critical distinctions. Sometimes this interaction is formalized between the networks or ‘‘studios’’ and ‘‘the media’’ (as in the networks’ critics meetings that I examined in chapter 2). At other times the interaction is more informal (when publicists assume the role of ‘‘sources’’ for journalists). Whether marketing and publicity departments adopt hard sell or soft sell to get their message out, an epk is now an obligatory part of this exchange/negotiation aimed at positive critical reception—especially in the broadcast and cable media. As a result, understanding on-screen critical activity in the industry means better understanding the codes, predispositions,

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and formal strategies of the epk artifact. This is because much of the footage that makes its way into broadcast making-ofs, behind-the-scenes documentaries, promos, and the like also comprise preedited epk videotapes or dvds. During the transition from hard copy to electronic formats, electronic or moving image documentation was usually fairly minimal in epks. As late as 1992 the epk for Wayne’s World 2 included only two one-minute versions of the film’s promo, edited back to back on a single Betacamsp tape.∞Ω One version had prewritten critical narration already added (graphically identified on the tape as ‘‘news wrap 1 w. text’’); the other version of the clip was without voice-over narration (graphically described and titled on the tape as ‘‘news wrap 2, no narration’’). In short, the visual images, sync sounds, music, and e√ects are the same in both versions, but the second version— without prerecorded narration—helpfully allows the reviewer or ‘‘critic’’ to record and add their own commentary, thus claiming the footage as part of the critic’s take on the movie or show. The user-friendly first version, predigested and narrated, means that even deadline-stressed producers who needed to fill a lot of screen time could do so, almost mindlessly, with the epk. By definition epks are planned and designed to be helpfully customizable. epks also help fuel the public relations world. Since pr and publicity are forms of marketing that companies do not have to pay for (unlike advertising), studios and networks work out elaborate schemes to make their video epk’s attractive to deadline-focused producers and on-screen showbiz reporters at Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, Extra, and the E-Channel. The epk for the one hundredth episode of the Roseanne series in 1992 was considerably more customizable than the Wayne’s World 2 epk. Roseanne ’s epk opens with a graphic table of contents that reads as follows: Electronic Press Kit: Roseanne 1 Featurette—short 2:02 2 Featurette—long 4:20 3 Open-ended interviews A. Roseanne; B. Roseanne and Tom Arnold; C. John Goodman 4 Clips 5 B-roll.≤≠

The two ‘‘featurettes’’ included are preedited ‘‘stories’’ complete with a scratch track (a nonprofessional voice-over narrator) that provides reporters

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

with suggested, ‘‘easy-to-use’’ narration. Reviewers who are in a hurry can simply strip-o√ the voice-over scratch track and mimic or mouth the same words on tape to ‘‘author’’ the ‘‘review’’ as their own. The menu includes both long and short versions to fit the time constraints of epk end users. Part three of the epk consists of ‘‘open-ended interviews,’’ which are later graphically introduced as ‘‘sound bites.’’ Implying that even the quasicomatose can edit together a ‘‘story’’ or review on the series, each openended sound bite is preceded by graphic titles telling reporters how to mouth interview questions in their own voice. These pre-scripted ‘‘questions’’ for the reporter/reviewer include, for example, ‘‘What kind of realities does Roseanne portray?’’ which is then ‘‘answered’’ by Roseanne’s video/ sound-bite paraphrasing the show’s pitch: ‘‘Well, it’s a working-class comedy from a woman’s point of view.’’≤∞ Roseanne doesn’t hesitate to historicize her show’s importance in the next sound bite: ‘‘I think that she’s the first and only three-dimensional female that’s been on the small screen.’’ Then, in response to the pre-scripted question ‘‘Do you enjoy the shoots?’’ Roseanne mouths her first obvious lie in the epk: ‘‘We all get along great, and in between the takes we have a great time.’’ In the four seasons leading up to the release of this epk, Roseanne was notorious in trades and popular press for the tirades and fighting that went on between an ‘‘out-of-control’’ Roseanne and her producers and writers. Indeed, Roseanne chewed up and spit out writer-producers at a frantic pace during this period.≤≤ The content of the Roseanne epk, therefore, can be understood vis-à-vis four institutional activities beyond mere promotion. First, the epk functions as ‘‘damage control’’ intended to blunt accusations coming from many quarters in the press at that time. On a second, institutional, level, the epk served to cross-promote Tom Arnold’s new sitcom The Tom Arnold Show. In the epk’s ‘‘Roseanne and Tom Arnold’’ sound bites, the two awkwardly explain how their on-set interactions are constructive in that Tom brings insights to Roseanne’s show, and Roseanne brings insights to Tom’s show. Yet, the epk covers over the acutely asymmetrical nature of their relationship, and the fact that Roseanne’s show is immensely successful and Tom’s is critically panned and low rated. The epk also overlooks Tom’s opportunistic marriage to Roseanne, which he exploited to launch his show-business career. Third, the epk makes concerted attempts to reconnect Roseanne— then television’s most powerful female figure on and o√ the screen—with her ‘‘working-class’’ roots. Despite the epk’s repeated assertions of social

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realism and working-class authenticity in the interviews, however, this is not the Roseanne Barr of the late 1980s. The Roseanne of this epk has clearly benefited from cosmetic surgery, a face lift, and the fashions and cultural airs that come with wealth and power. The claims of low-culture solidarity and authenticity in the tape, then, seem suspiciously out of alignment with the star’s on-screen visage. Finally, the epk was produced to announce completion of the one hundredth episode of the Roseanne series. Historically, the one hundredth episode mark has been a crucial goal for all prime-time programs since that number guarantees that a show will have a long and profitable life in syndication. The epk therefore provides a valuable opportunity to sum up through the first four seasons of the series the historical and critical importance of the show and the cultural significance of the star and her social values. In e√ect, the epk functions to ‘‘counterprogram’’ and ‘‘negotiate’’ dissonant buzz about the series and its star’s reputation by o√ering less prejudicial interpretive schemes. To facilitate positive critical reception and interpretive containment, the epk adds ‘‘unedited clips’’ in part 4, and ‘‘B-roll’’ footage in part 5 to ‘‘help’’ the reporter/editor assemble an on-screen story. The unedited shots either match those in the preedited, prenarrated ‘‘featurettes’’ or they helpfully ‘‘illustrate’’ the themes and questions discussed by the on-camera interview subjects. The B-roll footage in part 5 of the epk, by contrast, is narrationless footage shot on video with a handheld camera during the actual production of the show. Even though B-roll footage records some of the same dramatic action as the studio pedestal cameras recording the sitcom for broadcast, B-roll almost always includes documentary camera movement and reframings of video assist monitors, boom mics, and studio lights. Such images draw attention to the fact that an intensive production experience is actually underway as viewers watch. Pre-scripted questions, prerecorded voice-over scratch tracks, precut sequences and stories, interview sound bites, and ‘‘ready-to-use’’ unedited footage all make this epk more like a video ‘‘paintby-number’’ set for the critics. E√ective epks, that is, predispose end users to cut stories and critical reviews in ways that are congruent with the critical agenda of producers rather than of consumers or show-business reporters. At least from a marketing or publicity perspective, an intelligently designed epk ideally serves as a preemptive critical strike, useful in softening up potentially hostile recipients. If Roseanne ’s ‘‘helpful’’ epk emulates a paint-by-number methodology

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

(valuable for rapid editing-to-air and publicity damage control), then a more complicated epk designed for X-Files: The Movie closely approximates a di√erent paradigm: a film/video editor’s task during nonlinear editing. The X-Files movie epk includes an extensive list of promotional features, variations on those features, interviews, shots, and B-roll footage, just like the Roseanne epk. But the stylistic and editorial choices available for the X-Files’ entertainment reporter are much more vast. A detailed table of contents is a≈xed to the epk’s Betasp case, which is repeated as an onscreen graphic within the epk’s video. The broad segments of the epk are listed in table 3. The graphic menu of featurettes on the industrial epk strongly prefigures the design of bonus featurette menus that eventually would be popularized on consumer dvds. This sequence of features and variations in format also gives the end user (reporter, reviewer, or showbiz program producer) a set of options that allow for nuanced appropriations of the epk’s footage. Segment 1 can be aired as is (leaving Fox’s preemptive voice-over intact). Segment 2 allows reporters to cleanly add their voiceover to channel 2 (without disrupting dialogue, music, and sound e√ects on channel 1). Without pre-scripted narration, segment 2 allows greater flexibility in custom assembling discrete elements on the soundtrack (dialogue and sound e√ects on 1, music on 2). Segment 3 provides a longer-form ‘‘featurette’’ (a mix between a trailer and a making-of ) to work from (where dialogue from interviews and a narrative text provides ‘‘needed’’ information). Segment 4 provides the same featurette as 3 but strips o√ the text allowing greater customizability. Segment 5 starts a lengthy sequence of what the epk terms ‘‘unedited’’ clips from the forthcoming film. In fact, the clips are already edited into scenes for the end user, but these more ‘‘open’’ shot sequences/scenes were not subsequently narrated or edited into a trailer or making-of featurette. Segment 6 includes unincorporated interviews entitled ‘‘selected sound bites.’’ Each of these one to seven minute pieces of interview footage provide lengthier source materials that incorporate the shorter character ‘‘sound bites’’ chosen for the fully edited segments (1–5). Finally, segment 7 is comprised of ‘‘unedited B-roll’’ (handheld making-of footage). This systematically categorized audio, video, and film footage has the appearance and feel of roughed-out scenes that typify the latter stages of the nonlinear editing process. Not only are potential media stories already roughed-out for the epk’s end user, but the organization of the material on the tape itself is reminiscent of the graphical ‘‘bins’’ and user

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Table 3

twentieth century-fox film corporation: x-files: the movie electronic press kit Trailer—version #1 (Ch 1 Audio= D/M/E; Ch 2 Audio=Narration) 2:17 Trailer—version #2 (Ch 1 Audio= D/E; Ch 2=Music) 2:17 Featurette (with text) (Ch 1 Audio= D/M/E; Ch 2 Audio=Music) 4:27 Featurette (without text) (Ch 1 Audio= D/M/E; Ch 2 Audio=Music) 4:27 Film clips (unedited) (Ch 1 & 2 Comp) 1. ‘‘I Had You’’ 1:42 2. ‘‘Spooky’’ 1:02 3. ‘‘Blame Me’’ 1:10 4. ‘‘Cornfield Chase’’ :42 5. ‘‘The Virus Has Mutated’’ 1:12 6. ‘‘Somebody’s Covering Their Tracks’’ 1:10 7. ‘‘A Planned Armageddon’’ :52 ≤ Selected sound bites David Duchovny 5:09 Gillian Anderson 4:20 Martin Landau 2:37 Blythe Danner :44 Armin Mueller-Stahl 1:01 William B. Davis :51 Mitch Pileggi 1:14 John Neville :57 Chris Carter 3:46 Rob Bowman 1:36 ≤ Unedited B-roll (Ch 1 Prod. Audio; Ch 2 Music) 7:29 ≤ ≤ ≤ ≤ ≤

Note: D = dialogue; M = music; E = sound e√ects; Comp = mixed tracks.

interfaces typical of the Avid nonlinear editing systems used to bang out showbiz reports at E-Entertainment and Access Hollywood. Interestingly, this epk includes the same basic audio, video, and interview material used in the creation of the hour-long making-of program examined earlier, and in the film’s eventual dvd as well. In fact, well over half of the footage in Fox Network’s special is prepackaged from this epk tape. Although all of the audible ‘‘questions’’ are cut out of the ‘‘sound bites’’ provided, the interviews bear the heavy traces of the kind of reduced ‘‘talking points’’ mastered by the Bush administration in the 2004 election. Each

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

of the ten featured interview subjects (crew and actors) are asked the same questions over and over again (‘‘How is this di√erent from producing for television?’’ ‘‘Will viewers who are not fans be able to understand the feature movie?’’ etc.). More importantly, each interviewee responds with a set of very compatible answers. These shared talking points (coached by the publicity department or set up by the studio interviewer) mean that potential media stories on the film will be easily editable around limited clusters of recurring themes. Editing from this epk is less like postproduction on a documentary (with its inordinately high shooting ratios) than it is like editing the fine cut of a commercial spot from a short script. In e√ect, the epk preselects and arranges interview themes in a de facto rough cut, even as the epk prearranges audio, film, and video footage into identifiable, ready-to-use postproduction hierarchies. The epk, furthermore, builds in a reduced set of preconceptualized themes that will eventually dominate the subsequent hour-long Fox making-of ‘‘documentary’’ as well. Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny, and Chris Carter, for example, all echo how the film will simultaneously ‘‘reward’’ the hard-core fan even as it introduces newcomers to The X-Files world. In clichéd making-of fashion, the director Rob Bowman underscores the physical hardships of working long hours alternating between ‘‘freezing soundstages’’ and ‘‘106-degree desert heat’’ where the ‘‘crew was dropping like flies.’’ Such epk statements about the many physical hardships that Duchovny and Anderson faced on the set and in stunts prefigures the broadcast making-of ’s tired (and almost always false) assertion ‘‘that the stars did many of their own stunts.’’ Martin Landau at one point sketches out the narrative arc of the film (‘‘Mulder doesn’t believe him; he begins to believe him; he finally believes him; then he doesn’t believe him, again’’), along with the backstory needed to get the plot. A close comparison of these three corporate artifacts—the Fox Studio epk, the Fox broadcast making-of, and the subsequent dvd —shows how tightly contemporary multimedia marketing campaigns are woven into productions from the start. The epks merit special attention because they integrate and encode—in tight, clustered moving-image artifacts—a studio or network’s preemptive theoretical conception of each film and series into forms that can be endlessly repurposed for consumers.

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DVDS AND BONUS TRACKS (DISCIPLINING DIGITAL INTERACTIVITY)

Industry futurists have alternately predicted that technical convergence (the TiVo/Web tv model), or aesthetic convergence (the Homicide.com/sec ond-shift/Digital Entertainment Network model described above) will ultimately dominate and drive the development of profitable digital entertainment. Yet an alternative to this, the dvd, may emerge as the more popular (and far less radical) form of digital convergence. Specifically, the dvd fits within the consumer electronic product model of technical convergence. Unlike many convergence predictions, the dvd exists on a modest scale (it can be transported by hand and is not wired to the Internet). In this way, the dvd follows the more humble tradition of home video (vhs) and consumer audio (the cd player and the Walkman). In fact, whereas new media apologists and cyber-prophets frequently theorized online experience and culture in futuristic, utopian, and metaphysical terms, the dvd can easily be theorized within the logic of a fairly traditional Hollywood studio distribution window. No need for McLuhan, Negroponte, or Virilio here. Fox set the standard for the dvd in the classical Hollywood studio paradigm, and Blockbuster updated it for the age of home video. The major studios/networks zealously strategize dvds within the decades-old paradigm of motion picture distribution, yet the dvd has also initiated new forms of theorizing and critical reflexivity by those same studios/networks. As a result, dvds epitomize striking innovations in the ways that industry represents itself and the ways audiences engage Hollywood’s self-representations. One of the dvd’s chief innovations has been its ability to provide a cultural interface in which critical discourses (aesthetic analysis, knowledge about production technologies, working methods, and behind-the-scenes information) can be directly discussed and negotiated with audiences and users without critical/cultural middlemen.≤≥ For almost a century some production knowledge has always played a part in studio/network marketing and promotions. Yet studios have aimed such knowledge mostly at cultural intermediaries, handlers, and gatekeepers (trade editors, distributors, exhibitors, journalists, reviewers, critics). These sanctioned intermediaries would then ‘‘translate’’ and ‘‘dumb down’’ that critical and production knowledge for the audience and lay reader. As indicated in the preceding section, the epk evolved through this historical process to embed a rich mix

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of critical analysis and on-screen theorizing (complete with production bios, making-ofs, behind-the-scenes looks, director interviews, and the like). In many ways, the dvds are merely more fully evolved and ‘‘repurposed’’ epks. The dvd ‘‘bonus tracks’’ and ‘‘featurettes’’ that home viewers click on are almost exactly like the features on the Betacamsp epks disseminated en masse to press and broadcasters in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, the change in technical format, from analog video (on the industrial epk) to digital video (on the consumer dvd), is rather inconsequential, whereas the viewing context has changed considerably. From the perspective of its prototypes, dvds now aim marketing directly at the viewer/buyer and not at an intermediate cultural handler (a critic) who stands in for and negotiates or processes marketing information for the viewer. Of far greater consequence than technology change has been the gradual elimination of key cultural middlemen in the traditional equation— namely, the editors, reviewers, and journalists in the trade and popular press. Endless pages have been published about how the Internet and digital will ‘‘cut out’’ the old media gatekeepers so that individual Web surfers at home can access any information at any time they want. What no cybervisionary seems to address, however, is that while the old studios and networks may have lost control in the face of a vast new ‘‘digital democracy,’’ the same studios and networks have figured out ways to create digital and new media content that can be ‘‘managed’’ on (their own) more traditional terms. The dvd serves just such a management-of-navigation function, and it does so in four ways. First, although the Internet user may cut out the network gatekeepers online, in the dvd the network gatekeepers cut out the traditional ‘‘representatives and advocates’’ of the mass audience: the critical and popular press. Circumventing the popular critical press in this way ostensibly allows studios/networks to talk directly with the audience about artistry, quality, and cultural significance. Second, studio/networks now circumvent the ‘‘dumbing down’’ role of the popular press and incorporate their critical activities within the industry’s producing organizations proper. Reviewers and critics become superfluous in this scheme, for the dvd system preauthors and provides critical analysis as primary on-screen content. The resultant ‘‘dumbing up’’ strokes and rewards viewers who fancy themselves as culturally knowledgeable and relatively sophisticated fans. Third, the dvd ‘‘hardens’’ the entertainment experience into a saleable consumer product. This is no small accomplishment, since the first decade

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of online entertainment proved to be an extremely di≈cult world from which to economically harvest viewer dollars and distribution profits. Fourth, the dvd greatly tamed and constrained the original god of the cyber-visionaries: ‘‘interactivity.’’ Interactive dvds today provide menus to choose from but little else, even compared to fairly rudimentary Web sites, which at least allow for fan interactions, bulletin boards, contests, feedback, and the like. At least with these greatly controlled online old media Web sites, users were always only one click away from going somewhere else and thus creating their own ‘‘unruly’’ migration or ‘‘flow’’ across the Web. In addition, even though television (in particular) has usually posed as an entertainment provider, the medium has always also been about merchandizing—with ads, sponsorships, and product placement encouraging viewers to buy other consumer products. Now, however, the onscreen dvd experience is also the primary consumer product. No sleight of hand (narrative experiences masking an underlying advertising function) is even needed. In e√ect, the dvd rewards consumer impulse and the possibilities of cultural gratification and distinction that are packaged in ‘‘featurettes’’ and bonus tracks. The ‘‘bonus tracks’’ alone on dvds are worth considering as a pervasive critical industrial preoccupation. Bonus tracks are sometimes deployed as part of two antithetical strategies. Some dvds, first of all, are loaded with bonuses. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring dvd (2001), for example, includes over twenty bonuses: the film-related music video ‘‘May It Be’’ by Enya; a preview of the video game ‘‘The Two Towers’’ by Electronic Arts; a ‘‘behind the scenes preview of the yet-to-be released second installment of the trilogy (The Two Towers ); a short preview of the special dvd extended version of the film; fifteen featurettes of interviews with cast members, as well as documentary explorations of the geography of Tolkien’s ‘‘Middle Earth’’ (which were ‘‘repurposed’’ from the franchise Web site www.lordoftherings.net); three longer documentaries about the secrets ‘‘behind’’ the production taken from other sources (the Sci-Fi Channel, the fbc Network, and an ‘‘in-store’’ documentary distributed originally to bookstores by Houghton MiΔin); and special ‘‘live’’ online content available to dvd users on set dates. By contrast, other dvds have almost no bonuses, like Quentin Tarantino’s initial Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003, Miramax)— even though Miramax has the resources to jam its other dvds with numerous featurettes. Business logic drives both of these antithetical dvd

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strategies. The bonus overload in The Lord of the Rings, for example, fits both the ‘‘total merchandizing’’ requirement of contemporary blockbuster films and the goal of ‘‘building’’ a comprehensive fan community capable of growing over the life of the franchise’s three features. Miramax’s sparse bonus menu strategy, by contrast, cultivates the existing Tarantino fan-base niche in a di√erent way. As an art-house film, Miramax forces Tarantino’s junkie-like fans to buy an initial stripped-down dvd version of the film in order to subsequently sell them a second and (possibly third) extended version. This is the approach mastered by Lucasfilm for the Star Wars franchise, where ‘‘special’’ reiterations of the same films will appear endlessly for purchase by the same buyers. Many films, by contrast, do not have the Tarantino-Miramax luxury of a committed, preexisting fan-base niche and the guaranteed first and second dvd sales that usually come with it. Instead, less stellar e√orts load up even box o≈ce duds with extensive bonus materials, based on the sometimes desperate assumption that more icing makes a better dvd cake. A brief survey of forty-five dvds released in 2002–2004 shows the wideranging ways that bonus tracks function institutionally and industrially (see appendix 2). Such dvds as The Stepford Wives, Hollywood Homicide, Pinocchio, and direct-to-video animated films like Batman: The Mystery of Batwoman all feature bonus tracks intended to ‘‘resuscitate’’ box o≈ce duds and financial failures. Sometimes this resuscitation works, as when the martial arts film Chinese Connection was redubbed with contemporary slang and hip hop music to update it for a new market and generation; or when Roger Ebert provided advocacy and a film appreciation lecture for the European film The Decalogue in order to save the films from relative obscurity in the United States. Sometimes, studios will actually savagely ridicule their own failed film in order to ‘‘re-create’’ it as an ‘‘intentional’’ camp or cult classic. Because the director Paul Verhoeven refused to participate in the dvd production of the critically reviled, disastrous mgm film Showgirls, for example, mgm hired the writer David Schamer to provide commentary on the film. At one point Schamer mocks: ‘‘Showgirls triumphs in that every single person involved in the making of the film is making the worst possible decision at every possible time.’’ On another dvd bonus track, ‘‘Heather’’ (an ‘‘exotic’’ dancer) teaches a ‘‘ten-step lap dance tutorial lesson’’ for women dvd viewers at home: ‘‘You tease him—don’t let him touch. . . . Your partner will find it sexy if you spank yourself.’’ In these bonus tracks mgm works

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overtime to create camp, as well as a ‘‘second shift’’ viewing experience that allows dvd viewers to emulate the film’s on-screen erotic action in their own living rooms.≤∂ Another set of dvd industrial functions entails cultivating explicit consciousness of aesthetic distinction and placing a given title within a recognized aesthetic or cinematic canon. This canonizing activity frequently involves bonus tracks that critically analyze four di√erent issues: control, virtuosity, authenticity, and cultural influence. One resilient way to aesthetically elevate a film involves documenting a high degree of authorial control on a production. Panic Room and Russian Ark both dramatize complete directorial control through ‘‘previsualization’’ via exacting storyboard-toscene comparisons and footage of excessive preplanning, respectively. Other dvds, like Cooler and Curb Your Enthusiasm show the importance of the quality-via-control ethos by mocking authorship through disclaimers and disinterest on the part of participants. Meanwhile Once Upon a Time in Mexico showcases the obsessive involvement of its zealous director Rodriquez through three di√erent production documentaries made for the same dvd. Another set of dvds artistically ‘‘canonizes’’ films as works of intelligence and virtuosity by documenting examples of profound quality (for example, via complex analyses of cinematography and sound design in The Godfather ); profound intellect (via director interviews by figures like Salmon Rushdie and footage of manic behavior in Lost in La Mancha ); and artistic genius (via a composite reel of the ‘‘early’’ music videos that prefigured the eventual accomplishment of feature directors Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michael Gondry in Director’s Label Series ). A slightly di√erent means of canonization comes when bonus tracks seek to establish the cultural influence or significance of a film or series. Some dvds do this via historical juxtaposition (the 1964 anti-Nuke ‘‘Daisy Girl’’ ad in Fog of War, and the montage of interview footage with Kennedy and Goldwater in the Jack Paar Collection ).≤∑ These examples use juxtaposition to establish cultural significance, but other dvds canonize themselves by underscoring legacy and authenticity in more direct ways. Beyond Borders cites un Secretary Kofe Annan’s endorsement of authenticity in the film to tame its melodrama. Bram Stoker’s Dracula parades Coppola’s memorabilia and photos for production design to highlight its substance and origins. And The Dick Van Dyke Show provides an orgy of retrospection alongside the unearthing of the ‘‘lost’’ failed series pilot, all as evidence of cultural stand-

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

ing and America’s heritage. Finally, one of the now-standard clichés of bonus track and ‘‘making-of ’’ stories is the ‘‘against-all-odds’’ mythology. Searching for Paradise shows early and rough glimpses of scenes from the indie film via ‘‘workshops’’ at the Sundance Institute that occurred four years before the production had the resources to commence.≤∏ A final set of institutional appeals and functions depend less on the traditional thematic motifs just described than on overt direct address, interaction, or contestation between the producers of the dvd and other parties. For example, some dvd bonus tracks serve as overt rebuttals against detractors or adversaries of the production. The program The Reagans— yanked from broadcast by cbs because of right-wing political pressures, then dumped onto Showtime—restores censored scenes and overt antiRight-political speech on its dvd in a slap back at Viacom and its attackers. On the Bowling for Columbine dvd Michael Moore includes a defensive fifteen-minute speech justifying his anti-Bush Oscar speech. The Magdalene Sisters includes a ‘‘serious’’ history of asylums and interviews with actual abuse victims to prove its case against critics.≤π Capturing the Freedmans defensively fires back at skeptics by including two hours of never before seen ‘‘evidence’’ about the crime, while the star of King of Queens mocks nbc for rejecting the show as ‘‘stupid’’ before it became a hit on cbs. Actually getting a film or television production to the screen is sometimes an arduous and warlike task, and fall-out from this contention regularly seeps from bonus tracks like these. A less strident form of direct interaction comes in the form of dvd features that allow users an experience in virtual filmmaking. The laser discs for Men in Black and the Bram Stoker’s Dracula both provide viewers with an interactive editing workshop that allows them to choose alternate takes or shots of scenes in the film. This essentially allows the viewer not just to ‘‘cut’’ his or her own film but also to over-identify with and mimic the filmmaker. Interactive or virtual filmmaking is one of the few actual dvd functions that fits the emancipatory rhetoric that once dominated discussions and theories of new media. Many more bonus tracks serve to exploit fan relationships by o√ering featurettes that function as ‘‘fan barter.’’ Such tracks usually include extensive background information and minutiae about the series. The Godfather dvd Collection includes a detailed ‘‘Corleone Family Tree’’ and time-line for the entire franchise. Bu√y, Season 5, includes an extended examination of nonsupernatural death on the series. The X-Files, 9th Season includes two documentaries on the series made six or

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seven years earlier; and Final Destination 2 includes ‘‘pop-up video’’ screens that give dvd users links detailing ‘‘secrets’’ behind the production. All of these examples overload the viewer-user with extensive detail that would not normally be available at the time of the viewing. In e√ect, these functions directly address an implied fan base capable of constructing a narratological time line over the nine years of the X-Files series or the three installments of The Godfather. Such dvds seek to animate fan interaction by performing minute details that may or may not be known widely. Finally, some dvds have what might be termed ‘‘unruly bonuses’’ or featurettes that directly exacerbate the relations or tensions operative on the industrial side of the dvd equation. The best example of this is probably the Three Kings (rerelease), in which the original thirty-three-minute antiwar bonus documentary entitled Soldiers Pay was cut from the dvd by Warner Bros. due to political pressure. The director David Russell went on to screen and broadcast the bonus documentary elsewhere, and the negative publicity that erupted around Warner Bros.’s decision to censor was disruptive in ways that the studio had not wanted. Interestingly, dvds of television series (rather than films) are among the hottest and most lucrative areas of the home entertainment industry. On May 1, 2005, Fox resurrected and relaunched the ‘‘failed’’ series Family Guy based on fan-driven dvd sales, despite the show’s originally abysmal ratings. This trend is surprising because, unlike film, old television series are always available (somewhere) in broadcast or cable syndication. This suggests in part that dvds are bought not to screen content that is otherwise unavailable but rather as ‘‘collectibles’’ capable of ‘‘memorializing’’ some earlier, personal film/tv experience in the life of the viewer/user. Unexceptional and mostly forgotten shows from the 1970s, like Battlestar Galactica, have recently sold 150,000 copies at $110 each for Universal, while limited-run 1980s series like Sledgehammer have sold 100,000 copies.≤∫ With twentyfour and forty-one episodes respectively, neither show was around long enough to even go into broadcast syndication. The pervasiveness of dvd hits made from old, failed tv shows suggests that mediated experiences may serve as popular ways to mark one’s individual biographies. Even more recent ‘‘financial’’ failures like the critically lauded Boomtown on nbc and Arrested Development on Fox have rushed the dvd component of each series to the market after only one full season in an e√ort aimed at keeping a struggling series alive and profitable. In these two series, fan communities

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Traditional distribution windows and sequences are turned on their head: starting in 2004 it was not uncommon for prime-time series to prerelease complimentary DVDs of shows to the mass market before the first episode had ever had its official network ‘‘premiere.’’ Such DVDs function for audiences like epks traditionally have done, which virally plant and prefigure positive critical reception in the press and now the audience. Photo © J. Caldwell.

were solicited, created, rewarded, and addressed in ‘‘real time’’ via dvd. In both contexts—shows lost in the archives that are reborn as dvd hits (like Battlestar and Sledgehammer ) and current shows that are rescued and sustained by dvds (Boomtown and Arrested )—the interactive dvd and its bonus tracks have proven to be strategic ways that producers can reverse their fortunes and resucitate dead screen properties. The dvd o√ers some interesting permutations for flow and second-shift theories.≤Ω On the one hand dvds are inert consumer artifacts that seem to exist as very bounded experiences when compared to online entertainment sites. That is, dvds can be viewed as first-shift experiences since interactivity and navigation are severely limited. On the other hand, the wild success of ‘‘old’’ tv shows as dvd hits suggests that dvds are used differently from other forms of home video or first-shift media. Research by Universal Home Video shows that 85 percent of tv-on-dvd buyers have already seen the shows that they buy, which contrasts dramatically with film-on-dvd buyers where only 45 percent have seen the film they are buying on dvd.≥≠ Most tv-on-dvds are purchased to allow for repeated viewings and opportunities to think through the complicated fictional

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worlds of multiyear television series that are narratively far more massive than are mere two-hour films. In these ways, even the dvd employs a second-shift tactic since dvd developers now build the potentially endless ‘‘re-viewing’’ of episodes and bonus tracks into the very function and logic of the dvd format. From the audience side of the equation, by comparison, dvds allow new relationships with film and television, first as collectibles and second as ways to ‘‘memorialize’’ one’s personal history. Memorializing one’s private self with a media brand is a particularly e√ective form of marketing. REFLEXIVITY AS TRANSMEDIA VIRAL MARKETING

Most of what consumers see and know about film/tv behind the scenes was planted or spun as part of formal industrial marketing and publicity initiatives. As I will suggest in this final section, epks, epgs, and vnrs function as viral marketing that fuels ideally endless chains of critical mutations in multiple press outlets. Studio/network employees ‘‘lurk’’ on the net where they post content-positive ‘‘gossip’’ about proprietary content to ‘‘other fans.’’ Studio/networks invent fake critics to blurb movie releases. Media conglomerates buy publications like tv Guide and Entertainment Weekly to ensure that a tolerable level of e√ective cross-promotion always takes place in the form of ‘‘reviews’’ and rankings, even as they feature above-ground ‘‘spoilers’’ who systematically ‘‘leak’’ information prematurely. In short, the boundaries and borders between production and consumption are blurring, problematic, and constantly negotiated by industry in public. Furthermore, industrial reflexivity and industrial critical practices provide the central means through which industry negotiates those borders. It is not terribly useful to think of the industry’s aesthetic and critical activities—the traditional province of academic media scholars—as industry’s usurping of roles. It represents instead a strategic opportunity for scholars to publicly engage important contemporary issues of media commerce, labor, economics, and public policy. Critical theory, far from marginalized, is the fuel that makes the new systems work. Reflexivity, far from radical or oppositional, is the linchpin of contemporary industrial marketing initiatives. Fully understanding film or television’s role in multimedia convergence means framing or defining film or television on terms other than its own. As I have argued in this book, far from being a discrete artistic or entertain-

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

ment form, film represents but one stratum in a complicated multimedia industrial marketing and consumption scheme.≥∞ Because of its place within multimedia development/distribution, film should be viewed as part of a ‘‘viral marketing scheme.’’ As an institutional strategy film functions essentially as a semiotic cluster bomb. That is, several media formats precede a film’s release (the epk or electronic press kit, and the broadcast ‘‘making-of ’’ special), and several media formats follow the ever-shorter period of a film’s release (the studio/network Web sites that ‘‘add value’’ to the property, and the dvd that disciplines and ‘‘harvests revenue’’ by locking-down interactivity). This viral marketing model can be conceptualized as outlined in table 4. Each of the five multimedia platforms presented in the table serve as ‘‘host bodies’’ for the studio/network’s mutating content. And, more importantly, various forms of industrial reflexivity (behind-the-scenes, making-ofs, bonus tracks, and interactively negotiated knowledge) serve as the fuel that drives the endless mutation of content across proprietary host bodies within this conglomerated world. As constant textual renegotiations, critical analysis (whether from scholars, publicists, showbiz reports, or industrial marketing departments) facilitates repurposing and mutation within the contemporary conglomerates. Far from being bounded, film should be engaged as a component of broader industrial and cultural practices. Screenwriters, producers, or directors, therefore, do not really author films. Long-standing conventionalized industrial practices from electronic media (marketing, branding, syndication, and repurposing) author the films we unwisely bracket o√ as texts. Adding this kind of industrial perspective from electronic media history to film studies, while an awkward fit in some film studies departments housed within art or humanities contexts, is nevertheless an important step. Otherwise, scholars keep ‘‘discovering’’ in film or dvds what scholars in television discovered long ago. As dvd practices begin to dominate film form, production, and distribution, two factors increasingly define the dominant ‘‘cinematic experience’’: merchandising and domestic consumption. Far more accurately than other technical or stylistic characteristics, both factors —merchandizing and home viewing—have long defined television as both a medium and an art form. With a few important exceptions, like the work of Barbara Klinger, film theory has largely ignored domestic consumption.≥≤ Many scholars have also held their collective noses in the face of the advertising and merchandising that has defined and developed television over its

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Table 4

Transmedia viral marketing: Mutating critical analysis and industrial reflexivity as Business Plans

variant

audience model

economic model

model of interactivity

1 Deep Version (epk)

Critics as surrogate viewers Prescripted analysis

A≈liationdriven, userfriendly Soft-sell, risk aversion

Most-open, interactive Most-customizable

2 Negotiated Version (broadcast making-of )

Migratory viewer flow Manufactured news/event

Conglomerate repurposing Hard-sell, risk mitigation

Multitasking Herding/push tactics

3 Stunted Version (theatrical film)

Self-segregated viewers First-shift management

Loss-leader, trailer, preview Commercial agit-prop

Textual activity Gazing Appointment viewing

4 Value-added version (Web site)

Unruly/stealth viewers Second-shift management

Ancillary promotions Soft-sell, branding

Rhizomatic navigation Grazing, pull tactics

5 Disciplined version (dvd)

Viewers as quasi critics Viewers as faux gatekeepers

Rationalized, merchandizing Risk management

Locked-down interactivity Least open, revenue harvesting

long history. Yet film studio executives now monitor the merchandizing ‘‘shelf-space’’ in dvd departments at Wal-Mart and Costco (rather than just opening weekend box o≈ce numbers) as one of the most important benchmarks of a film’s success. Likewise, film/dvd developers now research domesticity and interactivity in the home to guarantee a film’s ultimate economic success, just like Viacom’s mtv has done for decades.≥≥ Cinema has,

Industrial Reflexivity as Viral Marketing

in some ways, become television. Film scholars would benefit by considering how this shift has placed research on television’s half-century history at the heart of cinematic analysis as well. Not unlike television, on-screen reflexivity has recurred in film since the silent and classical eras.≥∂ What television brought to this practice in the 1940s was an excessively conscious and direct linkage to the medium’s economic scheme (advertising, promotion, and merchandizing) through an onscreen rhetoric of direct address to the audience. Promotion via reflexivity became so important, in fact, that television came to deploy it as a ‘‘primary marketing function . . . [an] indispensable tool for creating and exploiting di√erence.’’≥∑ Almost a half a century later, conglomeration further mined the industrial opportunities of critical self-reference by vigorously exploiting reflexivity across the full extent of a company’s multimedia platforms and strategies (branding, cross-promotion, and viral marketing). Reflexivity, in short, became marketing, and marketing became viral and ubiquitous in both film/television production and consumption. Reflexivity achieved its force in conglomerates by synthesizing three di√erent marketing traditions. First, Hollywood brings to the mix its long-standing expertise in ‘‘major event’’ marketing and controlled information cascades (exploiting stars, cultivating fan magazines, and spinning journalists). Second, television contributes its historic expertise in scheduling ‘‘routine time’’ and episodic marketing (promos, previews, and trailers on television are still the single most important factor determining the success of either a network’s own programs or a studio’s feature film). Television’s facility with narrative ‘‘irresolution’’ and continuous ‘‘self-promotion’’ programming actively builds relationships and fan communities as well—both of which are essential to e√ective branding. Finally, contemporary marketing and publicity brings a dizzying array of new ‘‘under-the-radar’’ marketing strategies. These ‘‘opt-in’’ strategies (willingly accepted by audiences) are proving essential as some corporations admit that ‘‘companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it,’’ and will ‘‘never’’ entirely ‘‘get it back.’’≥∏ Viral marketing has been extensively adopted partly because of its ability to systematize and exploit the traditional province of scholars: critical media analysis and cultural ‘‘research.’’ Fortune 500 media companies (Disney’s Imagineering) and nonmedia companies (General Mills) alike contract with ‘‘think tanks’’ like the Philadelphia-based group Cultural Studies and

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Television, which has favored onscreen reflexivity from its start in the 1940s, continues to take selfdeconstruction to the bank. Here stars Kate and Jessie provide weekly viral doses of film-studies-style ‘‘cinema psychoanalysis’’ to the WE cable audience, thus virally adding value to the films it features. Photo of poster from NATPE market, J. Caldwell.

Analysis, to analyze the future and develop products ahead of the industrial curve.≥π The Cambridge-based consultants group Monitor provides critical analysis of Web markets and usage to help companies strategize preemptive marketing schemes by focusing on media. As the group’s director states: ‘‘The Web . . . provides an early understanding of the forces, desires, and preferences that shape markets. . . . Think of the Web as a real-time snapshot of what’s on people’s minds—not what they are doing yet, but what they’re visualizing.’’≥∫ Another company, Doublespace, provides corporations with one-stop shopping for full-service rebranding coordination. Doublespace builds on current research to o√er forty di√erent multimedia production platforms, branding services, and marketing products, all in support of its own culturally utopian ethos: ‘‘Individually vital; collectively unstoppable.’’≥Ω Perhaps the most dramatic examples of the commercial adoption of academic critical studies methods, however, are ‘‘trend research’’ companies like Look-Look. With audiences and consumers largely cynical about any kind of overt persuasion or advertising, Look-Look has mastered viral marketing. Their approach is to create a national network of as many as ten thousand adolescent cultural ‘‘reporters’’ and volunteers who systematically hunt down young ‘‘alpha consumers’’ (who ‘‘lead the pack’’ for other

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consumers). Through ethnographic espionage, field researchers photographically document any edgy new ‘‘subculture’’ (without always disclosing who they work for).∂≠ Look-Look then amasses huge amounts of cultural research and audience data that can be leveraged by clients to reach customers ‘‘before’’ they even know they ‘‘need’’ the product. Look-Look provides extensive ‘‘ethnographic research execution’’ for its clients in the form of an ‘‘actionable deliverable’’ (also known as an ‘‘audience bible’’). Trend researchers ostensibly operate ‘‘ahead’’ of the proverbial trend curve and systematically harvest any resistant cultural activity that their network of ‘‘ethnographers’’ can get their hands or digital cameras on. Once corporations access this cultural research database for $20,000 each and then market to the trend, the resistant trend inevitably dies. Dick Hebdige’s resistant youth ‘‘subcultures’’ have become, in the trend-research frenzy, the El Dorado of modern consumerism.∂∞ Cultural resistance sells unequivocally well, and industry deploys critical research methods to make such sales. By mainstreaming di√erence, this safari research method kills as quickly as it starts any ‘‘outsider’’ trend being analyzed. New media technologies also help make viral marketing a dominant trend. While popular accounts condemn rogue spammers and hackers, few have e√ectively countered the massive use of ‘‘spyware’’ by corporations on the Internet. Spyware typically infects an unknowing pc user, resulting in unwanted pop-up ads that prove di≈cult to uninstall. Even deadlier are forms of spyware that ‘‘follow’’ or track the personal user in order to amass demographic and purchaser data without permission. Many blue chip corporations o≈cially frown on the use of Spyware. Yet a Byzantine system of Internet marketer ‘‘subcontracting’’ almost guarantees that someone down the outsourcing line will covertly install spyware on a user’s pc in order to generate more hits/inquiries/sales on their client’s Web sites.∂≤ MercedesBenz doesn’t intentionally install spyware on pcs, yet their specialized Internet marketing subcontractors may secretly install ‘‘drive-by downloads’’ to ensure that users will unwittingly contact the 800 numbers upon which the consultant’s fee is calculated. This kind of ‘‘intelligent’’ surveillance is also fully operational in more traditional Hollywood marketing methods. Online polling of sneak previews, once done in theaters by companies such as nrg, has considerably enhanced the e√ectiveness of prerelease film/television research. One veteran Hollywood researcher, otx President Kevin Goetz, gushes about the possibilities: ‘‘We can access everyone from Asian

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laxative users to African American women who saw [a] film last weekend.’’∂≥ Unlike most mail intercepts, the data can be collected at any time and delivered the following day. Older companies like nrg still use traditional theater research with test audiences alongside Internet polling and tracking. These four corporate practices—industrial cultural studies, critical ethnographic trend research, the corporate use of spyware, and the extensive utilization of on-line audience and preview research—make the ‘‘producer’s tracking boards’’ and the ‘‘directors’ blogs’’ that I discussed in chapter 1 seem like rather token forays into new media. Two key factors give these other marketing strategies a distinctive profile: their covert or quasi-covert nature and their migratory mutability. Semiotic chunks of the epk, for example, morph and mutate as they travel through various multimedia formats (making-ofs, bonus-tracks, showbiz reports, dvds, Web sites). Viral textual travel is also multidirectional and coalitional. Commercial demo tapes of hardware or software designers frequently incorporate footage from the personal demo reel of an editor or an e√ects house that has beta tested the corporate product. Sometimes multiple postproduction houses will donate services to produce a single ‘‘spec reel’’ (complete with its own ‘‘making-of ’’) to demonstrate how an innovative producer/director might integrate the latest collection of new technologies into a cohesive commercial spot.∂∂ Even as industrial trend researchers persistently seek out and exploit edgy cultural users, industrial marketing firms move in the opposite direction by rewarding or making brand name placements in industrial niche entertainment products. The marketing firm Agenda Inc. calculated that fifty-nine major brands had been mentioned (‘‘name dropped’’) 645 times in the few songs with Billboard Top 20 status during the first seven months of 2004 alone (mostly in hip hop).∂∑ As an ostensibly resistant cultural form fueled by aggressive racial and class assertions, rap and hip hop have ironically proven to be perhaps the most lucrative means to virally market luxury products. Seagram’s, Hennessy, Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz, and Luis Vuitton all earned numerous paid and unpaid rap plugs, while Gucci earned top billing with thirty-five music plugs/mentions in Agenda’s survey. Viral marketers love rap’s outsider stance and angry attitude but try to maintain an ‘‘arm’s length’’ relationship by not directly paying for the plugs. In essence, prestige capitalist brands elicit unsolicited ‘‘praise’’ from rappers. This process evokes how trend researchers ‘‘allow’’ consumers to ‘‘opt-in’’ or ‘‘volunteer’’ to become personal advocates for a brand with their friends. As sinister

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as viral marketing may sound as a form of commercial exploitation, it works primarily through volunteerism rather than with coercion and hard sell. For example, the McConnell and Huba branding agency established what it terms the ‘‘Church of the Customer.’’ Guided by the company’s mission statement (‘‘Creating customer evangelists: how loyal customers become a volunteer sales force’’) McConnell and Huba specialize in ‘‘creating emotional connections.’’∂∏ As they explain: ‘‘By deepening customer relationships, successful organizations create communities that generate grassroots support and value for their products and services. . . . The ultimate marketing approach . . . [is] to convert good customers into exceptional ones who willingly spread the word.’’ No wonder industrial reflexivity and contemporary media marketing cloud the reach of critical theory. Viral marketing throws at least four wrenches into the machines of traditional scholarly criticism. First, viral marketing is ecumenical (its goals are ostensibly ‘‘open’’ and its research constantly ‘‘proves’’ it follows only the god of responsiveness to consumers). Second, viral marketing works not via paid advertising but through inexpensive word-of-mouth volunteers (moved to spontaneously evangelize their friends and friends’ friends). Viral referrals work only if the product is seen to say more about the person referring it than to the product itself. Third, viral marketing works through opt-in decisions triggered by products and services that constantly change and mutate to meet the ostensibly ever-changing needs of users/viewers (rather than the mandates of dominant capitalist interests, ideologies, or assembly lines). Finally, viral marketing finds, affirms, and cultivates ‘‘radical’’ and ‘‘resistant’’ subcultural activities wherever they can be found and identified (thus hijacking the defining progressive and leftist perspectives that most linked scholars, artists, and activists across the disciplines of media and cultural studies in the latter decades of the twentieth century). Viral marketing, furthermore, is not limited to Hollywood, prime time, or Madison Avenue. Sadly, recent controversies like the Bush administration’s continuing use of vnr’s (‘‘video news releases’’) to create and plant ‘‘stealth’’ stories supporting the administration in ‘‘legitimate’’ newscasts suggest that film/television’s viral marketing (driven by epks, making-ofs, Web sites, and dvds) is now a sanctioned form of publicly funded communication. Bush’s refusal to require identification and disclosure of vnr material as the gao requested proves just how benign stealth and viral

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marketing have apparently become in the minds of watchdogs and the public alike. Criticized as ‘‘taxpayer-funded’’ ‘‘covert propaganda’’ by the gao, Bush washed his hands of responsibility in replying that disclosure of planted material is ‘‘up to individual stations.’’∂π Given this apparent green light, Broadcasting and Cable quickly ran with a cover story helpfully explaining how to harness the ins and outs of ‘‘manufactured news’’ production. Trade readers learned to distinguish di√erences between vnrs, ‘‘brolls,’’ ‘‘secured placements,’’ ‘‘paid newscasts,’’ ‘‘branded journalism,’’ and (of course) a ‘‘bona fide newscast.’’ Mastering the nuances of these stealth practices would allow broadcasters to reap the economic benefits of ‘‘free publicity’’ as a viable alternative to the excessive costs of traditional advertising. Boasted one ecstatic viral specialist: ‘‘We can produce a 90-second newscast for the cost of catering a traditional 30-second spot . . . [which] costs 10–20 times more.’’∂∫ This widespread unchecked shift to fabricated news reflects both the influence of reflexive media theorizing (entertainment marketing practice) and overt policy shifts by the U.S. government. Authorized by the post-9/11 national ‘‘state of emergency,’’ the Whitehouse immediately established the osi (O≈ce of Strategic Influence) to ‘‘rebrand the United States’’ by planting ‘‘false news stories in the international media.’’∂Ω Although the osi was closed due to controversy in 2002, the Whitehouse merely followed entertainment marketing’s lead by shifting from overt branding strategies to covert publicity strategies. The Federal government, much like Hollywood, now regularly operates ‘‘under the radar’’ in its attempts to virally create opt-in brand evangelists. The forms of critical industrial theorizing examined in this book broadly impact opinions about media policy and politics and not simply local film/television production communities. In some cases, marketing and industrial reflexivity methods from film/television are directly imported and emulated by government, for ‘‘homeland security’’ and political gain. At other times, the ubiquitous and unending forms of on-screen reflexivity in film/television struggle to demonstrate that the critical and analytical interrogation of industrial change is being taken care of—and taken care of competently—by those inside the conglomerates and inside of the very ‘‘free market’’ that the fcc /ftc now says will guarantee media democracy in the digital era. In this way, industrial theorizing and textual practices do matter. At times they function as sanctioned, if unfortunate, substitutes for critical analysis from the outside. Yet such practices also set in motion a very

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The Whitehouse adopts epks and viral marketing as key political tactics. Video news releases (‘‘VNRs’’ or ‘‘manufactured news’’) produced by the Bush administration to influence public opinion infiltrated ‘‘legitimate’’ newscasts in 2004–2005 without any disclaimers, much to the consternation of the GAO and congress. Broadcasting and Cable celebrates these viral initiatives as giving the green light to, and officially sanctioning, ‘‘branded journalism.’’ Photo of cover of B&C, J. Caldwell.

familiar critical language with which to debate and challenge media—a language developed by scholars and critical theorists that is now competently deployed by a younger generation of media practitioners, producers, and media marketing researchers who have had some contact with critical and cultural studies. Broad-based critical competencies o√er provisional and tactical opportunities for taking advantage of industrial volatility in ways not envisioned (and far from controllable) by those in the boardrooms. Rather than look at these trends as bastardized forms of deconstruction, or illegitimate forms of theory, or a ‘‘Cli√ Notes’’ brand of intellectualism, it seems far better to recognize that theorizing and reflexive interrogation have simply been adapted and modified for a di√erent work world, one with other kinds of opportunities for engagement.∑≠ The industrial practices considered here make it di≈cult to talk convincingly about the political economy of entertainment or contemporary media policy without also talking, in some way, about industrial theorizing, viral marketing, and the self-referential texts that producers and crewmembers make not just for themselves but also for the audience at large.∑∞

Set visits and other remote activities . . . may be coordinated not by individual presenters but by corporate partnerships inspired by industry consolidation. —Television Critics Association1 You have to know when to kiss and when to bite. Sometimes you need a public hanging. —Film studio executive, December 7, 20052

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Shoot-Outs, Bake-Offs, and Speed Dating (Manic Disclosure/Non-Disclosure)

Film and television invest tremendous resources in producing self-analysis and critical knowledge about the industry, a habit that complicates attempts to study them.≥ Furthermore, viewing this kind of industrial knowledge production as mere public relations, marketing, promotion, context, or even backstory is shortsighted and misguided given the extensive and convoluted nature of the contemporary mediascape. In this book I have examined such metacritical information, including embedded industrial artifacts and trade activities as self-ethnographic cultural expressions. I have also considered ways that these layers of industrial self-theorization provide challenges for cultural studies research, as well as distinctive opportunities for more fully understanding the ideologies and behaviors at work in something as convoluted, contradictory, heterogeneous, and as ostensibly monolithic as ‘‘the industry.’’∂ What began to interest me, as my research developed, was not the issue of truth or falsity of informants, or motives, or vested interests, or the ‘‘truth’’ behind the screen and its spin in retrospective interviews.∑ Rather, the very process of informing and collective sense making by practitioners emerged as my central preoccupations in these communities. The workaday narrative forms used to establish authority, the inter-

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personal rituals used to establish moral standing and collective identity, the genres of disclosure used to establish networks and personal relations, and the management/labor structures that regulated critical knowledge about the industry and its players all now function as primary—rather than secondary—cultural expressions and activities. As with producer interviews, commercially produced marketing artifacts used to manage trades, organizations, and professional identities (epks, vnrs, epgs, demos, bonus tracks, shoot-outs, bake-o√s, and pitchfests) should not be viewed as mere flak for the truth-bound ethnographer or researcher digging for some more fundamental key to industry. As I have suggested in this book, in many ways these tangible, industrial critical media forms define the industry and manage both its internal and external cultural significance.∏ The fact that a great deal of what viewers see in film/tv critically mediates or deconstructs other forms of screen content may suggest that the newly convergent industry now leads by hyping its theoretical and critical sophistication to viewers. But this is not always the case. In fact, although deep texts and on-screen practices show a constant churn of critical and theoretical ideas among practitioners, actual spoken disclosures by industry players, in public, commonly deny or disavow any agency or intellectual pretense. Far from being crass movers and shakers who exploit critical trends or cultural ideas, industry players tend to talk about themselves as being simple, honest, and direct; screenwriters as being in touch with the universalism of Aristotle’s three-part drama and well-rounded characters; producers as responsively creating what the common person wants; executives as couching even the lowest-common denominator programming as opportunities for reflection, consensus, and therapeutic escape. In trade talk, screenplays and films are never ideological, television shows are never racist or about race, and producer-creators never have a cultural axe to grind. Remarks by veteran writers, producers, and directors demonstrate one resilient way that the industry poses rhetorically. Spoken denials of intention, relevance, and profundity, that is, rule retrospective trade talk. One senior writer dismisses the significance of the many edgy intellectual references in his series with a standard explanation: ‘‘People think it’s mostly a result of some deep e√ort. Mostly it’s just about trying to be funny.’’π One film studio executive mocks intellectual pretension by defining producing in bodily, visceral terms: ‘‘As a zoo . . . as zoo-keeping’’; as an emotional situation that ‘‘connects the producer’s ‘eureka’ with the audience’s epiph-

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any.’’ He then shares an ‘‘insider’s’’ key to success in film/television: ‘‘You have to know when to kiss, and when to bite. Sometimes you need a public hanging.’’ An agent and film executive mimics tragic, Nietzschean ‘‘hubris’’ in his approach to production: ‘‘I am not relying on the gods to come down and give me an Academy Award. I—am going to make my own destiny.’’ Another producer likens producing to dangerous ‘‘high-stakes gambling’’ based on intuitive ‘‘hunches’’ and then goes on to define the multimillion dollar producing process in the most simplistic, Forrest Gump–like terms possible: ‘‘You’re the guy who turns on the lights at the beginning of the project. And turns the lights o√ at the end.’’∫ Strangely, this same executive’s own online publicity underscores the producer’s elite status as a graduate from an Ivy League university to situate him industrially in the pantheon of prestige creators. Consider the favored metaphors spoken here by executives to explain the feature filmmaking skill set: animal husbandry, touchy-feely facilitation, gut instincts, kissing-biting, public lynching, meditative simplicity, mythic hubris, and simple care and feeding. I would argue that this metaphorical litany of ‘‘serious’’ explanations and disclosures is precisely why studying the industry from the top-down—that is, from the vantage point of above-theline executives in interviews—can be so useless. At least if one wants to get past the cultural flak of personal branding in order to examine actual production activities. In this way, above-the-line self-disclosures can stand as interpretive cul-de-sacs, especially if one hopes to get beyond corporate expressions to understand the deeper critical dimensions of industrial practice and daily work. Even as creative practitioners assume their formulaic but e√aced ‘‘it-was-nothing’’ posture, many of the films and series that these executives have produced have generated immense amounts of critical writing that expose the dense cultural and intellectual intertexts that form the very fabric of many productions.Ω The practitioner disavowal systematically deployed in executive rhetoric here can also be found in other film/video production sectors. In some cases, producer disavowals tame industrial complications and thus cover over economic and ideological dimensions of media. In other cases practitioner disavowals legitimate long-standing, tightly held industrial mythologies (see appendix 3).∞≠ As public relations and producer rhetoric announce that the industry is only about basic human values, ‘‘emotional transport,’’ and ‘‘entertainment,’’ the deep texts, socio-professional networking, new technologies,

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and stylistic methods all suggest something very di√erent.∞∞ Even though administrative hierarchies, bottom-line thinking, legal constraints, and producers’ overt rhetorical disclosures may underscore self-su≈ciency, creative intuition, moral integrity, and personal mystique, various embedded texts and practices may demonstrate the importance of cooperative work. This avowal/disavowal habit regularly inflects public events. Advertisements for an event in Los Angeles honoring one distinguished screenwriter promised that the featured speaker ‘‘will try not to be boring,’’ and publicized the event with the subtitle: ‘‘Why People Who Suck Make It Big; aka: More Hollywood Gas-Bags Yak about Themselves.’’∞≤ This Beavis-and-Butthead posture of feigned disinterest and self-contempt frequents public appearances and q&as. Yet the same pose is dramatically undercut by endless dvd bonus tracks intended to ‘‘prove’’ the opposite: the acute intentionality of practitioners in all aspects of production. The former executive Martin Kaplan notes that in Hollywood ‘‘both sides of transaction[s] assumed that rank insincerity was baseline behavior; everyone also understood that ‘yes’ could just as easily mean ‘no.’ ’’ This habitual duplicity he then linked psychologically to the ‘‘imposter syndrome, in which people have nightmares that they will be discovered to have no credentials for their job.’’∞≥ Despite such denials of significance, production cultures publicly act out their critical abilities on a daily basis as part of a new industrial and commercial imperative.∞∂ The institutional habits that I describe in this conclusion— disclosure/nondisclosure, avowal/disavowal, habitual duplicity—can thus be understood not as any ‘‘essential’’ a√ect in Hollywood but rather as arbitration mechanisms used to manage industrial change. Analytical and critical disclosures, that is, are fundamental parts of this organizational process. The Universal Pictures chair Stacey Snider, for example, ‘‘educated’’ her new ‘‘old business’’ partners in the ge /nbc conglomerate with what she termed her ‘‘movie business 101 primer,’’ which explains Hollywood terminology such as ‘‘tent-pole pictures and franchise strategy.’’∞∑ Snider’s theoretical disclosures about film proved the crucial ways that employees from film (whose ‘‘business is built on relationships’’ and mystique) could enable employees from ge (whose ‘‘plastic business is based on how many contracts they can get in China’’) to productively coexist within a single multimedia conglomerate. Detailed critical, analytical disclosures are increasingly part of the fabric of film/television management and work. Some work sectors establish critical analysis by the group as a winnowing

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‘‘gate’’ before allowing products to surface as candidates for industry-wide attention. As I describe in chapter 2, for example, every year the Motion Picture Editors Guild hosts the ampas sound branch’s annual group ritual of competition—and artistic disclosure—called ‘‘the bake-o√.’’ As part of the process, the Editors Guild provides its members a detailed list of artistic criteria to use in judging the films that were prenominated by e√ects editors (‘‘sub-woofer rumble does not a profound reel make,’’ ‘‘louder is not better,’’ ‘‘recognize subtle, tasty, thought-provoking work under 96 spl,’’ etc.).∞∏ Another example of this kind of Geertzian ‘‘focused gathering’’ occurs at the trade gathering and technical ‘‘camp’’ called ‘‘hd Expo,’’ as I noted in chapter 2. The women coordinators of the 2005 hd Expo in Los Angeles facilitated intense personal disclosures by practitioners by organizing what it termed a ‘‘HiDef speed dating with industry experts’’ event. Lucky participants got five minutes of ‘‘face time’’ to ask a succession of twenty individual experts their ‘‘burning questions, . . . insider tips, how-tos, and knowledge of new trends.’’ A bell gonged every five minutes, sending each solicitor on to the next in a long line of interpersonal ‘‘hookups.’’∞π The industry also stimulates disclosure—by rigidly controlling it—in the form of the semiannual ‘‘Television Critics Association’’ meetings in Los Angeles. The tcas were launched to provide journalists with important insights and behind-the-scenes realities behind each season’s prime-time programming. Rather than the unfettered gateway to industry access that the concept may presuppose, the tcas now unfold as a frenzied interactive ritual choreographed by programming executives and publicists who deftly know how to sway and influence critics by strictly managing access to stars and to a succession of meeting-related parties. The tca’s own Web site underscores how tightly journalistic standards are now bound to industry access and even conglomeration: ‘‘Set visits . . . may be coordinated not by individual presenters but by corporate partnerships inspired by industry consolidation.’’∞∫ The tcas are one of the most explicit examples of how industry’s ostensible sharing, openness, and disclosure functions more like a publicist’s tightly coordinated dog and pony show. Even though reviewers resent being carefully led around by the nose, they must ‘‘play by the rules’’ if they want to continue with the kind of access and industry snapshots that their media editors expect of them. Even professional interactions that appear to be benign and therapeutic opportunities for personal development are frequently designed, instigated,

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‘‘Rub elbows with industry colleagues’’: Los Angeles Center Studios hosts and stages weekend ‘‘shoot outs,’’ in which workers and aspirants from various companies leasing space on the lot compete to make short films in two and a half days. Such cultural activities—evoking a hypermanic film festival ethos—attempt to build community across the otherwise anonymous workforces of competing companies. Just like ‘‘pitchfests,’’ ‘‘HD speed dating,’’ and producer ‘‘boot camps,’’ shoot outs produce a tremendous amount of ‘‘free’’ creative product on the cheap, even as the rituals transform unknown workers into erstwhile artists. The vast oversupply of labor in Los Angeles makes these hyperactive, desperate group cultural activities a useful and pervasive form of cheap concept R&D for the industry. Los Angeles, 2005. Photo © J. Caldwell.

or overseen by corporations. Screenwriting software companies, for example, sponsor professional ‘‘user groups’’ and bulletin boards to facilitate ‘‘community’’ and critical ‘‘feedback’’ among writers. In building its professional community, one enabling company announced: ‘‘We welcome new people . . . no reservations required.’’∞Ω In a related vein, Los Angeles Center Studios sponsors what it terms ‘‘weekend shootouts’’ for various ‘‘aspiring’’ film workers employed by any company renting production space on its lot and soundstages. Shoot-outs are essentially no-budget filmmaking opportunities where on a Friday writers write scripts based on one verb and one adjective (both arbitrarily selected). Thirty volunteer film workers then light, shoot, edit, and mix a film in two days. The ‘‘final’’ shoot-out film is screened on the lot on Sunday evening, where a party is thrown to celebrate. Many regional film festivals mount the same kinds of manic sleepless, nobudget filmmaking shoot-outs to lure filmmakers out into the provinces. Los Angeles Center Studios uses shoot-outs to market itself to potential renters as a film ‘‘campus,’’ while regional festivals (Sundance wannabes) use shoot-outs to build ‘‘edgier’’ festival circuit brands. A peculiar industrial logic lies behind the kinds of imaginative, ostensibly creative group self-disclosures that unfold at weekend shoot-outs,

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screenwriter/therapy workshops, new technology camps, pitchfests, critics meetings, and professional speed-dating events. Each of these implicitly enabling initiatives cost relatively little; produce either free on-screen content or buyers/renters for commercial products/services; exploit the acute oversupply of production labor in Los Angeles; and facilitate orgies of smart, personal self-disclosures without having to pay for them, even as the companies hosting such events largely control the results (for either marketing uses or direct financial gain). The theatricalized group self-disclosures at the heart of these activities represent only the tip of the disclosure/nondisclosure iceberg. Each labor sector has numerous mechanisms that facilitate the exchange of critical insider knowledge: media lab researchers with PhDs promulgate new standards for the field at Siggraph or in the smpte Journal ; cnn brands its research-driven prowess with specific aΔuent, educated demographic groups for ad buyers and programmers; scri sells annual ‘‘Global Trends Reports’’ and ‘‘Brand Awareness and Ratings Reports’’ to time- and resource-stretched broadcasters; and semiexclusive trade publications are invented ‘‘to educate television and station network owners, management and engineering talent on the opportunities and challenges presented by the latest technological developments.’’≤≠ As in any industry, these latter forms of basic critical knowledge about new technologies, methods, trends, markets, and buyers necessarily pervade trade discourses in film/ television as well. Unlike other industries, however, film/television seems particularly adept at staging and dramatizing critical industrial self-disclosures as bracketed artistic events or entertainment experiences for its professional members. Couching or theatricalizing trade knowledge in this way as personal, cultural sophistication proves an e≈cient way to stimulate workers to innovate while keeping any tangible labor or legal responsibilities for them at arms length. Cultural relationship building in the trades helps move the process along. As one videographer explained, the key to the quintessential metatext of below-the-line workers is a good demo tape: ‘‘If they cry, they’ll buy . . . a good demo should show emotion.’’≤∞ For film/television workers, establishing this kind of emotional relationship with other practitioners is arguably as important as establishing such a bond with consumers. Mass media audiences are positively influenced by what the economist Arthur De Vany terms film marketing’s ‘‘information cascade,’’ but professional practitioners depend upon more-nuanced forms of community building and

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While the oversupply of workers in the labor market stimulates a Darwinian ethos of survival of the fittest, numerous institutional practices and organizations seek to stem the tide of dissensus and atomization by cultivating consensus and common professional identities. Here, ‘‘Siggraph’’ forges professional community among digital artists by deploying two standbys of academic culture: the critical historification of the field since the 1970s (field formation) and curating and discovering visionaries (mapping an innovative institutional future). Los Angeles, 2001. Photo © J. Caldwell.

di√erent kinds of reflexivity.≤≤ Excessive, critical therapeutic sharing among industrial workers may make the industry’s systematically regulated disclosures to consumers particularly e√ective. In this way, yet again, the stylistic and on-screen practices in film and television are thoroughly enmeshed by o√-screen industrial, technical, and economic activities. REFLEXIVITY AS INDUSTRIAL CULTURE JAMMING

The preceding chapters have tangled with a set of resilient industrial habits involving collective, critical self-representation. The recent explosive growth and popularity of self-referencing, self-disclosure, and organizational transparency has been stimulated by at least four general factors: by the wideranging breakdown of traditional barriers between media professionals and audiences; by new digital technologies that have animated the cross-cultural leaks and blurred borders that once distinguished lay and professional media worlds; by the increasingly dense clutter of multimedia markets which require self-referencing meta-texts for e√ective viewer navigation; and by

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increased competition and task uncertainty which triggers pressures to symbolically value craft distinction and innovation in public ways. These tendencies can be mapped on a wide continuum, ranging from institutionalized corporate reflexivity on one end to inter-personalized worker reflexivity on the other (see appendix 4). Corporate reflexivity involves topdown self-referencing, organizational relations, and is closely related to marketing. By contrast, worker reflexivity can be understood via more local forms of individual self-disclosure, socio-professional interactions, and craft meritocracies. In the model used here, top-down self-referencing makes sense as an outgrowth of two contemporary corporate goals: first, to ‘‘level labor distinctions’’ in the production chain; and second, to ‘‘level hierarchical distinctions’’ in the market/distribution chain. While the immediate, abstract goal of the first strategy is to lower corporate costs and eliminate costly labor ‘‘entitlements,’’ something more profound and unsettling unfolds alongside these benefits. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, leveling labor distinctions in the production work force—between colorists and timers, dps and directors, producers and executives, editors and sound-designers, story editors and screenwriters, reality pas and union editors, production designers and visual e√ects supervisors—keeps much of the workforce o√balance and stirred up with inter-craft contention. The manic pace of production today—in union and non-union work, on location and in postproduction work—reflects this objective. Desperate filmmaking increases productivity, and, some now argue, creativity. The erosion of job classifications also helps drive down production costs and scale, as production companies unintentionally emulate the reform ethos of the outsider’s Scratchware Manifesto, in order to create innovative titles with small teams for a√ordable purchase.≤≥ Such tactics reinforce what I now consider to be the new uber-fantasy and goal of Hollywood: to acquire content for little or no cost and to get everyone to work for free. While the second strategy in the model—leveling hierarchies in the market/distribution chain—aims to cultivate direct and e≈cient economic relations with media consumers (by cutting out middlemen), it too has a more lasting cultural impact. Endless publications hail the new consumer power that now ostensibly drives film and television in the United States due to digital interactivity. Fewer accounts acknowledge that Internetdriven media, blogging, and uploading also provide ideal conditions within

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which the media conglomerates succeed in utterly traditional business activities like direct-to-consumer marketing. The collapse of the barriers between media producers and consumers, then, is less about democracy than it is about co-creating with viewers information cascades on multiple media platforms (a publicity-driven viral process needed to maximize buzz around exceptional, blockbuster franchises); and second, the cross-promotion of less exceptional conglomerate properties (advertising-driven promotions needed to raise mundane, syndicated content above the media market clutter). The continual shrinkage of the box-o≈ce distribution window before dvd release, and in some cases the release of content on all media platforms simultaneously, have made finding the audience a chaotic industrial freefor-all. The new direct-to-consumer imperative therefore makes selfreferencing and hyper-marketing a necessary corporate skill set. The deerin-the headlights assault of YouTube by Sumner Redstone in March 2007 illustrates the business logic of unsettling the distribution chain. By suing YouTube for $1 billion at the same time that its corporate partner cbs struck a major deal with YouTube, Viacom’s schizophrenic relations placed chains on the uploaders even as Viacom opened its own distribution floodgates. As the majors wring their hands about no longer ‘‘owning’’ distribution, they textually carpet-bomb video sharing sites thereby making every uploader and downloader one of their potential distributors. The collision of reflexive corporate strategies and reflexive worker counter-measures can be guaged in three arenas in which the contest unfolds: unruly workworlds, unruly technologies, and unruly audiences. The picture of reflexive corporate-versus-worker warring described in the last few chapters may look too causal, top-down, and deterministic. In practice, any fieldwork in the world of production shows that there is as much ground-up worker agency and resistance via self-referencing as there is topdown corporate control and acquiescence. Considering the three ‘‘unruly’’ industrial areas just described from ‘‘below’’ proves this point. First, in the o√-balance, increasingly division-less, unruly work world of crews, worker reflexivity constantly negotiates and resuscitates technical and craft identities for vocational survival. Much reality programming is nonunion, and all reality shows are scripted, the majority surreptitiously by story editors and members of producers’ sta√s. Fearing the networks’ plans to use reality shows as warehoused ‘‘filler’’ to circumvent the unions if labor strikes ensued, the wga and iatse went after cw’s top show Top Model by asking the

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nlrb to intervene in 2006. The nlrb sided with the unions, prompting iatse president Thomas Short to draw out the moral: ‘‘This election points up the importance of bottoms-up organizing and grass-roots representation —these (types of ) employees have always belonged in the ia, and we are pleased to bargain on their behalf.’’≤∂ This was a warning shot across the bow to networks everywhere against collapsing job descriptions. It succeeded by critically challenging the industry’s genre theory that had made spurious aesthetic/labor distinctions between fiction and reality screen content. From labor’s perspective, the reflexive principle of unruly work worlds means that the histories, hierarchies, and cultural rhetoric of crafts increase in prominence and intensity as the oversupply of labor increases. Distinctions between workers do in fact matter. Second, in response to the disruptiveness of new and unruly digital technologies, worker reflexivity is deployed to legitimize one technical or craft group over another, usually by establishing superior competence and thus exclusivity. abc, Fox, and nbc opened up the new digital technology gates in Fall of 2006 to allow viewers to freely download expensive primetime programs, like Heroes, Prison Break, and Ugly Betty, immediately after airing. One problem. In the networks’ giddy embrace of video sharing and video iPods, half-century-old precedents for paying screenwriters syndication royalties or ‘‘residuals’’ on the shows they’d written was thrown out the window. ‘‘We’ve learned from history that when these new technologies emerge we can be left behind,’’ said one union spokesman.≤∑ Again, only critical legal arguments from the unions—that these were syndicated enduses, not just marketing—forced the networks to back away from the digital free-for-all. Once again, labor had to make convincing arguments that the new portable and mobile technologies fit the old definition of syndication and distribution windows. Industry’s well-managed confusion between selfreferential onscreen marketing and onscreen content was at the root of the conflict. From labor’s perspective, the reflexive principle behind these unruly technologies is that craft and worker theorizing, self-referencing, and collective cultural activities increase as the pace of technical obsolescence accelerates. Critical distinctions between old and new technologies unhinge corporate-worker a≈nities. Third, worker reflexivity also churns in response to the unruly audiences that now threaten the lucrative job guarantees once securely held by organized production labor. Users, fans, and digital uploaders increasingly share production and aesthetic competencies with film/tv workers. What makes

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At the 2006 ASC ‘‘open house’’ in Hollywood, cinematographers create contact zones, merchandizing, and networking opportunities for affiliates, members, and aspirants, even as they underscore traditional craft legitimacy during times of acute technological change. Photo © J. Caldwell.

production workers distinctive and economically valuable, therefore, now matters a great deal. As one wearied, middle-aged videographer complained about the competition, ‘‘The sad part is that a lot of good, talented people will su√er. It seems that (our profession) is constantly being undermined by wannabes.’’≤∏ From labor’s perspective, the reflexive principle of unruly audiences is that worker claims of ‘‘professionalism’’ increase as the popularity and circulation of user-generated-content increases. Dismissing amateurs, independents, and outsiders is a time-honored cultural habit in Hollywood, one that goes hand-in-hand with high-production values and the cult of technical superiority. Behind the trade harangues against amateur uploaders and 1-person crews, however, many film/tv workers in the lesser ranks are also quietly migrating to the lower-stakes world of the Internet. Break.com now pays pros to produce uploads, YouTube compensates the best of its uploaders from ad schemes, and Jack Black and his Hollywood ‘‘entourage’’ pose as outsiders who—with actual outsiders from Channel101.com—co-produce ‘‘tv pilots’’ for the vh1 series Acceptable tv (part of the giant Viacom conglomerate). This worker flipside of corporate reflexivity shows that there is not one type of reflexivity but many, as Georgina Born discovered at the bbc.≤π In Los Angeles, some forms circulate around the interpersonal ground-zero of

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disenchanted employees, who ‘‘de-fame’’ their producer/executive bosses at ‘‘Defamer.com,’’ who take-down former on-set celebrities at ‘‘tmz.com,’’ or who bitch and moan anonymously online about horrible conditions caused by specific producers on the set. Remember that for every fan ‘‘spoiler’’ who ruins future plot episodes of Lost through cultural espionage, there are crewmember spoilers who sabotage series story-arc secrets and skewer showrunner hubris by ‘‘leaking’’ episode info before broadcast. But it gets even more complicated than that. Fans, lay critics, and production employees are not the only ones launching cynical criticisms and unauthorized ‘‘snarking’’ against shows and producers on ‘‘Televisionwithoutpity.com’’ (twop). Producers and executives themselves anonymously wade through this site, facing critical deconstructions of their shows, in order to monitor reception and, if possible, influence it positively. By 2007 Bravo, a network in the Universal-nbc conglomerate, purchased twop precisely in order to harness the churning, agitated buzz of worker and corporate reflexivity as part of the industrially incestuous programming flow that has come to define the Bravo brand. Dozens of my students in Los Angeles (having recently fled from alienated positions as burned out producer’s assistants, interns, and pas in order to return to graduate school) vouch that if producers or executives themselves do not produce positive preemptive disinformation about their shows and films on these sites, then their employee minions at lower levels do. It’s easy enough to see production worker online rants as ‘‘resistant’’ forms of reflexivity, but what is one to make of gangs of anonymous pas and interns posing as fans on faux-blogs and MySpace.com? As one ‘‘desk slave’’ (aka producer’s assistant) marveled: ‘‘I watched firsthand as [he] high-jacked the Hollywood subculture and used its obsessive information sharing network for personal gain. The machinery of fame was waiting. I just had to turn it on.’’≤∫ Once you open this can of worms—recognizing industry’s pervasive presence inside online fandom—it’s di≈cult to imagine that anything could be truly ‘‘unruly’’ here. The producers and agents behind industrial lurkers are of course ‘‘workers’’ too, but the systematic self-referencing going on when they weigh-in online makes their ‘‘personal expressions’’ far more like corporate than worker reflexivity. Higher-up still on the continuum are marketing department professionals who systematically generate viral buzz campaigns as part of what is now called ‘‘crowd-sourcing’’ or ‘‘hive-sourcing.’’ At this level, individual self-referencing by workers has given way

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almost entirely to the institutional parameters and corporate reflexivity that set them in motion in the first place. This suggests that highly publicized recent attempts by Stephen Bochco to retool his tightly scripted, A-List primetime persona for the ‘‘unscripted,’’ ‘‘distracting,’’ and ‘‘spontaneous’’ aesthetic of uploading culture is merely the tip of a much bigger, but submerged, producer iceberg.≤Ω This kind of coercive practice should change how we describe and address online agency and cherished academic notions of audience ‘‘resistance.’’ Alternative media producers, diy activists, and scholars have made convincing arguments for ‘‘culture-jamming.’’ This counter-media anticonglomerate strategy essentially updates for the information age Luddite calls for individual workers ‘‘to throw a wrench into the machine.’’ The Internet and digital media now provide optimum conditions for realizing the culture-jamming imperative, since access to the master’s ‘‘machine’’ is now ostensibly available to everyone. Being e√ective in culture jamming, however, also requires being aware of the bigger picture unfolding inside the networked machine. I would argue that the industrial reflexive activities detailed in this book demonstrate that there are many media employees as well as fans systematically throwing textual wrenches into the machine as a systematic part of corporate culture jamming. Two examples of corporate culture jamming are instructive in this regard, one successful, the other a failure. After the positive ‘‘up-front’’ hype that greeted nbc’s elite new signature show by Aaron Sorkin, Studio 60 in May 2006, the network created a fake fan blog-site called Defaker.com to preemptively generate viral buzz about the show. Problem was, the halfhearted attempt to have nbc employees fake fan amateurism by simply paraphrasing studio press-releases and posting production stills as surveillance photos was quickly read by real fans as a deception—and an insult at that. nbc paid the price. The same fans (spurred on by Defamer.com) that were supposed to turn the show into a viral phenomenon instead loaded up the nbc Web site with damning critiques of the naïve amateurism of nbc and its o≈ce minions, which forced the site to shut down. Six months later, another studio plant by the producers of the cbs series How I Met Your Mother, ‘‘The Robin Sparkles’’ MySpace page, pulled o√ the same kind of lie, but this time to raves from both the online community and respected journalists as well.≥≠ The di√erence? The cbs /Robin Sparkles page was deftly integrated into the content of the show, so that primetime episodes

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raised significant narrative questions (flashbacks, references to memories) that could only be answered on the MySpace page, and developed a system of cues whereby fans knew when to turn to the Web site to complete the narrative. Site hits spiked from 100 to more than 5000 hits in the first day, prompting the showrunners to deem the stunt and ‘‘online brush fire,’’ and a way to ‘‘activate the fan base, to turn them into advocates for your show.’’≥∞ Analogous to the budgets of standard reflexive ‘‘making-of ’’ documentaries for any feature film, which now regularly run into the millions of dollars, fake blog and Web sites by studios and networks only seem to work if there is a considerable critical, theoretical, and economic investment in creating complex, challenging narrative and screen forms that fans want to deconstruct in a multimedia environment. Industrial culture jamming like this, therefore, is not for the feint of heart, the under-capitalized company, or the low-budget crowd. On one level, the distinction and tension between corporate and worker reflexivity can be expressed as follows. Corporations circulate meta-texts to conceptually manage instabilities and unruliness once labor and consumption distinctions are leveled. In e√ect, corporate reflexivity plays on the blurring of consumer identities and job descriptions in order to mine the economic confusion that follows on both ends of the spectrum. By contrast, worker reflexivity tends to resuscitate many of the leveled distinctions in the production/labor and market/distribution chains. In the world of industrially leveled distinctions, jobs, craft legitimacy, and careers are clearly always at stake. Workers know this, and seldom limit themselves to the physical job at hand. Along with online and on-set griping, self-defining statements and meta-commentaries continuously issue from the labor unions, guilds, and professional gatherings in an attempt to manage the volatility from the ground-up. Yet the politics of corporate-versus-worker reflexivity are not as clear and unproblematic as the top-down versus ground-up model may imply. At least in union production, worker reflexivity emerges from professional communities that make their craft, association, or guild self-perpetuating through a quasi-medieval system requiring protracted mentoring. In Los Angeles, such groups still codify Taylorist e≈ciencies in order to maximize the degree to which production tasks and sub-routines are divided and distributed across department areas and crew. Given the nomadic system of rapid start-up/shut-down production incorporation described in chapter 3,

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workers need to network in order to survive the unending cycles of unemployment. These instabilities provide the groundwork from which many of production’s cultural activities described in this book are launched. As social and economic problem-solving operations, production culture now persistently: cultivates ideals of a unified industry in collusion with management in order to protect incomes after contracts signed; converts work into cultural capital, via socio-professional rituals, demonstrations of craft ancestry, and meritocracy; and bu√ers underemployment by showingo√ and leveraging cultural capital via credits and demo reels. From this perspective, in essence, the industry uses aesthetic and cultural capital to shortchange workers. But, given the yearly incomes of many in the industry, including below-the-line workers, it is di≈cult to explain this shortchanging as a form of victimization. Yes, organized labor is under attack, and jobs threatened. But even as the old labor system slips, slides, and regroups, many of its practices remain exclusionary. Labor’s old guard—which is still predominantly white, male, and upper middle-class—seldom gets much sympathy from tens of thousands of non-union workers, industry aspirants, women, and people of color in Los Angeles. The resilience of the old system results in part because production labor maintains high-costs of entry and exclusivity. As such, production’s cultural rhetoric preaches collectivity, even as it bars aspirants and outsiders from entry. Yes, production is anxious. But it is anxious for many more invisible aspirants and underemployed individuals o√-the-set and outside-the-studio as well. SEGREGATING AND DE-SEGREGATING CULTURES OF PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION

The growing confusion about what the industry now is, and is not, begs larger social questions. Five industrial tendencies can be understood as defensive responses to this rising confusion over identity and limits. The relationship building and collective rituals described in chapter 2 and at the start of this conclusion, make sense as part of the first two general tendencies: regeneration (keyed to the logic of the group); and legitimation (keyed to the logic of career and craft). These tendencies tend to segregate professional practices from audience activities, spotlighting their di√erences, by continuously redefining and re-valuing the otherwise uncertain futures of creative communities through expressions of professionalism.

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First, from the perspective of regeneration, many cooperative activities of film/video workers can be understood as socio-professional forms of consensus-building or dissensus-making. These unification and segregating tendencies tend to emerge in response to broader institutional and industrial changes.≥≤ E√ectiveness at these processes proves crucial in the formation, survival, and recreation of production groups, firms, and associations. Both consensus and dissensus activities enable the diverse and heterogeneous coalition of craft communities to constantly redefine and regenerate themselves—through cultural expressions of willed a≈nity—as a temporarily unified industry. Such identity boundaries hold at least until competition or economic and technological change threatens consensual relationships and temporary, tactical a≈nities. Practitioner networks also participate in broader social and professional processes, through rituals and events that define the industry in a symbolic and public relations sense. Members of unions and guilds, that is, don’t just participate interactively in the technical tasks that define production in the work place. They also represent di√erent groups that constantly cultivate either a sense of professional autonomy (when needed) or common cause and industry-wide consensus (when coalition is needed to crossover craft and company lines). Rapid technological change—and the threat of obsolescence that comes with it—has destabilized the traditional ways that tasks are distributed during a production. In response to these instabilities, companies regularly stage handholding events. One studio hosts holiday ‘‘tree-lighting ceremonies,’’ to forge common ‘‘studio family’’ identities. Yet many who attend are transient producers and contract employees soon to be replaced by other migratory tenants on the lot when productions fold.≥≥ Without the ‘‘real’’ long-term employee ‘‘family’’ that defined and profited the studios in the classical era, contemporary companies work overtime to concoct imaginary families for their brands, in ways that cover over the depersonalizing churn of tenants and contract employees on the lot. Second, industrial changes also animate the social rituals that are used to cultivate a craft or trade group’s legitimacy. These legitimizing activities frequently seek to underscore the ostensibly ‘‘necessary’’ role the given craft or trade group plays within a common industry (even though this consensus and commonality can be largely symbolic). The production stories that practitioners tell are not just narratives about ‘‘what happened,’’ they also function as legitimation for careers and crafts. As I suggested in chapter 1,

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allegories are also arguments, and sometimes parables, that legitimize one or more perspectives even as they discredit others. I include in this proposition not simply the stories and anecdotes one finds in trade publications, or the career ‘‘war stories’’ that professionals tell in public appearances, but also the icons, images, demo tapes, and self-representations that practitioners make across a wide range of formats. Invariably, by telling stories or making demos practitioners individualize industrial phenomena for career reasons. This tendency to personalize is fairly common in almost any field of work, since stories are among the most e≈cient ways to anchor more complicated ideas about any industry.≥∂ Throughout this book, I have been interested in both the career and institutional logics of trade narratives, iconographies, rituals, and spaces. Such forms and practices serve as self-reflections, or group self-portraits, thus providing scholars with evidence of workplace analysis and self-interrogation that is frequently as provocative as the films or series that the group produces for the public at large. Trade stories are told to value and resuscitate careers, but they are also emblematic expressions of trade group cultural preoccupations as well. Three other tendencies—distributed cognition, producers-as-audiences, consumerism-as-production (or producer-generated-users)—do the opposite of regeneration and legitimation, since they blur lines between producer and consumer. These trends operate systematically at a broader cultural level even though they are based on very local work practices and are fueled by the need to desegregate professional and audience activities. This makes these last three tendencies particularly e√ective in popularizing for consumers the kinds of self-referencing that are at the heart of my argument and this book. Professional knowledge about film/tv production now functions as a widespread cultural competence and consumer activity. First, the organization and working methods of crews can be understood as examples of distributed cognition. So too can the consumer users of production software and studio/network Web sites which industry now values as ‘‘networked externalities.’’≥∑ Once derisively dismissed as a mob, users today are welcomed by film/tv corporations in their e√ort to harvest productive work from audiences. Rather than rotely guard intellectual property, that is, the smart guys in film/tv today actively attempt to harvest the power of the online audience or ‘‘hive’’ through strategies of ‘‘crowdsourcing’’ or ‘‘hive-sourcing.’’ The collapse of traditional distinctions between entertainment content and marketing, a fundamental concern of this

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book, now spurs corporations to go with the flow of the audience, rather than to fight it; to tap the audience hive as a source for production not just consumption. Production groups conceptualize a film or scene interactively through worker-networks that pursue stylistic or narrative e√ects based on pre-established schemas and problem-solving roles. The circulation of computer software and videogames has pushed these forms of distributed cognition—along with a corresponding collapse of distinctions between work, leisure, and creativity—far beyond the bounded sets of old media or Hollywood. Web and pc software applications mimic aesthetic modes of interaction via interfaces derived from theatrical, gaming, televisual or cinematic icons and traditions. Apple sells tens-of-thousands of adolescent YouTube-fixated, iLife cocooned software buyers on the complex ‘‘metaediting’’ aesthetics (the sizzle) behind its fcp and idvd (the steak), thus hawking film theory as a home electronics user’s-guide. Even as they invite users into culturally coded, collective forms of thinking and creating, some products and services sell the utterly practical posture of the critical analysis they provide. Announced one product: ‘‘No Abstract Theory—Just 200 Proven Techniques.’’≥∏ Yet a competing product provides a dizzying list of itemized theoretical prompts for the frustrated, aspiring screenwriter who has lost ‘‘the big picture.’’≥π The software’s demo overtly traces the academic origins of its patented ‘‘story engine’’ to theories of: ai, sexuality, physiology and biochemistry, and psychiatry.≥∫ The company’s Web site flaunts its theoretical utility to imagine cinematic worlds in explicitly scholarly terms: ‘‘If Collaborator is the conscientious grad student Teaching Assistant, then Dramatica Pro is the worldly writing professor with a philosophical bent. Dramatica takes theory to a new level Collaborator never dares approach.’’≥Ω Theory is the ghost-in-the-machine of consumer production software and online video sharing sites alike. Sometimes it churns along quietly. Sometimes it guides the conjuring writer Socratically. At other times film theory mentors the mash-up-producing YouTube rookie posed as a Hollywood insider. O√-the-shelf software and social networking sites embed these theoretical discussions in their design, and each new software user becomes (in computer science terminology) an externality that adds value to the evergrowing, interconnected, mutating network that ensues. Second, we seldom acknowledge the instrumental role that producers-asaudience members play; or, the ways that the industry serves as cultural interpreter. Film/video makers are also audiences and film/video encoders

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A prime-time episode mimics the task analysis involved in producing and postproduction work for audiences at home. Here, characters from NBC’s prime-time show Homicide (in an episode aired January 3, 1997) critique representations of their own performance inside of fictional scenes that emulate a postproduction edit session; a producer/writers’ room; a screening/critique of filmed ‘‘dailies’’; and a graduate seminar room in film theory and analysis. Composite photo from video, J. Caldwell.

are also decoders. Media scholarship tends to disregard the inevitability of maker-viewer overlap.∂≠ Many favored binaries fall by the way when one recognizes the diverse ways that those who design sets, write scripts, direct scenes, shoot images, and edit picture also fully participate in the economy, political landscape, and educational systems of the culture and society as a whole. Above-the-line producers, directors, and executives are especially good at intentionally confusing the audience/producer split. Executives frequently invoke hard numbers from research departments when useful—but ignore them when the data contradict their personal hunches or intuitions. To break this research/intuition quandary (and the managerial conflict that necessarily follows from it), executives employ one favored tactic. They master the pose of ‘‘speaking for the audience’’ in order to get their way in

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contentious production, development and programming meetings. In the final analysis, executive arguments that the ‘‘audience wants this’’ or ‘‘that’’ trumps all others—at least if the person saying it has enough institutional power to ignore conflicting evidence to the contrary.∂∞ Production personnel also design productions vis-à-vis the parameters and constraints of consumer electronic and home viewing environments that they personally know. Media conglomerates, in turn, have shifted to direct audience merchandising and the dvd as the key to delivering features, given the inability of ratings and advertising systems to accurately track the multichannel flow in the home.∂≤ Directors/editors use split screens and frenetic editing to keep apace of viewers’ sensory acceleration, while producers design online components to engage the multi-tasking activities of increasingly distracted viewers.∂≥ To exploit these new digital options, tv creators develop mobile content and ‘‘snack tv’’ for hand-held ‘‘third screens,’’∂∂ and insert Internet referrals for the audience within screenplay dialogue and primetime scenes.∂∑ At the same time, online blogs ‘‘by’’ series characters help viewers solve fictional crimes before sending them back to view the next episode.∂∏ Finally, production personnel circulate publicly in consumer culture, and most film/television professional organizations seldom shy away from public exposure. Many associations and guilds have ‘‘speakers bureau,’’ ‘‘educational divisions,’’ and publicized ‘‘internship opportunities.’’ Other companies cultivate and interact with the public through timely topical media events, or by co-sponsoring local quasi-Sundance film festivals. Colleges host alumni meetings in L.A. for industry networking (aka fund-raising) and mount ‘‘Alumni in Hollywood’’ issues for alumni magazines. Far from L.A. and New York, film/television professionals circulate as short-term artists-in-residence, while film/video equipment companies, star dps, editors, and directors travel widely to participate in regional production workshops and technical demonstrations.∂π All of these producer-as-audience initiatives work to merge audience identification with industrial identity. Third, although much has been made recently about user-generated content (ugc), far less attention has been focused on two other trends: what I term ugc’s evil twin producer-generated-users (pgu); and the many ways that production analysis serves as a form of hyper-consumerism. Audiences themselves frequently function as self-conscious media producers and critics; even as production theory and media aesthetics now circulate widely in and as consumer discourses. More than simply a technology-driven phe-

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nomenon, many popular press and Web sites now promulgate film/tv theory as fan discourses. As discussed earlier, metacritic.com and televisionwith outpity.com compile second-order reflections on critical trends and biting deconstructions of film/tv style and content.∂∫ Entertainment Weekly and newspapers formulate film/tv ‘‘canons’’ through annotated lists of the ‘‘most important dvds, films, tv shows you should own.’’∂Ω Making-ofs and behind-the-scenes documentaries promote ‘‘production thinking’’ as staples on many channels and networks (amc, The Sci-Fi Channel, hbo, Bravo, Discovery, tnt, ifc, etc.). Plus, through reality television, ‘‘makingofs’’ and ‘‘makeovers’’ have become entertainment programs. We don’t just get Extreme Make-over: Home Edition, we get ‘‘The Making-Of ’’ Extreme Make-over Home Editions: How’d They do That. We don’t just get mtv’s Making of the Band (about music video production), we get abc’s Next Action Hero (blockbuster casting and acting), Jon Favreau’s Dinner for Five (critical debates about cinema), amc’s Shoot-out (industry trends and film development), and hbo’s Project Greenlight (producing, directing, and managing a feature film). Given this televised cineastic milieu, the ifc Channel’s series Film School (2004), Film Festival (2005), and Fox Movie Classics After Film School (2006–7) are actually fairly unremarkable exercises, since production pedagogy is constantly churning on many other channels as well. The theorizing bent also spills over into blockbuster films where some journalists pull out their philosophy 101 Cli√ Notes to score smug big-screen references to ‘‘metaphysics,’’ ‘‘ontological’’ inquiry, the ‘‘psychoanalytic id,’’ ‘‘ancient philosophical conundrums about the nature of free will,’’ and celebrity ‘‘intellectuals’’ from Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton.∑≠ Others paint a far darker picture of onscreen theoretical exhibitionism: ‘‘This summer, millions of teenagers have been invited to experience the tedium and pedantry of graduate school in Dolby-surround, accompanied by the latest special e√ects.’’ The industry also solicits and ‘‘welcomes’’ contact with viewers. Test screenings ‘‘in Glendale’’ or ‘‘Peoria’’ have been a part of the Hollywood mystique for decades. But current economic conditions have made the solicitation of viewers for service as focus groups, online, or test screening participants even more intense.∑∞ These public solicitations posture audience research less as a ‘‘deal with the devil’’ than as a unique opportunity to change culture and ‘‘serve the entire viewing public’’ by building personal relationships with producers, who are (apparently) standing by, waiting for

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The industry constantly researches and works to think like audiences. Here, a TiVo corporate representative sells a broadcaster on how their device will actually secure bigger and more loyal audiences for television. Other startups and technology companies develop integrated programming spin-offs of television (the first screen) as Web site activities (the second screen), and for mob-casting and pod-casting (the third screen). Las Vegas, 2001. Photo © J. Caldwell.

each viewer’s every command. Critical acumen about production, therefore, doesn’t just travel from Los Angeles to the heartland. It supposedly surges back to Hollywood, in an ecstasy of shared, staged critical analysis from the provinces as well.∑≤ Viral multimedia marketing and pgu strategies also employ numerous new media formats to perpetuate production’s conceptual frameworks as viewing frameworks.∑≥ The widespread network/studio practices discussed earlier of planting faux personal videos by ‘‘fans’’ on MySpace.com and YouTube.com in order to virally market forthcoming features, or of harvesting antagonistic personal video ‘‘mashes’’ on the same sites as part of ‘‘anti-marketing’’ campaigns, provide merely the latest evidence that lines between producers and consumers have irrevocably clouded.∑∂ Producers generate faux-amateur content, buy and distribute amateur content professionally, provide online learning in film/video aesthetics, spin blogs and online discussions, spoil ostensible show secrets as stealth marketing, snark and defame competitors, pose as fans, award fans, and are fans. Welcome to the brave new world of pgu. The classic binaries separating culture industry-and-citizenry, producerand-consumer, and ideological perpetrator-and-victim ill fit as explanations

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for these five cultural-industrial tendencies. This is especially evident when one talks to screenwriters, producers, or directors about how personal, private, and familial concerns they deem important work to inform, inflect, or percolate up through films and series they make. With rare exception, such creators have little problem discussing why and where the themes they deal with come from. Certainly this heightened form of analysis and interpretation by film/video professionals—together with the audience’s continuous awareness and reading of production nuance—provides a form of critical interrogation every bit as complex as those of professional critics. Yet we seldom grant industry this critical capability. INDUSTRIAL BIPOLAR ORDER (DISCLOSURE / NONDISCLOSURE, ACCESS / IMPASSE)

Finally, beyond the five tendencies of cultural-industrial self-theorizing outlined above, two fundamental contradictions pervade each industrial sector examined in this book. Scholars should carefully prepare for both, since they directly complicate and problematize the task of researching production cultures. First, as contemporary media corporations institutionalize the most extreme forms ever of proprietary vigilance and employee nondisclosure, contemporary production cultures churn out the most excessive forms ever of textual reflexivity and self-disclosure. I would argue, in fact, that this contradictory manic public self-disclosure/legal corporate nondisclosure behavior is one of the defining properties of the new multimedia conglomerates. Alongside this well-oiled double bind comes a second increasingly manic routine: the promotion of greater industrial access together with vigorous legal actions to shut access down. The academic tradition tends to view such splits or contradictions (where institutions say one thing but do another) as ‘‘ideological fault lines’’ (where capitalism breaks down) or forms of ‘‘cultural schizophrenia’’ (where commodity culture is cut from its social moorings). While each chapter thus far highlights the contradictory nature of the cultural practices of production in some way, I think it important to acknowledge that such a split is now seldom ‘‘latent’’ or unintended. Survival for networks and production companies alike now depends upon mastering and exploiting industrial reflexivity—a crosspromotional multimedia regime that functions as much like industrial damage control as a celebration of on-screen stylistic accomplishment. The

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manic self-disclosure/o≈cial nondisclosure stance is a calculated corporate practice that reaps institutional benefits: excessive disclosure/nondisclosure cultivates deeper relations with consumers, even as it manages industrial knowledge to sanction conglomeration. The tension between these two postures—cultural expression at the production level and public information control at the corporate level—plays out through a second contradictory posture involving access. Viral marketing, for example, is surreptitious and stealthy, but it depends upon consensus building and overt viewer/user endorsement nevertheless. By constantly initiating and a≈rming commerce through viral marketing transactions, that is, consumers stymie traditional ideological critiques of business (as coercive, victimizers, sellers of false needs or consciousness). The trades also popularize the importance of nuanced dealmaking, face time, and controlled interpersonal disclosures (in pitching, contracting, networking, a≈liation, and synergies). Yet increasing corporatization has achieved the opposite e√ect even for film/television veterans by aggressively blocking o√, limiting, and further constraining access to professional settings where face time can actually take place. Two specific situations exemplify the resulting structural double bind. Operators and dps are trained to never converse with talent during a shoot, since such interactions can undercut the authority and control of the director. Yet frustrated actors frequently approach dps and operators to generate sympathy and elicit more flattering lighting and composition.∑∑ The dps who break this gag rule can quickly find themselves o√ the set and out of work.∑∏ Despite all of the a≈rmations about networking and collectivity, then, the traditional set is still governed by a rigid top-down command structure. A hundred crew members may work on a set but only one gets to explore improvisational synergies with onscreen talent. Likewise, the trades marvel at the vast new avenues for content development, the new fluidity of traditional barriers, and the importance of flexible deal making. For example, I observed Gerard Bocaccio, vice president of fx Network, state to a room full of indie writers and producers that there was at his network, an ostensibly ‘‘open-door’’ policy that eagerly looked for new show ideas. ‘‘I will take calls from anyone. . . . Everybody’s approved. Everybody’s not approved,’’ he explained. ‘‘Our network never clears an area. There is a volume (of new proposals) we do not deflect.’’∑π At the same time, however, actually getting a development or pitch meeting is becoming

Conclusion

increasingly more di≈cult and exclusionary. One veteran writer/producer, frustrated about being locked out by many studios/networks, responded to Bocaccio’s claims of openness: ‘‘But I am constantly told that ‘without an agent or an attorney we won’t see you.’ ’’ To which a gsn Network programming executive paused, then admitted defensively: ‘‘Nine months ago, a major lawsuit provided great leeway/grounds to ‘ideas holders’; which allowed writers to sue cable networks due to similar story elements. It puts us in a very defensive position. We now have to be very cautious. You have to have a lawyer [present] before we will talk to you.’’∑∫ This, then, represents a classic example of the double bind: the cultural discourses and rhetoric of management and the trade media celebrate an ethos of flexibility and openness, while their actual legal policies have largely shut out new talent. Unless, of course, the small cadre of agents and lawyers already legitimized by the networks presanction the pitch and the pitcher. It is unwise to talk ethnographically about how and why pitch rituals occur, therefore, without also accounting for how industry’s metatexts and discourses legally regulate or severely constrain those same rituals and interactions. When I began the research for this book ten years ago, my goals were rather simple. I had not fully grasped the extent of these two industrial double binds, and I set about to better understand how film/television practitioners utilized critical and theoretical knowledge to make practical decisions on the set and in postproduction. I also wanted to understand both the kinds of intelligence that film/television work required and the networks of relations through which cultural communities are formed and symbolically maintained. I found these things, but I also confronted a mitigating reality not easily relegated to mere textual or archival study. On the ground, the worlds of film/video workers are organized and rationalized around an extensive set of secondary symbolic texts, trade stories, pedagogical rituals, and technologies. All of these rituals and artifacts serve to manage and inflect the social relations and labor activities, even as they enabled each craft and association to collectively imagine itself as a community. Above the ground of the set and postproduction suite, I also unavoidably faced a daunting array of industrial, economic, marketing, and managerial practices that constantly constrained production worker culture within the conglomerates. It wasn’t just that a set of macroscopic forces (globalization, convergence) was animating workers as part of a corporate system (outsourcing, runaway production). Rather, this constraint of workers operated

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via another, entirely di√erent set of higher-level corporate artifacts, rituals, and textual expressions. I have come to see that the relationship between the microcultural practices of creative workers and the macrocultural practices of the industry and its management are both related and fundamentally important in understanding film/television production cultures. For these reasons, the chapters on specific worker practices (trade storytelling, production rituals, machine iconography, and technical practice) examined in the first half of the book must be considered in the context of conglomerate management strategies (multimedia repurposing, under-theradar branding methods, and viral marketing) in the latter half of the book. Production indeed involves physical and manual work. But production also unfolds as a collective, daily cultural performance involving symbolic codes, conventionalized power hierarchies, and (usually) lots of overtime. Addressing film/television work as cultural negotiation and self-representation dramatized for me fundamental changes in industry vividly and very di√erently than did abstract generalizations about corporate economic practices. Approaching production work as cultural expression and social interaction in turn enabled me to understand not just the new politics of labor mutating within the evolving worlds of bid culture, digital boutiques, and outsourcing. Instead, the approach also clarified how machine use and technical design themselves function as manifestations of theory and marks of social distinction and status. Finally, seeing film/video production in its lived dimensions underscores not just how value is added to feature films and television programs, but how creative work also, fundamentally, embodies critical intelligence. The various industrial tendencies examined in this book underscore the need to reconsider how we study and understand cultures of production. The actual extent and complexity of critical theorizing and self-ethnographic reflection by the industry as outlined in the previous chapters also puts into some doubt industry’s ostensible contempt about ‘‘theory’’ as described earlier in the book. Now that the backlash against high theory in film/television has gone mainstream—with recent antitheory missives and broadsides from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor— the target (academic theory) seems increasingly, and suspiciously, like a journalistic straw man.∑Ω Such missives pose as stalwart acts of common sense. But common sense in practice would quickly confront a very di√erent phenomenon in contemporary media. Its makers, technologies, and net-

Conclusion

works of practitioners reveal an industrial culture in which—far from always reducing meaning to self-evident matters of common sense—complex critical and theoretical ideas churn through even mundane industrial matters. Film/video production machines, brand marketing, and business plans are also smart—and they are so in ways frequently not acknowledged by even their makers, managers, or users. This intelligence, that is, can be embedded, distributed, and networked among user-agents as commercial artifacts or forms of shared work. As such, critical industrial practice represents both a social formation and a cultural or institutional problem to be solved. A recent New York Times article piqued the critical skepticism of bloggers about viewers as mindless by arguing that ‘‘watching tv makes you smarter.’’∏≠ A far more interesting and timely question today would have been: ‘‘What makes tv production smarter?’’ The antitheorists may be barking up the wrong tree, or else simply looking in the wrong places for a caricatured and easy mark. Yet their house-cleaning mission may provide a productive occasion for others to reconsider what film/video theory is—both on the set and in practice.

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Appendix 1

Method: Artifacts and Cultural Practices in Production Studies

Filmmakers constantly negotiate their cultural identities through a series of questions traditionally valued as part of media and film studies—namely, questions about what film/video is, how it works, how the viewer responds to it, and how it reflects or forms culture. Yet filmmakers (unlike theorists) seldom systematically elaborate on these questions in lengthy spoken or written forms. Instead, a form of embedded theoretical ‘‘discussion’’ in the work world takes place in and through the tools, machines, artifacts, iconographies, working methods, professional rituals and narratives that film practitioners circulate and enact in film/video trade subcultures. Rather than simply accepting and legitimizing a studio executive’s generalizations from interviews about how film/television works or means, therefore, such explanations should be grounded within the kinds of contexts that I have schematized in this appendix—the material, symbolic, and representational practices of production workers. To do this, I have employed a culturalindustrial method of research to examine and integrate data from four registers or modes of analysis, including the textual analysis of trade and worker artifacts; interviews with film/television workers; ethnographic field observation of production spaces and professional gatherings; and economic/industrial analysis.

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My response to the coded and inflected nature of overt practitioner explanations is to consider them alongside a more systematic study of what I term the deep industrial practices of film/video production. In my research I seek to describe the contexts in which embedded industrial sense making and trade theorizing occurs, and to do so I categorize artifacts and rituals into three registers: fully embedded, semi-embedded, and publicly disclosed ‘‘deep texts’’ (see table 5). The first category, fully embedded deep texts, includes demo tapes, pitch sessions, machine interface design, equipment iconography, how-to manuals for production technologies, trade and craft narratives and anecdotes, on-the-set crew pedagogy and work behavior, union and guild workshops, association/member newsletters, and corporate retreats. These fully embedded deep texts are largely cut o√ from the public and are commercially enacted or circulated by production personnel within the relatively bounded, propriety worlds of work. Although the information contained in cinematographers’ demo tapes or producers’ pitch sessions can sometimes leak out into the public, the primary function of these artifacts and rituals is intraguild, intra-association, or interpersonal interaction and dialogue among crew members, all of which are dynamics involved in the formation and maintenance of groups. The second broad category of workaday industrial theorizing can be understood as ‘‘semi-embedded textual activities. These practices also function as forms of symbolic communication between media professionals. Yet these texts and rituals are simultaneously designed to spur and stimulate ancillary discussion and eventual awareness in the public sphere of the consumer as well. Semi-embedded deep texts include electronic press kits (epks), advertiser up-fronts, trade shows, trade publications, internship programs, technical ‘‘bake-o√s’’ and ‘‘reveals,’’ and panels on ‘‘how to make it in the industry.’’ These semi-embedded deep texts travel further from specific or local working subcultures, and typically function to bring generalizing discussions of the nature and meaning of film from one corporate media company to another. If the fully embedded practices are ‘‘intra-group’’ in nature, semi-embedded practices are ‘‘inter-group’’ and function as institutional dialoguing between media corporations and trade associations. Even if the ultimate objective is to promote or market a studio or network’s film to the viewing public, the deep texts in this second category succeed only if they are persuasive in maintaining or forging new relationships between the makers of content and media journalists (through epks), advertisers (through up-fronts), a≈liates (through a≈liate meetings), clients and buy

Appendix 1 Table 5

fully embedded deep texts and rituals (Intra-group Relations: bounded professional exchanges) ≤ Demo tapes ≤ Pitch sessions ≤ Machine interface design ≤ Equipment iconography ≤ How-to manuals for production technologies ≤ Trade and craft narratives and anecdotes ≤ On-the-set crew pedagogy and work behavior ≤ Union and guild workshops ≤ Association/member newsletters ≤ Corporate retreats

semiembedded deep texts and rituals (Inter-group Relations: professional exchanges with ancillary public viewing) ≤ Electronic press kits (epks) ≤ Advertiser up-fronts ≤ Trade shows ≤ Trade publications ≤ Internship programs ≤ Technical bake-o√s and reveals ≤ Panels on how to make it in the industry

publicly disclosed deep texts and rituals (Extra-group Relations: professional exchanges for explicit public consumption) ≤ Making-of documentaries ≤ dvd director tracks, and ‘‘extras’’ ≤ Docu-stunts during ‘‘sweeps’’ weeks ≤ Online Web sites (tv /dot-com interactions) ≤ Studio- and network-supported fan conventions ≤ Screening ‘‘q&as’’ ≤ Televised show business reports ≤ Viral videos on YouTube.com and MySpace.com

ers (through trade shows), and new personnel (through making-it panels and internships). The third broad set of practices in this model are self-consciously directed at the viewing public, yet still must be recognized as textually inscribed or embedded. Publicly disclosed deep texts include making-of docu-

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mentaries, dvd director tracks and ‘‘extras,’’ docu-stunts during ‘‘sweeps’’ weeks, online Web sites (tv /dot-com interactions), studio- and networksupported fan conventions, and televised show business reports (like Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight ). The use of dvd director tracks, online Web sites, making-of documentaries, and sweeps-week stunts on television and viral videos from studios on YouTube.com and MySpace.com might all be characterized as genres for public (rather than industrial) consumption. While increased viewership is an obvious goal of each of these genres, audience engagement works primarily by ostensibly providing ‘‘access’’ to the ways that practitioners work, think, and talk about how they work and think. This kind of industrial theorizing, that is, is publicly performed for the ostensible benefit of the viewer (the person watching the dvd ‘‘bonus track’’ or the cable tv ‘‘making-of ’’) who is positioned as lucky enough to have been given access to those ‘‘inside’’ the production process. Although these look in some respects like texts or programs that circulate on the very ‘‘surface’’ of mass culture, the public contact made available here is actually limited to and focused on the embedded theorizing process itself. This, then, is a kind of ‘‘extra-group’’ engagement, a far more open form of industrial theorizing than are the previous categories of intra-group, and inter-group deliberation outlined above. Looking closely at the artifacts and deep texts on these lists shows the complex and varied ways that contemporary film/video corporations and their personnel broach, barter, discuss, employ, explain, and contest ideas about the nature and meaning of film/television. Compared to academic media and film theorizing—a discipline developed almost entirely through logically argued written texts—the industry argues with and deploys a far richer variety of communicative registers and media formats to collectively examine and understand film. As I have argued in this book, furthermore, seriously looking at these kinds of demo tapes and epks suggests a range of recurring concerns, tropes, and paradigms—many of which undercut or disregard the explicit explanations o√ered in interviews with producers, at least when undertaken within corporate or industrial spaces. Within the context of a succession of research questions I have attempted to triangulate between these three broad registers, each of which marks a place on the continuum between proprietary industrial information embedding and publicized industrial information disclosure. In addition, to better understand the work worlds that participate in this complex continuum I used four basic method-

Appendix 1

ologies, as follows: ethnographic fieldwork, analyses of technology and trade artifacts, practitioner interviews, and interactions with practitioners as part of staged personal disclosures, q&as, and trade discussions. ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK AND OBSERVATION

My fieldwork and observation in production spaces and trade gatherings provided especially good opportunities for me to examine the second register, semi-embedded industrial texts and practices. In preparing for this book, I spent considerable time between 1993 and 2006 at a succession of film and television industry summits, meetings, conventions, trade shows, festivals, and distribution markets. This fieldwork included observation of production spaces at Los Angeles Center Studios, Raleigh Film Studios, the Post Group, Moviola Digital, Christy’s Editorial, Image Transform/4C, and Fotokem in Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Burbank. In addition, I participated in the following trade production venues: Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (Los Angeles, 1997; Pasadena, 2001), National Association of Television Program Executives syndication market (New Orleans, 2000), Independent Feature Market (New York, 1987, 2001), ShowBiz Expo (Los Angeles, 1997, 1998, 2001), National Association of Broadcasters (Las Vegas, 2000, 2001), Siggraph (Los Angeles, 1997, 1999); Widescreen Festival (Long Beach, 1992, 1993, 1994); hd Expo (Los Angeles, 2005); and Below-the-Line Expo (Los Angeles, 2005). Many of these trade meetings also o√ered production workshops, technical how-to sessions, and side-by-side camera comparisons or shoot-outs, which allowed access to various professionals as described below. During the preparation of this book I also participated as a producer and director of my own projects in the following competitive film festivals and in their accompanying industry panels and markets: Sundance Film Festival (2002), Recontres Cinemas d’Amerique Festival de Toulouse (France, 2002), Los Angeles International Latino Film Festival (2002), Palm Springs Festival of Festivals (2002), Pacific Rim International Film Festival (2002), Cineteca Nacional, Jornada de Cortometraje Mexicano (2002), Cinefestival San Antonio (2003), Dahlonega International Film Festival (2003), Silverlake International Film Festival (2003), Sedona International Film Festival (2004), River Run International Film Festival (2004), and San Francisco Film Arts Festival (2005), among others. Both the trade meetings and these festivals/markets provided extended

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opportunities not just for observing production’s cultural rituals and conversing with production personnel, but also for examining a wide range of fully-embedded and semi-embedded deep texts. PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES AND THEIR REPRESENTATIONS

As fully-embedded production artifacts, production equipment demonstrates a range of insights possible given the various faces that machines assume as tools, cultural expressions, and social practices. This includes equipment’s collective use, interface design, historical antecedents, technical explanations, trade representations, and role in organizing labor. Much of the preparation for this book came from my firsthand experience with a range of contemporary film and television production technologies. This experience included either hands-on use and operation by me, or technical demonstrations for me by other professionals, of the following production trade gear: the Aaton (ltr, xtr), Arriflex (s, sri, iic), Panavision (Panaflex), and Eclair (npr, acl) 16mm and 35mm film cameras; video assist and Cinema Products Steadicam mobile camera supports; Sony, Ikegami, and Panasonic electronic/video field cameras (Betacamsp, dvCam, dvPro); Steenbeck, kem, and Moviola flatbed editing systems; cmx-6000, Avid, Media100, and Final Cut Pro nonlinear editing systems; Adobe After Effects, Shake, and Motion visual graphics and motion software; Rank-Cintel and DaVinci film-to-video transfer and colorizing systems at the Post Group; a / b-roll negative cutting at West Coast Editorial; optical printing, lab timing, and digital intermediate (di) timing at Fotokem; Panther Dolly, Technocrane, and various smaller camera support systems manufactured by Miller, O’Connor, and Manfrotto; grip, c-stand, and lighting equipment by Mole-Richardson, Colortran, Matthews, and Arriflex/Arrilights; and, finally, 16mm and 35mm camera negative and intermediate film stocks by Eastman Kodak and Fuji Film. Far more than exploring machines merely as such, in this book I have considered such technologies as material forms of critical and aesthetic craft knowledge (in machine and user interface design); as the nexus of dynamic, social actor-network series (via the teams that use and animate these technologies); and as cultural and social expressions (in terms of the way they are used in work and public spheres, discussed among practitioners, and spun in trade discourses).

Appendix 1

INTERVIEWS WITH PRODUCTION WORKERS

As the book’s chapters have underscored, scholars should remain appropriately skeptical about ‘‘behind-the-scenes’’ explanations o√ered in industry’s corporate, publicity, or marketing contexts, since such insights are invariably spin driven. Yet personal disclosures and conversations between scholars and workers sometimes serve as the most e√ective way to cut through the cloud of studio/network marketing flak and spin. The research for this book has benefited in this way especially from a series of discussions I had in Los Angeles with various film and television professionals between 1994 and 2006. These encounters included conversations and interviews with the directors/executive producers John Cassar, Scott Brazil, and Becky Smith; the producer/directors Spike Jones Jr., Scott Palazzo, and Grace Lee; the screenwriter/producers Felicia Henderson and Stanley Rubin; the television director Herb Stein; the screenwriters Robert Powell and Belinda Bauer; the producers Greg Vogel, Barbara Boyle, Myrl Schreibman, and Gil Cates; the Stedicam operator and dp Guy Bee; the cinematographers and dps Tom Denove and Bill McDonald; the editors Scott Powell, Chris Willingham, Nancy Richardson, and Barbara Marks; the actor Catherine Dent; the assistant director Lynda Tarryk; the associate producer Dave Hall; the production managers and coordinators Bryan Sierra and Stephen Hubbert; the postproduction technician and screenwriter Devora Gomez; and many others whose names are withheld in citations and endnotes in the preceding chapters to ensure their anonymity. I found a range of production workshops with professionals to be particularly valuable: a workshop in nonlinear editing by Avid in 1998; a workshop in Final Cut Pro editing software at the ifp /Los Angeles in 2005; a lighting/cinematography workshop directed by Haskell Wexler in 1997; a lighting for HiDef cinematography workshop coordinated by George Spiro Dibie, asc, at hd Expo in 2004; and a lighting/cinematography workshop sponsored by Eastman Kodak at ucla in 2005, which was directed by the dp Lazlo Kovacs, asc. STAGED PERSONAL DISCLOSURES AND MANAGED CONTACT ZONES

While practitioner interviews and conversations helped clear up a range of questions germane to the book in my own mind, another set of more

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constrained conversational disclosures took place in the kinds of halfway houses and ‘‘contact zones’’ that I examined in chapter 2. These forms of staged access can be understood within the second and third registers of deep industrial practice—that is, as semi-embedded or publicly disclosed explanations. The carefully managed personal and behind-the-scenes disclosures examined for this book include, among a series of staged disclosure events, a table reading by the cast, and discussion by the writer/executive producer Mitch Hurwitz, of Imagine/Fox’s Arrested Development in 2004. Proving especially helpful were panel discussions and q&as with the executive producer Tom Fontana and the cast and creative sta√ of nbc’s Homicide and hbo’s Oz at the Museum of Television and Radio (mtr) in 1999; with writers, producers, and network programmers of ‘‘reality television’’ at the mtr in 2001; with the writers and producers of The Simpsons at the Writers Guild of America (wga) in 2001; with producers, packagers, and executives at the f / x, Hallmark, and gsn networks debating how to create content for the new cable networks and multimedia platforms (hosted by atas in 2005); with the producers, cast, and writers of Playhouse 90 (1999); with the producers J. J. Abrams, Carlton Cuse, and Bryan Burk of abc’s Lost (2005); with the producers Marc Cherry, Michael Edelstein, and Tom Spezialy of Desperate Housewives (2005); and with producer/director Bryan Singer, and the creators and cast of House (2006) at the William Paley Festival of Television and Directors Guild of America (dga). Of the many screenings and in-person appearances of film/television practitioners at the ucla film school between 1992 and 2006 I found several panels and postscreening q&as to be particularly helpful, including a panel on producing and transitioning to the industry with the studio executive and producer Peter Guber, the creative agent Arnold Rifkin, and the network television executive Tom Nunan in 1999; conversations with the studio executive and atas president Dick Askin at the Los Angeles Peabody Awards Meeting in 2004; q&a discussions about directing independent features for the studios with the film director Catherine Hardwicke in 2005; the ‘‘Producers’ Marketplace’’ and public pitch competition finals in 2005; and a q&a with the dp Haskell Wexler about the ‘‘12 On / 12 O√ ’’ safety campaign and the sobering state of the working conditions for California production crews in 2006. The ‘‘Open House’’ at the American Society of Cinematographers in 2006 also o√ered the opportunity to mix and talk with asc members on an informal basis. Two industry groups granted me extended formal access to industry

Appendix 1

professionals. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (atas) enabled me to complete the interviews with Cassar, Brazil, Palazzo, Dent, Jones Jr., Willingham, and Powell, described above in 2003. The National Association of Television Programming Executives (natpe) provided a fellowship to attend and participate in their annual television syndication market in 2000. This provided me with the opportunity to talk to, and listen to presentations by, agents, syndicators, distributors, producers, media regulators, and studio executives. Various statements and quotes, taken from many hours of audio and videotape transcripts of these conversations, panel discussions, and meetings, are cited in notes throughout the chapters of this book. The book also builds on scores of hours of transcripts of technical and production industry discussions recorded on audio and video at Showbiz Expo in Los Angeles in 1997 and at the nab Convention in Las Vegas in 2000 and 2001. DEMO TAPES AND DEEP TEXTS EXCHANGED BETWEEN PROFESSIONALS AND TRADE GROUPS

Another set of embedded worker artifacts proved instrumental in my research for this volume: mediated equipment demos and personal reels (on video, cd, dvd). These demos and comp reels are cited in notes throughout the book, but especially in chapters 3 and 4 on below-the-line workers. The technical, personal, and production demonstration tapes, promos, previews, network fall-season presentation reels, individual compilation reels, electronic press kits, recorded interviews, corporate videos, and recorded video documentation used in the research for this book include the following: ‘‘Advertising in the Digital Age.’’ natpe. vhs. (Video documentation). Jan. 27, 2000. ‘‘Air-to-Ground Surveillance: Wescam, Rock Solid-Worldwide.’’ (Demo). 13:45 min. 1998. ‘‘Alias.’’ (Demo). 1992. ‘‘Alladin Media Printer.’’ Pinnacle Systems, Inc. (Demo). 9 min. 1994. ‘‘An Evening with John Wells.’’ atas Archives. vhs. (Video Documentation). April, 2003. ‘‘Arriflex Cameras.’’ (Demo). 10 min. 1989.

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‘‘Avid Media Composer.’’ (Demo). 10 min. 1992. ‘‘Because Life Doesn’t Stand Still.’’ Cinema Products. Steadicam Jr. (Demo). 1992. ‘‘Below-the-Line Expo: Raleigh Film Studios, Hollywood.’’ dvCam tape. (Video documentation). June 11, 2005. ‘‘Betacam sp 2000 Pro Series.’’ Video Preview (Demo). Sony. 1991. ‘‘Blue: The World’s First Interdigital Post Workstation.’’ Fast Multimedia. 1997. ‘‘Body Rocks.’’ Pope Productions. (Advertisement/ Promo). n.d. ‘‘Butterfly Snorkel Camera.’’ (Demo). n.d. ‘‘Cambridge Animation Systems.’’ Siggraph. (Demo Reel). 1996. ‘‘Catalog of Digital E√ects/Electronic Title Samples.’’ Renaissance Video Corporation. 3/4’’ U-Matic. (Demo). 1998. ‘‘Cinemeter II. Marsh/ Glickman Enterprises.’’ Hollywood Video Services. Burbank. n.d. ‘‘Co√ee with Bernie Brillstein.’’ Session 8. natpe. (Video Documentation). Jan. 25, 2000. ‘‘Controlling the Image: Lighting for Electronic Cinematography.’’ Part II. Henry Mathias (Instructional Video/Demo). 1988. Colonizing Cyberspace. pbs. (1 hr. Broadcast Documentary). July 22, 1993. ‘‘CopterVision: Remote Control Systems for Film and Video.’’ (Promo/ Demo). nab. 2000. ‘‘Crossing the Line in tv Editing & Content.’’ atas. Lightning Dubs. vhs. (Video Documentation). October 30, 2003. ‘‘Denove, Tom.’’ (Compilation Demo Reel). 2001. ‘‘Digital Daze: The Living Curriculum.’’ natpe. vhs (Video Documentation). Jan. 25, 2000. ‘‘Digital Jungle. Post Production.’’ (Compilation Demo Reel). 2001; (Compilation Demo Reel). 2002. ‘‘Digital Magic.’’ (Demo). Winter 1992. ‘‘Discovery Channel Promo.’’ Discovery Channel. vhs. (Preview Presentation Reel). n.d. ‘‘Dr. Phil.’’ atas. Lightning Dubs. (vhs). (Interview Video). Feb. 25, 2003. ‘‘Drama Is . . . Interviews with Today’s Leading Actors and Directors.’’ tnt. vhs. (Corporate Demo). 2003. ‘‘Edit Flex.’’ nec. (Equipment Demo). n.d. ‘‘El Naftazteca.’’ G. Gomez-Pena. (Experimental Video). 1995.

Appendix 1

‘‘Entourage : Electronic Press Kit.’’ hbo. (dvd-epk). 2006. ‘‘Expert Vision Full-Body System.’’ Motion Analysis Corporation. (Demo). c. Aug. 1996. ‘‘Final Cut Pro Demonstration.’’ ProMax Systems, Inc. (Demo). Feb. 1, 2001. ‘‘First Person, Maria Shriver : Corporate Surveillance.’’ nbc (Broadcast). July 21, 1993. ‘‘FUJI Photo Film.’’ Fuji U.S.A, Inc. Motion Picture Products Division. (Demo). n.d. ‘‘General Session: Sid Caesar (Chairman’s Award).’’ natpe. vhs. (Video Documentation). Jan. 25, 2000. ‘‘Graphic Motion Group.’’ (Equipment Demo). n.d. ‘‘Hoopstv.com.’’ (Corporate Demo). 2000. ‘‘Indy 500: How Producers Will Thrive in the Digital Age.’’ The Living Curriculum. 2000. ‘‘natpe.’’ vhs. (Video documentation). Jan. 26, 2000. ‘‘Information Superhighway Summit.’’ ucla. C-Span. (Cablecast). Jan. 11, 1994. ‘‘Innovation Optics.’’ Probe Lense Tape. (Demo). 1998. ‘‘Inside Trinity Demo: Featuring Kiki Stockhammar.’’ Play Incorporated. (Demo). 1999. ‘‘An Introductory Overview for New Users: Inside Trinity.’’ Play Inc. Trinity. (Demo). n.d. ‘‘Jump Back: Digital Juice.’’ www.Digitaljuice.com. 2003. ‘‘Introvision. L.A. Times Movie Trailer.’’ (Preview). 1999. ‘‘Lab Ky Mo.’’ dvd. Rochelle Stevens and Co. (Compilation Demo Reel). 2003. ‘‘Legends of Syndication.’’ natpe. vhs. (Trade Documentary). Oct. 31, 2000. ‘‘Lords of Dogtown : Screening and q&a with Director, Producer, and Editor.’’ Bridges Theater, ucla. dvcam tape. (Video documentation). July 9, 2005. ‘‘Masters of Illusion.’’ (Making-of ). n.d. ‘‘Matrox Studio.’’ (Demo). n.d. ‘‘Mirage.’’ Digital Video E√ects by Quantel. vhs. (Demo). n.d. ‘‘Metrolight.’’ vhs. (Demo). Spring 1992. ‘‘Microdolly Hollywood.’’ vhs. (Demo). n.d. ‘‘Motion.’’ Apple Computer. dvd. (Demo). 2005.

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‘‘nab: Las Vegas.’’ vhs. (Video Documentation, edited). April 2001. ‘‘natpe at nite: Pitch Me!’’ Session 7. natpe. (Video Documentation). Jan. 24, 2000. ‘‘nbc Revamp.’’ Betacam-sp /vhs. (Corporate Branding Demo). 1994, 1995. ‘‘Pacific Data Images.’’ pdi. cgi Demo. vhs (Demo). 1992. ‘‘Politically Incorrect : Panel.’’ Session 9. natpe. (vhs). (Video Documentation). Jan. 25, 2000. ‘‘Pro8mm: Supersound.’’ vhs. (Demo). n.d. ‘‘Producers’ Marketplace.’’ Competitive public pitch-session and critique by studio execs. Freud Theater, ucla. dvcam. (video documentation). June 16, 2005. ‘‘Promos: Fall Season Presentation.’’ upn. (Preview Presentation Reel). 1998–1999. ‘‘Promos: The Comedy Network.’’ Comedy Central. ucla Film and Television Archives, pva111997. (Preview Demo). (Preview Presentation Reel). n.d. ‘‘Promos 2000: Hot or Not?’’ Session 27. natpe. (Video Documentation). Jan. 26, 2000. ‘‘Radcam: Miniature Wireless Radio-Control Camera Cars.’’ Innovision. (Demo). 1997. ‘‘Renaissance Productions.’’ vhs. (Compilation Demo Reel). Oct. 17, 1988. ‘‘Revolution.’’ Newtek Video Toaster. vhs. (Demo). 1990. ‘‘Roseanne : Electronic Press Kit.’’ abc. ucla Film and Television Archives, va200043. (epk). n.d. ‘‘ShowBiz Expo.’’ John Caldwell. (Video Documentation, Hi8mm). June 1997. ‘‘Simmons, John.’’ (Compilation Demo Reel). 2000. ‘‘Steadicam ‘efp’— It’s Your Move.’’ Cinema Products Corporation. (Demo). 1992. ‘‘Super Panther Dolly.’’ Shotmaker Dollies and Cranes Inc. (Demo). 1997. ‘‘Superstars of Digital Media.’’ Media 100. vhs. (Demo). 1998. ‘‘Television Spots, Feature Trailers, Music Video Montage, Corporate Presentation.’’ New Wave Productions. (Compilation Demo Reel). 1988. ‘‘Television: The World’s Best View.’’ natpe Public Service Announcements. Betacam-sp /hdCam. (psa Broadcast Masters). Jan. 2000. ‘‘Testa’s Convention tv: Day 1 At CES.’’ (Compilation Demo Reel). 1997.

Appendix 1

‘‘Testa’s Convention tv: Day 3 At nab.’’ (Compilation Demo Reel). 1997. ‘‘The Making of Body Rocks.’’ Produced by esny (Demo). n.d. ‘‘The Project: Video Editing.’’ Lightworks V.I.P. (Demo). 1997. ‘‘The Speed of Ideas Video.’’ avid Xpress. 1998 ‘‘The Studio.’’ Production Equipment Training Tape. Westlake Village. n.d. ‘‘Tools for the Creative Professional.’’ Digital Juice. (Demo). n.d. ‘‘tv Before 1950. Popular Science.’’ (Newsreel Outtakes). c.1948. ‘‘Ultimatte Demo.’’ Rebo Studios. hdtv. (Demo). 1990. ‘‘Using the Web to Increase Your Net.’’ natpe. (Video Documentation). Jan. 25, 2000. ‘‘Wescam Sports.’’ Wescam/Hill’s Video Production. (Demo). 1997. ‘‘What Did You Have in Mind?’’ Media 100 Demo. 1997. ‘‘When Technology Attacks! Audience Viewing in the Future.’’ natpe. (Video Documentation). Jan. 26, 2000. ‘‘Who Needs to Sleep?’’ Screening and q&a with Haskell Wexler, asc, on Hollywood labor conditions. dvcam tape. (video documentation). May 2006. ‘‘X-Files: The Movie: ‘‘Electronic Press Kit.’’ Fox Studios. 56 min. Betacam-sp. (epk). June 4, 1998. ‘‘z-jib: The Ultimate Jib Arm.’’ Training Workshop. z-jib. vhs. (Demo). 1997. REFLEXIVE ON-SCREEN TELEVISION SHOWS AND PRODUCTIONS

In my research for this book, the various television shows and productions that critique or analyze other television shows and film productions (by publicly disclosing behind-the-scenes and making-of knowledge to audiences) include the following: Arrested Development. ‘‘Special Features’’/ Season 1. Disc 3. Fox. (dvd). 2004. ‘‘Best Buy dvd Ads.’’ vhs. (Commercial Spots). 2004. Brady: An American Chronicle. Nick-at-Nite. (Cablecast). 1994. Celebrity Death Match. mtv. (Cablecast). Aug. 6, 1998. CSI: Miami. (Webcam sorority episode). cbs. (Broadcast). Nov. 17, 2003. Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Second Season. hbo. (dvd). 2004.

357

Appendix 1

358

Cyber Bandits. vhs (Feature Documentary). 1994. Daily Show: ‘‘Guide to Home Video.’’ (Cablecast). July 20, 1998. Days of Our Lives. cbs. Dir. Herb Stein. (Broadcast, episode 8557). June 2, 1999. Desperate Housewives: Cast and Creative Team Onstage. William S. Paley Festival. mtr. dvd. (Video Documentation). March 8, 2005. Dick Van Dyke Show: ‘‘A Day in the Life of Alan Brady.’’ cbs. (Broadcast). April 6, 1966. Dick Van Dyke Show: ‘‘You Ought to Be in Pictures.’’ cbs. (Broadcast). April 27, 1966. Digital Movies. Segment on from pbs News. (Broadcast). March 12, 2002. Digital TV: A Cringely Crash Course. pbs (Broadcast). Nov. 9, 1996. Who Is Allen Smithee. amc. (Cablecast). March 2002. Drew Carey. Live Episode. (Broadcast). Nov. 10, 1999. Dumont Promos. ucla Film and Television Archives, pva9435. vhs. n.d. (c.1948–1950). dvd -tv . amc. (Sunday programming block). (Cablecast). Fall 2004. Emmy Awards. nbc. (Broadcast). Sept. 13, 1996. Empire of the Air. pbs. Dir. Ken Burns. pbs Home Video. (vhs). 1991. Entertainment Tonight. (Segment on tv ad hype during Superbowl). (Broadcast). Jan. 28, 1993. Entourage: The Complete First Season. hbo. (dvd). 2005. Entourage: The Complete Second Season. hbo. (dvd). 2006. er: ‘‘Ambush’’ (The ‘‘Live’’ Episode). Warner Bros. Home Video. (vhs). 1998. Eyewitness News. (‘‘New tv’’ programming segment). kabc. (Broadcast). May 19, 1992. Freaky Links. Premiere. Fox. (Broadcast). Oct. 6, 2000. Frontline: ‘‘Anatomy of a Homicide. ’’ pbs. (Broadcast). November 2, 1998. Frontline: ‘‘Hackers.’’ pbs. (Broadcast). Feb. 13, 2001. Frontline: ‘‘The Merchants of Cool.’’ pbs Home Video. (dvd). 2004. Frontline: ‘‘The Monster that Ate Hollywood.’’ pbs Home Video. (dvd). 1999. The Future of Film. cnn. News segment. (Cablecast). Nov. 5, 1993. Gay Hollywood. amc. (Cablecast). Aug. 11, 2003. Glick. Comedy Central. (Cablecast). 2003. Great Moments in Television. cbs. (Broadcast). Dec. 31,1993. Project Greenlight. hbo. Series. (Cablecast). 2001–2002.

Appendix 1

Glick. Primetime. Comedy Central. (Cablecast). July 20, 2001. Hercules, the Legendary Journey: ‘‘For Those of You Just Joining Us.’’ (Broadcast). January 9, 1999. Hidden Art of Hollywood. kcet. (Broadcast). Aug. 25, 2004. Homicide. nbc. Episode dir. Barbara Kopple. (Broadcast). Jan. 3, 1997. Honda Virtual Reality. Honda. (Broadcast spot). 1994. Hype. Premiere. The wb. (Broadcast). October 8, 2000. Inside the Actors Studio: ‘‘Simpson’s Cast.’’ Bravo. (Cablecast). Aug. 24, 2003. Larry Sanders Show: ‘‘As My Career Lay Dying.’’ hbo. (Cablecast). Mar. 29, 1998. Larry Sanders Show: ‘‘Roseanne.’’ ucla Film and Television Archives, pva4346. n.d. Law & Order, SVU: ‘‘Game.’’ (Broadcast). February 8, 2005. Legend of the Beverly Hillbillies. cbs. (Broadcast). May 24, 1993. Live Shot. upn. (Broadcast). Sept. 5, 1995. Look at Me: The Webcam Explosion. msnbc. Aug. 13, 2000. Los Angeles Plays Itself. Thom Anderson. (Independent Feature Film). 2004. Lost: Cast and Creative Team Onstage. William S. Paley Television Festival. mtr. dvd. (Video documentation). March 12, 2005. Mad About You. (Episode done in one shot). (Broadcast). Dec. 16, 1996. Making the Band. mtv. (Cablecast). 2001. mtr : Influences. cbs. (Broadcast). Aug. 27, 1999. Naked Hollywood: ‘‘The Producers.’’ nbc. (Broadcast). Sept. 1, 1990. nbc Nightly News. (Ad exec ‘‘rebranding’’ U.S. vs. bin Laden). nbc. (Broadcast). Nov. 7, 2001. Nerds 2.01: A History of the Internet. pbs. Jan. 25, 1998. Network. Dir. Paddy Chayevsky. (Feature Film). 1976. Newsnight with Aaron Brown. cnn. News segment on TiVo. (Cablecast). Nov. 30, 2004. Next Action Star. nbc. (Broadcast). June 29, 2004. Nightline: ‘‘Virtual Reality.’’ abc. (Broadcast). May 18, 1992. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. Disinfo.com. (dvd). 2004. Pixar Campus. Monsters, Inc. Pixar. Opening Bonus Track. (dvd). n.d. Pop-Up Video. vh1. (Cablecast). July 22, 1998. Reality of Reality: ‘‘The Unseen Side.’’ Bravo. (Cablecast). Sept. 8, 2003. Reporters Prep for War. cnn. News segment. (Broadcast). Aug. 15, 2003.

359

Appendix 1

360

Roseanne: ‘‘Isn’t It Romantic.’’ (Soap Opera Episode). abc. (Broadcast). May 17, 1994. Shoot-Out. Hosted by Peter Guber and Peter Bart. amc. (Cablecast). Nov. 28, 2004. Sports Center: ‘‘The OJ Verdict.’’ espn. (Cablecast). n.d. (c. 1995). Sportsnight. abc. (Broadcast). Jan. 26, 1999. Sportsnight. abc. (Broadcast). Oct. 4, 1999. Talk Radio. Dir. Oliver Stone. (Feature Film). 1988. tbn : Behind the Scenes. Trinity Broadcasting. (Broadcast). July 22, 1998. The Decision Makers. abc News Special. (Broadcast). n.d. The Downer Channel. Premiere. nbc. (Broadcast). July 25, 2001. The Insider: ‘‘Fall Season Previews.’’ wb. (Broadcast). Sept. 11, 2002. 20/20: ‘‘Surveillance.’’ abc. (News Feature). Sept. 1, 1995. The Simple Life Reunion. Fox. (Broadcast). Jan. 13, 2003. The Simpsons. (Kids ghostwrite Itchy and Scratchy ). Fox. (Broadcast). May 19, 2004. The Simpsons. ‘‘Behind the Laughter.’’ (Broadcast). n.d. thirtysomething: ‘‘Series Finale.’’ abc. (Broadcast). May 27, 1991. tv Nation. nbc. Dir. Michael Moore. (Broadcast). Dec. 28, 1994. 20/20: Special on Ellen DeGeneres. abc. (Broadcast). April 25, 1997. U-2: Pop-Mart. abc. Special. (Broadcast). April 26, 1997. Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography. pbs. Prod. afi /asc /nhk. (Broadcast). Aug. 18, 1996. War: New Simulation Technologies. msnbc. Pat Buchanan. (Cablecast). c. March 2003. Wayne’s World II: ‘‘Electronic Press Kit.’’ Fox Studios. Betacam-sp. ucla Film and Television Archives, va2004tm. (epk). n.d. The X-Files: ‘‘Behind the Scenes.’’ Fox. Special. (Broadcast). June 15, 1998. The X-Files: ‘‘Drive.’’ Fox. (Broadcast). Nov. 15, 1998. The X-Files: Fight the Future. 20th Century-Fox. (dvd). 1998. The X-Files: ‘‘Hollywood A.D.’’ Fox. (Broadcast). Aug. 30, 2000. The X-Files: ‘‘First Person Shooter.’’ Fox. (Broadcast). Feb. 27, 2000. While this appendix provides only the basic definitions, rationale, and outline of my methodology, the in-depth studies found in each of the book’s chapters provide more complete models for pursuing production studies research in the future. Whereas the phenomena I describe above were once

Appendix 1

anchored in Hollywood, many are now accessible by scholars and teachers everywhere. atas, ampas, and the mtr (in both Los Angeles and New York), for example, make extensive audio and videotaped interviews, oral histories, and discussions available for viewing and study by both scholars and students. After several years of hosting real-time industry discussions via satellite hookup across the country, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences recently placed online much of its library of interviews with production professionals; a striking move for an industry that still considers all content proprietary. Demo tapes and dvds are now available to consumers for many of the crossover professional/consumer software and hardware examined in this book, and almost any dvd includes extensive ‘‘staged’’ making-of narratives. In addition, every film and television company is filling its Web sites and portable media platforms with behind-the-scenes information. The amount of reflexive on-screen programming dwarfs the survey of behind-the-scenes programming that I sketched out in chapter 7, thereby providing viewers with a round-the-clock diet of everything from Fox Movie Classic’s After Film School series to vh1 and the e! network’s wallto-wall deconstructions of Hollywood and popular media phenomena. Ironically, this ubiquitous multimedia bu√et of film-and-televisionabout-film-and-television sometimes seems to produce the opposite of its intended e√ect. Rather than actually providing credible revelations or authentic secrets about what is actually going on in the industry’s ‘‘inside’’—or even cultivating the desire for it—industry’s reflexive overdose arguably cultivates doubts. Cynicism about overselling and overkill makes it clear that much can be gained by examining reflexive flak as a primary rather than secondary object of study; that is, as deep textual practices, collective behaviors, and socio-professional expressions that are both industrially and culturally significant. Industrial reflexivity unseats traditional anxieties about gaining access to industry’s guarded center. This, in turn, makes the self-referencing borderlands between industry and audience a compelling question to be solved.

361

Appendix 2

A Taxonomy of DVD Bonus Track Strategies and Functions

title and distribution info

bonus track / featurette

critical function

RESUSCITATION

The Decalogue: Special dvd Ed, 562m, 2000 (Facets)

Critic Ebert provides advocacy for obscure films

Teaching, film appreciation class about lost masters

Pinocchio, 100m, 2002 (Miramax)

‘‘Original’’ Italian version with English subtitles

Reviving box o≈ce failure by changing cultural context

Chinese Connection, 2003 (York Entertainment)

Music rescored/sound redubbed as hip hop/slang

Repurposing dead martial arts franchise as hip, urban, contemporary

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, 75m, 2003 (Warner)

Interviews with voice-over actors of animated film

C-list actors earnestly flog low-budget film’s complexity

Appendix 2

title and distribution info

bonus track / featurette

critical function

Hollywood Homicide, 116m, 2003 (Columbia)

Bored director Shelton explains censors ruined film

Half-hearted attempt to recoup big losses in ancillary market

The Stepford Wives, 92m, 2004 (Paramount)

Director ignores box o≈ce disaster to reexplain film

As if highlighting original premise and arcs will redeem director’s failure

CROSS-PROMOTION

Predator: Collector’s Edition, 107m, 1987 (Fox)

Trailer for upcoming Alien vs. Predator 2004 feature

Flog new ‘‘sequel’’ with dvd ‘‘backstory’’ provided by 1987 film

The Lion King 1 1/2, 77m, 2004 (Disney)

Parodies of a&e’s Biography and trivia game show

Hype critical distinction of cheap direct-to-video release

Alien Quadrilogy, 2003

Featurette on propmaster ‘‘Aliens in the Basement’’

Prop collector as ‘‘star’’; bonus track as review bait for EW

Girl with a Pearl Earring, 100m, 2003 (Lions Gate)

Music video for rock song ‘‘Girl with a Pearl’’

Film star appears in mv; mv appears on film’s dvd

cbs Sneak Peak, 2004 (cbs)

Clips of upcoming network season plus csi feature

dvd fulfills function of network ‘‘up-fronts’’ but for audiences

Kingpin, 303m, 2004 (nbc)

Trailer/plug for nbc’s Law and Order

Miniseries dvd serves as platform for rest of network shows

VIRTUAL FILMMAKING

Men in Black: Special Edition, 2001

Interactive editing workshop, viewers choose takes

Cineaste/fan identification, imagining oneself as crew member

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, laserdisc, 1992 (Criterion)

Interactive editing workshop, viewers choose takes

Cineaste/fan identification, imagining oneself as crew member

Appendix 2

title and distribution info

bonus track / featurette

critical function

AUTHORIAL CONTROL

Panic Room: Special Edition, 112m, 2002 (Columbia/TriStar)

Shows relation of storyboard to final cut of film

Previsualization dominates, thus proving director’s sophistication

Russian Ark, 96m, 2002 (Wellspring)

Doc and commentary explain how single take is achieved

Impossible one-take technical accomplishment via cohesion

Cooler, 102m, 2003 (Lions Gate)

Star Baldwin a no-show, but gets e√usive praise

Covers over on-set fights between director and star

Curb Your Enthusiasm, 390m, 2000 (hbo)

Producer/star complains he ‘‘appears under duress’’

Mocks featurette trope of dvd participation as index of power

Once Upon a Time in Mexico, 102m, 2003 (Columbia/TriStar)

3 docs by Rodriguez showing complete involvement

Vision and zealous concern of creator, dvd as bigger stage for ‘‘auteur’’

INTELLIGENCE / VIRTUOSITY

The Godfather: dvd Collection, 2003 (Paramount)

Analysis of cinematography, analysis of music/sound

Profound quality/complexity in concept/execution of production

The Magnolia Diaries, 2000

74-min. making-of of complete production process

Profound and complete conceptualization of all details in film

Lost in La Mancha, 93m, 2003 (Docudrama)

2-hr. director interviews by Salmon Rushdie and NYT

Profound intellect and artistic mania of Terry Gilliam

Directors Label, 11hrs, 2003 (Palm Pictures)

Clips of successful film directors’ early music videos

The genius was in their earliest ‘‘sketches’’; dvd is demo reel

CULTURAL INFLUENCE

Gilmore Girls: Complete 1st Season, 15h, 2001 (Warner)

Bonus doc explains origins and ‘‘Gilmoreisms’’

Attempts to historify cultural slang lingo from series dialogue

Appendix 2

title and distribution info

bonus track / featurette

critical function

Girl with a Pearl Earring, 100m, 2003 (Lions Gate)

Sundance Channel’s ‘‘Anatomy of a Scene’’

Hijacks pop critical reception to legitimize itself

Fog of War, 107m, 2003 (Columbia/TriStar)

LBJ’s 1964 antiNuke/Goldwater ‘‘Daisy Girl’’ ad

Hijacks historical benchmark to establish 2003 film’s import

Anna Nicole Show: The 1st Season, 4h, 2002 (LionsGate)

‘‘Nicole speaks on’’ is montage of E! network promos

Lazy dependence on original marketing spots to prove import

The Jack Paar Collection, 384m, 1959–65 (Shout!)

Montage includes interviews with Kennedy and Goldwater

Entire dvd is intertextual collage, making of American legend

LEGACY / AUTHENTICITY

Beyond Borders, 126m, 2003 (Paramount)

un secretary Kofi Annan ‘‘appreciates’’ authenticity

To give credibility versus excessive melodrama

Sex and the City: 5th Season, 4hr, 2002 (hbo Video)

Exclusive look at costumer designing show fashions

To underscore the true consumer reality/main subtext behind show

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, dvd, 1992

Coppola’s memorabilia; photos for production design

Proof of originary insight/vision

Russian Ark, 96m, 2002 (Wellspring)

Documentary on the Russian Hermitage

Underscores the national and cultural need to make this film

Dick Van Dyke Show: Seasons 1/2, 13hr, 1963 (Image)

Interviews and failed series pilot starring Rob Reiner

Buried stories from America’s cultural heritage revealed

AGAINST ALL ODDS

Searching for Paradise, 88m, 2003 (Sundance Channel)

Workshop of scene at Sundance Inst., 4 years earlier

Humble origins, heroic struggle to get made, fortitude, vision

Lost in La Mancha, 93m, 2003 (Docudrama)

Deleted scenes, making-ofs show production catastrophes

Nightmare via making-of of making-of

Appendix 2

title and distribution info

bonus track / featurette

critical function

Finding Nemo, 100m, 2003 (Disney)

‘‘Filmmaker’s World’’ shows massive task and minutiae

High-tech as genric mountain to climb in technical making-ofs

Dopamine, 85m, 2003 (Sundance)

Making-of shows frantic speed of shoot and no budget

True artists survive despite economic hostilities, hardship

REBUTTAL

The Reagans, 180m, 2003 (Lions Gate)

Scenes censored by Showtime plus political speeches

dvd fights back against cbs cave-in to right-wing political figures

Bowling for Columbine, 119m, 2002 (mgm)

On-camera 15 min Moore defense of Oscar speech

Fight back against political retribution by press and Hollywood

King of Queens: 1st Season, 10hr, 1999 (Columbia/ TriStar)

Star explains how nbc rejected the show as stupid

Mocking the stupid net execs who missed out on big success

The Magdalene Sisters, 119m, 2002 (Miramax)

Doc tells history of asylums plus interviews with victims

Legal evidence o√ered to prove film’s case against antagonists

Capturing the Friedmans, 2hr, 2003 (hbo)

2 hours of never-before-seen ‘‘evidence’’ and footage

Doc about crime/trial continues to make its case (as promo)

FAN BARTER

Bu√y the Vampire Slayer: Season 5, 16hr, 2001 (Fox)

Examines place of nonsupernatural death in series

Narrative minutiae to create fan dialogues

Kill Bill Vol. 1, 111m, 2003 (Miramax)

Minimal 20 min making-of; scarcity of background

Makes Tarantino ‘‘junkies’’ buy first ‘‘empty’’ release plus special ed. later

The Godfather: dvd Collection, 2003 (Paramount)

Corleone family tree; Godfather historical timeline

Challenges fans to decipher franchise’s narratalogical labyrinth

Appendix 2

title and distribution info

bonus track / featurette

critical function

The X-Files: Complete 9th Season, 14h, 2002 (Fox)

2 documentaries on series made 6–7 years earlier

Attempt to cultivate and reinforce historical ‘‘life of series’’

Final Destination 2, 91m, 2003 (New Line)

‘‘Pop-up’’ screens link scenes to production ‘‘secrets’’

Sustain fan interest via internal ‘‘pop-up video’’ critical mode

UNRULY TRACKS

Three Kings (re-release), 2005 (Warner)

33 min Soldiers Pay overt antiwar documentary

Studio cuts antiwar featurette from dvd and delays release

Appendix 3

Practitioner Avowal/Disavowal (Industrial Doublespeak)

disclosures / avowals

non-disclosures / disavowals

(understood via intentional discourses)

(understood via embedded industrial practices)

Industrial disclosures Unsolicited explanations Informants, interviews

Deep texts that analyze industry Actor-network behaviors Iconographies, narratives, rituals

myth-cliché from producers

forms of disavowal from producers

(public relations goal)

(industrial logic elided)

‘‘Nobody knows anything’’ (Aura of chance, in irrational media market)

Disavowal of rationality by execs claiming artistic vision (in industry that is heavily rationalized and continuously researched)

‘‘Fake it, until you make it’’ (Aura of self-su≈ciency, against all odds)

Disavowal of cooperative nature of work by ‘‘players’’ (while all advancement careerwise depends upon ‘‘who you know’’)

Appendix 3

myth-cliché from producers

forms of disavowal from producers

(public relations goal)

(industrial logic elided)

‘‘All information is marketing’’ (Aura of persuasive ability)

Disavowal of basic industrial need for producer’s product (when media content fulfills manufacturing need and corporate logic)

‘‘I’ve developed a ‘feel’ for winners’’ (Aura of personal intuition and magic touch)

Disavowal of collective authorship in public appearances (while industry works by dredging creative ideas from anonymous writers’ rooms)

‘‘I only produce projects I care about’’ (Aura of personal integrity)

Disavowal of bottom-line imperative (even though industry is driven by ‘‘bottom feeders’’ and endless repetition)

‘‘Our only goal is entertainment’’ (Aura of responsiveness to audiences)

Disavowal of critical intention by successful producers (when artifacts and media texts explicitly promote producer’s intention)

‘‘Hollywood is a state of mind’’ (Cult of personality)

Disavowal of legalized corporate relations (when legal contracting rules corporate business activities and careers)

Appendix 4

Corporate Reflexivity vs. Worker Reflexivity (The Two Warring Flipsides of Industrial Self-Disclosure)

TOP-DOWN CORPORATE REFLEXIVITY (CR) (Branding, Marketing, Making-Ofs, Franchises, DVD Extras, EPKs)

corporate logic Industrial Leveling Strategies: ≤ To level distinctions in production/labor chain (lowers costs, eliminates union entitlements, creates inter-craft conflict) ≤ To level hierarchies in market/distribution chain (fulfills the pre-digital notion of direct-to-consumer marketing) Specific Film/ tv Tactics: ≤ To create information cascades on multi-platforms (publicity, buzz about blockbuster properties) ≤ To cross-promote conglomerate properties (advertising unexceptional content in the clutter) General Corporate Goals: ≤ To externalize risk (through co-productions, presales, outsourcing, merchandizing) ≤ To cultivate flexibility (through outsourcing, contract labor, project-based incorporation, runaway production)

Appendix 4

371

impact / results UNRULY WORK WORLD

UNRULY TECHNOLOGIES

UNRULY AUDIENCES

cr exploits volatile labor contestation to create over-supply of content (and workers) at industry’s input boundaries. Economic anxiety creates product. As costs decrease and revenues increase, theoretical justifications by corporations increase.

cr industrially rationalizes new tech as user-friendly to collapse workflows. cr disciplines new tech by theorizing them within traditional aesthetic standards and conventional business practice. The greater any new tech’s disruptiveness, the more extreme the theorizing that tames it.

cr brands corporations emotionally by creating psychological relations with fans via viral marketing and immersive, ancillary, content. Fan loyalty is keyed to corporate selfdisclosure and transparency.

cr Intellectually manages instabilities once labor and consumption distinctions are leveled wr resuscitates leveled distinctions to maintain professional communities and career advantage UNRULY WORK WORLD

UNRULY TECHNOLOGIES

wr constantly negotiates worker and craft identities to survive. The history, hierarchies, and cultural symbolism of a craft increase in prominence as the oversupply of labor increases.

wr used to legitimize one technical or craft group over another to establish competence and exclusivity. Craft and worker theorizing selfreferencing, and collective cultural activities increase as the conveyor belt of technical obsolescence and uncertainty accelerate.

UNRULY AUDIENCES

Users and fans increasingly share production and aesthetic competencies with Film/tv workers. wr discourses of ‘‘professionalism-vsamateurism’’ become acute and more exclusionary in era of amateur ugc.

Appendix 4

372

labor’s cultural practice Craft Strategies: ≤ Make craft, union or guild self-perpetuating through medieval system of protracted mentoring. ≤ Maximize and codify degree to which production is distributed across department area and crew. Cultural Tactics/Contradictions: ≤ Cultivate ideal of unified industry with management to protect incomes after contracts signed. ≤ Convert work into cultural capital, via socio-professional rituals, ancestry, and meritocracy. ≤ Bu√er underemployment by displaying and leveraging cultural capital via credits, demo reels, and craft-based awards. General Work Goals: ≤ Network to survive morphing, nomadic system of short-term production startups/shut-downs. ≤ Maintain high-costs of entry and exclusivity. Preach collectivity, but bar new aspirants from entry.

labor logic GROUND-UP WORKER REFLEXIVITY (WR) (Mentoring, How-to Panels, Trade Stories, Technical Retreats, Craft Meritocracy)

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1

2

3

‘‘Multichannel Branding’’ was presented at the University of Bergen on May 1, 1996, and the rest were presented at the University of Copenhagen over a twoweek period in September 1997. I have also benefited greatly from three other sources in contemporary media studies: studies of television producers set in the context of ‘‘liminality’’ and the ‘‘public forum’’ (see especially Horace Newcomb and Robert S. Alley, The Producer’s Medium ; conceptions of ‘‘lay theory’’ from recent ethnographic audience and reception research (for these concepts see Ellen Seiter, Television and New Media Audiences ); and proposals that examine critical dimensions and cognition operative in ai applications and computer technologies (see Phil Agre, Computation and Human Experience ). I am also grateful to the many individuals in film and television production who allowed me to interview or talk with them (see appendix 1). A special note of appreciation goes to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (atas) for facilitating my interviews with various producer/directors, cinematographers, and editors about below-the-line issues in 2003, and to the National Association of Television Programming Executives (natpe) for allowing me to have ethnographic access to the activities of the association and their international market in 2000.

Notes to Introduction

374

INTRODUCTION: PRODUCTION CULTURE 1

2

3 4

5

Paramount brags in the trades that its various ‘‘surging’’ showbiz series like The Insider and Entertainment Tonight ‘‘power’’ Viacom. See the full-color Paramount/Viacom ad in Broadcasting and Cable, March 7, 2005, 25, 27. Although reflexivity has a central place in current television and screen content, its long tradition of precedents includes the new television-based synergies formed by Disney in 1954. On this topic, see especially Anderson’s account in Hollywood tv : The Studio System in the Fifties. Broadcasters in the 1930s and 1940s had made behind-the-scenes programming a staple in radio, with shows like Lux Radio Theater and Hollywood Hotel (broadcast dramatizations of Hollywood scenes, hosted by stars) and Selznick Test Stage (using studio ‘‘screen tests’’ and ‘‘star making’’ as tv programming in a show that was developed but never broadcast). Even earlier variants of behind-the-scenes ‘‘studio tours’’ emerged in filmed shorts that preceded features in the 1920s. On this point, see Arthur, ‘‘(In)Dispensable Cinema.’’ Television made this form of reflexivity and ‘‘repurposing’’ lucrative in the 1950s, even as electronic media and the dvd has fueled reflexivity after 2000. On the possibilities of reflexivity as a resistant and critical activity, see especially Burch, ‘‘Narrative/Diegesis—Threshold, Limits’’; White, ‘‘Television Genres’’; Polan, ‘‘A Brechtian Cinema?’’; and Caldwell, Televisuality. Many journalists and some ethnographers tend toward the former, while critics and film studies scholars have normalized the latter. I have found two perspectives particularly useful in this regard: first, Cli√ord Geertz’s shift in critical focus from the social group to the social group’s own embedded critical and interpretive frameworks; and second, Sherry Ortner’s move ‘‘beyond’’ Geertz’s ‘‘culture as systems’’ approach to culture as always fully embedded in processes of social power and politics. See Geertz, Local Knowledge, for classic formulations of his ‘‘cultural systems’’ approach and for what many have termed the ‘‘symbolic’’ or ‘‘interpretive’’ turn in anthropology. Ortner surveys the many critics of Geertz (especially the positivists but also the critical studies scholars) and formulates how ‘‘cultural systems’’ analyses can and should shift to ‘‘culture-making’’ analyses—that is, ones that always recognize that culture acts beneath and within broader social and political processes involving power. Ortner’s move ‘‘beyond Geertz,’’ which I discovered late in my revision of this manuscript, has a≈nities with the ‘‘integrated cultural-industrial analysis’’ (local cultural analyses with political and economic contexts) that I had used to research each of the detailed studies in this book. Ortner’s work also draws on the 1970s work of Willis, Learning to Labor, even as my own research did for this book. See Ortner’s introduction to her edited volume The Fate of Culture, especially, 1–3, 8–10. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences publication Television Quarterly cynically dismissed the disclosures of various television producers this way:

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‘‘The least satisfying feature of the book is that the material on the program creators reads like network press releases. I know all too well that most producers are essentially salesmen, liable to begin sentences with ‘Can I be honest with you on this?’ They are also capable of creating their own mythology and spreading the myths with joy.’’ Lawrence Laurent, ‘‘Review of Prime Time, Prime Movers,’’ Television Quarterly, 88. Such a ‘‘law’’ makes some sense given that economic power and corporate risks escalate exponentially as one moves up the status ladder from manual laborers to craft department heads to producers and finally to corporate executives. There may simply be too much at stake to be completely honest at the corporate level. Also, while crew members working for an hourly wage must indeed worry about reputation in order to get their next job, an executive’s personal brand is his or her career. An executive producer functions, in part, as an authorizing mystique or industrial aura that must be managed not just for the individual but for the network’s or studio’s success as well. Production culture researchers need thick skins, a healthy dose of skepticism, and should prepare to be spun. I admit that my cynicism here may result from my own comfort level and background in film/video production (that is, I generally had an easier time ‘‘talking tech’’ or ‘‘talking shop’’ to cinematographers and editors than to executives or agents). Julie D’Acci in Defining Women provides an especially good example of media industry study that integrates on-set observations, interviews, textual anlaysis, and audience responses—a multiperspectival form of analysis that is very rare in scholarship and also di≈cult to realize due to the rigid control of access to productions and sets by producers. Another important book, which appeared after my manuscript was largely complete, is Georgina Born’s Uncertain Vision. This book, together with Born’s earlier essay ‘‘Reflexivity and Ambivalence,’’ provide useful precedents and alternatives for the fieldwork and methods I use in this book. See Marcus, ‘‘Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern World System.’’ See Willis, Learning to Labor, 201–3. I am especially interested in finding out how cultural forms are forged by worker resistance and accommodation within corporate media culture. While I find some overlap in the technical trades with Willis’s picture of white male masculinity, I find very di√erent forms of irony and selfconsciousness that sometimes do not fit with Willis’s ideas of class ‘‘resistance.’’ When the producer Josh Schwartz spun his hit series The O.C. as a ‘‘posteverything universe’’ where ‘‘everybody is hyper self-aware,’’ he was describing the industrial logic of many other self-absorbed series and films as well. See Schwartz’s description of The O.C. in Anne Becker, ‘‘What a Teen Wants: How tv Chases an Elusive Demo,’’ Broadcasting and Cable, March 7, 2005, 17. The producer’s justification (‘‘Everybody is hyper self-aware. We live in a posteverything universe’’) draws on the broader social implications of industrial selfinvolvement to explain the success of his series.

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This is how Geertz summarizes his approach in his influential ethnographic account ‘‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’’ (italics added). Ibid., 266. Geertz is developing this idea and methodological proposal from the work of Ricouer, Freud and Philosophy, 20; and from Frye, The Educated Imagination, 99. This skepticism and oversight has been mutual—sometimes bordering on contempt. Academic theory has had a historical relationship with contemporary film production and industrial practice that may best be described as problematic (largely impressionistic, disconnected, or irrelevant from industry’s point of view). See LaTour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life. My application of the ‘‘actor-network’’ theory derives from the pioneering work of Bruno Latour and, later, Cynthia Cockburn. Conceptual and manual work tasks are ‘‘distributed’’ across networks of craft employees. In film and television production, little lateral communication takes place between each node of the network during an actual shoot or take. Unlike the linear increments required by Taylorist e≈ciency, habitualized shooting conventions make worker cognition a collective enterprise, where each craftsperson achieves his or her task goal simultaneously and without comment alongside other members of the network. See Cockburn, ‘‘The Circuit of Technology.’’ These numbers are cited in Jordan Rau, ‘‘Runaway Filming a Challenge for Gov.,’’ Los Angeles Times, September 30, 2004, B6. More than just analogous to ‘‘blue-collar’’ workers in film and television, ‘‘below-the-line’’ refers, traditionally, to all of the hourly wage crafts and trades that work on a film/video production, but that are not given credits ‘‘above’’ or before the title of the film or program. ‘‘Above-the-line’’ functions (producers, writers, directors) negotiate their fees, were traditionally credited before the title, and are roughly equivalent to the executive or management ranks in traditional industries. Andrew Ross’s recent work No Collar is especially relevant on this point. Although some of the workplace anxieties and the personal/cultural acting-out that Andrew Ross describes in the New York dot-com sector are reminiscent of the Hollywood practices I highlight in the chapters ahead, the industrial contexts could not be more di√erent. After all, Ross’s dot-com/new-economy/newmedia juggernaut consciously defined and organized itself in dialectical opposition to the Hollywood/film industry/old-media context and tradition that defines and organizes the workspaces examined in my book. I have written extensively about these new media/old media/cultural di√erences elsewhere: see Caldwell, Electronic Media and Technoculture, and Everett and Caldwell, eds., New Media. In Southern California stunt doubles, carpenters, set decorators, grips, and ga√ers (below-the-line technical workers) more commonly work across the film versus television distinction than do directors, for example, who tend to be

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typecast as specialists in one medium or the other (although the compartmentalization of directors is changing as film directors migrate to television to do ‘‘edgier’’ and more ‘‘cutting edge’’ work). Crews for movies of the week, miniseries, single-camera-filmed sitcoms, and hourlong prime-time dramas in television, for example, market the same kinds of location and set competencies as crews for feature filmmaking. Individual International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employee (iatse) locals provide workers for both film and television. In contrast, crews for television news, sports broadcasting, and game show productions are far less likely to cross over. Many practitioners from both film and television work in commercial production (ads) for television when this sort of lucrative work is available and employment schedules allow—thus further blurring the film versus television distinction. Note that this common or overlapping labor pool is typical of Los Angeles, but it is not necessarily the norm in other parts of the country such as New York, Atlanta, or Chicago where ‘‘broadcast’’ workers (represented by National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians [nabet] union locals) infrequently interact with or work alongside feature film crews (represented by iatse union locals). As to the labor categories and industrial sectors analyzed in this book, the chapter breakdown that follows makes several distinctions based on recognizable industrial categories and o√ers several other distinctions that are not explicitly part of that scheme. I am interested in institutional interactions and labor trends within production cultures, so I have chosen to build a study that follows the basic distinctions between ‘‘above-the-line professionals’’ (traditionally the upper levels of the ‘‘creative’’ sector, which are highly paid via individual negotiation and contract) and ‘‘below-the-line workers’’ (typically the oversupply of hourly employees in the craft or manual sectors whose wages and extensive proliferation of job descriptions are set by union contract or nonunion negotiation). While Allen Scott in On Hollywood describes this as a bloated pyramid with an oversupply of low-level aspirants at the bottom struggling to become above-the-line professionals, I refer to the new conglomerated multimedia industries in chapter 6 and 7 as an ‘‘inverted pyramid’’ (given the rapid increase, flux, and dominance of contract labor, flexible specialization, outsourcing, and long-term horizontal and contractual relations between corporations across the higher-level management strata above what is now a largely disposable workforce in the labor hierarchy). So, while acknowledging the complications in this scheme, these two spheres usually include the following craft and technical a≈liations: Above-the-line sector : The ‘‘executive’’ creators and high-level ‘‘creative’’ professionals who negotiate independently by contract on each production. Positions in this sector include directors, producers, screenwriters, directors of photography, production designers, and editors.

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Below-the-line sector : The ‘‘technical crafts’’ and labor involved in production; usually hourly wage workers whose rates and extensive and elaborate job classifications are set and guarded by union contract. Positions in this sector include assistant directors, associate producers, camera operators, sound recorders, assistant camera operators, assistant sound technicians, assistant editors, set decorators, carpenters, ga√ers, grips, production assistants, visual e√ects artists, animators, lab colorists, video assist technicians, etc.

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Part of what now complicates this distinction is the fact that many of the new roles that traditionally were not seen as part of the production process have infiltrated the ranks of the cadres both above and below the line. Clerical and o≈ce workers, equipment contractors, and personal assistants, for example, have made their way into the end credits of many films, while the struggle for a producing credit is sometimes approached as a free-for-all fought over by almost anyone with a strategic position within the business process or project negotiations. The increasing use of nonunion and o√shore production by companies that are not part of the studio/producer signatory agreements have further watered down these distinctions. In several of the chapters that follow I deploy this basic distinction directly, even as I further clarify that the above-the-line sphere can and should be further divided into ‘‘business’’ and ‘‘creative’’ areas (chapters 5 and 6), and the below-the-line sphere should be divided into production and postproduction and via ‘‘technology’’ and ‘‘user/iconography’’ perspectives (chapters 3 and 4). To address the kinds of interactions and intergroup influence described earlier, in chapter 2 I examine how film/video practitioners use production space and professional rituals like trade shows, pitches, and upfronts to move across the lines that typically separate management from workers, individual labor castes from each other, and one company’s workers from another company’s workers in the same craft. The industry and its labor divisions are far from static. The close study of practitioner rituals shows how some important forms of career mobility and craft change come about. These reserve numbers are taken from the Motion Picture Association Worldwide Market Research ‘‘First Quarter 2005 Report’’ as reproduced at www .edwardjayepstein.com/mpa2004.htm. I hope in this introductory chapter to describe connections between the extensive circulation and merchandizing of ‘‘behind-the-scenes’’ knowledge among consumers and the function of theory and behind-the-scenes knowledge within the professional work worlds of film and television. The excessive disclosure of knowledge about film and television now pervading the world of consumers (through cable tv, dvds, making-ofs, Web sites, videogames, etc.) creates a cinematic object for analysis that is very di√erent from either the films of the classical cinema era or the modernist and avant-garde film traditions. The industry now floods the world surrounding the viewer’s ‘‘primary’’ film-watching experience with tangible and very public forms of lay theorizing and critical analysis. I think we very much need to question how and why reflexive industrial theorizing has achieved this status.

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Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Variety is quoted here by Robert Bierstedt in his ‘‘Review of Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory.’’ Other cultures, tribes, industries, and social groups also deploy and cultivate mystiques, but this fact has seldom derailed serious cultural studies research in the way that Hollywood has managed to do. Lawrence Laurent’s full comment on David Marc’s book of interviews with prime-time producers also states: ‘‘The least satisfying feature of the book is that the material on the program creators reads like network press releases’’ (Laurent, ‘‘Review of Prime Time, Prime Movers, ’’ 88). The actual quote states: ‘‘He has always worshipped the people about whom he has written. . . . After interviewing Dawn Steel in her o≈ce, he is still so transfixed that he ‘barely got home without hyperventilating; she has the intensity of a star’ ’’ (Kent, ‘‘Players at Their Own Game,’’ Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 17, 1992, 2). Explained one reviewer: ‘‘Having been a marketing analyst in Hollywood before becoming an academic professional, Justin Wyatt is especially well qualified to examine the rise and dominance of high concept filmmaking in Hollywood’’ (see Coleman, ‘‘Review of High Concept, ’’ 653, on the ‘‘insider’’ authenticity of ‘‘outsider’’ academic Justin Wyatt). This missive is from Gary A. Randall, former president of Orion Television and now executive producer of Any Day Now, and is quoted in David Weddle, ‘‘Lights, Camera, Action: Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology: Film School Isn’t What it Used to Be,’’ Los Angeles Times Magazine, July 13, 2003, www.lat imes.com. Industrial self-reference works to sanction or legitimize both the new products and the legacy properties of a studio, production company, or network. To do this, industrial reflexivity regularly postulates the value of any new phenomenon vis-à-vis its relationship to a collectively willed industrial center or cultural ‘‘inside.’’ That is, trade discourses tend to identify (explicitly or implicitly) every film, program, producer, or trend relative to their perceived (or marketed) location—whether in industry’s imagined center, or on the cultural/economic periphery, or on some trajectory or transition from either position to the other. Margins are in some fundamental ways only logical in relation to the existence of a perceived center, which margins in turn constantly underscore and rea≈rm. Center-versus-margin paradigms, furthermore, are fundamental industrial preoccupations and tropes that are regularly underscored and restated within the work worlds of film and television. I first presented this notion of an industrial center in my ‘‘Liminal Industry’’and in ‘‘Industrial Geography Lessons.’’ It was subsequently published in Couldry and McCarthy, eds., Media Space, and it fully supports Couldry’s important formulation of ‘‘media centers’’ outlined in his The Place of Media Power. At other times academic studies of industry are criticized for lofting abstract generalizations from the ‘‘outside’’ (the academic as amateur or naive). Some industrial

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accounts of industry, by contrast, are taken to task as missives from the sour-grapes genre. Such an attribution can help bolster a reviewer’s accusation of skewed perspectives (the author as an insider, perhaps, but with an axe to grind). Other accounts are contextualized by their supposed obsolescence (the author as over the hill and out of touch, a onetime ‘‘player’’ now obsolete and marginalized). Such a heuristic view is not unexpected in an industry noted for its obsession with accelerated change, youth, cyclical fashions, ageism, and twenty-something management trainees. See Willis, Learning to Labor ; Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads ; Seiter, Television and New Media Audiences ; Mayer, Producing Youth, Consuming Dreams, and ‘‘Soft-Core in tv Time’’; and Dávila, Latinos, Inc. See Hirsch, ‘‘Processing Fads and Fashions; DiMaggio ‘‘Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century Boston’’; DiMaggio and Hirsch, ‘‘Production Organization in the Arts’’; [McRobbie, British Fashion Industry ; Ross, No Collar ; and Hochschild, The Managed Heart. See Geertz, Local Knowledge and ‘‘Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight; Turner, The Anthropology of Performance ; Cli√ord, ‘‘On Ethnographic Allegory’’; and Dornfeld, Producing Public Television. See Becker, Art Worlds. See Schiller, Digital Capitalism ; Miller et al., Global Hollywood ; Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries ; and Schwoch, They’re Working on Global tv . See Latour, ‘‘Mixing Humans and Non-Humans Together’’; Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life ; and Agre, Computation and Human Experience. For two very good recent collections that propose a more systematic pursuit in the field of ‘‘anthropology of media,’’ see Askew and Wilk, The Anthropology of Media ; and Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin, Media Worlds. See Rosten, Hollywood ; and Powdermaker, Hollywood, The Dream Factory. Key works in this ‘‘historiographic turn’’ in film studies include Schatz, The Genius of the System ; Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, Classical Hollywood Cinema ; and Allen and Gomery, Film History. For more recent work in this trend, see Maltby, ‘‘Nobody Knows Anything.’’ See Newcomb and Alley, The Producer’s Medium ; and Gitlin, Inside Primetime. Other important industry studies books appeared during roughly the same period but were less recognized by film studies scholars than either Newcomb or Gitlin. See Turrow, Media Industries and Ettema and Whitney, Individuals in Mass Media Organizations. One method involves the application of analytic frameworks designed by the researcher to understand the structure and practice of a local cultural expression (an ‘‘-etic’’ approach, as in ‘‘phonetics’’); the other requires that researchers adopt the analytic and interpretive frameworks of the culture itself as the basis for the scholars’ analysis (an ‘‘-emic’’ approach, as in ‘‘phonemics’’). Film theorists, who have focused on the universal aspects of cinema (during the classical and early contemporary periods at least), have tended to use ‘‘-etic’’ approaches involving propositional arguments of their own making. Anthropologists, on

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the other hand, tend to favor ‘‘-emic’’ approaches that show greater deference to the indigenous group—not just for facts or data but for second-order interpretive or explanatory schemes as well. Newcomb published a more detailed articulation of the ‘‘cultural forum’’ idea, which he has since revised to account for the very di√erent ‘‘postwork’’ era, and of Victor Turner’s notion of ‘‘liminality’’ in the same year as The Producer’s Medium. See Newcomb and Hirsch, ‘‘Television as a Cultural Forum.’’ For Newcomb’s revisions, see ‘‘This Is Not Al Dente.’’ For my earlier studies on production culture (involving analyses of production methods, labor conditions, digital sweatshops, post-Fordism, technical instabilities, and worker a√ect), see ‘‘Modes of Production,’’ in Televisuality ; ‘‘Low Theory: Television’s Industrial Discourses’’; ‘‘Liminal Industry: Ceremonial Rituals of the Production Culture’’; ‘‘The Business of New Media: Technological Revolution/Institutional Evolution; ‘‘New Media/Old Augmentations: Television, the Internet, and Interactivity’’; ‘‘Critical Television Practice: The Migratory Pattern of Industrial Texts’’; and ‘‘Industrial Geography Lessons: SocioProfessional Rituals and the Borderlands of Production Culture.’’ One particularly good account of the same shifting postnetwork era, involving historical and industrial analysis, is Boddy, New Media and Popular Imagination. Two other recent books have framed production (especially the relations between cultural activities and political economy) very much in the spirit that I attempted in this book: see Hesmondhalgh, The Culture Industries ; and Hartley, ed., The Creative Industries. Julie D’Acci’s Defining Women represents a model for television production scholarship, as it draws on D’Acci’s access to the development process and producers’ meetings and builds on a methodology to initiate observation to a wider discussion of gender politics in American culture of the 1980s. This includes an analysis of the corporate logic of feminism for prime-time programmers. In the same year, Herman Gray’s Watching Race critically adapted the interviewing mode of Gitlin, Newcomb, and Alley in order to situate the insights of producers within Gray’s theoretical and textual readings of ‘‘racial formation’’ in American television. In the following year, Jostein Gripsrud’s The Dynasty Years drew both from interviews with producers of the American prime-time soap series and from personnel in the Norwegian television industry. This comparative industrial framework served as a framework for his study of the series in international distribution and reception, and for his evaluation of critical theoretical practices in the field. Whereas D’Acci examines similar dimensions to map the rise and fall of a single series, Jane Shattuc’s The Talking Cure uses many of the same methods—interviews, access to producers’ meetings, site observations, and an emphasis on the construction of femininity—as a way to clarify production tendencies from a vast textual sample of an entire genre: daytime talk and tabloid television of the 1990s. Amanda Lotz provides particularly good precedents for fieldwork in industry study in ‘‘Seventeen Days in July at Hollywood and Highland.’’

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Barry Dornfeld’s ethnography Producing Public Television adds a methodological dimension to the emerging oeuvre of industry studies. Dornfield himself served two simultaneous roles in the production of the pbs series Childhood : he was both an academic researcher for the producers and a production assistant for the production company. While some scholars criticized this dual role as counterproductive and self-defeating (cf. Curtin, ‘‘A Review of Producing Public Television ’’), the relationship again raises the issue of whether access and insider knowledge in any way enhance or compromise analysis. Dornfeld is particularly adept at considering problems that arise when ethnographers ‘‘study up’’ in researching sites where producers wield more economic and cultural capital than does the anthropologist. Cassell and Jenkins’s From Barbie to Mortal Kombat is multiauthored work on gender and experience in computer games. The book’s in-depth interviews with professional computer game developers show a surprising level of constructive a≈nity between academic media scholars and commercial game developers. This same mutual a≈nity does not emerge from the industry-academic colloquia documented in Richard Ohmann’s edited volume Making and Selling Culture, where Elizabeth Traube and others underscore the sometimes contentious interchanges that ensue between producers and scholars. Institutional contexts do make a di√erence, for Cassell and Jenkins’s computer game developers betray none of the cynicism about scholarship that Ohmann and Traube’s film/television producers assert. And these divergent stances directly impact the kinds of production research that the four authors can undertake. Two other important books based on industry fieldwork—Laura Grindsta√ ’s The Money Shot and Georgina Born’s Uncertain Vision—appeared after my field research for this book was largely complete. In Hirsch’s ‘‘Processing Fads and Fashions’’ the model of how organizations respond to ‘‘task-environment uncertainties’’ provides a particularly apt picture of the industry. Television and film, after all, are particularly good at ‘‘overproducing’’ creative product at industrial ‘‘input and output boundaries,’’ a facility that requires the systematic ‘‘proliferation of contact men’’ (agents, representatives, lawyers), as Hirsch calls them, for fluid management. Similarly, in the book Art Worlds Howard Becker’s shift from a ‘‘sociology of art’’ to a ‘‘sociology of occupations in the ‘art world’ ’’ provides a useful precedent for the kinds of institutional/labor analysis of the ‘‘production worlds’’ I pursue in the chapters that follow. Paul DiMaggio’s sociological model of ‘‘cultural entrepreneurship’’ in his ‘‘Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century Boston’’ also resonates with contemporary production practice by providing a heuristic model for understanding interorganizational relations in Hollywood, including the function of ‘‘status groups,’’ the relations between for-profit and nonprofit organizations, the role of ‘‘organization-forming organizations,’’ and the institutional construction and maintenance of cultural legitimacy. Andrew Ross’s No Collar provides a critical ethnographic look at the downsides and tensions of high-tech jobs in New York fueled by the ‘‘new economy.’’ Based on his field-

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work (and employment) at the new media company Razorfish in New York, Ross’s year-long study describes an alienated world of labor that resonates particularly well with my ‘‘below-the-line’’ research detailed in chapters 4 and 5. What Ross skewers as the ‘‘humane workplace’’ sanctioned by the new economy and the dot-com boom evokes the conditions in the ‘‘digital sweatshops’’ of the motion picture industry that I studied in Los Angeles from 1996 to 2000, although the dot-com/high-tech and Hollywood sectors di√er in some very fundamental ways. I also did not have the benefit of Allen Scott’s recent On Hollywood when the essays in this book were first published. On Hollywood provides a prescient study of the regional spaces of production and the forces behind successful ‘‘agglomeration’’ in the Los Angeles area. As such, the book situates the kinds of ritualized socio-professional spaces that I examine in chapter 2 within broader regional contexts and public policy. See Ettema, Whitney, and Wackman, ‘‘Professional Mass Communicators’’; Whitney and Ettema, ‘‘Media Production’’; and DiMaggio and Hirsch, ‘‘Production Organization in the Arts.’’ Toby Miller et al. promote a particularly negative view of the political and social myopia inherent in textual analysis in Global Hollywood. At least from an epistemological perspective, therefore, the practitioner’s working theoretical paradigms can be no less or more suspect than the ‘‘-etic’’ inventions of scholars. Quoted in John Calhoun, ‘‘Putting the ‘Move’ in Movie,’’ American Cinematographer, October 2003, 83. Charles Lyons, ‘‘New Machine Comes into Focus: Majors’ Need for Specialty Fare Coincides with Indie Coin Crunch,’’ Variety, May 12, 2002. Here Michael Grady is describing his indie film aesthetic expressed through arcane permutations of film lab chemistry and processing. He was dp on the feature film Wonderland (2003), and elaborates the approach the camera department took: ‘‘We have a shared aesthetic, constantly watching films together . . . Sid and Nancy . . . Wong Kar-Wai’s films . . . Michael Mann’s Heat, Martin Scorsese’s films, and Reservoir Dogs. . . . The important consideration was always whose world we were in, who had control of the narrative. Those were the key rationales for using di√erent processing for each version. We used everything from full skip-bleach and partial skip-bleach processing to reversal cross-processing, straight negative, and two-stop pushing combined with a 45-degree shutter for the murder sequence. I feel if you’re not doing something you haven’t done before, then it’s hard to argue that a film is art. You’ve got to experiment’’ (Grady, ‘‘A Porn Star’s Spiral,’’ 30). This statement is from my interview with the director/producer John Cassar at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in North Hollywood, California, on October 30, 2003 (italics added). This quote is from my interview with Scott Powell, ace, editor of Fox Network’s and Imagine’s 24 and numerous other films and series since the 1970s at

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the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, North Hollywood, California, October 30, 2003. Italics added. This statement by Steve Burum (asc) is from the feature documentary Masters of Light, produced by the American Film Institute with support from the American Society of Cinematographers and nhk, the Japanese broadcasting and television equipment corporation, 1992. Even when producers or directors have deployed acute critical or theoretical ideas during a production, asserting such a connection can divert attention from the same ‘‘creator’’ who uses public appearances to build and enhance his or her career trajectory. At industry panels and in interviews producers and directors will inevitably fall back on explanations that tie accomplishment to their personalities. That is, they succeeded because of ‘‘creative vision,’’ personal fortitude, gut instinct, or intuition. To give credit to either their understanding of postmodernism or cyberpunk or the hundred other artists in their crew would only get in the way of landing or launching another project. Such acknowledgments, as it were, would only drag down the prospects of a producer or director whose career is made up of an endless succession of multimonth production contracts, and who is only as good to studios or networks as his or her most recent success or failure. Says John Wells: ‘‘Some of the shows that have failed, I was too egotistical. And I just thought: ‘Well, I just don’t need these people any more.’ Producing for prime-time television is a huge task—where you need three to four people on the (executive) producer/writer sta√ who are at the very top of their game. And six to eight people—you can trust—is even better’’ (statement from ata’s videotaped interview with Wells at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, North Hollywood, California, April 30, 2003). Here Wells shares, from his years in the production trenches, a hard-learned personal moral lesson about pride and hubris. Even though on-set tirades and confrontations are considered unremarkable behaviors in the reputations of other producers and directors, Wells o√ers one key to his award-winning longevity in the business: pride and egotism are in the final analysis counterproductive and self-destructive. Building longterm, personal trust in a closely knit group of individuals proves to be a far more successful move, both artistically and commercially. ‘‘Acting-out’’ sole authority, on the other hand, may define an executive producer’s power in the production of a show, but understating this relative autocracy is also a regular part of a practitioner’s public self-representation—after the production. Successful careers may depend on ably mastering both poses. See Anderson, Hollywood tv . Behind-the-scenes film shorts were, since the early days, also produced for theatrical exhibition. See also Arthur, ‘‘(In)Dispensable Cinema.’’ For a discussion of vaporware as theory, see my ‘‘Introduction: Theorizing the Digital Landrush.’’ Here Jack Serino, production executive for ‘‘Red Riding Hood’’ (an hd production), outlines the historical significance of the theoretical paradigm shift cre-

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ated by his production unit (quoted in Scott Billups, ‘‘Once Upon a Time in Sylmar,’’ Millimeter, October 2003, 31). The comments in this section on the nature and dark side of trade writing come from my analysis of a wide set of video production trades in the United States, and from my May 8, 2004, discussions with a seasoned trade writer who asked that his identity remain anonymous (for perhaps obvious reasons) in Bellflower, California, on May 8, 2004. Even industrial texts, whether from promotions, internal communications, or creative content, can usually be understood as part of a proprietary economic scheme or business plan. For example, one of Hollywood’s repeated truisms (discussed more fully in chapter 6) is that ‘‘all screenplays are also business plans.’’ This is to say that script and story decisions are directly tied to marketing and merchandizing plans. No screenplays are optioned, developed, or greenlighted today without strategic input from a studio’s merchandizing, marketing, distribution, video-gaming, online, and ancillary rights departments. And this interrogation of a project happens almost immediately in the development process, long before the final drafts of the screenplays are actually written. While written trade accounts like the one on the hd promotional piece above can result in tortured, excessive forms of preemptive theorizing, even screenplays (thought by many still as the benign or ‘‘artistic’’ heart of the film/video endeavor) can and should be viewed as a kind of reflexive, industrial selfrepresentation. What we might then add to the adage about scripts is that ‘‘all screenplays are also aesthetic and public theorizing plans.’’ Of course, this kind of marketing-driven aesthetic deliberation may be distasteful given its ad hoc and wholly commercialized origins. But it is worth considering how this kind of practice on the ‘‘front end’’ of a film’s release a√ects the kinds of responses that audiences and critics (and eventually theorists) have on the ‘‘back end’’ of a film’s release. This statement is from my interview with Scott Brazil, director/producer of f / x’s The Shield, at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in North Hollywood, California, on October 30, 2003. In this section the notions of ‘‘epistemological modesty’’ and ‘‘workmanlike’’ theorizing come from Bordwell and Carroll, Post-Theory. On this point I return to Geertz, whose article ‘‘Common Sense as a Cultural System’’ helps draw out possible relations between industrial practices and worker dispositions on the one hand, and academic theory on the other. I am more interested in considering some of Geertz’s underlying points than I am in matching back the points, paradigms, and poses of the film industry theorizing practices outlined earlier to these five (fairly congruent) tendencies. Geertz’s critique is not unlike Bordwell’s critique, in Making Meaning, of the interpretive obsession in academic film criticism. But while Geertz’s view might appear to unsettle my consideration of industrial practice as forms of theorizing, several other insights in this account do just the opposite. He outlines, for example, five characteristics of common sense: ‘‘naturalness’’ (or

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of-courseness), ‘‘practicalness’’ (not as in utilitarian, but sensible and level headed), ‘‘thinness’’ (sobriety not subtlety, literalness not academic complexification), ‘‘immethodicalness’’ (prone to ad hoc forms, tending to emphasize inconsistencies and contradictions), and ‘‘accessibleness’’ (open and available to all, requiring no special expertise). Geertz finds in his comparative ethnographic case study three recurring principles: (1) common sense is marked and loaded with presuppositions and categorical distinctions; (2) common sense is totalizing, dogmatic, ambitious, and general; and (3) common sense is inconsistent across cultures and groups. The first two of these tendencies are roughly congruent with both academic film criticism (the deployment of critical distinctions based on strongly held presuppositions) and academic film theory (the ‘‘totalizing’’ aspirations of ‘‘general’’ theory). Of course the third principle (‘‘inconsistency’’ and cultural relativity) might seem antithetical to the systematic aspirations of academic theory. Yet several other factors make it di≈cult to relegate film industrial theorizing practice solely to the realm of ‘‘mere’’ common sense. Louis Althusser was perhaps the most influential of these theorists (see his For Marx ). His shift from economic determinism to education, religion, and the family as ‘‘isas’’ (ideological state apparati) helped displace popular common sense from any meaningful role in critical understanding or progressive action. A particularly good application of Althusser in this regard is Hall’s ‘‘Signification, Representation, Ideology. A good summary introduction of Althusser’s influence and common sense as part of an ideological system can be found in White, ‘‘Ideological Criticism.’’ Oddly enough, one might expect to find theorizing behaviors in the registers where practitioners are asked to be the most consciously reflexive: the formal interview or on-set conversations. But this is not always the case. For example, the many director’s commentaries on dvds are little more than loosely collected anecdotes. By contrast, demo tapes and making-ofs by design wear reflexivity and critical abilities on their sleeves. Interpretation is an integral part of the business of the industry, not simply an invention of practitioners nor an imposition of the academic researcher. Providing a grounded analysis of film/video production culture means historically examining how specific industrial selfreflections and critical interpretations are made and circulated. Corporate videos have been used to support and manage various brand-building initiatives in the mass media. Both the ‘‘nbc 2000’’ and ‘‘abc Yellow’’ branding campaigns used on-screen network ‘‘self-interrogations’’ to cultivate new corporate identities via what the networks termed institutional ‘‘makeovers.’’ Both abc’s and nbc’s branding campaigns are described more fully in chapter 6 of this book. Lest we unduly denigrate the nbc executive’s lack of knowledge about his own company, we should point out that Raymond Williams was also ignorant of Weaver’s historic ‘‘flow’’ programming innovations in the early 1950s (which had been widely discussed in the trades that Williams clearly did not read).

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Two particularly good books, published after this manuscript was largely written, are Lisa Kernan’s Coming Attraction: Reading American Movie Trailers and Denise Mann’s Hollywood Independents. Kernan examines trailers as ‘‘paratexts’’ and considers reflexivity from the perspectives of audience address, rhetoric, and textual practice. Mann also deals with reflexivity but spends considerable time connecting these on-screen practices to industrial changes in Hollywood during the transitional period in which the studios lost considerable power to television and talent agencies, among others. Network makeovers also suggest that industrial on-screen theorizing (about film/television by film/television) may be characterized not by any essential formal or generic quality but by o√-screen/on-screen mobility—by their fluid ‘‘travel’’ between industry and audience and back through primary, secondary, and tertiary channels. Any explanation of the industrial or cultural logics of these on-screen theorizations must, therefore, also reckon with the migratory behavior of such texts as they travel. Tackling broader cultural questions like these, however, entails some further considerations about how film and television workers communicate and think about the production task. The chapters that follow more closely consider critical on-screen and o√-screen practices (and their related artifacts). Such objects and practices now pervade a number of industrial areas: cross-promotions (behind-the-scenes and making-of documentaries); secondary marketing theorizations (news ‘‘tie-ins’’ promotions, and ids); ancillary textual forms (electronic press kits [epks], video press kits); and, finally, programming stunts (special episodes, sweeps ‘‘events’’). For example, Rey Chow has recently underscored the troubling similarities between celebrated aesthetic and intellectual forms of self-representation and the reflexivity of militarism and cultural supremacism that defines the ‘‘compulsive frenzy’’ of out age. Chow rejects academic deconstruction as too Eurocentric and ‘‘inward-turning’’ in favor of scholarship that restores things to their ‘‘constituent exteriority.’’ Yet it is unclear how this critique might be applied to Hollywood’s reflexive ‘‘interiority’’ (self-gaze), which also simultaneously functions as a constituent ‘‘exteriority’’ for marketing and industrial gain and has done so at least since the silent era. See Chow, The Age of World Target. On the roots of reflexivity in Hollywood, see Arthur, ‘‘(In)Dispensable Cinema.’’ My own view on this question of influence between sectors is that Hollywood has a history of developing ‘‘creative’’ and unorthodox business practices that are subsequently mainstreamed by a more conventional industry. This includes the early use of flexible subcontracting and outsourcing as a dominant form of production, and the suspect elegance of ‘‘Hollywood accounting’’ that by the end of the twentieth century became the corporate business plans of many more-traditional companies such as Enron and Worldcom. See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish ; and Lasch, Culture of Narcissism. See McRobbie, ‘‘Clubs to Companies.’’

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See Ross, No Collar. Scott’s On Hollywood is particularly insightful and convincing on these last themes and trends related to film and television’s local and regional geography and agglomeration. 1

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TRADE STORIES AND CAREER CAPITAL

Mark, explaining the need for studio damage control in response to leaked stories and gossip, quoted in Aljean Harmetz, ‘‘They’re Rumors Not Predictions,’’ Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2000, 6. Peggy Archer, who here is complaining about the lies of producers, is a pseudonym used to protect the identity of one of the most popular below-the-line bloggers/complainers on the Web site Totally Unauthorized (www.filmhacks .blogspot.com). She is quoted in Mary McNamara, ‘‘A Voice for the Techies,’’ Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2005, E1. In this large field, see Chatman, Story and Discourse ; Metz, Film Language ; Bordwell, Narration and the Fiction Film ; Genette, Narrative Discourse ; Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative ; Kozlo√, Invisible Storytellers ; Newcomb, tv : The Most Popular ; and Feuer, ‘‘Narrative Form in American Network Television.’’ As the following examples will show, some of these trade stories mirror both the onscreen blockbuster narratives of teamwork and survival and the self-promotional publicity engines of producers like Jerry Bruckheimer. Thanks to one of the (anonymous) reviewers of the manuscript for suggesting this ‘‘Bruckheimeresque’’ variation on a theme. Additionally, while some of these genres can be found in other fields (e.g., law or real estate), I am particularly interested in how such cultural practices impact, and are in turn impacted by, economic and labor conditions that are distinctive to film and television in Los Angeles. This quote by dp Conrad Hall is from Bergery, Reflections, 23–24. One wga member describes his aesthetic method by emphasizing not his personal approach to expression or narrative design but rather through a statement from his Vietnam War experience: ‘‘I was turned into a Security Policeman, a Black Beret. And was promptly shipped to Vietnam—to help replace all of the sp’s who were killed in the Tet O√ensive.’’ But this anecdotal sojourn to Tet and Vietnam turns out to be but one manifestation of his model of the artist as a hunted and almost killed man: ‘‘From 1972 to 1975 I was a cop. My last day on the job I was almost killed. This was the final straw for my wife. . . . To this day, no one knows it, but . . . from 1996 to 1999 I always had a .9mm automatic tucked into the back of my jeans. That’s why I always wore a chambray shirt. I had to watch my back’’ (a screenwriter, name witheld by request, in personal communication with the author, December 10, 2002). As the narrator of this trade story tells it, the violent attacks that proved formative early on in his

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development also provided him with a skill set in weaponry that would allow him to survive in the (apparently) warlike footing of Hollywood. Insurgent talent agents and mercenary producers beware. Daryn Okada, asc, quoted in ‘‘asc Close-Up,’’ American Cinematographer, September 2004, 112. Sam Bayer quoted in Kodak’s ‘‘On Film’’ promotional brochure, September 2004. This statement is from an interview with Scott Willingham at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in North Hollywood, California, October 30, 2003. Willingham was an award-winning editor on the the primetime series 24 and The X-Files. This statement is from an interview with the director of photography Scott Palazzo at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in North Hollywood, California, October 30, 2003. This statement is from an interview with the producer and director Spike Jones Jr. at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in North Hollywood, California, October 30, 2003. Marsha Scarbrough, ‘‘Eight Hours for Hollywood,’’ http://members.cox .net/ 120n120√.eight—hours—for—Hollywood.htm. These campaign instructions are from http://members.cox.net/120n120√/12 0n120√.htm. Je√ords quoted in Scarbrough, ‘‘Eight Hours for Hollywood.’’ Chris Dufrense, in ‘‘Can Cal Rebuild?’’ Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2004, D11, describes football ‘‘story nights’’ in the passage that follows: ‘‘When freshmen gather each year for ‘story night’ Tedford tells his story first, just so, as he explains, ‘they understand that Coach has problems too.’ Tedford’s story starts, ‘My father was an alcoholic. . . .’ When a recruit from a tough background says, ‘Coach, you don’t understand,’ Tedford says, ‘Maybe I do.’ ’’ This statement is from a documentary about production design, The Hidden Art of Hollywood (Los Angeles: Timeline Films, 2002), which was produced with the cooperation of the Art Director’s Guild and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This comment on Menzies, by Zanetti, continues: ‘‘He completely designed the movie from a visual point of view.’’ As quoted in Michael Goldman, ‘‘Remembering Esco≈er,’’ Millimeter, October 2003, 28. This quote is from the screenwriter Robert Powell in ‘‘Waiting for Next Year,’’ The Journal (wga West), July 1993, 32. This film director’s description of life on the set of an independent film shoot is from a seminar titled ‘‘Ethnography as Therapy,’’ presented at the University of California, Los Angeles, June 8, 1999, 2. All names here have been withheld or changed to protect the identity of the individuals involved. This statement is from an interview with the director John Cassar at the Acad-

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emy of Television Arts and Sciences in North Hollywood, California, October 30, 2003. These figures for the ‘‘current’’ or active writers versus the number actually employed in a given year (in this case 2002 and 2001 respectively) are taken from wga records as reported annually in April and reprinted at http://www.wga .org/annual/2002/market.html. The requisite status that negotiation skills have achieved across the creative occupations in Hollywood show that such skills go far beyond the ‘‘input’’ and ‘‘output boundaries’’ of the industry that Paul Hirsch has studied, and also define many or most of the workspaces and o≈ces ‘‘inside’’ of the industry as well. As I show in the next section, even Hirsch’s concept of ‘‘contact men’’ needs to be opened up or questioned because the vast majority of lower-level employees who do internal negotiations are women, who in many cases deploy skill sets traditionally thought of as feminine. See Hirsch, ‘‘Processing Fads and Fashions.’’ According to Biskind, Schrader explained this spatial approach to career development as ‘‘fucking up.’’ Beverly Walker is quoted from Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 234. This overblown claim, of course, is reflected in the subtitle of Biskind’s book: How the Sex, Drugs, and Rock-and-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Deborah Starr Seibel, ‘‘Reality as We Know It: One Hectic Day in the Lives of Four Power Brokers,’’ Broadcasting and Cable, August 30, 2004, 34–36. Ibid., 36. Two particularly good recent essays on the gendered practices of casting directors are Erin Hill, ‘‘Women’s Work: Femininity in Film and Television Casting,’’ and Denise Gass and Vicki Mayer, ‘‘Necessary Femininity: Reality Television Casting,’’ both of which were presented at the Console-ing Passions Conference, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, May 25–28, 2006. Seibel, ‘‘Reality as We Know It,’’ 35. Another good example of how sexual politics informs production practice outside of primetime is Mayer, ‘‘Soft-Core in tv Time.’’ Kearns, Tabloid Baby, 28, 119, 45. Harris Crashing Hollywood, 158. Hanssen and Gottlieb, tv , Sex, Lies, and Promos, 115, 117, 158. Davis, Development Girl, 20, 23, 116–17. Ibid., 117–18. Oddly, while this work world shows similarities with the work worlds of fashion and club culture that Angela McRobbie researches, Hollywood’s case suggests that some other term should be developed to describe such practices. That is, McRobbie, building on Andreas Wittel’s ethnographic research, contrast the current fixation of fluid, independent ‘‘porfolio careers’’ to earlier forms of ‘‘narrative sociality,’’ which she uses to describe traditional careers housed within single corporations. What my research shows is that narrative, far from being a symptom of old corporate employment, is at the center of the new portfolio careers as well. See McRobbie, ‘‘Clubs to Companies.’’ John Hartley

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also deploys McRobbie and Wittel’s paradigms throughout his edited volume Creative Industries. Linda Buzzell, ‘‘The Creative Career: Put the Topspin on a Tough Break,’’ Emmy, April 2004, 26, 27. The quote here is from Cristina Clapp, ‘‘Editor’s Corner: The Conversation,’’ Videography, April 2004, 4. Tom Sherak (who for seventeen years was a distribution and marketing executive at Fox and now is an executive at Revolution Studios) is quoted in Aljean Harmetz, ‘‘They’re Rumors Not Predictions,’’ Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2000, 6. Harmetz, ‘‘They’re Rumors Not Predictions,’’ 6. Defamer.com hammered away at the patronizing and naïve way that nbc tried to masquerade as a fan blog to promote its expensive, critically lauded but financially risky series through the summer of 2006. Semel quoted in Dana Calvo, ‘‘Fake Fans, Fake Buzz, Real Bucks,’’ Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2001, A1. Moloshok quoted in ibid., A1 Ibid., A1, A16. Schweitzer quoted in ibid., A16 Fresh Yarn.com, October 2, 2004. This short excerpt from Matt Price’s reflexive, making-of story was posted on Fresh Yarn.com, October 2, 2004. See Baseline StudioSystem’s film tracking service at www.filmtracker.com. I thank Erin Hill, whose current dissertation research at ucla examines the cultural politics of gendered ‘‘assistant-ing’’ functions in Hollywood, for referring me to this rich source of online worker griping in film and television: http://www.hollywoodmomentum.com/pastissues.htm. This theory is based on ethnographic work in the new media sector in England. See Wittel, ‘‘Toward a Network Sociality.’’ See Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, 82. I thank Vicki Mayer for suggesting this connection between the production storytelling practices in this chapter and Braverman and MacDonald’s research. This concept of the varying value of self-selling in both open and closed labor systems is developed more broadly by Keith MacDonald in his The Sociology of Professions. TRADE RITUALS AND TURF MARKING

From a letter by the camera operator Mike Schrengohst, entitled ‘‘The Future’s So Bright, I’ve Gotta Draw the Shades,’’ in www.emedialive.com, July 2004. To leave no doubt about similarities between sound design competition and the ‘‘Pillsbury Bake-O√,’’ the Editors Guild Web site states: ‘‘Food for thought . . . all the basic food groups (are) included . . . and if that doesn’t bring the indigestion back, consider this: Face/O√ had (only) twelve weeks from the end

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of principal photography to print master.’’ Mark Mangini, Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter vol. 18, no. 2 (Mar/Apr 1997). This characterization about spatial analysis holds for the field of academic film studies. For influential works in this area, see Bazin, What Is Cinema? ; Burch, Theory of Film Practice ; and Bordwell et al., Classical Hollywood Cinema. The field of communication studies has been more willing to talk about social space, usually in a less textual or formal and more macroscopic sense, as in Hay, ‘‘Locating the Televisual,’’ and Meyerowitz, No Sense of Place. In response to earlier presentations of this essay in Birmingham, U.K. in 2000, and Washington, D.C. in 2001, Nick Couldry stimulated my thinking about the connections between my concept of the ‘‘imagined cultural center’’ favored by film/video production workers and the ‘‘myth of the mediated center’’ operative in his research. I thank him for these insights. An influential philosophical work that critiques mental versus material conceptions of space is Lefebvre, The Production of Space. For spatial analysis keyed to the formation of power and the control ethos, see Foucault, ‘‘Space, Knowledge, and Power’’ and Discipline and Punish. A particularly good study that moves beyond the respective philosophical and power/discourse approaches of LeFebvre and Foucault and more fully connects spatial practice to contemporary social practice, collective activities, work, and gender is Massey, Space, Place, and Gender. Throughout this book I have incorporated the insights of performance theory as outlined in Turner, The Anthropology of Performance. A very good application of Turner’s performance theory to media ritual (which is mostly focused on relations between audiences and media as opposed to the production culture focus of my research) is in Couldry, Media Rituals. As discussed in chapter 1, sociologies of work, especially the studies by Braverman, McRobbie, and Ross, describe spaces of work in late capitalism that both mirror and contrast with many of the spatial practices of contemporary Hollywood. For an early, influential work that established key terms in the sociology of the workplace (including institutional status, license and mandate, career and task ‘‘callings,’’ contradictions of status, personality types, and the formation of personal identity), see Hughes, Men and Their Work. I have also been particularly drawn to the ‘‘worlds of production’’ theory that attempts to move beyond the static nature of economic theory and even institutional analysis to talk about ‘‘economic action.’’ See, in this regard, Storper and Salais, Worlds of Production. Another key book (published after this manuscript was largely complete) is Scott, On Hollywood. In seeking to understand the key to L.A.’s successful geographic and industrial ‘‘agglomeration’’ behind film and television, Scott’s proposal for a culturally implicated ‘‘economic geography’’ deftly clarifies how facilities and supplies, relations between worker residences and worker employers, regional policies, and more-macroscopic contexts figure into the creation of successful media centers like Hollywood. Building on earlier works, like Scott and Soja, eds., The City, Scott’s paradigm o√ers productive options for

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future research that more closely align economic and regional policies with the kinds of close cultural studies of industrial spaces in this book. This statement is from Roberto Benabib, screenwriter for Ally McBeal, as quoted in Peter Mcquaid, ‘‘Job Security,’’ Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, September 12, 2004, 18. This first-person account is from the film director Gren Freyer, ‘‘Once They Were Clothes-Horses,’’ Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, March 21, 2000, 14. See Go√man, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and Hochschild, The Managed Heart. Whereas the unremarkable habitual activities of personal presentation described earlier illustrate self-performance aspects in everyday interaction, other more overt dramatizations of status and rank can be understood as higher-order social interactions. This dynamic evokes Cli√ord Geertz’s analysis of status and rank as performed in a Balinese cockfight, but it also raises questions about relations between (1) ‘‘habitual action’’ (which may be conventionalized, but whose meaning may still be contained within the individual’s everyday work or life, as in Go√man’s model of self-performance and the director and screenwriter’s notion of a standardized uniform); (2) the ‘‘liminoid’’ (which is a metaphoric acting out, but one that is entered into voluntarily, especially in modern situations where work is cleanly separated from play or leisure); and, finally, (3) ‘‘liminal’’ action (which is truly set apart from the everyday, frequently responds to crisis, and involves not just a reflection of the social order but also the active reconstitution of the group’s identity [trade summits, publicity events tied to labor negotiations, mergers, etc.]). See Turner The Anthropology of Performance. See also Couldry, Media Rituals, 21–36, for perhaps the best synthesis of Turnerian ritual theory with modern media/audience interactions. Peter Guber, speaking at ‘‘Transition Event: Producers’ Program Panel’’ at Bridges Theater, ucla, April 25, 2000. Arnold Rifkin, formerly of caa, speaking at ‘‘Transition Event: Producers’ Program Panel’’ at Bridges Theater, ucla, April 25, 2000. Martha Groves, ‘‘The Fun Factor: When Your Business is Designing Video Games, Electronic Arts Figures Letting Employees Enjoy Some Downtime Has an Upside,Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2004, E.22. This mixture of leisure/play/ recreation in the new flexible workspaces of ea and Dreamworks is very much like that observed by Andrew Ross in the dot-com spaces of Razorfish in New York. See Ross, No Collar, 55–86. Roy Rivenburg, quoted in ‘‘Retracing (Sort of ) Jesus’ footsteps,’’ Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, January 24, 1999. Frances Anderton, ‘‘Virtual O≈cing Comes in from the Cold,’’ New York Times, December 17, 1997, B13. Kuperman quoted in ibid., B13. This is precisely the kind of stress-inducing environment that Andrew Ross, in No Collar, finds at work in the pre-crash New York dot-com world of Razorfish.

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Chuck Henage, ‘‘Building a Small Studio: Basic Concepts in dv feng shui,’’ dv , March 2001, 29–31. Feng shui is the ancient (and now modernized) Chinese art of organizing living spaces and architecture. Feng shui focuses on designing a room or building according to the most optimal arrangement of life forces (yin and yang, light and dark, directional orientation) that bear upon or permeate any space. Ibid., 29. From Lisa Le√, ‘‘The Creative Spirits of Nickelodeon Animation Studio Have Turned Their Drab O≈ce Cubicles into Celebrations of Personal Style,’’ Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, November 28, 1999, 22. Consider in this regard the metaphors used to describe this process as an intimate stage that allows screenwriters to spin out story-concept ‘‘decorations’’: ‘‘But if Stacey Snider (Universal Pictures Chairman) is underwhelmed by the pitch, she doesn’t show it. Her job, she explains is to keep the architecture of the film intact. It’s up to the screenwriters to decorate the room’’ (Patrick Goldstein, ‘‘Empire Builders: They Greenlight Big Budget Features and Produce Niche Films,’’ Los Angeles Times Magazine, March 26, 2000, 18). On the historical importance of high concept in the development of blockbuster films in the 1970s through 1990s, see Wyatt, High Concept, and Maltby, ‘‘Nobody Knows Anything.’’ This statement is from ‘‘Jonathan Treisman, ‘‘Writing Loglines That Sell,’’ BiWeekly Ezine, August 30, 2003, www.writersstore.com/ezines/17.html. As quoted by Kevin Downey in ‘‘Here’s How to Sell a Reality Show: The Pros Say a ‘Game Changer’ Can Get You Through The Door,’’ Broadcasting and Cable, August 30, 2004, 38. Ibid. Quoted in Allison Romano, ‘‘Table Scraps: From abc to tlc, Networks Feast on Hits, Independent Producers Get Thrown the Bones. Five Ways to Stay Alive,’’ Broadcasting and Cable, July 26, 2004, 18. Ibid., 18. See Clarrisa Cruz, ‘‘Havin’ a Cheat Wave,’’ Entertainment Weekly, January 26, 2001, 8. ‘‘Q & A: Brenda Hampton, Hollywood Reporter: 7th Heaven, 100th Episode Special Issue, January 29, 2001. Selditch quoted in Kevin Downey, ‘‘Here’s How to Sell a Reality Show: The Pros Say a ‘Game Changer’ Can Get You Through the Door,’’ Broadcasting and Cable, August 30, 2004, 38. Jordan quoted in ibid. The statements here by Davis, Darby, and Krasnow are quoted in Paul Bond, ‘‘Public, Panel Unsure of Interactive tv Direction,’’ Hollywood Reporter, January 29, 2001, 12. Lonergan quoted in ‘‘Top Screenwriters Talk Shop,’’ Hollywood Reporter, March 24, 2001, 98. Sander, of the Belo Station Group, quoted in Nellie Andreeva, ‘‘A≈ls Upset over Non-Meeting,’’ Hollywood Reporter, April 12, 2001, 23.

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Chris Carter, of course, is the name of the very successful show-runner and creator of The X-Files series; a designation that leaves no doubt as to the demo producers’ model for emulation. The quotes in this paragraph are from Debora Vrana, ‘‘Tech Bashes Have Sobered Up,’’ which is subtitled on the subsequent page as ‘‘Networking: DropO√ in Technology Party-Goers,’’ Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2001, C1, C3. Fin-Syn refers to the Financial-Syndication Act, and ptar refers to the ‘‘Primetime Access Rule’’ of the fcc, both of which were established in the 1970s to protect local broadcasters and independent syndication companies from the three big networks. Fin-Syn prevented the networks from blackmailing the indies into giving them distribution rights in series that they did not totally fund, and ptar prevented the networks from ‘‘taking over’’ all of the primetime programming hours. Both acts stimulated activities and profits for local broadcasters and syndicated production companies. The abandonment of Fin-Syn and ptar in the 1980s and 1990s has made the economic fates of broadcasters and syndicators even more precarious. This psa, produced in 2000 by natpe, is entitled Television: The World’s Best View. I viewed the widescreen version at the event in New Orleans and then examined a Betacamsp version of the tape later on. This description and warning comes from Elizabeth Guider, ‘‘Buyer’s Market: Bargain Hunters Should Find Programs Priced to Sell,’’ www.variety.com, April 7, 20002. Brill quoted in Meg James, ‘‘With ‘Pride’ Problems, nbc Finds It’s a Jungle Out There,’’ Los Angeles Times, August 27, 2004, C2. Beiber, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Ibid. Ibid. This promotional video from Sony Broadcast was produced in 1991 and distributed in the years that followed both at the nab and through sales and regional operations of the Sony Corporation. The economic geographer Allen Scott, in his book on cultural and industrial agglomeration in Hollywood, uses the term ‘‘captive’’ companies or facilities to describe such relations. See Scott, On Hollywood, 96. Starting in the 1950s, uses and gratifications research countered the then dominant ‘‘media e√ect’’ model in communication research by demonstrating how audiences—far from being ‘‘victims’’ of media—actually use media to realize a range of basic human needs and gratification, many derived from the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s pyramidal ‘‘hierarchy of needs’’ model. See Elihu Katz, J. G. Blumler, and M. Gurevitch, ‘‘Uses and Gratification Research’’; and Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality. In taking this approach, I intend to build on and respond to the important recent work on media space by Nick Couldry and by Anna McCarthy. Couldry’s The Place of Media Power is particularly good at demonstrating the flaws of postmodern theory, which tended in figures like Baudrillard to ‘‘erase’’ space as a

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meaningful category. McCarthy’s Ambient Television, in turn, serves to unseat the traditional privilege assigned to the home and the domestic sphere by media scholars in accounting for television. The kinds of industrial, spatial, and textual practices in the pages of this chapter similarly complicate the place of viewership and agency—but they do so not from the perspective of the lay audiences, viewers, or consumers focused on by Couldry and McCarthy, but rather from the perspective of professional media practitioners who also daily manage, traverse, and negotiate institutional borderlands from the other side. Recurring professional rituals, the use of space, and exchanges of industrial texts and trade icons constantly negotiate what it means to make media and what it means to form institutional alliances. They also dramatize what and how changes in economy, technology, and public taste stand both as threats to career and corporation and as forces that can be ‘‘leveraged’’ by foresighted and resilient artisans. Workspaces and depictions of space frequently serve as terms used to rationalize, understand, and make sense of change, or even the threat of change. Fully understanding this dynamic means following Foucault’s and Lefebvre’s calls to focus on the materiality and social use of actual spaces, rather than on space as an idealized or conceptual category. A close examination of a range of deep texts in production culture suggests that film/tv practitioners are as versed in staging professional spaces as they are in producing the spectacle of twodimensional visual images on film and television screens. This more reflexive evidence (in deep texts and rituals) therefore supports more benign theories of industry power, which tend to find enabling personal and social functions in work worlds. Marlys McGregor, movie extra, in letter entitled ‘‘The Unforgiving Life of a Movie Extra,’’ Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, July 11, 2004. 3

1

2

TRADE IMAGES AND IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

Maria Demopoulos’s explanation of how she cuts a demo reel based on lessons learned as a production manager for commercials and music videos begins as follows: ‘‘I got to see the whole process of putting together a [commercial] spot, and it was great to see that over and over and over again’’ (quoted in ‘‘Rookie Class,’’ in Directors: Special Report, fall edition, October 28, 2002, 27– 28, 54). Based on their extensive field research in Fiji, Kelly and Kaplan launch a selfstyled polemic against Anderson by showing how Anderson’s notion of the ‘‘nation-state’’ (based on a cultural genealogy of decolonization, the rise of print media, and an overdependence on notions of ‘‘ethnicity’’) is ahistorical and covers over many of the cross-cultural and political complications at work in non-Western countries like Fiji and Kenya. For Kelly and Kaplan, ideas of community and communalism, far from being a benign force, were in fact part of a divide-and-conquer dynamic and ‘‘a new name for race’’ while community

Notes to Chapter 3

3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19

20 21

‘‘was an alibi against contradictions of citizen and subject of British nation and Empire’’ (Represented Communities, vii–ix, 198–200). While Anderson’s notion has influenced and stimulated much activity across the humanities and in cultural studies, fewer in media studies have come to grips with Kelly and Kaplan’s counterargument. Sid Gannis, former head of marketing at Columbia, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Lucasfilm, quoted in Aljean Harmetz, ‘‘They’re Rumors Not Predictions,’’ Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2000, 87. Harriet Ching, producer, Universal Studios, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Ibid. Bailey, quoting dp Stephen H. Burum, asc, in introduction to Bergery, Reflections, viii. Valuable historical background material on the asc is given in Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 254–55. From the documentary The Hidden Art of Hollywood (Los Angeles: Timeline Films, 2002), produced with the cooperation of the Art Director’s Guild and ampas. See Shae√er and Salvato, Masters of Light. See Oldham, First Cut. See, for example, Gallagher, Film Directors on Directing ; Jarecki, Breaking In ; or the scores of other books of this ilk on directors. Lawrence G. Paull, production designer, quoted in The Hidden Art of Hollywood. Demopoulos quoted in ‘‘Rookie Class,’’ in Directors: Special Report, fall edition, October 28, 2002, 28. Beiber, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. See, for example, the composite demo ‘‘Digital Jungle: Postproduction,’’ Los Angeles, 2002. This follows the general parameters of theory as outlined by Andrew in his foundational book The Major Film Theories. This demo for a new high-definition compositing system—and the digital boutique that used it to produce the video—was circulated professionally in 1990. This vhs ‘‘morphing’’ demo (with clips of the Michael Jackson video) was produced and circulated by pdi studios in 1993 as a demonstration of their technical capabilities. The breakthrough by pdi of ‘‘shotless’’ morphing (which reveals no edits or cuts for the entire length of the music video) complicates traditional film/video theory based on the idea of the shot as a basic unit. John Fleet, animator, e√ects supervisor, and president of Available Light, Burbank, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. From the transcript of the demo tape ‘‘Dramatica Pro,’’ 1994.

397

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45

Ibid. Bergery, Reflections, vii. Carter, ‘‘Member Portrait,’’ American Cinematographer, September 2004, 30. The Hidden Art of Hollywood. Beiber, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Fleet, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Paull, quoted in The Hidden Art of Hollywood. This statement is in reference to one of the ‘‘landmark’’ examples of production value, Blade Runner, and it evokes an ideal within demo production as well: create moving-image experiences that challenge trade viewers to recognize stylistic codes that underscore the demo maker’s ability. From a promotional brochure by Encore, 1998. The two images described here are from a 1998 direct mail promotional brochure by Roland House, which is a commercial postproduction boutique. In an industrial world defined by individuated and showcased looks, the auteur Chris Carter—of X-Files fame—markets himself not with the edgy visionary screen-looks of his trademark series but with the pre–word-processor icon of a ‘‘writer’s writer’’: a manual typewriter photographed in noirish black and white. Those with enough artistic capital and appreciation for aesthetic restraint know what this means. More than a producer of pop ‘‘eye candy,’’ Carter’s acute aesthetic identity is posed as that of the lone, serious ‘‘author.’’ This congratulatory, full-page ad by Chris Carter to Fox is from the Hollywood Reporter, May 13, 1997, 21. This postapocalyptic jib arm (a movable cranelike camera mount) is from a 1998 promotional brochure by Image G. For a more exhaustive summary of specific technical icons referencing space, and geography as industrial conditions, see my chapter in Olsson and Fullerton, Moving Image Technologies. Ad in Wired, August 1997, 168. Ad in Videography, July 1997, 87. From a 1997 promotional brochure by the ixs company. Ad in tv Broadcast, June 1997, 15–16. Ad in Film and Video, July 1997, 2. Hughes, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Anonymous director quoted in ‘‘Ethnography as Therapy,’’ unpublished paper and guest presentation, ucla, June 8, 1999, 2. Fleet, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. This description is from a color brochure by Panavision distributed in 1993, but the photograph itself appeared in numerous full-page ads in various trades throughout the early 1990s. Ad in Broadcasting and Cable, August 18, 1997, 48–49. See the ad in Wired, August 1997, 126. This narration is from the 1997 Wescam aerial demo videotape.

Notes to Chapter 3

46

47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Various ads throughout the trades—by Digital Fusion, Videonics, hbo, Accom, and cmc —deployed these tropes from 1997 to 1999 in their depiction of women figures. See the ‘‘Videographics’’ column on ‘‘Robo Babe’’ avatar in Videography, July 1997, 61. This Delacroix emulation is from a promotional brochure by Sony for its Betcam sx camera, 1997. See Lifetime studio’s full-page ad in Film and Video, November 1996, 75. From the fall 1997 Silicon Graphics promotional brochure titled ‘‘Create Your Future.’’ Ad in Post, July 16, 1997, 37. This is especially the case given Virginia Wright Wexman’s 1994 book Creating the Couple, which summarizes classical Hollywood cinema’s public screen practice as overwhelmingly focused on the creation of the heterosexual couple. See the production still in Bob Fisher, ‘‘As a Director-Cinematographer, Toby Phillips Has It Both Ways,’’ American Cinematographer, July 1993, 73. See the full-page Tektronix ad in tv Broadcast, June 1997, 22. See ‘‘Let There Be Light,’’ Videography, June 1997, 156–57. ‘‘Z-Jib’’ demo videotape, 1997. ‘‘Shotmaker’’ demo videotape, 1997. Full-page image and ad in International Photographer, July 1997, 1. Full-page ad in Millimeter, July 1997, 101. See Steve Mullen, ‘‘Breaking the Speed Limit,’’ Millimeter, July 1997, 83. See ibid., where the illustration shows digital video workers as hard-hat steel workers. See the logo by Serious Robots Computer Graphics in Post, July 16, 1997, 102. See the Atlas-like diagram in Horizons’ corporate logo in Post, July 16, 1997, 107. Modern Digital uses this diagram in its logo and ad in Film and Video, November 1996, 98. The stylized blacksmith serves as wpa’s brand logo in everything from the company’s letterhead to its many ads in the trades, including Film and Video, November 1996, 96. See the ad in Post, July 16, 1997, 31. Ad in Millimeter, July 1997, 43. See the ad in Videography, June 1997, 7. Hughes, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Fleet, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Hughes, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Ibid. A di√erent variant of distributed cognition is examined in the next chapter, primarily as it relates to film/video production technologies. Fleet, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997.

399

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4 1 2

3

4 5

6

7 8

9

TRADE MACHINES AND MANUFACTURED IDENTITIES

Cynthia Wisehart, ‘‘To Digital or Not,’’ Millimeter, March 2004, 9. Cynthia Cockburn might describe such a constraining process as ‘‘black-boxing,’’ for the great unruly potential of digital is constantly disciplined to achieve standardized, traditional work tasks. Cockburn, in ‘‘The Circuit of Technology,’’ incorporates Latour’s ‘‘actor-network’’ theory within a Marxist-feminist critique of domestic technologies in formulating the ‘‘black-boxing’’ process. Cockburn draws on Latour’s idea that ‘‘the amount of power exercised varies not according to the amount of power someone has, but to the number of other people who enter into the composition,’’ thereby demonstrating how the forms of task distribution that I discuss below are activities fundamentally involving power as well. Cultural and technical metaphors are crucial in this machine design and use. Metaphors don’t just produce an outcome but also provide a necessary orientation and intelligibility to machine users as part of what Phil Agre terms ‘‘critical technical practice’’ and what Tarleton Gillespie terms the ‘‘politics of self-interpretation.’’ See Agre, Computation and Human Experience, 37; and Gillespie, ‘‘The Stories Digital Tools Tell,’’ 111. Clancey goes so far as to assert ‘‘that human knowledge is located in physical interaction and social participation’’ (Situated Cognition, 344). Latour defines these ‘‘lieutenants’’ as a ‘‘retinue of delegated characters.’’ For his classic work on the ‘‘actor-network’’ theory, see Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life. Elsewhere Latour makes the following statement, which very much applies to technologies in film/video production work: ‘‘If, in our societies, there are thousands of such lieutenants to which we have delegated our competencies, it means that what defines our social relations is, for the most part, prescribed back to us by non-humans. Knowledge, morality, craft, force, sociability are not properties of humans, but of humans accompanied by their retinue of delegated characters’’ (‘‘Mixing Humans and Non-Humans Together,’’ 276). Tality Corp., for example, hypes outsourcing as their primary business plan, with the following brand boast: ‘‘Tality: The largest provider of product development outsourcing. . . .’’ (www.tality.com, 2004). John Fleet, animator, e√ects supervisor, and president of Available Light, Burbank, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. As one aging alumni of the studio system looked back wistfully: ‘‘The old studio system had completely passed away. The training and experience of a close-knit colony of artists was gone. Gone too were the legions of in-house craftsman, experts and specialists in everything from greenery and weaponry, and wainscoting and carpeting that studios deployed’’ (from The Hidden Art of Hollywood, Los Angeles: Timeline Films, 2002). Michael Beiber, director of business a√airs at ilm, states: ‘‘The workforce—do you have enough people to do the job? Can you keep them together for eighteen

Notes to Chapter 4

10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18

19 20

21

22 23 24

months? ‘‘We used to be an ‘open house’ [until companies began raiding our artists]. Now we have longer contracts’’ (spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997). John Hughes, director of human relations, Rhythm and Hues Studios, goes on to describe his company’s solution: ‘‘We couldn’t get them insured. And by going self-insured, we could cover these employees when they worked (at least) sixteen hours per week and beyond that. These part-time workers were people we wanted to cover’’ (spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997). Tim Sassoon, ‘‘Desktop? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Desktop,’’ Millimeter, September 1998, 96. John Fleet, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Wisehart, ‘‘To Digital or Not,’’ 9. Beiber, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Fleet, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. As Beiber stated: ‘‘But the relationship only goes so far, when the production team is working seventy-hour weeks. To a certain extent, the last-minute e√ect of overtime can be avoided by extensive planning, and by staying on top of the work. And, by doing your utmost for your artists’’ (spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997). Harriet Ching’s complete statement is: ‘‘A lot of companies are ‘hodge-podging’ all of their resources together. One of the big things is that there are all of these small companies with Macs and sgi’s hodge-podged together. . . . There are lots of digital e√ects operations in Los Angeles who all do the same thing. . . . And I want to know how this is going to work for me. I look out for someone who tries to low-ball me. I want somebody to partner with me’’ (spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997). As Fleet goes on to underscore: ‘‘So here was a complete breakdown of the three branches [artists, engineers, administrators]’’ (spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997). Paul Siblow, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. In some ways this was a throwback to the old studio system (which utilized many assistants) and a retreat from the new status that nonlinear had achieved (by combining the entire editing process into single multitasked workstation). On this last point, I thank Erin Hill, who makes this argument about the elimination of upward mobility in videotape logging versus paing in research for her forthcoming dissertation on the gendered nature of production culture jobs in L.A. in 2006. Fletcher’s analogy and this paragraph are from my essay ‘‘Steadicam’’ in Newcomb, ed., The Encyclopedia of Television. This quote is from the Cinema Products Steadicam demo (vhs videotape), distributed in 1992. This apparent ease-of-use message is, however, undercut in the tape by images of physical preparation, group workshops, etc.

401

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402

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41

The ‘‘Power Pod’’ is illustrated in an ad for ‘‘Roy Isaia: The Equipment Broker,’’ in American Cinematographer, June 1993, 77. From a promotional brochure for Victor Duncan, 1993. See the ad for ‘‘The New Jimmy Jib III’’ in American Cinematographer, June 1993, 101. From a Preston Cinema Systems promotional brochure, 1993. Ad by Innovision in American Cinematographer, December 1991, 75. See also ‘‘Table-Top Technology,’’ promotional pamphlet, Innovision Optics, June 1993. Innovision’s Probe Lens demo, showing the actual ‘‘fly-through’’ used in a prime-time commercial for Intel pcs, was distributed on vhs video in 1995. This spinning, Z-axis rotations mount was demonstrated at ShowBiz Expo in Los Angeles in June 1997, and is documented on videotape by the author. This snorkel lens from Panavision was demonstrated at ShowBiz Expo in Los Angeles in June 1997, and is documented on videotape by the author. Trade shows like Showbiz Expo in Los Angeles also typically include a number of tinkerers along with the heavyweights Panavision, Arriflex, and Aaton. These garage inventors hawk unorthodox mechanical motion-picture contraptions alongside neon-lit pavilions hosted by multinational electronics giants like Sony and Panasonic. These descriptions of the ‘‘Rad-cam’’ are from a videotape produced and distributed by Innovision in 1997. The ‘‘Auto-Robot Crane’’ is a product of Filmotechnic International Corporation. These descriptions are from a 1997 trade sales brochure. The ‘‘Traveling Cascade Crane’’ is also a product of Filmotechnic International. This illustration is found in American Cinematographer, September 1997, 70. The device was built and designed by David Boyd, a camera operator, and Kevin Widowski, a key grip. Some might deem this the ultimate in autoerotic camera mounting technologies. This contraption materializes (in a very crude sort of way) the 1970s psychoanalytic analogy of cinema as ‘‘phallocentric.’’ From the ‘‘Cover Every Angle’’ promotional brochure for SpaceCam, 1997. From the ‘‘In Our Case the Sky Is Not the Limit’’ promotional brochure for Wescam (a SpaceCam competitor), 1997. My interview with Dent at atas precipitated this statement with the following question: ‘‘What special demands have the shooting schemes of The Shield and its innovative forms of narrative had on your performance or approach to acting? Or on your preparations for performing in front of the camera?’’ Catherine Dent responded by saying: ‘‘I think that the format of our episodic is what you are going to find in a general episodic. The format, the way that we shoot, I find it incredibly freeing. . . . Scott actually directed that clip, where Michael and I are running down the alley, and I have to give credit to our cameraman Billy. . . . I think that one time, in twenty-six episodes, we’ve been on sticks [tripods]. . . . We’re just working one on one, and moment to moment. Because the camera’s going to be swishing around all the time. It’s freeing.’’

Notes to Chapter 4

42

43

44

45

46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54

In explaining the benefits of this approach, Scott Brazil continues: ‘‘And you never know when the camera is going to swing into a close-up. So you can’t dog it. You can’t wait. You’ve got to come ready. . . . Catherine Dent says ‘‘You can’t fake it.’’ And I think that’s probably liberating, because you are always ‘on.’ ’’ The question and full interchange went as follows: Question: ‘‘Stylistically, where did the show come from? What were your influences: Use of 16mm, cameras, handheld?’’ Scott Brazil: ‘‘And this sort of approach for us, from a storytelling point-of-view, was to try and make it feel like a ride along, a police ride along. That’s where it began. No time. No money. Handheld.’’ The question to Cassar that led to his statement was: ‘‘[This approach] sounds like those documentaries that [editor] Scott Powell talked about doing in the 1980s. Right?’’ Mitch Hurwitz, executive director, spoken comments at the ‘‘table reading’’ of Arrested Development, Los Angeles, August 13, 2004. Hurwitz explains his objectives in the process: ‘‘The hope was that we would go so quickly in production since the lighting requirements were minimal. And with that extra time we would rehearse and that would be right. But we didn’t actually [end up] doing that.’’ Glenn Morgan, interview with author, atas, October 30, 2003. Heydar Adel, online editor for Fox’s 24 and nbc’s Third Watch, quoted in Avid ds Nitris advertisement, Post, October 2004, back cover. Price Pethel, colorist and creative director, spoken comments at the Below-theLine Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. The numbers 25–25–25 represent the three primary colors that together makeup white light. If one number is larger than the ‘‘straight-across’’ norm, say at 33 rather than 25, the resulting print would look exceptionally blue or reddish. Since films like Chinatown (in color) or film noir (in black and white) dps hardly ever light their shots with uniformly white light. By telling the lab to print 25–25–25, the dp ensures that scenes he or she lit to look cold or bluish, or warm and Rembrandt-like, won’t be naively ‘‘re-corrected’’ by the lab technician who might make the lighted scenes look white again. For years dps and lab timers worked together to ensure that the film print looked like the scene shot. Now with no contact between the dp and the digital technician, the digital dailies frequently eliminate the skewed color scheme intended by the dp. Josh Pines, Technicolor, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. Yuri Neyman, cinematographer for Gamma Density, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. Pethel, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. John Galt, Panavision, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. Pines, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005.

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55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Neyman, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. Bill Sandell, production designer, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. Allen Lasky, Dalsa Digital Cinema, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. Legato is describing the dailies process on the film The Aviator (2005) (spoken comments, Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005). Neil Robinson, head of engineering at FilmLight, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. Pethel, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. Larry Cherno√, Cherno√ Touber Associates, spoken comments at the Belowthe-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. Pethel, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. Kerry Madden, ‘‘The Right Spot,’’ Blue Print for Health, http://blueprint.blue crossmn.com/topic/camera, July 21, 2003. George Spiro Dibie, ‘‘ICG Priorities: Diversity, Education,’’ Millimeter, December 2002, 10. Marc Graser, ‘‘Dismal 2000 Sends Web Sites Spinning,’’ Daily Variety, January 9, 2001, 20. Zorianna Kit and Mathew Doman, ‘‘Brass Reassures Warners Sta√,’’ Hollywood Reporter, February 14, 2001. 35. Chad Graham, ‘‘For Showbiz, Lean Look Is In,’’ Hollywood Reporter, January 22, 2001, 18. Posted on the Web site of the Society of Camera Operators Magazine, July 21, 2003, reprinted from Operating Cameraman (spring/summer 1996) http://soc .org/opcam/08—sps96/mg08—negrin.html. Negrin is attacking the naive view of those who believe that ‘‘just because the camera operator is on payroll seems clear incentive for the dp to operate the camera with a ‘clear conscience.’ ’’ Negrin warns that eventually the operator won’t be hired at all. Sony classified ad, ‘‘Now Make It Real,’’ Post, July 1997, 131. Sony classified ad, ‘‘Bring It to Life,’’ smpte Journal, June 1997, 428. Matrox Digisuite ad, Film and Video, August 1997, 85. Roland House, full-page trade ad, Post, July 16, 1997, 27. See Bogen’s ‘‘Strong Grip’’ ad, American Cinematographer, June 1993, 87. Film Bank ad, Millimeter, July 1997, 107. See ‘‘Serial Ports on Steroids,’’ dv , October 1997, 47–49. This s&m trade image is in ibid., 46. See the Film/Video Equipment Services ad in American Cinematographer, June 1993, 50.

Notes to Chapter 4

78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86

87

88

89

90

Toronto Film Liaison, promotional brochure, 1997. See Qualcomm’s eyeballs ad in Wired, August 1997, 87. From Avid’s ‘‘Xpress Yourself ’’ promotional brochure, 1997. From ‘‘Sound Forge xp’’ promotional sheet, 1997. The tortured male image is from a Houdini ad in Film and Video, July 1997, 105. The ‘‘suicide by electrocution’’ image is from a Boss Studios ad in Digital Magic, February 1997, 43. See Digital Magic, February 1997, 57, for cranial surgery motif and a similar (but less visceral ad) for icefx/The E√ects Editor in Videography, July 1997, 135. See also the ‘‘open-brain’’ promotional ad for ‘‘Energy Film Library’’ in Film and Video, May 1998, 26. Beiber, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Hughes’s full statement is as follows: ‘‘When we get new people in, we have a training program. Usually four weeks. But that depends upon the employee. If we’ve got a classically trained animator and we’re trying to train them on the computer systems, there’s no way we can do it in four weeks. It’s going to take two weeks just to introduce him to the concept of what a computer is. . . . Most classically trained animators take eleven to thirteen weeks before they get trained at our facility. That’s an investment we are willing to make. Because we can’t train animators from scratch. That’s a three to four year process. We don’t have that kind of money. But we can do three to four months to teach them how to ply their wares on our computers’’ (spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997). As Hughes further explains: ‘‘Health, dental, vision . . . were very important to us. . . . So we went to a self-insurance plan, wherein we control whether benefits get paid or not. We discovered that we could dramatically extend benefits to employees and at the same time save considerable dollars.’’ Hughes explains the incremental math of production sabbaticals: ‘‘By the sixth year our employees get five weeks of vacation/sick leave. . . . And then every five years we give employees eight weeks of sabbatical. So, really, in the sixth year our employees get thirteen weeks o√. And we do that because we are in an industry that seems to be populated by a lot of young people.’’ They also clarify how symbolic a≈rmations of physical labor, masculinity, and the stressed male body relate to the technical and environmental instabilities of the production enterprise. Since these practices are located in trades, demos, and technical literature, they function less as attempts to persuade the culture at large (viewers, spectators, or consumers), than as ways that the industrial community dialogues with itself; makes sense of change and uncertainty; and involves critically jockeying between groups in the production culture. The sociologist Sally Hacker, in her essay ‘‘The Eye of the Beholder,’’ has argued that changes in the ways that masculinist fields (like engineering and the military) are organized and reproduced are keys to addressing imbalances of power and forms of gender domination in society. Homi Bhabha has stated that ‘‘it must

405

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91

92

be our aim not to deny or disavow masculinity, but to disturb its manifest destiny—to draw attention to it as a prosthetic reality—a prefixing of the rules of gender and sexuality’’ (‘‘Are You a Man or a Mouse?’’ 57). Hollywood’s technical culture (like Hacker’s engineering and computer science cultures), is both militaristic and quintessentially masculinist. Its technical encasements and production modes, in addition, are dramatic ideological and physical manifestations of Bhabha’s ‘‘prosthetic’’ trope. While media theorists can target and explicate such tendencies as I have tried to do—in hopes of critically stalling prefixed rules—the industry o√ers its own critical mediations that rationalize and reward the traits and their functions. These industrial self-representations and commentaries are far from buried. Indeed, the anxious creative industry examined in this chapter publicly lauds the ecstasies of probe imagery, push programming, and militaristic strategies of production as remedies capable of making creative properties ‘‘travel’’ profitably in the increasingly fragmented world of global culture. As a result, lower budget productions and genres (that do not emulate costly, immersive, cinematic stylistics) are usually ‘‘reformatted’’ (re-created) by other countries as ‘‘indigenous’’ programs rather than distributed. Pethel, spoken comments at the Below-the-Line Expo meetings, Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, June 11, 2005. 5

1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

INDUSTRIAL AUTEUR THEORY

Meryl Marshall, chairman of atas, president of Two Oceans Entertainment Group, and independent producer, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 25, 2000. Bryan Singer, director’s blog bluetights.net, posted online while on location on Superman Returns, as quoted in ‘‘Dear Diary: Action!’’ Time, April 4, 2005. From the Larry Sanders Show episode ‘‘Beginning of the End,’’ hbo, March 22, 1998 (available on tape at the ucla Film and Television Archives, pva-15210). See Sarris, The American Cinema. See Schatz, The Genius of the System. See Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, Classical Hollywood Cinema. See Newcomb and Alley, The Producer’s Medium. See Wild, The Showrunners. Of course Newcomb and Alley recognize collectivity as a distinctive factor in television, even though they single out influential executive producers as the key authors. Some of the best recent work on the film/television industries—Allen Scott’s On Hollywood and David Hesmondhalgh’s The Culture Industries—similarly shows how complicated authorship is yet falls back on the old (and I would say) suspect distinction between the ‘‘creatives’’ at the top and the ‘‘worker’’ below the line. Quoted in The Hidden Art of Hollywood (Los Angeles: Timeline Films, 2002). Ibid.

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17 18 19 20

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24

The art director John Muto’s traditional view of authorship as control is expressed in the following statement: ‘‘I think Ridley Scott storyboards each shot of his films. I have friends who’ve worked for him. I’ve seen them. He figures out where each shot goes. I mean, that’s how William Scott Menzies worked.’’ This estimation of Scott (and, in the text, of Hitchcock) are stated in The Hidden Art of Hollywood. Quoted in Wild, The Showrunners, 73. Helford quoted in ibid., 55. Marshall, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 25, 2000. Hurwitz, spoken comments at the ‘‘table reading’’ for Arrested Development, Los Angeles, August 13, 2004. The full transcript of his statement is as follows: ‘‘The network keeps saying we need to do something di√erent, gotta shake it up a little bit. You know it takes a lot of money to make these shows in the final analysis. People get nervous. But I think what Imagine had with this concept from the very start was you can’t have a laugh track. [Our ‘‘sitcom’’ ] is a documentary work. We’re making fun of reality television, were using that vocabulary. So the question never came up and I think everyone of us is grateful for that because we all had come out of that very standard rhythm [of studio sitcoms]. And for whatever reason right now it seems like a time in comedy where everyone starts to see the jokes coming. So I feel like in a lot of ways it is written like a multiple camera show, there’s a lot of the setups and punchlines. But these guys throw it away, and make it so e√ortlessly, and make it so small, that it works.’’ Larry Charles, producer, Mad about You, and writer for Seinfeld, quoted in Wild, The Showrunners, 119. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, described by Wild in The Showrunners, 31. Paul Simms, described by Wild in The Showrunners, 24. This email interchange between Judd Apatow and Mark Brazill over authorship and attribution was published on the Internet at http://www.well.com/doc torow/laundry.txt. See Newcomb and Alley, The Producer’s Medium. Rosenthal quoted in Wild, The Showrunners, 73. Hurwitz’s explanation is in response to the question: ‘‘How many writers are involved in this show?’’ (spoken comments at the ‘‘table reading’’ for Arrested Development, Los Angeles, August 13, 2004). Aljean Harmetz, ‘‘They’re Rumors, Not Predictions,’’ Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2000, p. 87. Consider the following rather characteristic description of the writing-committee hell that came to be known as Charlie’s Angels : ‘‘But the Murray-Liu screaming matches were only red flag number 1 for Charlie’s Angels. Red flag number 2 was the pink, yellow, and green pages of new scripts that tumbled out of the copying machine daily; [scripts that] bore the names of at least ten writers.’’

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32 33 34 35 36

Diane English quoted in Christopher Noxon, ‘‘Television without Pity,’’ New York Times, October 17, 2004, B1. Crane quoted in Wild, The Showrunners, 60. Noxon, ‘‘Television Without Pity,’’ B1. Ibid. Bentham’s ‘‘panopticon’’ is a central metaphor in Michel Foucault’s influential work Discipline and Punish. The award-winning episode of Homicide titled ‘‘The Subway’’ was broadcast during fall sweeps week by the nbc network on December 5, 1997. A behindthe-scenes documentary about the making of the Homicide episode was subsequently aired on pbs as a Frontline special titled ‘‘Frontline: Anatomy of a Homicide’’ (available through pbs Home Video). Morgan, spoken comments and interview with the author, North Hollywood, California, October 30, 2003. Morgan goes on to explain his task as an editor: ‘‘It has very little to do with cutting music videos. There’s a musical sensibility that goes into it. I’m di√erent than a lot of the other editors. I cut the whole show without music. And then I work on the music later.’’ Morgan continues by stating: ‘‘It’s like we are fighting these other things [lack of coverage and continuity] to get there. But I do think it’s all about storytelling. And I think that the reason the show has been successful for so long is that it’s got really compelling stories—with often compelling people.’’ Hurwitz, spoken comments at the ‘‘table reading’’ for Arrested Development, Los Angeles, August 13, 2004. Ibid. Helford quoted in Wild, The Showrunners, 51. Ibid., 53. In addition to note giving, other monitoring rituals always keep the production space and enterprise from stasis and balance. Many independent program productions involve the daily reconciliation of costs spent versus projected budget estimates. The obligatory production and postproduction meetings during works in progress also inculcate the personnel with the sense that the project is always ‘‘incremental’’—that their future is always tied to successfully meeting projected benchmarks throughout the shooting schedule. Most independent program productions also contractually tie financial disbursements to the necessary approval of each major stage in the production by executive producers or studios. Constant awareness of television ratings, like the box o≈ce, has also become an ever-present monitoring ritual. Ratings provide, in e√ect, terra firma for all competitors, since accurate viewing numbers and demographics are the basis for rationalizing the success or failure of a show or series. For this reason, endless tactics are devised to spike or hype ratings in various portions of the day across the country. The high season for this kind of ritual interchange occurs three times a year during ‘‘sweeps week,’’ where viewer numbers are codified as the basis for ad rates for the months that follow. Still other monitoring and

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oversight rituals result from ever-present forms of institutionalized surveillance. Each May and June, after the fall season has been unveiled for advertisers and a≈liates, bets are taken on which network programming heads will roll first. This sense of an ‘‘executive revolving-door ritual’’ further underscores the fact that despite all of the overdetermined attempts to build consensus among industrial participants, the daily spaces of the production and producing worlds are characterized by great instabilities and anxieties about duration of employment. Inculcating this impending sense of inevitable temporariness works perfectly to legitimize the vast system of ‘‘contract’’ rather than permanent employee labor that is viewed by some as the Hollywoodization of American business. Spatially, monitoring rituals unsettle the ostensibly private and proprietary nature of studio and production space. Studio and soundstage walls evoke walled-o√ privacy. But note giving, ratings, endless in-progress production meetings, daily budget reconciliations, incremental production funding and disbursement, and the executive revolving door all betray just how ‘‘porous’’ those proprietary walls are. This porosity—providing a one-way vantage point to those controlling both the bottom line and the possibility of project green lighting—serves to psychologically discipline the community of production in cost-e√ective ways. The director continues: ‘‘Just when you start feeling sorry for the guy, however, he’ll call Ben upstairs on the walkie-talkie. Minutes later, Ben will address us in a condescending tone, and reminds us that the dga contract requires their credit page to be prominent among the title sequence of the movie. Subsequent checking of the contract reveals that no such stipulation exists’’ (spoken comments at ucla, June 8, 1999). Kristina Sauerwein, ‘‘Unscripted Angst at Writers Guild Forum,’’ Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2002, F1, F10. The Hidden Art of Hollywood. Dean Tavoularis quoted in The Hidden Art of Hollywood. Hurwitz, spoken comments at the ‘‘table reading’’ for Arrested Development, Los Angeles, August 13, 2004. Cassar is responding to my question: ‘‘How has this quick cutting a√ected the viewers’ ability to perceive and absorb information? In 24, the use of split screens creates a real challenge for viewers to pick and choose where to go. This doesn’t exist in classical film/television where you typically assign shots to the point of view of one main character who we follow in a scene. You may cut back and forth, but essentially the viewer is locked into the mind of a character. And now there are many competing points of view—in some cases, four things to choose from at the same time. And I wonder if you can talk about this task for, and demands on, viewers?’’ John Cassar answers my question: ‘‘That was unusual too, because that’s the most we’ve ever done. Because all of the characters were listening to that [phone] conversation in that particular episode. We usually break it down into two or three [split screens]. In our case, it’s really interesting,

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because the boxes were borne from phone calls. . . . And when Stephen cut the first episode, we didn’t realize that literally thirty minutes of the first episode were phone calls. And so this way we were able to put both people on the phone call at the same time. And it just made it visually more interesting than cutting back and forth on a phone call constantly. And then, because of that we liked the style of it. And started using that in action scenes, and in this case it is perfect. Because all of the characters are listening to the same thing, so you get to see them all do that’’ (interview with the author, North Hollywood, CA, October 30, 2003). Spelling quoted in Primetime tv : The Decision Makers, abc news special, 1972 (ucla Film/Television Archive record number VA2340t). Ibid. Sanchez, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 26, 2000. Sanchez continues: ‘‘Many times we are looking at establishing internships on the first rung. And then there are groups like namac who have worked to try to get executives mid-level. But senior management is really where all of the action is done. And that’s why we’ve worked really hard to get a vp for diversity in all of these deals. And it’s very critical that that person reports to the ceo. Because that’s the one thing we’ve seen.’’ Kweisi Mfume, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 26, 2000. Mfume’s full comments before and after this statement are as follows: ‘‘I’m glad that you mentioned that you are an agent. Because we have been meeting with the talent agents. From the biggest (and I don’t want to mention names) to the smallest ones. And you know, if there’s a problem with the networks there’s also a problem with the agencies. . . . Because I think there has to be greater opportunities for people to be agents as well. And not just so that people of color can represent other people of color. But that they can represent everybody. . . . They say: ‘‘You know change takes time. It’s a slow process. And I keep saying: ‘‘It’s been fifty-two years . . . It’s been fifty-two years!’’ My full question to Brazil went as follows: ‘‘Did the editing practices and aesthetics on mtv influence your approaches to directing prime-time dramatic television in any way?’’ ‘‘And if so, how?’’ ‘‘What were the stylistic origins for The Shield ?’’ (interview with the author, North Hollywood, CA, October 30, 2003). My full interchange with Cassar, before and after this comment, went as follows: Question: ‘‘Where did the stylistic origins for 24 come from, and what were your influences?’’ Cassar: ‘‘It was quite the same with 24. . . . What he was doing, whether it was intentional or not—I think he did—by breaking all of those rules it starts getting very uncomfortable for the audience to watch. And 24 is that kind of show. It puts you . . . it involves you in the show. By the way he shoots it. The uncomfortableness of hand-held; always behind things; always feeling like you are always watching. That’s where it came from for 24 ’’ (interview with the author, North Hollywood, CA, October 30, 2003). Ibid.

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The Hidden Art of Hollywood. Thomas’s full statement is as follows: ‘‘Spike throws his heart and soul into his scripts. The great thing is that [Spike] lets the people working for him interpret those scripts. He gave me a lot of freedom to choose this location, and we utilized every single building on that block. The joy of working in the movie business is the collaborative process. And we start this process with the director and the writer. And we work with the cinematographer and the costume designer, and particularly in my case, with the set decorator. And the joy is in talking and communicating and working with all of those people to give definition to what we are trying to do.’’ Jason Bateman, actor, and Mitchell Hurwitz, executive producer, spoken comments at the ‘‘table read’’ for Arrested Development, Los Angeles, August 13, 2004. Cassar’s full statement on this method is as follows: ‘‘Well this is gonna sound strange. . . . But that mtv style has got us closer to theater than I’ve ever seen. Because what happens to the actors is, you don’t save the one shot for the one line, and here’s another shot for another line. Instead, here’s the three pages. And we do that scene from the beginning to the end. And we rarely break that up. And even if we go into one room or two rooms, or inside or outside, and the actor turns around. . . . We will have Guy Skinner, who’s our handheld cameraman. And he’s always right behind (the actors). So the scenes are complete from top to bottom. We also have zooms all the time. So we are constantly changing picture sizes. So again—the actors are not in the world of a master, a medium, and a close-up. Within the same [take] we’ll do all of those shots. So again, the actor must be on, from the very beginning to the very end. And it plays like a theater piece. So from the director’s point of view, you get to see the whole scene, and you get to see how it plays in real time. You don’t have to think about it as cut by cut by cut. And one thing I’d like to mention: this puts a lot more importance on your cameraman and on your editor, because you are shooting so much more film in a way. Because you are doing everything top to bottom. And because unlike traditional style, when you’ve got your master, medium, and close-up and the editor moves in [from one to the other]. Now, you are giving him so much more footage that he becomes a part of the process. He needs to find that feeling for you, because you’ve given him so much [footage]. So I think the operator and the editor have become a huge part of making this all work. I think they’re bigger than they’ve ever been before’’ (interview with the author, North Hollywood, CA, October 30, 2003). Scott Brazil, producer/director of The Shield, explains the manic mode on his series as follows: question: ‘‘How has the quickened pace of these shows a√ected shooting days? Time to get a show in the can? Budgets? Time allocated for postproduction vs. production, etc. Can you talk about what you are up against time wise on these shows? Your task?’’ Brazil: ‘‘We’re trying not to look like motion pictures. We’re trying not to look like mtv. We certainly have capitalized on the audience’s ability to pull story out of images. But we shoot ’em in

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seven days. We’re reckless. We light fast. We shoot fast. It’s all about what Catherine does—and the rest of the cast. We’ll capture it. We’ll find a way to capture it. We look for locations that inherently o√er something that supports the scene. Or that supports the environment as it’s been defined in the show. By way of example, we were location scouting today. And one of the directors, a former cinematographer, a terrific cinematographer; is really a great director, and he said: ‘Let’s fill this area with water, it’s a night scene, and we’ll get the reflection of the city lights in the water, and we’ll get double images.’ And it’s a glorious thing. And that’s a very high-design motion picture concept. Which I immediately pissed all over. And bless him. He immediately put it in Shield terms. And he filled it with garbage. And suddenly the images are all broken up and fractured. Which is very much The Shield. But we just shoot like crazy. And that’s our whole M.O.’’ (interview with the author, North Hollywood, CA, October 30, 2003). Cassar’s full statement, before and after this comment, is as follows: ‘‘Question: With the new editing styles, do you try to get more, or less ‘coverage’ during a shoot? I’m curious about shooting ratios, for example?’’ Cassar: ‘‘I think the shooting ratios are high. It’s really strange . . . I don’t really look at it as if one shot is a [one lighting] set-up. Because it really doesn’t work that way. . . . If you had done it traditionally, you would have had four shots: two cameras going this way, and two cameras going that way. But because we change our frame sizes so much, you end up with a lot more coverage’’ (interview with the author, North Hollywood, CA, October 30, 2003). Brazil’s full explanation on this point is as follows: ‘‘We shoot a ton of film. Our lighting style is less specific. And we’ll shoot—instead of this way and this way (two ways like in twenty-four)—we’ll shoot this way [gestures all 360 degrees]. All the time, we’ll shoot 360s all the time. We’ll shoot our movie lights. And sometimes, if you watch closely and you pan through a very bright light, and then freeze it and go back, you say, ‘‘Why that’s the light from the house they rented the movie lights from!’’ But you don’t know when you are watching. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a bright light in the scene. And I directed something else this year, and I printed twenty to thirty minutes of dailies each day. And on The Shield we try to keep it under two hours every day. We print almost everything we shoot. Because what you find—and this is where the pressure is enormous— in editing, the pressure is enormous to cull through all of that for the true gems. And really just cherry-pick every little beat’’ (interview with the author, North Hollywood, CA, October 30, 2003). Although the payo√ in production values in this case is dramatically less than it is on The Shield and 24. Marshall, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 25, 2000.

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3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11

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13 14 15 16

INDUSTRIAL IDENTITY THEORY

Ad for the natpe Syndication Market, in dv , Feburary 2006, 27. The classic account of subcultural style, focusing on acute displays of di√erence by marginalized social groups, now serves as a de facto primer for contemporary commercial marketing strategies (see Hebdige, Subculture ). One of the best and most influential models for understanding identity as performance is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Out of the large body of cultural studies research in this area, one of the best sources that incorporates newer ideas of identity as performance—especially in relation to media—is Herman Gray’s Cultural Moves. Gray is one of the few scholars to e√ectively tie sociological notions of identity performance with dominant media industry practices. See Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, 172–73. See my essay ‘‘Convergence Television,’’ 68–70. See Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, 44. For key works on social identity theory in social psychology, see Haslam, Psychology in Organizations, 26–57; and Tajfel and Turner, ‘‘The Social Identity Theory of Inter-group Behavior.’’ For an introduction and overview of ‘‘cultural identity theory’’ in psychotherapy, see William E. Cross Jr., ‘‘Cultural Identity Theory: Definition, Present Status, and Research Findings,’’ video from Microtraining and Multicultural Development, 2005, www.emicrotraining.com. See Gecas, ‘‘The Self Concept,’’ 1–33; Hatch and Schultz, ‘‘Relations between Organizational Culture, Identity, and Image,’’ 356–365; and Hill, Becoming a Manager. See Hughes, Men and Their Work, 127. See Go√man, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ; and Hochschild, The Managed Heart. For a symptomatic late 1990s discussion of ‘‘personal branding,’’ see Tom Peters, ‘‘Brand Called You,’’ Fast Company, August 1997, 83. See John Hartley, ed., Creative Industries, especially 105–55. One important exception to this business-as-managerial and production-ascreative model can be found in Thomas Schatz’s important book on the studio system, The Genius of the System, which argues that it was the studio moguls and not the directors who were far more important in determining the style of a film. Thus, this chapter on executives and nonproduction professionals who take on, leverage, or hijack above-the-line creative credit on projects that they are in some way attached to di√ers from the preceding chapter on the industrial cultivation of authorship among above-the-line creative personnel. Kim Masters, ‘‘A Rush to Take Some Credit,’’ Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2004, E4, E5. Ibid., E5. Veesman, spoken comments at the National Association of Broadcasters meeting, April 2000. Carlin, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 25, 2000.

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20 21 22 23

24

Pomerantz, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 25, 2000. See McRobbie, ‘‘Clubs to Companies’’; and Hartley, Creative Industries, 3, 302, 353. Instead, producers of both consumer goods and media content today face more highly competitive and ‘‘flexible’’ post-Fordist markets and a culture defined by narrower ‘‘economies of scope.’’ These economies are comprised of distinctive ‘‘niche’’ consumer taste cultures, whose demographically based consumption practices (which include spending and viewing habits) form the basis for the kind of ‘‘narrowcasting’’ favored in the new world of cable and digital media. See D’Alessandro, Brand Warfare ; and Gobe, Emotional Branding. See chapter 6, ‘‘Framing and Video Bites,’’ in Mullen, The Revolution Now in Sight ; and Turow, Breaking Up America, 104–6. This branding model and success story is described in Tim Swanson, ‘‘A Tale of Two Branding Strategies,’’ www.variety.com, February 21, 2001. espn’s Daly is quoted in Martin Lieberman, ‘‘Does Image Matter? The Reality Behind the Brands—espn: Sports Haven,’’ www.experiencenetwork.com, spring 2000, 34, 40. During the postwar era, marketing departments and ad agencies spent considerable energy designing, developing and promoting brands for their nonmedia clients, who were mostly large manufacturers (e.g., Procter and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Goodyear, gm, and other Fortune 500 companies) that successfully promoted their products by advertising on network television. In a few cases, like Dumont, companies operated both as manufactured brands (of television sets) and as broadcasters (of programs), but this soon changed. The television networks that survived and prospered during this period (nbc, cbs, and abc) did so in part by promoting themselves to governmental policymakers and audiences not as manufacturers of proprietary, branded consumer products but as enlightened stewards and caretakers of the airwaves. This successful promotion of the networks as trustees (rather than brands) protecting a vast public resource arguably helped legitimize and sanction a network ‘‘oligarchy’’ during the 1950s (one controlled by only three corporations who were referred to o≈cially in abbreviated three-letter shorthand). But even as caretakers of the public trust, the same networks were always producers of content, and when this reality surfaced in public discussions tensions emerged among policymakers and industry management. These tensions typically resulted in the application of constraints to the television industry (such as the limitations on syndication rights allowed to the networks when they served as producers). Such constraints were intended to ensure the free and open flow of trade and speech on the airwaves. But this situation slowly changed, as the major television networks (and then the federal government starting in the Reagan era) began to acknowledge the original networks less as public trustees than as corporations (and thus

Notes to Chapter 6

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27

28

29 30 31 32 33

34

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manufacturers of branded content) competing for a market share. Early on the networks exploited one side of their dualistic identity (lobbying for trusteeship with regulators), even though they e√ectively and simultaneously sold themselves to viewers (as providers of branded entertainment). This tension between branding and trusteeship has existed in American network television from the start, but shifts in industry emphasis have been even more dramatic in the last two decades. Beginning in the 1950s, cbs promoted itself as the ‘‘ti√any network’’ to reflect its ‘‘higher’’ cultural status compared to abc and nbc. For contemporary accounts of the ‘‘yellow campaign,’’ see ‘‘Mark Landler, ‘‘Glib Jokes—on Whom? Now Worse Than Ever! Cynicism in Advertising,’’ New York Times, August 17, 1997, 4:1; and ‘‘nbc Copies Promo Idea with a Twist,’’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 13, 1997, B4. For more background on the abc yellow campaign and brand building in general, see Stephen Battaglio, ‘‘abc Campaign to Get Bad Reaction,’’ New York Times, August 18, 1997, D10; and Dupree, ‘‘Building Better Brands,’’ Adweek, February 12, 1996, 27. The imperative to brand and rebrand circulates globally as well, as when James Murdoch, ceo of Startv (with one-third of a billion viewers in fifty-three countries) announced that his company had revamped their television brand by deleting any explicit reference to ‘‘tv’’: ‘‘Star tv . . . will be known as star, thereby evolving from a television brand to a multi-service, multi-platform brand’’ (Nyay Bushan, ‘‘Star tv Rebrands as star,’’ Hollywood Reporter, February 2001, 65). Brian Lowry, ‘‘On tv, It’s the Show, Not the Network, That Keeps Viewers Watching,’’ Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1999, 8. See Lindstrom and Andersen, Brand Building on the Internet ; and Marrioti, Smart Things to Know about Brands and Branding. Ries and Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, 13–17. Ibid., 17. This comment and those that follow are from Siblow’s spoken comments at the ShowBiz Expo production convention, Los Angeles, CA, June 14, 1997. Siblow’s remarks leading up to this comment were: ‘‘We handle Fox’s on-air look, and identity, based on demographics. . . . So actually, we don’t have the role of the traditional production company. We brand entertainment companies. What is the objective of a given project? If it’s Fox, how do we deal with the 18–34 yearold audience?’’ Siblow’s full comment is: ‘‘We do three things to package entertainment companies. We develop vision, strategy, technology. We do this by working with clients on their mission statements. . . . We are becoming proactive partners, an independent organization that helps them do well in their universe.’’ Siblow’s full comment is: ‘‘All of us are in the relationship business, period. We

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40 41 42 43

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are all trying to connect businesses and services together, whether it’s entertainment enjoyment or about bringing someone forward to do a transaction on an atm-like device. Whatever it is, you are trying to have a relationship with a client. Our relationship [as a branding company] is to help our clients have relationships with their clients.’’ Siblow’s full comment is: ‘‘So in this we bridge almost into an ad agency’s role. We help engineer the ‘‘perception engine’’ that will attract that particular audience that Fox wants. . . . We seek to create ‘‘self-organized programs,’’ so as to develop modular architectures that can be created to use in that arena.’’ This statement is from Robert P. Mark, ‘‘Brand Builder,’’ Northwestern (fall 2002): 37. See Kompare Rerun Nation. Bleier, quoted in Bill Carter, ‘‘Television: Cable Is Busy Resurrecting Anything and Everything that Was Once on the Networks,’’ New York Times, December 9, 1996. C7. Howard Rosenberg, ‘‘The Blurred Lines of Today’s ‘Reality,’ ’’ Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2002, F1. See Chris Peacock, ‘‘Are You Being Metabrowsed?’’ Inside, December 12, 2000, 103. Joe Schlosser, ‘‘A≈ls to upn: Don’t Tread on Me,’’ Broadcasting and Cable, January 29, 2001, 30. Valentine quoted in ibid. While the trades interpreted this as a corporate merger threat, upn’s resistant pose functioned more to show how conglomeration threatened another fundamental component of American television—namely, migrating content. The endless ‘‘ancillary afterlife’’ is discussed in my Televisuality, 297–301. Bob Cook is quoted in Steve Brennan, ‘‘End of Syndication Era as Station Groups Rule,’’ Hollywood Reporter, January 22, 2001, 4. Kaplan, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 25, 2000. Kaplan’s full comment included the following: ‘‘It certainly is a tough environment, as tough as we’ve ever seen it. Especially for the una≈liated program suppliers. It’s sort of a spectrum question: At the end of the day, what the buyers around the world want is great, quality product. And if you have the ability to deliver that quality product, you are always going to be in a powerful position. Your ability to do that comes from a lot of places. Including financial resources and relationships with writers, producers, and talent.’’ Kaplan goes on to describe how this kind of deal making and horse trading is always as an option, even right up to the a≈liate meetings in the spring or the upfronts in May: ‘‘Inevitably we find ourselves in the second week of May when the nets are deciding the next season, negotiating. When those [deals] should have been negotiated earlier. But there’s always another bite at the apple.’’ Mosko quoted in Josef Adalian, ‘‘Sony Unplugs tv,’’ www.variety.com, October 25, 2001.

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58 59 60 61 62 63

These statements are from a studio president who asked to remain anonymous (conversation with the author, Los Angeles, February 26, 2004). Kaplan, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 25, 2000. One exception to this occurred when the oln Network hyped reruns of old Survivor series as its featured prime-time programming in summer 2005 in the United States. Since the question of who would win was already largely known, oln exploited the show’s characteristics that appealed to its niche hunting and outdoors audience—namely, depictions of physical struggle in the outback and jungle. The nine-installment Star Wars franchise by George Lucas is probably the most successful example of this excessively profitable linkage of franchise identity with personal identity in the history of film. Quotes here are from Peter Bart, ‘‘Disney Facing a Creative Energy Crisis,’’ www.variety.com, June 24, 2001. Compared to the corporate retreat, dealing with or responding to network ‘‘notes’’ probably simply produces more overt forms of cynicism and on-set bonding than it does the kind of tan one might expect to get from a company retreat. One set of monitoring practices is organized on a top-down model (note giving); the other on a ground-up model (retreats and team-building exercises). Both activities allow commercial organizations to process additional information in a way that keeps the company more flexible and controlled in the face of instability and change. See Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism. See Ross, No Collar. The notion of ‘‘exhibitionist history’’ is examined in my Televisuality, while the theorization of the ‘‘overproduction of history’’ is found in White, ‘‘Re-living the Body, Over and Over Again.’’ John Hughes, spoken comments at ShowBiz Expo, Los Angeles, June 1997. Carlin, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 25, 2000. Miller quoted in ‘‘Hollywood Balancing Act,’’ Los Angeles Times, E3. See Brian Lowry, ‘‘On tv, It’s the Show, Not the Network, That Keeps Viewers Watching,’’ Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1999, 8. See Michael A. Hiltzik, ‘‘Honeymoon is Over in Alliance Between Oritz, Burkle,’’ Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2000, C1. In this ongoing tension between, say, the executive-revolving-door and writingby-committee constraints on the one hand, and pitch-mode volatility on the other, the newer networks, studios, and upstarts tend to gain the most from the genre-crunching pitch mode. Expensive, star-driven network sitcoms on nbc and abc encourage generic caution in the writing committees and executive suites, whereas the less traditional generic tastes of upn, wb, Fox, and Comedy Central place a premium on pitch-glommed story ideas that promise to rise above the programming clutter. Fox’s (cheaply made but sensationalist, ride-

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along video) Cops gets repitched as Fox’s (cheaply made but sensationalist videotape carnage collage) World’s Scariest Police Chases, which gets repitched as When Animals Attack, which gets repitched as When Good Spouses Go Bad. The network upn’s (cost-e√ective) shock-tv success wwf Smackdown, gets repitched as the silicone-enhanced spectacle Women in Wrestling, which then gets repitched as the steroid-enhanced masculinity of the new xfl football launch in February 2001. In the programming world of the lower-caste networks (upn, wb, Fox), the pitch mode spins out new show concepts with clockwork-like regularity. By contrast, redundancy and stylistic inertia intensify as one moves up the programming food chain to the major networks (abc, nbc, cbs). Manic genre-hybridization and the reliance on pitch-mode intensify as one moves down the programming food chain to lowlier network wannabes (upn, wb, Fox) and the first-run syndicators desperately seeking financing for coproductions and o√-prime-time cablecasts. Simon, spoken comments at natpe 2000, New Orleans, LA, January 25, 2000. Simon’s full comment is: ‘‘Failure has been no boundary for anyone in the entertainment industry. It’s a prerequisite. I think the notion that somebody spends twenty-one years of their career in the same company, coming up the ranks, doesn’t have the same pizazz as it did a generation ago. And frankly, it doesn’t matter if you’ve had multiple jobs in that career. It doesn’t matter whether you leave the entertainment business and go to the new media business, and then come back.’’ Pomerantz, spoken comments at natpe 2000, New Orleans, LA, January 25, 2000. Pomerantz’s full comment is: ‘‘It’s really the path of building your own career, owning your own career, and being responsible for your own career. One needs to follow one’s own passions about the career. What do you like doing? Do you want to be in a big organization, or a small organization? Do you always want to be in a building mode? Then you are going to go to lots of smaller companies. If you like to be an operator and an extender of business, you’re going to be in broader organization. So the notion that you only have a one-way ticket does not exist. There’s not that same kind of rigidity to the career path or the same kind of career path.’’ Simon’s full comment is: ‘‘They are all looking for a management team. They have to be able to articulate, in a very brief manner, what the business concept is. Why it’s a killer app. What they really need in terms of people and management. And what’s the value added that these companies provide for the applicant from a career point of view. These companies have to sell potential hires on why they should come in. As opposed to the hire trying to sell him or herself. It’s a more equal balance.’’ Binzel, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 25, 2000. This career contestation represents conflict between divisional identities as well, as in the Fox/Binzel and the Disney/Eisner examples cited above.

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Shifting responsibility for onscreen choices to audiences function as ways to disavow charges of racism, stereotyping, exploitation, since their firms are ostensibly governed by the ‘‘popular democracy’’ of media audiences. Kweisi Mfume explains: ‘‘But when you create an environment at the networks, at the executive production and talent levels, that does not allow for diversity of thought, that does not allow for a creative process to take hold, where they say that ‘we can’t try that because it won’t work, and we may not be able to roll that out, And we don’t have time to roll that out.’ Then you end up with a situation where you roll out what you’ve pretty much always rolled out before. Only you find in that process, that the demographic is getting narrower, and narrower, and narrower. While the (networks) didn’t sit there and plan it, they clearly were either careless or clueless about what was going on. It should not have taken the naacp on the sidelines to raise the issue. A bell should have gone o√ in somebody’s head’’ (Mfume, spoken comments at the natpe Syndication Market, New Orleans, January 26, 2000). INDUSTRIAL REFLEXIVITY AS VIRAL MARKETING

Clive Thompson, ‘‘The See-through ceo,’’ Wired, April 2007, 138. On-line posting by Mark Safranksi, quoted in Clive Thompson, ‘‘The Seethrough ceo,’’ Wired, April 2007, 139. See my essays ‘‘Second Shift Aeshetics’’ (2003), ‘‘Industrial Geography Lessons’’ (2003), and ‘‘Convergence Television’’ (2004). Consider the repurposing possibilities that emerged when the heretofore traditional nbc took on the market-share challenge of cable and digital. Of all of its divisions, network news served to drive the proliferation of nbc texts by repurposing news stories and talk shows for cnbc, msnbc, and the msnetwork. Corporate heavyweights Microsoft and nbc cooked up these kinds of synergies in a cross-media onslaught, and by 2000 nbc threw down the gauntlet to the even bigger globalizing Internet success stories aol and Yahoo when it rebranded its own Online internet activities (then named Snap.com) as a comprehensive one-stop entertainment and shopping Web service called ‘‘nbci.’’ All of the erstwhile hype about how ‘‘new media’’ will replace ‘‘old media’’ dinosaurs like network television now carried little credibility at ge /nbc. Thus nbc would assume its place at the new media table even as cnn and abc / espn /Disney had done. Bits and pieces of the hybridized news anchor Brian Williams now show up in the form of migratory texts customized and endlessly individuated as e-content for nbc, msnbc, cnbc, msnetwork, and nbci. See Miranda Banks, ‘‘Toys and Grrls: Comparing Figures in Merchandizing of Television’s Action Heroine,’’ in ‘‘Bodies of Work: Rituals of Doubling and the Erasure of Film/tv Production Labor,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006.

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Other approaches to externalizing risk and maximizing flexibility are discussed in the conclusion to this volume. ‘‘Detectives to Solve ‘‘Homicide’’ Case Online and On-Air,’’ Microsoft Press Pass, www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1999/Feb99/nbctvpr.asp. Matt Beer, ‘‘Homicide Cops Get Hands-On Lesson in Internet Crime,’’ San Francisco Examiner, posted online by the Kansas City Star, Feburary 3, 1999, www.kcstar.com/item/pages/fyi.pat,fyi/30dab8f8.203.html. My suspicions at the time about the significance of the critically acclaimed, seamless stunt proved warranted as the award-winning but low-rated series and integrated site came and then went o√ the air and oΔine. And while other shows like Fox’s Freakylinks/Freakylinks.com continued to angle for critical acclaim to get a leg up in the ratings wars in the next season (by hyping digital innovation and online integration with content), the vast majority of tv /dotcom sites today are far less ambitious narratively and aesthetically than these showcased exercises in visionary convergence. For zdtv’s involvement, see Stephen McLaren, ‘‘Sci/Tech: tv and Net Combine to Catch Killer,’’ bbc Online Network, February 3, 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/ english/sci/tech/newsid—271000/271660.stm; for ‘‘CyberCrimetv,’’ see Maria Seminario, ‘‘ ‘Homicide’ Tackles Cybercrime,’’ ZDNet News, February 2, 1999, http: //zdnet.com.com/2102–11–51–3592; and for Microsoft, see Microsoft Press Pass. McLaren, ‘‘Sci/Tech.’’ Beer, ‘‘Homicide Cops Get Hands-On Lesson in Internet Crime.’’ Microsoft’s lengthy press release about its integral involvement with the Homi cide.com stunt included the following short but exemplary excerpt: ‘‘With Microsoft, nbc owns and operates msnbc, a 24-hour cable news network, and [the] Internet News Service at www.msnbc.com. Also, together with Microsoft and Dow Jones, nbc operates cnbc /Dow Jones Business Video. . . . Other new media innovations from nbc include interactive television initiatives with Microsoft Webtv for Windows and the Webtv Network Plus service, Winkenhanced programming with Wink Communications, nbc Intercast with Intel Corp., electronic program guides with Gemstar, and on-demand video services with Intertainer. . . . Microsoft, Windows, Webtv, Webtv Network, Windows nt, and NetShow are registered trademarks in the United States.’’ The nbc executive Thomas Hjelm quoted Microsoft Press Pass. Ibid., 3. It is no longer entirely credible, for example, to imagine that digital media is somehow marked by a radical break with traditional media practices. The Microsoft-nbc conglomeration scenario above shows how meticulously managed, prefigured, and disciplined ‘‘new’’ breakthroughs have become. Gays in Hollywood, a special installment of the amc Project, was cablecast by amc on August 11, 2003. See Anatomy of a Homicide: A Frontline Special (with an episode of Homicide to follow), broadcast on pbs on November 2, 1998, and distributed by pbs Video.

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See Wayne’s World 2, ‘‘Electronic Press Kit’’ for feature film, Paramount Pictures, 1992, ucla Film and Television Archives, inventory number va-20047m. See Roseanne, ‘‘Electronic Press Kit’’ for prime-time series, fall 1992, ucla Film and Television Archives, inventory number va-200043t. After the scripted question, ‘‘How are you similar to your character, and how are you di√erent?’’ Roseanne replies: ‘‘She is part of me, but she’s not all of me . . . she’s a character of mine, but not that far from me.’’ See Wild, Showrunners, 52–53. The ideas in these next few pages have been significantly adapted and excerpted from my paper ‘‘Prefiguring the dvd: Making-Ofs, and Behind-the-Scenes as Prototypes for Bonus Tracks,’’ which was first presented on April 23, 2005 at the ‘‘What is the dvd’’ conference at the University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. I thank the organizers of that conference—James Bennett and Tom Brown—for their invitation to deliver that address, and for their especially good feedback and suggestions on my analysis. For a di√erent revision and other portions of the 2005 paper, see ‘‘Prefiguring dvds: epks, Making-Ofs, and Viral Marketing Prototypes.’’ In less demeaning ways, many dvds like Predator: The Collector’s Edition, Alien: Quadrilogy, Girl With a Pearl Earring, cbs Sneak Peak, and Kingpin shamelessly cross-promote other entertainment properties (music videos, other films or sequels in the franchise, upcoming network seasons, or other television series on the same network) via their respective bonus tracks. The nature of media conglomeration makes this kind of cross-promotion almost obligatory. Others simply reappropriate media coverage by other organizations as forms of self-proof (the Sundance channel documentary in Girl With A Pearl Earring and the E! Channel promotional teasers in the Anna Nicole Show ). The dvd of Finding Nemo includes the hackneyed trope of cadres of dedicated technicians struggling to overcome a mountain of detail through human artistry and dedication; while the low-budget Dopamine documents the frantic pace of production necessitated by an abrupt loss of funding during the shoot. For centuries, the trope of the su√ering artist persisting against all odds has been a staple part of aesthetic canonizing. Now dvds employ the mythology for profitable ends both in ‘‘big-budget’’ and ‘‘no budget’’ projects. Apart from several psa’s by the film’s actors that address abuse issues, this dvd’s single bonus feature is a fifty-minute documentary entitled Sex in a Cold Climate. Directed by Steve Humphries in 1998, this is an original British documentary film that inspired the writer/director Peter Mullan to write The Magdalene Sisters, which was released in 2002. I am not suggesting that the later, highly controversial feature film opportunistically added the earlier ‘‘more authoritative’’ documentary merely to cover its tracks against critics, but I am saying that the linkage of the feature and documentary on the same dvd do much more than simply reveal the ‘‘source material’’ for the later dramatic interpretation. Anchoring the feature in the context of history and documentary actuality did help blunt attacks

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on The Magdalene Sisters, however, which itself was an explicit attack on one of the most reprehensible chapters in the history of the Catholic Church. These statistics are from Jonathon Taylor, ‘‘Duds Find New Life in a Box,’’ Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2004, E1, 12. By ‘‘second shift’’ I refer to the kind of multimedia, multidirectional audience activity involved in the Homicide.com ‘‘second shift’’ programming stunt described earlier in this chapter. I discuss in detail how this approach challenges Raymond Williams’s traditional theory of ‘‘flow’’ in my essay ‘‘Second Shift Aesthetics.’’ These tv vs. film dvd viewing numbers are from Ken Gra√eo as cited in Taylor, ‘‘Duds Find New Life in a Box.’’ The menu structure on studio and network epks strongly evokes the structure of subsequent broadcast making-ofs and the interactive menus of dvds (see appendix 1). Even a partial schematic of the contents/menus of epks, makingofs, and dvds shows that they are cut out of the same bolt of marketing cloth (see appendix 1). See especially Klinger, Beyond the Big Screen. An account of how Wal-Mart monitoring has become an important weekly ritual at the Hollywood studios is given in Elaine Dutka, ‘‘Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: Fox Executives,’’ Los Angeles Times, April 19, 2005, E1. In the silent era, the Hal Roach studios produced behind-the-scenes shorts and filmed studio tours for screening before features. The classical-era feature films Bombshell (1933), Stand-In (1937), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), and Sunset Boulevard (1950) reflexively depicted Hollywood in their plots and included biting critiques of blind ambition, vanity, and sleazy publicists and studio bosses. See Eastman and Klein, Promotion and Marketing For Broadcasting and Cable, 3. These statements are from Stephen Baker and Heather Green, ‘‘Blogs Will Change Your Business,’’ Business Week, May 2, 2005, 45. Anna Muoio discusses cultural studies in ‘‘Think Positive,’’ Fastcompany 33 (March 2000), 70. Quoted in Gina Imperata, ‘‘Chatroom: New Headspace,’’ Fastcompany (Winter 2000). 8. See www.doublesace.com. This account is based largely on Look-Look’s own exhaustive Web site, at http:// www.look-look.com/dynamic/looklook/jsp/What—We—Do.jsp#research. For political contrasts with this ‘‘commercial pretrend research’’ view of resistant youth subcultures, see Dick Hebdige’s influential book Subcultures. A good account of this is Joseph Menn, ‘‘Big Firms’ Ad Bucks Also Fund Spyware,’’ Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2005, C1, 5. As quoted in Elaine Dutka, ‘‘Audience Tests: Plot Thickens,’’ Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2003, E8. This is precisely what occurred with a twenty-five-minute spec/demo reel entitled Body Rocks (New York: Pope Productions, 1985). The demo includes an acting ensemble and elaborate scripted special e√ects throughout. The feature

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51

film–like end-title credits list scores of production workers and acknowledges the dozens of companies that donated or provided services for the demo, among which are Editel, The Post-Group, Skywalker Sound, f&b Ceco, Eastman Kodak, and Sony. The clear objective of this ‘‘coalition demo’’ was to demonstrate how diverse production a√ects can be e√ectively integrated with the right kinds of production workers and artists. These figures are from Stephen Kiehl, ‘‘The Art of Brand-Name Dropping,’’ Los Angeles Times, August 25, 2004, E5. These statements are from McConnell and Huba’s own Web site, at http:// www.creatingcustomerevangelists.com/press/. The quotes in this section are from Joe Mandese, ‘‘The Art of Manufactured News: Forget the Whitehouse: pr Firms Take Branded Journalism to a Whole New Level,’’ Broadcasting and Cable, March 28, 2005, 24–25. Ibid., 24. These quotes are from Mark Mazzetti, ‘‘pr Meets Cy-Ops in War on Terror,’’ Los Angeles Times, posted at www.latimes.com, May 20, 2005. Scholars might denigrate industrial practices as ‘‘Cli√-Notes’’ quality critical theory, but producers and industry folk frequently assert that academics tend to bring a correspondingly impoverished understanding of industry to their media critical studies work; deeming it, in essence, ‘‘Cli√-Notes industry’’ accounts by academics. I would argue that it is not the overt (and typically watered-down) ‘‘quotation’’ of one field by the other that is the most interesting or sociologically significant, but rather the resident, discipline-specific discourses and generalizable models that make up critical thought in a given field, discipline, or creative craft. Nick at Night’s explicit and self-conscious use of postmodern theory and verbiage, for example, is far less interesting (and important) than its complex multimedia marketing schemes that circulate critical promotional texts around otherwise overlooked and forgotten shows in a way that animates and revalues components of the Nickelodeon/Viacom/mtv /Paramount/cbs conglomerate. Clearly, critics and academics have no corner on critical acumen. But scholarship can o√er systematic in-depth analyses, comparative perspectives, less spin, and patience—correctives of the sort that benefit consumers but that big media conglomerates seldom tolerate. Understanding industrial critical competencies helps explain how production workers both imagine and maintain their cultural communities in the face of change. Such an understanding may also help lay bare the ways that industrial reflexivity and viral marketing are not always as deferent and responsive to the viewer/user as industry imagines them to be.

CONCLUSION 1 2

This statement is from tca’s o≈cial Web site: http://tvcritics.org/interview2 .htm. This statement is from my interview with a studio executive (name withheld), University of California, Los Angeles, December 7, 2005.

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Any e√ective analysis of the production culture must account for the fact that the industry (far from being an inert, locatable object for analysis) excels at publicly generating overarching metaphors, figurative paradigms, and master narratives that constantly frame and reframe the production industry. For every theoretical paradigm celebrated by academia—pull technology, interactivity, electronic presence, virtual communities, cyborg/prosthetics, and technological disembodiment—industry theorizes its own preferred alternatives and corresponding master metaphors: push technology, value-added entertainment, branding, niche target marketing, commercial-user interfaces, and Web tracking/pod casting. While industrial theoretical paradigms like convergence, synergy, and globalization are pervasively posed in the trade talk as neat, ostensibly inevitable cultural outcomes, they are far from it. I would argue, in fact, that the more ‘‘totalizing’’ the paradigm the more the industry must work (discursively, narratively, and socially) to marshal the diverse interests involved to achieve apparent consensus. Print and moving-image artifacts, trade and professional publications, studio structures, labor practices, marketing, distribution, and contractual relations drive this consensus-building imperative. These reflexive practices also inevitably inflect the institutional behaviors of contemporary practitioners (whether scholars approach them as informants, interview subjects, or objects of workplace participant observation). Concerning definitions, throughout this book I have used the term ‘‘the industry’’ as it is commonly used by practitioners and critics in Los Angeles; that is, as a term that construes ‘‘Hollywood’’ as a geographically situated cultural phenomenon. Of course ‘‘Hollywood’’ itself is a misnomer and a construct, since it is typically used to reference a comprehensive set of media activities: the film, television, and digital media activities networked across the greater Los Angeles region. Obviously, there are many, many other ‘‘cultures of production’’ apart from Hollywood. So I have chosen to frame my study of ‘‘the industry’’ and/or ‘‘Hollywood’’ as the study of a very local and specific cultural site; albeit one that expends great e√ort in promoting and constructing itself as a global production culture. Historically, various writers have gotten tangled up in the industry’s self-disclosure/nondisclosure doublespeak, as I have. I recall a few years back being corrected when I remarked on the useful ‘‘thick description’’ of recent research on Hollywood and the valuable access to behind-the-scenes discourses that writers were beginning to provide for readers. These scholars came to Los Angeles, I was told, and were ‘‘taken to lunch.’’ Producers and executives take people to lunch for a living, and they do so every day. That’s their profession. They spin and legitimize their decisions as they talk and socialize. Producers and executives are in fact masters of retrospective self-justification. Socializing is part of the professional’s craft where this studied retrospection takes place, even as face time at lunch typically serves as a form of deal making. According to this skeptical reaction, scholars would somehow be unaware that they’d been hustled by selfserving myths in their pursuit of a behind-the-scenes vantage point. Although I

Notes to Conclusion

6

reject this view, hypothetically, perhaps these scholars were ‘‘fooled’’ by their informants, even as the sociologist Leo Rosten had arguably been fooled by his informants in 1938 and the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker had been fooled by her Hollywood ‘‘insiders’’ in 1946. Lawrence Laurent, in ‘‘Review of Prime Time, Prime Movers, likens the culture of prime-time producers to sales in a used car lot, where admissions of ‘‘honest’’ and ‘‘from-the-heart’’ disclosure actually mean just the opposite—and buyer beware. Yet Todd Gitlin himself, in Inside Primetime, raised this issue when he remarked that the industry works by ‘‘telling’’ and by ‘‘taking meetings’’ (14). In fact many of the early e√orts to study the industry included evidence and awareness of self-consciousness by scholars and industry alike. Powdermaker defended herself in print by noting that she— unlike trade writers, who always seemed to have a job application or screenplay to sell in their back pockets—was not in anyway secretly interested in employment or stature in the industry after her research was completed (see Nicholas Kent, ‘‘Players at Their Own Game,’’ Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 17, 1992, 2). Surveying inside-the-industry studies over the past half century shows a recurring pattern: access granted, stories told, behind-the-scenes knowledge made available, and scholar or journalist challenged or dismissed. This struggle over industrial authority evokes Derek Freeman’s indictment of Margaret Mead’s life work based on ‘‘naive’’ observation and misconstrual. Media ethnographies emerged as an antidote to the abstractions of media and cultural studies that had been built on acutely delimited forms of textualism or provocative (but always slightly suspect) theoretical speculations. Ethnography promised scholars more concrete conditions for analysis, ‘‘real’’ versus interpellated or positioned spectators, and engagement with lived identity and class formations rather than purely (or casually) theorized ones. As they flocked to the audience, the new media ethnographers in the 1970s and 1980s characterized other methodologies, either implicitly or explicitly, as forms of ‘‘naïve textualism’’ or speculative and naïve theorization (David Morley, Television Audiences and Cultural Studies ). Yet, I would argue that the kind of media industrial practices that I have broached here place the ‘‘commonsense’’ assumptions of ethnographic method (at work even in ethnographies framed by the complications of poststructuralism) similarly in doubt. ‘‘Naïve ethnography’’ that is, proves to be as problematic as naive textualism in accounting for cultures of media production. Having access, and informants, and backstory information on industry may by itself position the industry scholar as a ‘‘text’’ being written by the industry. In some ways, this mode of engagement is very similar to the industry’s strategic objective and relationship with its vast popular audiences. After all, in the age of digital media and ‘‘multipurposed’’ content, lay audiences also daily seek out critical knowledge about the industry through the viewing, purchase, and consumption of making-ofs, dvd bonus tracks, director’s commentary, and related Web sites. The contemporary multimedia conglomerates gladly mass produce and circulate mediated forms of critical analysis that are simultaneously reflexive and user friendly.

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Martin is quoted in William Lobdell, ‘‘Oh God! The Simpsons and Spirituality,’’ Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2001. These comments, from a studio executive, an agent, and an executive producer (names anonymous by request) come from my interviews at University of California, Los Angeles, December 7, 2005. These include books addressing the series as a systematic philosophical treatise (see Irwin, Conard, and Skoble, The Simpsons and Philosophy ). For an analysis of the show as an intervention in theological enquiry, see Pinsky, The Gospel According to the Simpsons. One important issue to consider is ‘‘disclosures, but on whose terms?’’ Yours, mine?’’ Both ampas and atas have extensive ‘‘oral history’’ archives. These include interviews with hundreds of below-the-line cinematographers and editors at ampas and hundreds of on-camera, above-the-line, and below-the-line talent at atas. This is all very valuable material, but the questions have been asked, and the topics framed, by someone else, usually a nonscholar, for a lot of di√erent reasons. Invariably, these prepackaged collections of interviews are created to ensure a given legacy, and usually a labor or advocacy group is behind the recordings and collections. Using them for scholarship inevitably begs the question about how and why they were gathered, and for what purpose. And this broader question makes it important to consider the cultural politics of the advocacy organization (the union, guild, or honorary association). Once again, the status of these artifacts becomes an issue that must be addressed up front in any study. Sponsorship or advocacy does not mean that the information is not valuable but rather means that an additional level of analysis must be brought to bear in understanding the insights made available. The executive and producer Peter Guber describes all successful films and television shows as forms of ‘‘emotional transport’’ (Peter Guber speaking at ‘‘Transition Event: Producers Program Panel,’’ Bridges Theater, ucla, April 25, 2001). These statements are from an announcement for an event celebrating the screenwriting of Ed Solomon, ‘‘The John Zakin Chair in Screenwriting,’’ held at the James Bridges Theater in Los Angeles, April 4, 2005. See Martin Kaplan, ‘‘Love Ya. Loved the Pitch. We’ll Do Lunch. I’ll Call,’’ commentary in the Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2005. Industrial reflexivity circulates through on-screen forms (making-ofs, show-biz reports, or dvd director’s tracks), and collective, critical interactions (in the deep texts and work spaces of film and video work worlds proper). Snider’s statement and the anonymous comment that follows are from Richard Verrier and Claudia Eller, ‘‘Universal, ge Getting Acquainted,’’ Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2005, C1, 5. Quote from Mark Mangini, The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter 18.2 (March/April 1997), reprinted at http://www.editorsguild.com/newsletter/Mar Apr97/bakeo√.html.

Notes to Conclusion

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I observed and visually documented the ‘‘Speed Dating with Industry Experts’’ event, which was also publicized in ‘‘hd /High Def Expo’’ flyers and signage at the Los Angeles Center Studios, March 3, 2005. The full text reads: ‘‘Current trends in the tv business are quickening the pace of change. Hotel-based interview sessions are now supplemented by set visits and other remote activities, some of which may be coordinated not by individual presenters but by corporate partnerships inspired by industry consolidation. As new business alignments emerge, and as tighter economics challenge us all, tca strives to keep its members’ coverage ahead of the curve’’ (http://tvcritics .org/interview2.htm). See ‘‘The Dramatica Writers Group—Free!’’ posted at http://www.dramatica .com/community/writer—group/index.html. For these traditional forms of industrial knowledge exchange, see John A. Watlington and V. Michael Bove Jr., ‘‘Stream-Based Computing and Future Television,’’ smpte Journal, April 1997, 217–24. Direct mail and trade ads entitled ‘‘Buy cnn: Get Light Viewers,’’ stated that the network was quantifying its ‘‘reach with more light viewers [aΔuent, educated], more than any other news network’’ and were distributed by cnn in fall 2004. See also ‘‘Welcome to the scri Website’’ at http://www.seri.com/index2/html. The final quote is from ‘‘Letter from the Publisher,’’ posted spring 2005 on the Web site for the trade Broadcast Engineering : broadcastengineering.com. This quote by the videographer Jenny Lehman is from Geo√ Daily, ‘‘Reel ’Em In: An Essential Part of Any Videographer’s Marketing Materials Is an E√ective Demo Reel,’’ Eventdv , January 2005, 25. See Arthur De Vany, Hollywood: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry. Greg Costikyan’s Scratchware Manifesto is praised in Jared Newman, ‘‘Rogue Leader,’’ Wired, Jan. 2007, p. 70. This quote and account is from Carl DiOrio, ‘‘ ‘Model’ a Step Closer to Unionization,’’ www.Hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content—display/news, posted Dec. 5, 2006. This quote is from Richard Verrier, ‘‘Residuals Debate: Old Script on New Set,’’ Los Angeles Times, Nov. 27, 2006. A1. This is from a letter to the editor of tv Technology, April 2, 2007, p. 4. See Georgina Born, ‘‘Reflexivity and Ambivalence: Culture, Creativity, and Government in the bbc,’’ Cultural Values, Vol. 6, Nos. 1–2. January 1, 2002. 65–90. See Nick Confalone, ‘‘Revenge of the Desk Slaves,’’ Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2007. M8. The Emmy-winning creator of Hill Street Blues and LA Law moved from the hour-long format of his primetime dramatic series to the 60-second format of the Internet on his new show Cafe Confidential, which premiered online at Metacafe.com on March 19, 2007. The point about the di√erence between the

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old, scripted Bochco, and the new unscripted Bochco, is from Alex Phram, ‘‘To Make a Long Story Short,’’ Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2007. C1, C6. 30 Even the New York Times appreciated the sophistication of this stunt. See Joe Rhodes, ‘‘A Fictional Video on MySpace Puts a tv Show’s Promotion Into Hyperspace,’’ www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/business/media/09sparkles.html, April 9, 2007. 31 The ‘‘online brush fire’’ analogy is from show producers Craig Thomas and Carter Bays. The comment about fans as ‘‘advocates’’ is from Steven Melnick, Senior vp of Marketing at 20th Century Fox Television, as quoted in Rhodes. 32 Chapters 2, 5, and 6, particular, demonstrated this point. 33 At the December 2005 ‘‘holiday tree lighting’’ at Paramount, for example, studio executives celebrated and thanked the ‘‘Paramount family,’’ even though many of those gathered were transient producers and independent company employees who would soon be gone and replaced by other tenants on the lot in a matter of weeks or months. This account is from a television producer on the lot, describing the odd ethnic/religious contradictions of such an event, which was staged the week of December 5, 2005 in Los Angeles. 34 In fact Angela McRobbie makes a key distinction between careers in the old industries, which were based on managing career ‘‘narratives,’’ and the new creative industries which are driven by what she terms ‘‘portfolio careers.’’ See McRobbie. Hollywood workers show that trade story-telling is almost as important as the demos they make and use to professionalize and manage their careers. 35 The networked externalities principle states that each new user added to an interactive or communication network ‘‘adds value’’ to the network as a whole. One of the themes examined in chapter 5 and elsewhere involved the symbolic struggle over authorship that pervades the film and television industries. One form of authorship contestation occurs when numerous executives, agents and rights-holders strong-arm producer’s credits in a film’s title, despite not being substantively involved in the actual production process. This unruly struggle can involve scores of producers and peripheral individuals, and is only the most obvious and shallow form of distributed cognition I am describing. r36 This statement/title, and the quotes that follow, are from David S. Freeman, ‘‘Beyond Structure: L.A. and New York’s Most Popular Screenwriting and Fiction Workshop!,’’ a direct mail flyer, Summer 2004 (ital. theirs ). 37 This includes: ‘‘11 ways of modifying any idea to develop radically alternative story-lines,’’ ‘‘5 ways to express a character’s dimensionality . . .,’’ ‘‘4 ways to inject depth or subtext,’’ etc.). Final Draft, by contrast, hypes its product as the ‘‘ultimate mind/computer interface.’’ Their ai /Donna Haraway-like metaphor is from Final Draft’s o≈cial website, http://finaldraft.com, April 19, 2005. 38 Produced to help writers write better screenplays, Dramatica Pro includes demo tapes that explain the complicated theoretical and scientific origins of the manufacturer’s sophisticated ‘‘story engine.’’ The demo articulates how the software is: a form of self-analysis; an ai consistency engine based on a simulated user-in-

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the-text; a form of visual modeling that anticipates imagined cinematic worlds before they are produced; and a programmed cognitive map of all possible logical arguments and choices available to users of the software. The conflation of software with one’s personal ‘‘professor with a philosophical bent’’ is from a review by Back Stage West (n.d.), posted at: http://www.drama tica.com/review/quotes/index.html. (ital. mine) Film and television have never been produced in a vacuum that completely walls o√ ‘‘the industry’’ from ‘‘the audience.’’ The general journalistic and academic tendency to segregate industry and culture methodologically, therefore, is shortsighted and problematic at the least. No matter how disingenuous this rhetoric can be at times, this kind of assertion is commonplace in everything from production meetings to ‘‘q&as’’ with producers after public screenings. The ‘‘producer as audience’’ trope also percolates through various behind-the-scenes genres, such as abc’s mid-1970s hour-long primetime news special entitled abc News Close-up: Primetime tv , The Decision Makers. See pva#2340t at the ucla Film and Television Archives. Most of the revenues for films comes from electronic media, and dvd merchandise is now by far the most lucrative of these home delivery formats. As a result, dvd content opportunities are exploited during all major film productions in Los Angeles, both in terms of what the film/video looks like, but also in terms of all of the meta-texts and making-ofs that will be produced and packaged with the dvd. Perhaps the best example of this domestication of film studio thinking is the first release of the boxed set of King Kong in December 2005—which consisted almost entirely of making-ofs, and was released simultaneously with the feature film premiere. A consortium of major studios established the dci (the ‘‘Digital Cinema Laboratory’’) to conduct various comparative tests of new digital projection systems with test audiences. dci underscored to the public the fact that ‘‘engineering knowledge is not required,’’ even as it stroked the egos of viewers who had the ‘‘opportunity to participate in an historic test that will influence the way motion pictures will look on the screen for the next 50–100 years!’’ (This statement and solicitation is from an ‘‘email blast’’ sent by Charles Schwartz, ceo of the Entertainment Technology Center, April 26, 2004.) Far from dismissing ‘‘amateur’’ technical knowledge, dci enjoined the public to critically participate in the development of media consumption technologies. Finally, companies like GoldPocket Interactive provide television producers and network programmers with ‘‘turnkey’’ interactive systems to augment programming. In providing an easy way ‘‘to connect internet audiences to your tv broadcast’’ via ‘‘competitions, chat sessions, (and) streaming audio/video,’’ the one-stop service allows programmers to ‘‘reach millions of people,’’ in order to ‘‘get the audience to reach back to your programming—before they go somewhere else.’’ From GoldPocket Interactive, direct marketing brochure. Los Angeles, 2003. With television viewing and box-o≈ce declining many entertainment providers

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47

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began developing content that could be e≈ciently dispersed to mobile phone users. The use of cell-phones for film/tv consumption follows concerted industrial e√orts to find and harness a ‘‘third screen’’ in the viewer’s hands. This is sometimes referred to as ‘‘snack tv.’’ The tv and pc /Web are deemed the other 2 screens. Fox Television, for example, developed 24: Conspiracy to launch the new season of primetime’s 24. Verizon cell-phone users in the U.K. and U.S. received 24 1-minute ‘‘mobisodes’’ that corresponded to the primetime series albeit with a di√erent cast. A mobile division of nbc produces up to 20 news stories per day for mob-casting. Fans can also watch updates from cnn, regular sports reports, or out-takes from The Simple Life—all custom produced to work e√ectively on the small 2-inch screens of cell-phones. One marketing analyst described the e≈cient financial logic of mobile phone usage: ‘‘You’re not necessarily looking to channel surf . . . you’ve got five to 10 minutes to kill.’’ This quote is from Linda Barrabee, senior analyst at the Yankee Group, a market research firm, as quoted in Matea Gold, ‘‘I Can’t Talk, I’m Watching My Cellphone,’’ Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2005, A18. This characterization of nbc’s Crossing Jordan is from the ‘‘tv Reaches Millions of People’’ advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter, February 6–12, 2001, 19. This ‘‘circular’’ strategy is discussed further in Chris Gaither, ‘‘The Plot Thickens Online,’’ Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2005, A1, A26. In this way, television creators now design stories that directly target the audience’s ‘‘second-shift’’ life outside of primetime, through multitasking technologies that mirror increasingly accelerated lifestyles. Contemporary on-the-run consumers are deemed too unpredictable and migratory for traditional television programmers and advertisers. Largely circumventing the problem of content clutter and grazing, pod- and mob-casting promise cost-e√ective ways to find and grab transient viewers with bursts of customized niche programming. Examples include hdCamp, and dvExpo/Chicago/Dallas, Film/television associations also regularly host production award shows that function as primary forms of onscreen consumer entertainment. See http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/ and http://www.metacritic.com. See, for example, the ‘‘Special Edition: Overwhelmed by Extras and Specials and Extra, Extra Specials at your Local Video Store? We Make it Easy With This Guide to 50 New and Revisited Titles,’’ Entertainment Weekly, April 15, 2005, 37–50. The 2003 arrival of the features The Hulk and Matrix Reloaded and their references or connections to film theorist James Schamus and Harvard/Princeton philosopher Cornel West generated endless ‘‘think pieces,’’ along with conceptand name-dropping throughout the popular press. These phrases and the quotation that follow are from: A. O. Scott, ‘‘The Pretentious Summer Superhero,’’ New York Times, July 13, 2003, reprinted at http://www.nytimes.com/ 2003/07/13/movies/13SCOT.html. The following promise strokes the viewers’ awareness of their role in produc-

Notes to Conclusion

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53

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tion: ‘‘Your participation in a Television Preview screening will serve the interests of the entire viewing public, as you will be providing direct feedback to producers, directors, sponsors, and other people behind television, who in turn will be better able to understand and respond to your viewing preferences.’’ This statement begins with ‘‘You have been selected . . .,’’ and is included in printed correspondence (direct mail) to the author from G. B. Edwards, Director, Audience Selection Sta√, Television Preview, Inc., Hollywood California, Spring 2004. Admittedly, film/video production cultures do not always approximate or mirror the cultures of consumption. Yet there are many significant overlaps between the two cultural sets, as these industrial examples indicate. When one finds marked di√erences between cultures of film/video production and cultures of consumption, important and/or problematic issues can be found and critical questions raised. Racial politics, for example, o√ers a classic, recurring example in this regard. Racial representations produced by the progressive, white liberal Hollywood establishment seldom mirror the actual degree of racial diversity in American society at large; or align easily with public pressures to achieve ethnic and racial diversity in the industry. As a result, public activists emerge every few years in repeated attempts to pressure Hollywood to change and diversify. Many of these confrontations end in a kind of headscratching or disbelief in Hollywood, mostly because industry employment still does not reflect the racial diversity of society at large. Bonus tracks and making-ofs function like film appreciation or intro production courses. Hidden dvd ‘‘Easter-eggs’’ facilitate film/tv production pedagogy among consumers. Choosing multiple shot-angles or endings to films on dvd cultivates production competencies among users. Director’s tracks encourage viewers to see production as a working process from its maker’s point-of-view. In August 2006, I was asked by a marketing sta√er at Columbia Tri-Star studios if I could provide film students who would be willing to produce ‘‘their own’’ unpaid videos for YouTube.com that would help market a forthcoming feature film by the studio. I thank the dp and commercial cinematographer Tom Denove for his insights and anecdotes on this principle of controlled access (comments made at University of California, Los Angeles, on March 16, 2005). A legendary example of this was when dp Haskell Wexler was fired in midshoot from the feature One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for talking excessively to the actors and thereby supposedly undercutting the director and threatening the production. These comments were made by Gerard Bocaccio at University of California, Los Angeles, March 23, 2005. This spoken remark from Zig I. Gauthier, vice president of original programming, gsn Network, was made at the University of California, Los Angeles, March 23, 2005.

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See Emily Eakin, ‘‘The Latest Theory Is that Theory Doesn’t Matter,’’ New York Times, April 19, 2003, d9; David Weddle, ‘‘Lights, Camera, Action, Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology: Film School Isn’t What It Used to Be, One Father Discovers,’’ Los Angeles Times Magazine, July 13, 2003, 1, 14. See also ‘‘The Fragmentation of Literary Theory,’’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 52.17 (December 10, 2004): A12. This statement is from Steven Johnson, ‘‘Watching tv Makes You Smarter,’’ New York Times Magazine, April 24, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/ 24/magazine/24tv.html?ei=5070&e.

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443

Index

abc: yellow campaign, 247–248 Above-the-line labor: 34, 47–51, 197– 198, 201–223, 227–231, 266; di√erence between above/below line, 3, 9, 193, 206, 214, 220 Actor-network theory, 7, 152, 376 n.15 Aesthetic status metaphors, 202–206 Ageism, 192–193, 215 Agre, Phil, 151 Alley, Robert, 12–13, 199 Ancillary markets, 232–233, 260, 277– 278 Anderson, Benedict, 111 Andrew, Dudley, 121, 140 Arrested Development, 200, 201. See also Hurwitz, Mitch Art directors, 47, 199–200 Audience: as author, 222–223; desegregated with production (producers as audiences), 333–339; producers speaking for, 335–336; segregated

from production (producers as professionals), 331–333; theory of, 221–223 Authorship: by audience 222–223; as claimed by corporation, 209–210, 216–221, 281; negotiated/collective, 17, 197–200, 202–203, 211–214, 224–225, 227–231; as theft 207–209 Banks, Miranda, ix, 419 n.5, 434 Bayer, Sam, 41–42 Becker, Howard, 382 n.50 Behind-the-scenes programming, 21– 22, 28, 116–118, 217, 283–286. See also Viral marketing Beiber, Michael, 101–102, 120, 127, 400 n.9 Below-the-line labor, 34, 37, 39–40, 43–47, 68, 77, 79–80, 102, 109, 113– 114, 117, 120, 123–124, 129–131, 132, 144–149, 152–153, 165–167, 180–184, 195–196, 328

Index

446

Bennett, James, viii, 421 n.23, 434, 435 Bergery, Benjamin, 39 Bhabha, Homi, 405 n.90 Biskind, Peter, 53 Blade Runner, 118, 128 Boomtown, 173, 175 Bordwell, David, 25, 199 Born, Georgina, 13, 375 n.7, 434 Boutiques, digital and postproduction, 139, 141, 142, 194, 253– 256 Branding: as immersion, 254–255; as industry identity theory, 234–238, 245–256; personal 204–206, 236, 271–273; and screenplays, 232–234. See also Corporate: identity; Corporate rituals; Resonate Braverman, Harry, 67, 267–268 Brazil, Scott, 24–25, 174–175, 227, 229–230. See also Shield, The Brown, Garret, 15 Brown, Tom, viii, 421 n.23, 434, 435 Burum, Steve, 20 Butler, Judith, 413 n.2 Buzzell, Linda, 59 Carroll, Noel, 25 Cassar, Jon, 15–16, 50–51, 175, 222, 227, 229–230. See also 24 Cassell, Justine, 382 n.49 Chapman, Michael, 15 Ching, Harriet, 161–162 Cho, Margaret, 236 Chow, Rey, 387 n.78 Cinematographers, 8, 15, 19, 20, 39–42, 69, 88, 115–116, 117, 125–126, 138, 167– 173, 179–183, 185, 187, 229–230, 340 Clancey, William, 151–152 cnn, 159, 222 Cockburn, Cynthia, 400 n.2 Collapsing workflows, 179–184 Confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements, 60–61, 339–342

Conglomerates, 61, 252, 260–262, 272–273, 274–279, 306–309 Corporate: identity, 234–238, 270–273; versus creative personal, 197–198, 216–223. See also Corporate rituals: credit commandeering Corporate culture jamming, 329–331 Corporate reflexivity (cr), 324–325, 328–331 Corporate rituals: as control measures, 271–273; credit commandeering, 238–244; franchising, 264–265; retreats/retrospectives, 265–270; speaking for audience, 334–336; syndication, 256–263, 268–269 (see also Syndication) Corporate strategies: cross-promotion, 275–276; repurposing, 276–277 Couldry, Nick, 106, 392 n.4, 395 n.46 Counter-tracking boards, 64–67 Culture: media production of, 7; as a reflexive system, 2, 32–33, 374 n.3; study by industry, 309–311 Curtin, Michael, 382 n. 49, 436–437 Credit commandeering, 238–244 Critical Industrial Practice, 5–6 D’Acci, Julie, 381 n.48 Davis, Hadley, 57 Defamer.com, 66, 328 Demo tapes, 110, 119–125, 135, 144–145, 165–167 Demopoulos, Maria, 110, 119 Dent, Catherine, 174 Dick Van Dyke Show, The, 211, 213– 214 Digital intermediates (dis), 179–184 Digital media: leading to labor downsizing/collapsed hierarchies, 154– 160, 179–184, 192–193; metadata/ digital intermediates, 179–184; as opposition to Hollywood, 8, 283. See also New Media

Index

Digital sweatshops, 160–167 DiMaggio, Paul, 13–14, 382 n.50, 437 Disciplining unruly technologies, 308 Distributed cognition in crews, 6–8, 151–152 Dornfeld, Barry, 382 n.49 Downsizing, 154–160, 164, 185–187 Duncan, Victor, 170 dvd, 298–300; bonus tracks/extras, 201, 300–304, 362–367; of television series, 304–306. See also Viral marketing Editors, 19, 117, 150, 157, 164–167, 183– 184 Electronic Press Kits (epk), 291–297. See also Trade imagery Embedded critical texts and rituals, 346–349 Entourage, 35 espn, 246, 255 Ettema, James, 14, 237 Extra-group relationships via deep texts and rituals, 347 Fake buzz, 59–62 Film/television studies: auteurism and, 198–199; collapse of media distinctions in, 9, 306–309; development of, 12–13; identity and, 235; ‘‘media e√ect’’ model of, 395 n.45; merchandise and marketing and, 277–278, 282; narrative studies and, 37, 69, 233–234; relationship of, to industrial practices, 306–315; research of production and, 13, 104– 106, 342–343; space of, 69, 392 n.5; and study of industry, 10–11, 18; from top-down, 318; and trade imagery, 110 Fleet, John, 127–128, 143, 147–148, 155, 162 Flow, 28–31

Fordism, 34, 59, 82, 156, 245 Foucault, Michel, 32, 216 Friends, 214–215 Galt, John, 181 Gay Hollywood, 284–286 Geertz, Cli√ord, 1, 5–7, 25, 27, 72, 320, 374 n.3 Gendered production practices, 53–58, 103, 136–140, 166–167, 214–215 Gillespie, Tarleton, 151 Gitlin, Todd, 12–13, 425 n.5, 438 Giving notes, 216–223 Go√man, Erving, 236 Goldman, William, 9–10 Gottlieb, Jodi, 56 Grady, Michael, 15 Gray, Herman, 381 n.48, 413 n.2 Gri≈th, D. W., 23 Grindsta√, Laura, 13, 438 Gripsrud, Jostein, 381 n.48 Guber, Peter, 73–74 Hacker, Sally, 405 n.90 Hall, Conrad, 39 Hanssen, Deidre, 56 Harris, Fran, 56 Hartley, John, 238, 244 Hebdige, Dick, 311, 413 n.2 Helford, Bruce, 202, 219 Hershman, Brent, 44 Hesmondhalgh, David, 235, 406 n.9 Hill, Erin, 390 n.29 Hirsch, Paul, 382 n.50, 390 n.24 Hochschild, Arlie, 236 Homicide, 17, 31, 174, 217, 221, 279– 282, 287–288, 335 House, 105, 305 Hughes, John, 131, 143, 147, 156, 190– 191, 269–270 Hurwitz, Mitch, 176–177, 203–204, 211–212, 218, 221–222, 228. See also Arrested Development Hyperproduction, 173–178, 229–231

447

Index

448

Idea theft, 206–210 Imagined production communities, 111, 112, 114–115, 118, 126–131, 144– 149, 163, 319–323 Industrial habits: avowal/disavowal, 368–369; bipolar order, 339–343; disclosure/nondisclosure, 319–323 Industry: back-channel gossip as business practice, 64–67, 87; definitions and parameters of, 7–8; identity theory (see Branding); as imagined community, 11, 114–115, 118–119, 125–131, 145–149; marketing in, 23, 84, 246– 250, 274–279, 287–297, 306–315; militarist business practices and, 131, 143; reflexivity and, 1, 4, 5, 9–10, 15– 36, 70, 72, 98–99, 111–112, 147–149, 200, 203, 216–217, 283–287, 298, 316–317, 370–372; responses to digital/new media technologies, 279– 286, 324–325 Industry rituals: aesthetic status metaphors, 202–206; giving notes, 216– 223; idea theft, 206–210; mentoring/mystifying, 223–228; writing by committee, 211–216 Inter-group relationships via deep texts and rituals, 347 Intra-group relationships via deep texts and rituals, 347 Inverse credibility law, 3, 375 n.6 Isaia, Roy, 170 Je√ords, Bob, 46 Jenkins, Henry, 382 n.49 Jones, Spike, Jr., 43 Kaplan, Martha, 111 Kearns, Burt, 55–56 Keeping assistants stupid, 225 Kelly, John, 111 Kernan, Lisa, 387 n.76 Kingpin, 276–277 Klinger, Barbara, 307

Larry Sanders Show, The, 197–198 Lasch, Christopher, 32 Latour, Bruno, 7, 152 Leaky story-worlds, 37, 59–61, 63–68 Liminal rituals, 105, 81–109 Littlefield, Warren, 29, 217 Lotz, Amanda, 13, 440 Making-of programming, 27, 105, 287– 290. See also Viral marketing Manic production mode, 173–178, 229–231 Marshall, Meryl, 197, 202, 231 Mayer, Vicki, 14, 440 McCarthy, Anna, 395 n.46 McRobbie, Angela, 14, 32, 244, 390 n.37, 428 n.34 Mentoring/mystifying, 223–228 Menzies, William Cameron, 199–200, 223 Media Studies. See Film/television studies Metadata/digital intermediates, 179– 184 Mfume, Kweisi, 226, 419 n.70 Migratory labor, 113–120, 145–149, 154–156, 160–161, 270–273 Miller, Toby, viii, 441 Morgan, Glenn, 177–178, 217–218 Murch, Walter, 157 National Association of Broadcasters (nab): 85, 91, 93, 102–103, 123. See also Trade shows National Association of Television Program Executives (natpe): 85–88, 89, 97–98, 103, 232, 262–263, 268. See also Corporate rituals: syndication; Trade shows nbc, 89, 100–101; nbc 2000, 28–32, 248–251 Newcomb, Horace, viii, 12–13, 199, 373 n.2, 441 New media: cgi and digital produc-

Index

tion, 21–22, 160–167; digital boutiques 139, 141, 142, 194, 253–256; digital metabrowsing, 258–260, 279; and viral marketing, 279–282, 306– 312. See also Digital media Neyman, Yuri, 181–182 Nomadic labor system, 113–120, 145– 149, 154–156, 160–161, 270, 271–273 Non-union labor, 50, 51–59, 223–228 Ohmann, Richard, 382 n.49 Online complaining, snarking, and spoiling by workers, 37, 59–62, 328, 329 Okada, Daryn, 40 Ortner, Sherry, ix, 374 n.3, 441 Palazzo, Scott, 42–43 Panavision, 134, 148, 152 Personal branding, 204–206, 236, 271– 273 Pethel, Price, 181, 195 Pines, Josh, 180–181 Piracy, 79–80, 209–210 Pitching, 69, 81–88 Postnetwork, 13, 252 Powdermaker, Hortense, 9–10, 425 n.5 Powell, Robert, 388 n.7 Powell, Scott, 20 Producer-director versus writerproducer function, 16–17, 199 Producer-generated-users (pgu), 336– 338 Producer’s Guild ‘‘Truth in Credits,’’ 239–242. See also Corporate rituals Production ‘‘bibles,’’ 16, 213 Production churn, 113–114 Production design, 116–117, 118, 128 Production knowledge, 3, 9–10, 14, 67–68, 145–149 Production labor: 12 On/12 O√ campaign, 44–45; above-the-line, 34, 47–51, 197–198, 201–223, 227–231, 266; aesthetics and, 26, 162, 174–178;

below-the-line 34, 37, 39–40, 43–47, 68, 77, 79–80, 102, 109, 113–114, 117, 120, 123–124, 129–131, 132, 144–149, 152–153, 165–167, 180–184, 195–196, 328; di√erence between above/below line, 3, 9, 193, 206, 214, 220; digital, 46, 139–144, 146, 160–167, 178, 186– 191; downsizing and, 154–160, 164, 185–187; gender/sexuality stereotypes in, 53–58, 103, 136–140, 166– 167, 214–215; genesis myths and, 47–50; hyperproduction and, 173– 178, 229–231; imagined communities and, 111, 112, 114–115, 118, 126– 131, 144–149, 163, 319–323; militaristic analogy of, 131–136, 143; nomadic labor system, 113–120, 145– 149, 154–156, 160–161, 270, 271–273; paths-not-taken parable and, 50–51; as performance, 72–73, 81–82, 84, 96–97, 115, 236, 342; as physical work, 6, 20, 36, 44, 139, 140–142, 160–167, 177–178, 184–186; public storytelling and, 63–64; reflexivity and, 6, 19–21, 25, 26, 34–36, 116, 129–131, 184, 325–327, 330–331, 370– 372; relationship of, to theory, 18–19; and space as site of inquiry, 69–80, 82, 104–109, 211, 214–215; trade stories typology and, 37–38; unauthorized storytelling and, 37, 59–61, 64; unions, 45–46, 52, 66, 80, 112, 144, 145–146, 155, 161, 185–187, 330–331, 325–326; unregulated, 50, 51–59, 223–228; war stories and, 39–47, 68 Production studies: methodology of study, 345–361 Reality television, 54–55, 94, 105, 158, 165, 177–178, 207, 217–218, 241, 263, 284–286, 325–326 Reflexivity, 1, 4, 5, 9–10, 15–36, 70, 72, 98–99, 111–112, 147–149, 200, 203,

449

Index

450

Reflexivity (continued) 216–217, 283–287, 298, 316–317, 370–372; as common sense, 24–26, 317–318; in marketing, 23, 84, 246– 250, 274–279, 287–297, 306–315; and race, 98, 225–227 Regeneration and legitimation, 331– 333 Resonate, 253–256. See also Branding Retreats and internal workforce branding, 265–270 Roseanne, 292–294 Rosenthal, Phil, 201, 211 Ross, Andrew, 33, 268, 376 n.18, 382 n.50, 393 n.16 Schatz, Thomas, 198, 413 n.11 Schrader, Paul, 53 Schultz, Don, 255 Schwartz, Josh, 1, 375 n.10 Scott, Allen, 34, 377 n.22, 383 n.50, 395 n.44, 406 n.9 Screenplays as business plans, 232–233 Second-shift programming, 279–282 Seiter, Ellen, 373 n.2, 442 Self-ethnographic, 5, 7 Self-portraits, worker, 125–131, 165–167 Selznick, David O., 47–48, 199–200 Shattuc, Jane, 381 n.48 Shield, The, 16, 173, 231, 281. See also Brazil, Scott Simon, Bill, 271–273 Singer, Bryan, 197 Sociology: of work and organizations, 13, 235–237. See also Production labor: as performance Soloway, Jill, 63 Sony, 102–103, 135, 261–263; Betacam, 157–160 Space: collective, as social negotiation, 81–88; conceptual, as cultural representation, 79–81; as cultural presentation, 72–75; material, and master

plans, 75–77; tactical, as countermeasure, 77–79 Stealth marketing, online lurking by producers, 59–62, 309–313, 327–331 Storaro, Vittorio, 20 Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, 4, 62, 329 Sweatshops, digital, 160–167 Syndication, 52–53, 98, 103–104; network-a≈liate relations and, 89, 248–249. See also Corporate rituals: syndication Table-read, 200, 203 Technologies and tools: and aesthetics, 168–173, 180–184, 194–196; desktops, 157, 164–165, 251; directing labor, 152–153; immersive cameras, 167–173; as meaning 22, 150–154, 195–196; o√-the-shelf software, 46, 124–125, 157, 164–165; standardization of digital, 159–160; as weapons, 133, 134, 136 Tracking boards, 64–67 Trade imagery, 110–112, 116–149, 186; brand logos, 139, 140–142, 247, 250– 251 (see also nbc: nbc 2000); demo tapes, 110, 119–125, 135, 144–145, 165–167; gender/sexuality stereotypes and, 117, 136–140, 146, 188– 190; masochism and, 188–190, 192; as reflexive theory, 121, 124–125, 140– 142, 146–148, 194–195; self-portraits and, 125–131, 165–167; as warfare, 133–136 Trade publications, 10, 23–24, 54–55, 60, 77, 110 Trade rituals, 19, 41, 69–71, 104–109, 147–149, 320–322; deal making, 69, 99–104; demo tapes, 91–93, 95–96, 98–99, 102–103, 168–169 (see also trade imagery: demo tapes); networking, 69, 88–96, 225–227; pitching, 69, 81–88; regeneration/legiti-

Index

mation, 331–333; television critics meetings, 64, 93–94, 207, 316, 320. See also Trade shows Trade shows, 71, 82, 90, 99–101, 102, 123. See also National Association of Broadcasters; National Association of Television Program Executives; Trade rituals Trade writing as ‘‘whoring,’’ 23–24, 385 n.65 Transparency, organizational, 323–324 Traube, Elizabeth, 382 n.49 ‘‘Truth in Credits’’ campaign, 239–242 Turner, Victor, 105 12 On/12 O√ campaign, 44–45 24, 175–176, 229–231, 281. See also Jon Cassar Unauthorized storytelling, 37, 59–61, 64 Unions, 45–46, 52, 66, 80, 112, 144, 145–146, 155, 161, 185–187, 325–326, 330–331 Unregulated labor, 50, 51–59, 223–228 User generated content (ugc), 325, 334, 336–338

Video News Releases (vnr): 313–315. See also Viral marketing Viral marketing: 35, 62, 201, 274, 278, 306–315. See also Behind-the-scenes programming; dvd; Making-of programming; New media Weaver, Pat, 28 Wexler, Haskell, 19, 432 n.57 Wexman, Virginia Wright, 399 n.52 ‘‘What is the dvd’’ conference, 421 n.23 Whitney, D. Charles, 14, 443 Willed a≈nities in industry, 332–333 Williams, Raymond, 28 Willingham, Scott, 42 Willis, Paul, 5 Wisehart, Cynthia, 150 Wittel, Andreas, 67, 390 n.37, 443 Worker reflexivity (wr), 325–327, 370– 372 Writing-by-committee, 201, 211–216 X-Files, The, 210, 288–290, 295–297 YouTube, 325, 334, 338

451

JOHN THORNTON CALDWELL is a professor and chair of cinema and media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television, the editor of Electronic Media and Technoculture, the coeditor of New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, and the producer/director of the films Freak Street to Goa: Immigrants on the Rajpath and Rancho California (por favor).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Caldwell, John Thornton, 1954Production culture : industrial reflexivity and critical practice in film and television / John Thornton Caldwell. p. cm.—(Console-ing passions) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4092-8 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4111-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1 Motion pictures—Production and direction. 2 Television—Production and direction. 3 Motion picture industry—California—Los Angeles—Employees. 4 Television—California—Los Angeles—Employees. I. Title. pn1995.9.p7c25 2008 791.4502%32—dc22 2007038604