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Distributed Creativity in Film and Television

Three Case Studies of Networked Production Labor

John T. Caldwell, M. J. Clarke, Erin Hill, and Eric Vanstrom

Introduction

John T. Caldwell

The genius of the Hollywood production system for film and television lies in two interrelated workaday habits. The system excels at effectively “distributing creativity” to teams of artists and contract workers, even as it “harvests” and manages this collective idea churning into months-long and complex narratives for series television and for blockbuster film franchises. This chapter examines the ways in which the industry distributes, harvests, and monetizes creative work; and it does so through three case studies of very different industry sectors. These studies all underscore that “production” actually includes wide-ranging work practices that go far beyond the traditional stereotypes of location shoots and sound-stages. They also raise questions about the collective nature of creative work, and how this group work differs up and down the production food chain – from “below-the-line” craft workers to “off-the-set” support personnel and to “above-the-line” executives. These cases challenge production studies to think beyond physical production per se and to understand better how the distances, and the extent of interaction, between artists and executives are managed and how the social bonds between workers impact the film and television we experience on a daily basis.

Before considering work “outside” – or off the set – two examples illustrate “distributed, then harvested” creativity in places traditionally viewed as being “Inside” creative spaces. First, distributed creativity in the prime-time writers' room – where writer/producer teams create narratives through real-time pitching, debating, and negotiating story elements – can alternately function like brainstorming R&D (research and development), like group family therapy, or like a deadlocked jury room. This work environment has proven essential in creating large multi-episode story worlds, in part because the dozen or so writers present in a room learn their craft over time, in a system of graduated assisting, apprenticing, mentoring, and producing. Long-term teaching and modeling unfold here – that is, along with screen-writing and producing – which makes them model activities for corporate multi-tasking. The room survives industry-wide because successful executives have learned to monitor the chaos selectively, to glean ideas efficiently, and to channel the brain-storming economically so as to create focused high-concept screen content.

Physical production provides a second example, since traditional camera crews “on the set” also work in “teams.” Yet, unlike writers' rooms, these crews are organized around a quasi-medieval craft-mentoring system and are managed in a military-style, hierarchical, chain-of-command scheme. Both of these disciplining measures – distributed creativity and physical production – are supported by the job-threatened IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) unions and by management's cost-obsessed executives, who do not want crews to “invent,” but only to “render” their expensive and risky investments. The “speak only if spoken to” rules implicit in a camera crew differ dramatically from the constant, effusive “who can speak the loudest” group speculation that characterizes the writers' room. If camera crews still follow a classical Taylorist/Fordist approach to distributing production work (segmented and assigned down the line, in an assembly-line fashion), then writers' rooms follow a post-Fordist/psychotherapeutic model of simultaneity (creativity as an encounter group).

Both examples underscore why research on creativity and constraints should consider legal, economic, unionist, historical, and institutional factors – not just organizational structures or interpersonal interactions – in order fully to understand a specific culture or subculture of production. The following three case studies of collective work do just that. Each is a short essay that challenges us to compare insights gleaned from fieldwork research in Los Angeles to dominant trade discourses and popular depictions of production. Each case also asks us to think about creative work in production far beyond the on-the-set confines of the soundstage or the writers' room, paying heed to the legions of off-the-set support workers once thought to be “ancillary.” Hierarchies, “teamwork,” and “sharing” – sometimes in tortured manifestations – are as important for production off the set as they are for production on the set. Finally, these essays prompt us to think about where creative labor actually resides now – in the digital, post-network era. Each case shows how distributed, then harvested creativity is no longer confined to the bounded worlds of crews and rooms. Now, in the age of online media and economic recession, collective creative work melds indistinguishably with “outsourcing” (Clarke), with “dues-paying” (Hill), and with “crowd-sourcing” (Vanstrom).

In the first essay M. J. Clarke contrasts popular trade theories with his industrial research on the outsourced creative workers who produce Hollywood's newly branded ancillary content for “tentpole” mega-shows like Lost. In showing how studios now manage and monetize “infrequent contact” with increasingly anonymous production artists, he turns Chris Anderson's “long tail” theory on its head, showing how the current reorganization of screen content mirrors a major reorganization of creative workers. In the second case study Erin Hill compares “insider” blogosphere communications to her own fieldwork with producers' and agents' assistants, painting the picture of an unruly and poorly paid office workforce, whose gendered labor and contention is only barely managed through the habitual mantra of deferred career gratification and through a culture of “dues-paying.” She is particularly good at suggesting historical reasons for the industrialization of “emotional labor” and how a culture of “suffering for entrée” helps keep Hollywood's lowest paying jobs filled with an endless supply of cheap labor. Unlike Clarke's disaggregated artists, Hill's assistants are not far from the centers of power and are instrumental in creation; yet they remain invisible nevertheless. Finally, Eric Vanstrom shows how ostensibly unauthorized fan activities “outside” of the studios, in online start-ups like the “Hollywood Stock Exchange” (which cultivates sophisticated management knowledge about the film industry), have actually become more effective than “inside” studio marketing research in predicting a film's commercial success or failure. Vanstrom's picture – of “fans” defined through their “executive” affinities, and of box-office competencies freely fueling Hollywood's futures markets – undercuts two scholarly orthodoxies: that fans are unauthorized subjects recreationally hijacking screen content for personal ends; and that fans are subjugated by Hollywood's market research and media's “surveillance” regime.

All three case studies show just how calculated and problematic the practices of redistributing non-union work have become to the new Hollywood. Consider that Clarke's conglomerates obsess on reconnecting ancillary content to mother brands by simultaneously disconnecting and outsourcing production work. In turn, habitual industry recriminations against the lowest paid workers transform Hill's vast collective of producers' assistants into suffering Individuals – career ascetics who serve their vocational sentences. Finally, the industry easily converts the unruly “distributed intelligence” in Vanstrom's fan hive-sourcing into market research outsourcing, even as it freely hijacks and gathers fan intelligence-sharing into its marketing and business plans. Therefore all three cases involve pushing labor (its entitlements, health plans, and authorship aspirations) farther away from corporate centers, even as management ranges more widely to harvest creative ideas and intellectual property (IP) back for its screens. This trend may spur us to research distributed–harvested creativity in the executive suites and in finance and development meetings. After all, at this rate, executive teams may be among the only “workers” left harvesting ideas on the studio lot.

Aggregating Content/Disaggregating Labor in Tentpole TV

M. J. Clarke

Depending on the expert you cite, network television is either drawing its dying breath or slowly mutating into something radically new. Regardless of the description one chooses, change in the organization of work around many fictional television programs is evident. In the following pages my purpose is two-fold: first, I wish to show how network television producers in the US are currently experimenting with distributed organizational forms that are meant to capitalize on a postdigital landscape by more aggressively incorporating what Henry Jenkins (2006) has called transmedia; second, I intend to demonstrate the problems and provisional solutions raised by this important shift in creative management and its exploitation of loose social bonds. This section examines a specific mode of entertainment production, which distributes creative roles to a number of workers (a sort of limited crowd-sourcing) and across a number of platforms – a technique that I call, echoing the event-building and image-saturating strategies of the contemporary film, “tentpole” TV. What follows will then suggest some of the difficulties encountered by traditional television makers in their efforts to disperse creative responsibilities, as well as several common solutions favored by these same workers and producers of affiliated transmedia. In attempting to sketch a portrait of tentpole TV production, my section draws on industrial and popular press representations of the world of television workers, contrasting such representations to the conclusions drawn from a series of interviews with transmedia professionals.

In early 2007, Wired editor and television doomsayer Chris Anderson was the keynote speaker at the annual National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) conference, where he promptly informed the entire television industry: “you don't have megahits [. . .] the blockbuster is a diminishing part of the market as demand is distributed on a vast amount of products” (Nordyke, 2007). Here Anderson was drawing on his hugely influential book The Long Tail (2006), in which he discusses a “supply chain revolution” brought about by innovations in digital storage and distribution: this revolution creates an infinite amount of shelf space and an infinite range of demand, suggesting that nearly all the goods, no matter how obscure, will sell at least a few units when brought to this virtual market. The thesis of the book is that the mass of these nearly infinite niches – what Anderson calls the “long tail” – outnumbers the volume of singular mainstream hits. Thus thousands of video podcasts taken collectively do better numbers than CSI.

However, I would argue that a certain trend in television production suggests that the blockbuster isn't dying, but in some cases may be meeting the challenges cited by those who prefigure network television's death – and in ways not contradictory to Anderson's own observations. In his book, Anderson also describes the vital role of so-called filters that drive demand down the long tail, to more and more obscure niche products. The filters primarily addressed are online ones, such as “user recommends” metrics on long-tail exploiting Internet businesses like Amazon and Pandora. What these examples ignore is the way in which preexisting intellectual properties can also act like filters, pushing demand down the “tail.” In fact a recent trend in network television programming – a trend I call tentpole TV¹ – follows just this tactic, exploiting the streamability of content. Streamability is a new media term, coined to describe the way in which entertainment products have increasingly been made to be more replicable, more modular, and more transferable (Murray, 2005). I argue that the use of long-tail economics does not eliminate the blockbuster in television but gives rise to this other trend that, by moving affiliated content through multiple channels, allows the filter of the brand to soak up fabled latent demand all the way down the long tail. For example, one can look to the program Lost (ABC, 2005–2010), which hypothetically amassed the largest share of its revenue from its traditional on-air advertising, a little less from DVD sales, a little less from online advertising on affiliated websites, a little less from the share of profits from licensed video games, a little less from licensed novels, magazines, and so on. It is not unreasonable to suspect that, by combining all of these services and products associated with Lost, one could construct a model of distribution not unsimilar to the long tail, with demand progressively shrinking but always present – all the way down to the Lost candy bar.

Tentpole TV has been accompanied by managerial creativity among television professionals, a fact lampooned in a recent New York Times article that began with a job announcement for a television executive who knows how to move content and how to “shovel it onto the Internet in a way that makes money” (Siklos, 2006). Not quite as lost as this article suggests, tentpole-TV makers have actively experimented with new job roles and functions. And, as attitudes toward television's ancillary texts – traditionally maligned both in the academic and in the popular press as the zenith of the so-called commercialization of culture – have significantly softened and as the economic fortunes of network television have shifted, a new breed of storytellers, eager to exploit multiple media channels, has been employed in key creative positions. High-profile network showrunners, from Lost's Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof to Heroes' (NBC, 2006–2010) Tim Kring, have picked up on the concept of transmedia and have used it as justification for their own increased creative presence in everything, from Lost's alternative reality game to Heroes' web comics. Recently National Broadcasting Company (NBC) Universal head Jeff Zucker commented upon this growing practice in the field of network TV by stating: “All of these things have to line up early on in the food chain but not drive the creative” (Wallenstein, 2008). Translated from management speak, Zucker's comment is arguing that, to be successful, transmedia must originate in the creative writing core of a series. By more aggressively overseeing the creative integrity of a program's off-air manifestations, the job of showrunner has evolved to “managing a brand” – in the words of Heroes' Tim Kring (Kushner, 2007). This means that showrunners are responsible for more than just the writing of scripts and the editing of episodes – namely for the maintenance of an entire textual world. For example, the Lost-themed mobisodes (original content for cellular phones) Lost Missing Pieces, penned by series writers, feature brief character moments, many depicting events implied in the on-air series, or “missing pieces.” In other words showrunners must pay careful attention to the on-air program's unarticulated gaps and ellipses – textual aporiae that can become the source of the next transmedia text. Moreover, such work necessitates the existence of a more aggressive breed of creative managers and middlemen to oversee all the expanding manifestations of the core series. For example, Lost reportedly relies on its accountant-turned-writer Gregg Nations to maintain a ledger on all the minutiae of the intricate series. Showrunner Carlton Cuse described the staff's reliance on Nations's bookkeeping in a recent New York Times article by saying: “we quickly realized that we needed some system to keep track off all the details, that we weren't going to be able to do that by memory” (Wyatt, 2009).

At the same time as series writers and producers have reconfigured the organization of their own work, they have aggressively reached out to an army of freelance creative workers, incorporated in a vast system of loose social bonds, to provide transmedia extensions. Considering just these sort of changes, journalist David Wolf began a recent Broadcasting and Cable think-piece by pondering: “What does the term ‘television mean?’” (Wolf, 2007). In the article, Wolf sees uncertainty in the future of the TV business, given the flood of new entrants and platforms. This picture of a television with shifting boundaries and with an inconsistent set of personnel echoes observations made by a certain strand of contemporary social thinkers, who have turned away from the image of a powerful “Society” to examining the much more complicated fluid arrangements of what we may call loose social bonds. These diverse sets of theorists have considered the diminishing power of institutions to guide action (Bauman, 2000); they have more rigorously isolated the importance of individual practice in reconstituting these institutions, now fragile (Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1979); and they have studied the consequences of the increasing atemporality and aspatiality of contemporary networked and individualized labor arrangements (Castells, 1996). Despite vast theoretical differences and inconsistencies between these and like-minded thinkers, all would agree that, in the social science of the past, the solidity of social institutions, of their roles, of their boundaries, and of their bonds was overstated. Tentpole TV, I would argue, with its temporary, individualized bonds between workers along the long tail, with its unclear boundaries between traditional and other new media, with its shifting and evolving responsibilities for old and emerging professions, and with its experimental textual forms, becomes a model illustration of just the sort of agglomerations referred to by theorists of loose social bonds and a set of provisional responses to David Wolf's central query.

The looseness of networked bonds plays itself out in interviews with transmedia professionals as an organizational ambivalence that wants both to pull ancillary media in close to the creative core of the series and to keep it separate. To enforce their out-wardly ambivalent attitude towards transmedia, television producers as a whole have largely favored a set of industrial practices designed to minimize contact between freelancers and their on-air supervisors. In the first case television producers, in order to maximize the economics of the long tail, rely on the work of freelancers to fill out the textual worlds of tentpole TV programs – a project whose sheer volume, complexity and associated expenses invalidates simply relying upon the work of the series staff. While in television most labor is temporary, transmedia labor, in kind, is frequently freelance and project-based, minimizing producers' obligation to ancillary creatives.

Contact with freelancers is also minimized through a system of organizational barriers designed both to coordinate the approval process and to limit feedback loops. Despite the fact that freelancers often negotiate the exclusive rights to the adapted property, they are still beholden to the internal approval processes of the original IP owner. However, television producers have largely avoided micro-management in favor of looser structures of oversight. For example, writers of media tie-in novels based on network television properties have described their process as one marked by “double approval,” which refers both to these writers' distance from the creative core of the series and to the temporality of their work. In the first case, “double” refers to the fact that authors are twice removed, from series producers and writers, through a system of middlemen, be they editors or licensors. And in the second case “double” refers to the fact that the authors' work is reviewed at two key hinge points, the prospectus and the manuscript, with no contact in between. Commonly it is during the pre-production phase that transmedia freelancers receive most scrutiny. One comic-book editor of television-licensed titles described his own firm's approval process to me in a personal interview by stating:

Infrequent contact is also an expected mode of behavior in the affiliated video game industry. An article published by the industry website gamasutra vetted the advantages and disadvantages of working on licensed titles, warning: “Get used to hearing the phrase, ‘I'll get back to you by Wednesday especially on Thursday’” (Nixon, 2006). The approval process, however, is much more complicated in the case of current-generation video games that, because of their audio and visual sophistication, have to negotiate separately the likeness rights of acting talent, in addition to securing the property license.

Contact between the creative core and freelancers is also complicated by the temporal limitations placed upon transmedia creatives, which similarly minimize contact. Typically tight deadlines often imposed by IP holders make frequent contact and confabbing simply impossible. Artists working on the Heroes webcomic described working on a turnaround for as short a period as five days, while media tie-in writers are typically given three months to assemble a final manuscript. And, because transmedia workers are hired per project, they too are financially motivated to work very quickly. For example, one tie-in novel writer in a personal interview explained to me: “I try to write six or seven books a year because that's how you make a living [. . .] If you spend a year writing on an Alias book, that's a recipe for bankruptcy.” Similarly, the field of licensed video games is notorious for its rapid schedules and time crunches, which often result in compromised and hurried products.

Typically, licensed texts are arranged through an advance versus guarantee model whereby an outside organization guarantees the IP owner a minimum reimbursement, a large portion that is immediately paid – the advance; the remainder will be paid through royalties on each licensed unit sold. This means that these deals are generally low risk for IP owners; the latter receive the guarantee regardless of performance. While transmedia firms, be they video-game publisher or comic-book company, bear the financial risk, they are still held in check by the potential veto power of the approval process. As a result, the organizations and the freelancers who work for them practice a very measured form of self-censorship, which ensures that their work avoids the paradoxical constraints of both repeating and contradicting the on-air series.

Without anything resembling day-to-day, face-to-face contact to ensure creative integrity, tentpole TV producers often rely on several techniques to maximize trust and to undergird loose social bonds. Workers are often selected on the basis of pre-existing inter-firm relationships and of their native reputation systems. For example, when Fox's 24 sought to produce its own series of mobisodes, it tapped a producer who had previously filmed DVD (digital versatile disc) extras for the program's season box sets. Frequently producers farm out hiring and other creative decisions to trusted “brokers” (Dimaggio, 1977) or “contact men” (Hirsch, 1991). For example, the Heroes webcomic was staffed by artistic personnel (penciling, coloring, lettering) all affiliated with the small, Los Angeles-based comics firm Aspen MLT (Michael Layne Turner), whose own editors were in charge of hiring decisions. Reportedly this inter-firm relationship was based on the efforts of Heroes and of comic-book writer Jeph Loeb acting as a contact man with a prior co-collaborator – Aspen founder and comic artist Michael Turner (Tabu, 2007).

Former freelance Star Trek writer and inventor of the Tribbles, David Gerrold (1973), describes the impossible position of freelance writers in television: paradoxically, they have to know more about the program than its writers, without having access to production data. The question then becomes how in fact these freelancers can guide their own work with minimal contact from the series. One can assemble a set of explicit and implicit mandates given to freelance workers; but more frequently I have found that these workers act on insights given by their fandom for the on-air series. In his Art Worlds (1984), sociologist Howard Becker discusses the vital role that conventions play as social glue that binds together the members scattered throughout any given artistic endeavor. I argue that details arrived at through fannish enthusiasm and through repeated viewings act in a similar manner, allowing freelancers to make more or less appropriate creative decisions without intimate coordination with a program's creative core. Nearly without fail, all the transmedia freelancers I have talked to expressed at least a casual devotion to the franchise they worked on prior to employment. And fannish desire for transmedia integrity matches or – arguably – exceeds such a desire among IP holders. The convention most frequently discussed by tentpole TV freelancers is the use of character – a conglomeration of actions, attitudes, and backstory – to make decisions. For example, a freelance writer on the 24 comic minimized the importance of the realtime format in the translation of the series, claiming that it is the character of Jack Bauer who guides the series and his interpretation of it: “Jack Bauer hits at something basic that's missing from other media. And it's that he's resolute . . . it's a sort of modern interpretation on the John Wayne mythos.”³ I argue that academic media studies must take seriously these sometimes idiosyncratic, distributed industrial arrangements, their resultant practices, and their textual consequences if it is to track properly this discipline's always elusive object of study.

Distributed Assistanthood: Dues-Paying Apprentices and “Desk Slaves”

Erin Hill

This is the business, always has been and always will be – it's called paying your dues by working long hours, taking it up the ass and not getting paid [. . .] – if you can't hack it, then go back home, live with mommy and daddy and work at the local bank.

Deadline Hollywood commenter discussing assistant pay cut (Finke, 2009)

Blogger Nikki Finke's recent report on the pay cut planned for assistants at the newly merged William Morris Endeavor Entertainment (WME) talent agency was met with a surprisingly vicious response from her readers (2009). The reactions, which appeared on the comment thread of her Deadline Hollywood blog, were not surprising simply by virtue of being angry – indeed some venting was to be expected by, and on behalf of, the assistants in question, given that what was at stake was a nearly 20% drop in salary (from $13.50/hour to $11.00/hour). Rather the anger of the “commenters” (to use the online term) was surprising because it was expressed most frequently and most vehemently in support of management. Commenters applauded the architects of the pay cut while admonishing assistants that they were “not coal miners” and telling them to “sack the fuck up and deal with it,” to “grow up!! The world isn't fair . . . get used to it,” and even to “try Iraq for three years” (Finke, 2009, p. 1). These respondents further insisted that the assistants would be foolish to strike, since “in this town, walkout equals lock out” and they'd quickly be replaced by others “chomping at the bit to take their place” (ibid.).

Finke's blog, though de rigueur reading for many Hollywood insiders, is unaffiliated to any studio, agency, or network. Therefore it's easy to dismiss the comment dustup as a random Internet flamewar, separate from the entertainment industry proper and from its system of production. However, I would argue that the blog and its comments are very much part of the system and represent a perfect example of one of that system's most important sustaining functions: the continuous development of industrial mythology that, over time, is codified and dispersed as fact through its creative products, and by and to its members. It is this mythology that surrounds and supports the system, helping to contain and control the contributions of low-status workers – such as assistants to writers, producers, directors, agents, and executives. Despite claims to the contrary made by the industrial boundary police on Finke's blog and elsewhere, these workers are absolutely essential to the industry's products and do impact them creatively. Examining the specific mythology at the root of the Deadline Hollywood exchange, as well as its historical precedent, will help explain the lowly place of assistant work in the Los Angeles film and television industry and why assistants not only stand for poor treatment at the hands of employers, but are often willing accomplices in perpetuating it.

Popular shows like Entourage (2004–2011) and films like The Devil Wears Prada (2006) glamorize creative industries right down to their scut workers (the assistants), and, through the hero's journey narratives, explain these industries as a world that can be navigated and mastered – if one is willing to accept that world's rules. Industry workers and aspirants who watch these types of texts see the Hollywood entertainment industry as being ordered and as making sense, when – as Caldwell points out – in reality “production cultures are far too messy, vast and contested to provide a unified code [..] for breaching [their] walls” (2008, p. 36). Caldwell argues that the industry self-theorizes, codifying the accumulated industrial myths into a relatively unified mythology, which keeps an increasingly divergent mixture of industrial modes from diverging completely (p. 34). This mythology is especially useful in keeping low-status, entry-level jobs filled with cheap labor. In studying assistant work, I've identified the advice, stories, and “industrial wisdom” surrounding the concept of “dues-paying” as an overarching mythology that makes such a feat possible in this sector.

Actual assistant work is usually some combination of clerical and administrative work, personal errands, and creative/executive-level work on an employer's projects. Some actual assistants have supportive, mentoring employers and others wind up on the desks of bosses who are abusive and who assign them only unrewarding tasks. Despite this range of experiences, the mythology that has evolved around dues-paying –the process of “paying one's dues” at a low-status job in order to prove worthy of a higher status position – tends to elevate and celebrate the harshest, most embarrassing extremes of assistanthood and the most abusive, “screamer” bosses. From TV shows to chick-lit novels and to networking websites, stories of assistants completing unsavory tasks and taking vile abuse circulate endlessly. The stories might be mistaken for simple “venting,” if they didn't so often carry the moral that these sorts of experiences should not be shunned but rather desired, as the trial by fire necessary for advancement. Just one example of that moral at work can be found in the how-to manual It's All Your Fault! (How to Make It as an Assistant in Hollywood), which describes “assistanting” as “a purgatory” and “a rite of passage which, if suffered and surmounted, can land you in those heavenly regions beyond the pearly gates of Brentwood or Los Feliz” (Robinson & Morris, 2001, p. 14).

On the Finke blog, the necessity of dues-paying seems to be the only thing that all commenters agree on. Many times throughout the blog's 172 comments from June 16, 2010 on, assistants and their defenders qualify remarks by insisting that they know they must pay their dues, while the faction in favor of pay cut accuses assistants of not being willing to go far enough, insisting that they accept their fate, because “[t]his is the business, always has been and always will be” (Finke, 2009, p. 1). Statements like these show just how effectively dues-paying mythology contains worker dissent, since, contrary to the industrial wisdom it purports to impart, the dues-paying model of suffering for entrée is by no means the way “it always has been.” In fact, for the first 60-plus years of the entertainment industry, this model didn't exist at all. What did exist was a sector of the workforce that was allotted low pay and low status because it was sex-segregated and feminized.

In the early days of film, the implementation of Taylorist “scientific management” meant that studios segregated work into scores of new “departments,” as I detail elsewhere.⁴ This in turn produced an explosion of paperwork – an intermediate product that economists refer to as “clerical output” (Fine, 1990, p. 12). New business technologies designed to create and store this clerical output had been gendered as female, and clerical work was feminized, because women could be paid and promoted less and were thought to be more “manually dexterous and tolerant of routine” than men (Davies, 1982 – p. 55). In the film industry this workforce made possible increased paper communications between various departments and the directors, producers, and executives who served by turns as managers in the developing system of production – which Janet Staiger describes in its various stages in The Classical Hollywood Cinema (Bordwell, Thompson, & Staiger, 1985, pp. 128–142) – so that large numbers of films could be tracked and monitored. In this developing, large-scale system of film production, women – as secretaries, stenographers, and script girls – became the primary producers, distributors, and custodians of the clerical output without which the expanding studios could not have functioned, and they provided much needed rationality and control to the system of production by serving as the recorders, rule minders, and timekeepers of the creative process. For this they were rewarded with a salary that was competitive with those of other skilled “women's professions” (e.g., teaching or nursing), but they had little expectation of promotion out of the female-dominated clerical ranks. However, especially at the highest creative levels of the production process (i.e., in the offices of writers, executives, directors, and producers), secretarial work at studios was not actually limited to the clerical sphere.

As Kathleen McHugh has explained, by the early to mid-1900s domestic labor had come to be associated both with the subjective, emotional, and maternal values stemming from the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity and with the rational, organized, and detail-oriented qualities encouraged after its early twentieth-century transformation into the discipline of home economics – a process influenced by Taylorism (McHugh, 1999, p. 61). The result was that woman's identity was variously constructed as emotional caretaker, household manager, wife, mother, and detail-oriented record-keeper/organizer. These jobs were meant to be carried out with the appearance of ease, or of doing little (p. 76). Studios similarly assigned women to detail work, but they also expected them to take a managerial view of the sphere they inhabited through effortless multitasking, list-making, and filtering of information. There, too, they were called upon to use wifely, motherly, or daughterly skills to nurture co-workers, to mitigate the emotional content of messages, to communicate pleasantly, and to exercise an influence under the guise of feminine passivity, all while rendering their efforts virtually invisible through other aspects of gendered performance – such as chatter, flirtation, and gossip associated with girlish pleasure and leisure.⁵ Self-effacing, extra-clerical skills from the domestic sphere even enabled some women to expand their duties in order to better meet the needs of their employers or co-workers in film production, and in some cases they achieved a measure of creative agency despite their relatively powerless positions. Such was the case with Marcella Rabwin, secretary and later executive assistant to Hollywood producer David O. Selznick from 1932 to 1944. In the mere five pages that she devotes to her own career at the end of a memoir filled with stories of the celebrities who crossed her path, she admits to running Selznick's offices, holding meetings in his place, composing many of Selznick's famous memos herself, and signing his initials “as authentically as he could” (Rabwin, 2000, p. 161); but she refuses to take even the smallest amount of credit for his creative achievements. Like many successful female workers in the studio system, Rabwin achieved a kind of agency, but that agency came in part through her willingness to confine the signs of her own authorship to the reference initials at the bottom of Selznick's memos.

The use of femininely deployed skills –by which I mean skills normally thought of as masculine, such as delegating orders to underlings, which are rendered non-threatening by a female worker when deployed with or disguised through some kind of feminine performance (e.g., nurturing) – seems to be common to successful workers in feminized, clerical-based jobs. I group these skills under the heading of creative support – a phrase of my own construction, which draws not only on the concept of gender performativity advanced by Judith Butler, where gender is constituted “through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler, 1990, p. 179), but also on Arlie Hochschild's characterization of the parts of workers' jobs in which “the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself” as emotional labor (Hochschild, 2003, p. 5). Hochschild defines emotional labor as labor that “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (ibid.). Creative support, then, represents the combination of feminized skills, gender performance, and emotional labor deployed in these different, clerical-based women's jobs to support the movie-makers, to facilitate their creative vision, and, occasionally, to impact that vision. This phrase helps to link and explain the methods by which different female movie workers fitted themselves into the studio system by working through their gender in a way that was acceptable to that system.

Although the ranks of assistants in contemporary Hollywood are far more gender-integrated than those of secretarial staff in the studio era, the actual work they do is not. The official job duties of assistants have changed very little since the studio era, and the unofficial expectation that assistants offer employers self-eliding creative support subsists as well.⁶ Additionally, despite great social change since the studio era, many socially constructed, essentialist notions of men's skills versus women's skills remain in the minds of both workers and employers, even though the language of job ads and corporate documents is gender neutral.⁷ Therefore, though there is no such thing as a typical relationship between an employer and an assistant in today's freelance, ad hoc entertainment industry, I argue on the basis of this evidence that assistant work remains feminized across gender. This continued feminization goes part of the way to explaining the continued low status and compensation of assistants, since pay may not have increased when men came to the field in large numbers if assistant work was still coded as “women's work.” However, to explain how continued low wages were accepted by the new, gender-integrated generation of assistants, it is necessary to return to the concept of dues-paying.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, at about the same time as assistant work began to be gender-integrated, modern assistantship shifted from being a career separate from others in the industry – one from which workers could not expect promotion – to a dues-paying quasi-apprenticeship in which workers were primarily compensated not in money, but in training for their future profession under one of its masters. Though it goes by various other names (trainee programs, internships, assistant hyphenates), apprenticeship is common practice in unionized below-the-line film professions, so it makes sense that it has been adopted by above-the-line professionals and agents. However, the difference between an assistant location manager and a producer's assistant is that, as with any real apprenticeship, the assistant location manager's union – the 399 teamsters – regulates the length, pay, and conditions of its members' apprenticeship and determines when they are eligible for promotion and pay raise. By contrast, there are no rules governing an assistant's pay, how he or she earns it, and what kind of training or promotions he or she may receive.

In reality, assistantship hasn't changed from the days of secretarial work so much as it has been rhetorically rebranded, so as to have the appeal of an apprenticeship without offering any of its guarantees. Hence the widely varying range of pay and work experiences of contemporary assistants.⁸ The mythology of dues-paying retrofits those parts of the apprenticeship system that are most favorable to management on to those – formerly gendered – aspects of the job that are equally favorable; then it spins the new combination as being not only attractive, but a key to success in the business. The sanctioning of work conditions through dues-paying might be more defensible if the promises of the dues-paying mythology were more consistently delivered. My research has shown, however, that, far from it being the case that assistants find themselves on track to creative or executive positions after a few years on the job, there is an extremely large assistant dropout rate due to the financial, mental, and emotional strain endured by workers for up to 10 years without promotion.⁹

The dues-paying mythology makes little mention of the contributions that assistants make to the creative process. However, like the earlier studio secretaries, the assistants in my study found themselves participating in creative projects through contemporary forms of creative support, which go from proxying for, and filtering non-creative work away from, employers to delimiting creative solutions to problems (say, generating writer lists or narrowing a field of 50 scripts to the five best) and to actively generating content (such as by creating transmedia texts). The impact of an assistant's work on creative texts was not as clearly delineated as that of the work of those higher in the creative food chain, who often characterized assistanting as ancillary, or parallel to the creative process. Yet, as members of the network that creates screen content, assistants were clearly essential to the process, being responsible for a large portion of the distributed knowledge that went into collaborative efforts and quietly carrying out a large share of the development and production work that took place on paper.

Far from being ignorant of the discrepancy between their value to the system and their compensation, most assistants recognize and accept it. Though California's labor laws for working overtime are broken every day in Los Angeles, offenses are seldom reported and attempts at unionization are rare and fruitless, since, under the rules of dues-paying, complainers “never work in this town again.” The assistants accept their fate because most of them believe that, if they pay their dues, they will be rewarded. And when they aren't, the mythology is in place to shift the blame from management to the assistants, for being unwilling to pay their dues. Of course, the only definite beneficiary of this policy is the industry that continues to sustain itself on these workers' backs. This helps to explain why Deadline Hollywood blog commenters with seemingly little stake in the dispute angrily champion management over labor. Whether they've transcended assistantship, are themselves assistants, or are outsiders looking in, the commenters actually do have a stake in the argument: a belief that the system is rational and that they have the ability to succeed – if only they can master it. And so they defend the system, policing its boundaries and its mythology, just as they've been mentored by television or job gossip to do. This rationalization sanctions the system, helping it contain exactly the kind of dissent that, ironically, might ultimately make it fairer and more masterable.

Sourcing Film Market Intelligence: Box Office Data, Tracking, and the Hollywood Stock Exchange

Eric Vanstrom

Together with creativity, Hollywood distributes much of the collection, measurement, and analysis of market and audience data to outside research firms. This case study examines one such firm: the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX), a virtual market that uses “crowd-sourcing” to aggregate knowledge about box-office gross, star power, and other entertainment “commodities.” In tracing the historical shift in box-office information from industrial secret to a widely reported and analyzed cultural topic, I argue that box-office data are the primary tool through which organizations and participants make sense of the film “market” and attempt to limit market uncertainty. HSX is then contextualized as a part of the industrial practice of “tracking” – that is, of accessing box-office potential through audience research and historical modeling on the basis of various textual variables (genre, star, director, soundtrack, etc.) and contextual ones (release date, competition for viewers from other release, number of theaters, distribution/marketing strategy, demographics and patterns of consumption, etc.). HSX's users analyze, distribute, and create market intelligence as they track production news, promotions, marketing strategies, and audience interest; in short, HSX traders are encouraged to act more like studio marketing specialists and researchers than like objects of research, subjugated by surveillance (see Miller, Govil, McMurria, Maxwell, & Wang, 2008, pp. 282–294). HSX suggests how market knowledge and forecasting expertise are distributed ad hoc and well beyond “professional” media organizations, to knowledgeable and engaged film audiences.

However, HSX traders are also products of technological and economic forces that reshape all aspects the film market and media research. In particular, the evolution of digital technology and of computer networking has created exponential growth in consumer and market research industry and has shifted the amount of data available and the ways in which they are collected, analyzed, and circulated. Media fragmentation (new media delivery platforms, the disaggregation of content, and increased bandwidth) and audience fragmentation (“long tail” economics and niche audiences) have thrown traditional market and audience measurement tools and methods into disarray. In some ways this has made audiences more elusive and unpredictable, while in other ways:

HSX traders are at times unruly and unpredictable, but, as with studio executives and film marketers, maximizing profits and limiting market uncertainty is their collective mission and interpretative framework for accessing films.

Box-office grosses have always been important within the film industry, but the weekend/weekly charts as we know them today were brought on by conglomeratization of the media industries, the ever-shortening window for distributing and marketing studio films, and shifts in how box-office numbers are collected and distributed. Hollywood studios were historically reluctant to reveal financial information about their operations. Moreover, box-office data were difficult to obtain and of limited value until the late 1970s. Reflecting the classical Hollywood film market, box-office numbers were regional, unevenly compiled over time, and largely utilized by theaters in the hope of gaining any knowledge they could about the films that might find their way into their theaters. Not surprisingly, given the decline in attendance, increased competition in the media marketplace, and the development of consumer research in other fields after World War II, “the use and development of film audience research began to accelerate” (Handel, 1950, p. 4). By 1985 independent firm Entertainment Data, Inc. (EDI, later Nielsen EDI) could offer a complete national picture of box-office sales electronically, in real-time. And the speed at which box-office data now circulates has helped to reshape the film market (by front-loading almost all marketing and promotional activity in order to generate good opening weekend numbers) and labor (by turning each film release into a full-blown “branding” campaign on a global scale and continually adjusting to local market feedback).

In the contemporary Hollywood of tentpole productions and increased risk associated with every picture release, the high costs of saturation distribution and their massive marketing campaigns ramped up the need for more accurate predictions of box-office potential. And the coming wave of corporate culture and highly educated executives with postgraduate degrees in finance, advertising, and consumer goods would soon turn “tracking” into an astoundingly strategic practice that balances advanced polling, demographic-minded mapping and scheduling, and sophisticated historical models (Wyatt, 1994). Since 1978 National Research Group (NRG) has been the primary supplier of tracking information culled from random national telephone surveys and from its own historical box-office database. In the mid-1990s the development of the Internet along with massive decline in media audiences created opportunities for new research firms to compete with NRG's dominance; these firms included the Online Testing Exchange (OTX) and MarketCast, which attempt to reach subjects online. In 1997 NRG was bought by VNU (a Dutch publishing company), which publishes Variety and now owns Nielsen Media Research. Reed Business Information, publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, bought MarketCast soon after. The consolidation of the media research and business information industries mirrors the consolidation and globalization of media industries and audiences in general, as well as the collapsing distinctions between them, as these firms expand their reach across media and around the globe in order to offer an ever more “complete” picture of consumer behavior and of the integrated media marketplace.

In the last 20 years, tracking methodology has also shifted from controlled survey groups and telephone polling toward qualitative research informed by crowd-sourcing, ethnographic research methods, and passive electronic monitoring systems (used by Nielsen EDI and Rentrack to report box data electronically, in real time). Moreover, the availability of tracking data has also exploded, thanks to movie-related services like Moviefone and Fandango, which “harvest” site traffic, search data, and ticket pre-sales and monetize them as tracking research sold to studios and theater chains. Film-related websites, like imdb.com and rottentomatos.com, harvest tracking information by surveying visitors' awareness of certain films and willingness to see them, producing data that is then shared with clients and partners. Some sites, like HSX, will offer the findings from these ad hoc surveys back to the online community, as a means of generating activity and traffic on the site.

Outside the film and media research industries, box-office data – and even tracking numbers – circulate widely, as part of our understanding of the film industry and popular culture. Box-office data are widely reported as items of general news and have become the ground for something of a marketing race between studios, as they compete to “win the weekend” in order to sell the film's success as a reason to see it. In that way box-office gross is a cultural obsession and a part of the popular understanding of Hollywood movies, especially as professional film criticism fades in influence and notions of commercial success appear to be merging with ones of quality. Today, just as film distribution and marketing rely on these data to make industrial decisions about how to produce, market, and position films in order to limit risk, audiences increasingly utilize the same data to navigate their participation in the market. Arguably the prevalence of market data in popular culture and their use among members of audiences increase corporate transparency; but, as the HSX example demonstrates, box-office data and tracking information are increasingly mixed up with reflexive movie-marketing strategies and campaigns designed to cultivate niche audience, to control viral word-of-mouth promotion, and to blur the line between market data and marketing. The fetishization of box-office numbers in industrial and consumer cinematic discourse today is an excellent example of how Hollywood blurs the line between cultural/artistic production and economic/business activity.

Created in 1996, the Hollywood Stock Exchange is another interesting example. HSX describes itself today as an “integrated marketing, research and technology company driven by its patented entertainment stock market” (Lamare, 2007). This carefully worded company boilerplate is intended to capture the multitude of practices and profit models that make up HSX as a business-to-business research service and as an ad-supported virtual market for consumers. As a “virtual stock market,” HSX allows would-be movie moguls to prove themselves in an online market that lets “traders” invest 2 million “Hollywood dollars” in Movie Stocks and Star Bonds and measures their bets as they rise and fall with each week's box-office grosses against a pool of investors – who, according to HSX marketers, include a fair number of Hollywood luminaries. Complicating this distribution of industry analysis for fans is that HSX also wants “insiders” to play. “Insider knowledge is not only legal on HSX, it is encouraged,” claims the site. This mixing and “networking” of industry practitioners and audience is part of what makes this community unique. For these “savvy” traders, all relevant film information – such as cast and crew announcements, funding issues, production problems, marketing materials, and so ob – usually affects a stock's price. Being good at the game is, then, not easy. It requires – even from crowd-sourced outsiders – detailed knowledge of how feature film production, distribution, marketing, and exhibition are organized and operated and of how the market/target audiences are liable to react to a film in relation to developing information. In short, HSX makes the crowd think about films like studio marketing specialists or executive producers.

Markets, whether based on actual or on virtual currency, are excellent aggregators of information and very good at answering questions that have a definitive solution, like box office (Surowiecki, 2004). HSX's “movie stocks” are pegged to a film's domestic gross four weeks after release. Through the trading activity of users, the price of a particular movie stock offers a forecast of the box-office gross after a month in release. In that sense, the exchange functions as a “prediction” or “futures” market – that is, a speculative market that creates assets whose final value is tied to a particular event or market outcome. Anita Elberse (2005), professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, compared HSX's forecast, as a prediction tool, with other tracking methods, and found – astonishingly – that the HSX closing price the night before a movie's opening is the single best available forecast of its weekend box office. HSX is more accurate at predicting box-office results than traditional “insider” tracking methods. The ability of prediction markets to aggregate the distributed intelligence of a diverse group of “outside” traders (with different and uneven degrees of market knowledge) into an accurate forecast has stimulated the industry's embrace of “the crowd.”

Recently a number of books and articles about prediction markets began championing the “democratic” power of networked prediction markets in terms familiar to academic cultural studies, theories of resistance, and historical theories of technological determinism. These arguments pitted the “collective intelligence” of the people and the inherent liberating potential of the “participation,” “interactivity,” and collective engagement of the Internet against the increasingly irrelevant bureaucratic old-guard “experts,” whose job is to analyze, understand, and predict market eventualities (Hubbard, 2007; Surowiecki, 2004). Not everyone is sold on this phenomenon, however. Harold Vogel, president of Vogel Capital Management and author of Entertainment Industry Economics (1986), says that much of HSX is “window dressing and fluff to make people appear erudite, when they really aren't,” but he adds that, “for the in-house studio prognosticators who make a living actually tracking film demand and adjusting marketing campaigns, HSX can be a valuable tool.” Apparently Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services and bond-trading company that bought HSX in 2001 in the hope of turning its virtual market into a real one, recognized that potential too. Former Nielsen Media Research executive and marketer Andrew Wing was hired to oversee HSX's market research product and to expand market partnerships for HSX. Thus HSX was conceived as a game designed to take advantage of the public's obsession with box-office numbers and to harvest the forecast it produces as real-time tracking research, selling the data as well as ad space and promotional opportunities to film marketers, media analysts, and buyers.

Throughout its history, HSX has attempted to negotiate its competing visions of marketplace equality and information transparency for all with marketplace control and manipulation through proprietary systems of data collection and audience surveillance. For example, HSX founders, Wall Street brokers Max Keiser and Michael Burns, initially envisioned the site would “democratiz[e] the [film] financing process,” enticing virtual traders into becoming real investors in independent production (Lamare, 1996). Beginning in April 1997, HSX hoped to allow traders to invest real money in low-budget film, with breakout potential. “The concept is to democratize the filmmaking process,” explains Burns. “Why should it just be the studio executives who get to decide what movies we watch? How do they know what we want to see? And they think that we have no say, and we're ultimately the ones that [sic] pay to see movies anyway” (quoted in Van der Zanden, 1997). Thus HSX was originally conceived as a film-financing marketplace that levels the playing field between producers and consumers by offering audience members the opportunity to become investors. The marketplace would do away with insider politics, nepotism, creative compromise, and other problems associated with the developing, financing, and green-lighting of a Hollywood feature and replace them with the populism of the free market. Market participants would have to put their money where their mouth is; tracking would become a pure expression of interest and personal judgment of the market (it seems to matter little whether that be construed as cultural taste or as investing acumen). Ideally a film's potential could be judged on its own, before a saturation release would be forced onto the multiplexes and before market positioning, branding, and targeted ads/promotions would have a chance to tip the balance of marketplace equity.

More recently, Veriana Networks Inc. and Cantor Fitzgerald have used this line of argument as they lobbied the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Congress for approval of a real “box-office futures” market. Veriana's Media Derivatives, which would only be open to professional traders, “will help better manage economic uncertainty and financial volatility,” according CEO Rob Swagger, who added that “every other segment of our economy has had a means to offset risk. The entertainment industry has not had an opportunity for futures-type contracts” (quoted in Shields, 2010). Hollywood's labor guilds and lobbying infrastructure back-lashed quickly, associating the market with gambling, suggesting how susceptible it was to manipulation, and arguing that, in a down economy, such a market would risk depressing box-office receipts further by “negatively affecting financiers' and audiences' pre-release perception” (Fleming, 2010). From the perspective of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), box-office futures pricing is “lacking any reliable economic basis.” Thus the fault line here is really perception, protecting the industry's ability to control and predict the marketplace through distribution, branding, and marketing of individual films. The industry-wide objection to film futures markets often postures as a concern to protect the creativity, art, and experience of film. Yet the objection is also about maintaining tracking research and box-office data as relative measures of profitability, quality, and success – both within the film industry, as career capital for above-he-line executives associated with a hit film, and between media industries, as sales data for, say, a television licensing deal. In this context, rather than “lacking any reliable economic basis,” box-office futures ground, even if they don't fully measure, many of the economic activities related to the distribution and marketing of a film theatrically and across various release windows. However, the continued focus of tracking research and box-office receipts on a single revenue stream for films in a shrinking market is rather inexplicable – unless box-office analysis and reporting are seen as marketing/promotional tools for a film's initial release, pushing the theatrical release as a “loss-leader” (since few films make turn a profit from domestic release alone) for the 10-to 20-year life cycle of Hollywood films today.

Tracking research and box-office data are, then, increasingly necessary, accurate, and available for measuring and anticipating audiences in today's fragmented and cluttered film market. The importance of box-office data has spread to popular culture and influences filmgoers and our culture to view films in economic terms, as notions of entertainment and quality merge with ones of profit and chart position. In this way tracking research and box-office data are a part of what Caldwell (2008) theorizes as Hollywood's “manic disclosure/non-disclosure” of industrial information, which it makes in an effort to manage and control risk in the globalizing and fragmenting film market. In audience communities like HSX, we have seen how increased disclosure and circulation of industrial data have encouraged the audience to engage with the film industry on its own terms, collapsing the distinction between producer and consumer as a matter of interpretative and informational differences. Such disclosure also seems to have improved and sped up tracking research, as well as the ability to forecast audience behavior accurately. At the same time, the collapsing distinction between marketing and market data, the interpretative relativity of tracking research, and the limitations of box-office data in relation to the profitability of a film over time are forms of non-disclosure that obscure the market, making audiences less predicable and yet, ironically, further exposed to market research and surveillance.

HSX's virtual market and traders are caught up in this paradox; they create and use market data and production information in order to forecast box-office profits, while the site not only sells its crowd-source intelligence, but also collects data about its users' tastes and moviegoing habits, in order to sell them to studios along with its real-time tracking service. The site also sells marketing space and promotional opportunities to marketers and media buyers looking to connect with savvy, reflexive audiences on HSX (mostly middle- to upper-middle-class men, aged 18 to 45). Partly because of the industry's manic disclosure/non-disclosure, contemporary film audiences are invited to consider the film market not as cultural expression, or even as simple entertainment, but as an object of economic and cultural analysis, and themselves as potential players in this marketplace. This distances the audience from filmgoing as a cultural and aesthetic experience, making economic frameworks the arena for interacting with and understanding the film industry. In this context, the MPAA's successful lobbying efforts against box-office futures – on the grounds that they would wither traditional labor divisions, that they would kill creative autonomy, and that such a market would be subject to manipulation from those with inside information – is not only a way of putting the cart before the horse, but also a highly hypocritical one.

NOTES

1 An informal, expanded list of these programs would include 24 (FOX, 2001–2010), Alias (ABC, 2001–2006), Day Break (ABC, 2006), Drive (FX, 2007), Heroes (NBC, 2006–2010), Invasion (ABC, 2005–2006), Jericho (CBS, 2006–2008), John Doe (FOX, 2002–2003), Journeyman (NBC, 2007), Kidnapped (NBC, 2006), Kings (NBC, 2009), Life on Mars (ABC, 2008–2009), Lost (ABC, 2004–2010), The Nine (ABC, 2006), Push, Nevada (ABC, 2002), Prison Break (FOX, 2005–2009), Reunion (FOX, 2005), Surface (NBC, 2005–2006), Traveler (ABC, 2007), Vanished (FOX, 2006).

2 The quote here is from an informant interview conducted as part of my fieldwork for this article and of my book Transmedia Television (Clarke, 2012). These interviews with media practitioners were conducted over a three-year period (2007–2009) under the condition of interviewee anonymity. This quote is taken from my fieldnotes, as are all the following ones, unless otherwise indicated. For more information on this research and fieldwork, please refer to my book.

3 From informant interview, 2007–2009; name withheld under conditions of anonymity

4 See Hill (2007).

5 The monthly studio newsletters at MGM, RKO and Warner Bros. at this time reflect almost nothing but this gendered performance, with descriptions of female workers focusing on how much they like to giggle or chatter while rarely mentioning their work.

6 I base these claims primarily on interviews conducted with 40 assistants in 2007, as well as on my own experiences working as an assistant to TV and film producers for four years. See Hill (2007).

7 Many interview subjects stated that, when they heard of a plum job opportunity, they would try to discover, before applying, if the employer was looking for a man or a woman, as many employers simply believed that only women could be good assistants: they were naturally more detail-oriented and had pleasanter phone manners. It's true that there were also instances of employers (usually men) who only hired men; but the explanation given for this preference was usually related to the belief that only men could absorb the kind of abuse the employer planned to hurl at them. This seems to indicate submission – an attribute associated with women under essentialism – to be an important part of the job. Indeed, the men I spoke to rarely if ever connected acts of masculine performance with success on a given employer's desk; they named instead self-effacement, submissiveness, and endurance of detail-oriented scut work as job prerequisites.

8 Among the assistants interviewed, salaries and work conditions ran the gamut from safe and respectful environments with decent pay and regular hours to downright hostile, sexually inappropriate, or harassing workplaces, and work weeks of 80–100 hours without overtime (Hill, 2007, pp. 71–111).

9 Of the 40 assistants I interviewed three years ago, only one has been promoted to a junior executive-level position, and seven have left the industry completely during the same period.

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FURTHER READING

Grainge, P. (2008). Brand Hollywood: Selling entertainment in a global media age. New York, NY: Routledge.

Hayes, D., & Bing, J. (2004). Open wide: How Hollywood box office became a national obsession. New York, NY: Miramax Books.

Henderson, F. (2011). The culture behind closed doors: Issues of gender and race in the writers' room. Cinema Journal, 50(2), 145–152.