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Hollywood Elsewhere

The Runaway Locations Industry and Transnational Production Cultures

Serra Tinic

In one of the first ethnographic studies of the US motion picture industry, Hortense Powdermaker (1950, p. 23) stated: “Hollywood itself is not an exact geographical area, although there is such a postal district. It has commonly been described as a state of mind, and it exists wherever people connected with the movies live and work.” Sixty years later, the rapid pace of media globalization has transformed transnational production practices to the extent that Hollywood, both as a metaphorical “state of mind” and as a literal mode of cultural production, is now located in Prague, in Vancouver, in Australia's Gold Coast, and in other international destinations. Over the last thirty years an increasing number of US television and film producers have moved their projects outside of the United States, in search of artistic realism in locations shooting and also in pursuit of the economic benefits offered by favorable currency exchange rates and labor environments. Consequently cities around the world are investing in the requisite production infrastructure and creative personnel to compete for a piece of what has come to be termed the US “runaway locations industry.” The rise of these new Hollywood service centers brings questions of the spatial politics of global inter-city competition to the forefront of media production scholarship. Therefore an exploration of the cultural geography of the new creative networks developed between Hollywood and these “locations” cities is imperative to understanding contemporary changes in the media industries and in the texts they produce across national contexts.

This chapter examines the cultural and economic debates surrounding runaway productions through the case study of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada – a city that has been dubbed “Hollywood North” and is now considered the model upon which other international cities attempt to build their own service industries, in order to attract and accommodate US television and film productions. The story of Vancouver's development as Hollywood North dates back to the 1970s, when the provincial government established the BC Film Commission with a mandate to attract and facilitate US film and television production as a means of diversifying a resource-based economy that was suffering the exigencies of global commodities markets. By capitalizing on the geographical diversity of the province's scenery, on the lower value of the Canadian dollar, and on physical proximity to Los Angeles, the commission contributed to the development of a service locations industry that would eventually establish Vancouver as the third largest production site for US television series and movies, after Los Angeles and New York.

Vancouver's relationship with Los Angeles-based producers transformed the region's television and film production community in ways that have not been adequately discussed in much of the academic scholarship about runaway productions. Not only did the entrenchment of Hollywood North allow for the development of new creative partnerships and intercontinental professional networking, it also led to a global profile for the city that would establish it as a centre for international co production projects. However, rather than exploring the transnational reconfigurations of space and place evidenced by Vancouver's rise as a production centre, much of the academic debate remains mired in nationally focused macrolevel analyses of the political and economic dimensions of locations production.

In the United States, Vancouver's success in attracting runaway productions led to vociferous complaints and to intensive lobbying, within the Los Angeles production community and within labor unions in particular, to “bring the industry back home” (Haysom, 1996). Such sentiments came to be echoed in scholarly research that implicitly connects the runaway locations industry with other forms of global economic outsourcing – such as the flight of the automobile and information technology industries (Miller, Govil, McMurria, Maxwell, & Wang, 2005). In Canada, analyses of Vancouver as Hollywood North resonate with the earlier work of Dallas Smythe (1981) and with his compelling insights into the peripheral status of Canadian television within the North American political economy of broadcasting. Without overt reference to the concept of cultural imperialism, the implication of recent analyses is such that the presence of US productions may operate as a form of production imperialism wherein the city and the province become a branch plant for LA-based studios and executives (Christopherson, 2005; Gasher, 2002). This is not to say that issues of labor strife and continental inequity are insignificant, but rather that such matters only provide us with a partial understanding of the multifarious implications of new transnational production practices. As O'Regan and Goldsmith (2003) assert in their study of the Australian context, such nationally focused analyses, and the qualification “runaway” for locations industry itself, privilege the conceptualization of Los Angeles as somehow the only “natural” home to Western television and film production. In their preference for the phrase “international studio complex,” the authors underline the importance of studying contemporary production cultures from a transnational vantage point.

My argument here offers a parallel to that of O'Regan and Goldsmith and to their call for the exploration of an “international production ecology.” Drawing upon excerpts from my previous research within the Vancouver television production community (Tinic, 2005),¹ I present new questions and frameworks for case studies of global production locations centers. I assert that, as industries of cultural production become increasingly mobile, we need to be better attuned to the ways in which producers work across borders and contribute to the emergence of new global media networks and of media spaces in general. In brief, I argue for a reconsideration of the ways in which we study media production, so as to address better the local, regional, and global reconfigurations of space and culture that accompany the economic dimensions of the international locations industries. Such sites have often been neglected or subsumed under dominant considerations of national systems of production. In the case of Vancouver, the evolution into Hollywood North may in fact facilitate the development of the city into a “media capital” as depicted by Curtin (2003, pp. 204–205):

The chapter begins by contextualizing “Hollywood North” within contemporary debates about the cultural geography of economic and cultural globalization processes. I then offer an overview of the specific governmental strategies that led to the development of the locations industry in Vancouver and of the concomitant academic critiques of runaway productions from both sides of the border. The following section extends Curtin's conceptualization of media capitals through a brief case study of the continental success of Vancouver showrunner Chris Haddock. Haddock's success in producing dramas for both Canadian (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)'s Da Vinci's Inquest, 1998–2005) and US (Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)' The Handler, 2003–2004) television networks illustrates the new forms of cross-border creative networks that develop in transnational production contexts – a cultural dynamic that is often overlooked in macrolevel academic analyses of global media settings. The chapter concludes with the proposition that comparative analyses of the cultural, economic, and geographical distinctions among different runaway locations sites (or international studio complexes) can give us a better understanding of both the emergence of new global media capitals and the contemporary challenges and opportunities facing Hollywood itself.

Media Geographies: The Politics of Space and Place

In the 1990s media studies research began to engage in a productive dialogue with larger interdisciplinary debates about the contemporary dynamics of cultural and economic globalization. The works of cultural geographer David Harvey (1990) and of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996), in particular, brought questions of mobility and spatiality to the forefront of global media analyses. In an era of scholarship that increasingly questioned the “nation-state” as a stable category of cultural identification, these authors contributed to a growing lexicon, which media studies drew upon, in an attempt to grapple with the contradictions and continuities that marked an acknowledgment that international no longer seemed an adequate modifier for the changing terrain of global communications practices and reception. Appadurai's depiction of “flows” and “scapes” of people, symbolic representations, and capital (to name but a few) and Harvey's emphasis on the transformative dimensions of global spatial politics in relation to the community formations of local places, underlined the increasing permeability of territorial borders and the multidirectionality of cultural exchange and impact. Although never explicitly articulated within these works, it seemed evident that the role of the media as both transnational corporations and cultural intermediaries should be brought to the forefront of questions of globalizing spaces at all levels, whether economic, interpretative, and/or representational.

Indeed, the media are inextricably linked to the cultural geography of globalization. The images they produce of spaces and places contribute to the global flows of people (whether émigrés or tourists) and discursive modalities. Moreover, the media industries, too, are increasingly mobile, as changes in production and distribution practices become transnational in scope. The evolution of the transnational film and television locations industry is but one example of the ways in which the media are implicated in questions of spatial competition and in the representation of places. In a manner similar to that of other global corporations seeking economically advantageous conditions for the manufacture and distribution of their goods, Hollywood production companies are increasingly dis-located from their national centers in New York and Los Angeles as they move their projects on the road, in search of cheaper labor and aesthetic realism. The establishment of Vancouver, British Columbia as “Hollywood North” is one of the more vivid examples of the new forms of city–region competition that marks Harvey's depiction of the struggle to control the terrain of space according to the interests of global capital. Consequently, in thinking about the relationship between the media and local, regional, and national communities, we need to reconceptualize identity, space, and production within a larger global cultural and political economic context (Mahon, 1993).

Most scholars tend to discuss globalization as a relatively recent phenomenon and focus their attention on the changes in the global economy that witnessed the passing of the Fordist model of production to one of flexible accumulation, from the 1970s into the present day.² Advances in satellite, computer, and other electronic communications technologies – and the consequent placelessness of international capital – marked the 1980s as a decade of rapid movement into a global political and economic environment marked by interdependence between its parts (Robertson, 1990). In this era of “disorganized capitalism” (Lash & Urry, 1987), questions of group identity become more problematic as people, cultural forms, and production practices are no longer territorially fixed. In communications terms, the media are implicated in contributing to the simultaneous development of supranational and subnational group affiliations that have led some Western nations to confront conflicting conceptualizations of cultural identity – local, regional, and national – for the first time.

To review the growing body of literature on the cultural ramifications of globalization from a Canadian vantage point is to experience an unsettling sense of déja vu. As political economists will argue, the Canadian economy prior to the 1970s is best described as one of “permeable Fordism,” in that its particular characteristic “since 1945 [was to be] permeated by international – or more exactly, continental – effects. Its Fordism was designed domestically, but always with an eye to the continental economy' (Jane Jenson, quoted in Angus, 1997, p. 23). Those years immediately following the end of World War II were a contradictory time in Canada's national trajectory. It was, in Harold Innis' terms (quoted in Laba, 1988, pp. 86–87), its brief moment of nationhood between British colonialism and US economic imperialism. By the 1960s Canadian industry was beginning to be seen as a branch plant of US corporations, and internal fault lines deepened as a result of increasing complaints of colonialism from within – Ottawa against the provinces and Québec against the country. It is within this context that Vancouver's development into Hollywood North has been critiqued as the logical outcome of a continental economic relationship in which US capital interests subsumed Canadian labor forces.

However, as theorists debate the dissolution of the nation as final arbiter of a sense of community under the current processes of globalization, they address an issue that echoes the Canadian experience since the nation's establishment – namely the fact that local, regional, national, and continental/international identities have always coexisted and competed within the political and geographic construct of the nation-state, and that such community identifications need not be mutually exclusive. It is precisely this dialectical relationship between global and local cultural practices that is most evident in the example of the Vancouver television industry and in the larger Canadian national identity debate. Among the producers I spoke with, only a few did not express a desire to operate within three cultural fields at once: the local, the national, and the international. If given the opportunity, they intended to take the particular experiences of their community (which cannot help but be inflected by global themes, given the large, diverse, and active ethnic communities within Vancouver), set the stories within the larger national context, and circulate them throughout the international marketplace. The realities of international television production and the quest for distribution and markets, to some extent, demand a fusion between the particular and the universal.

The role of cultural producers has only recently gained attention in media globalization studies, which tend to emphasize the rapid flow of media content in abstract terms, but rarely examine the specific negotiations behind the images that end up on television and on the movie screens around the world. However, these groups of transnational professionals can be seen as “third cultures,” which are important conduits of global cultural flows; and, while they operate in cosmopolitan circumstances, they are just as likely to be “locals at heart” (Featherstone, 1990, p. 9). It is, in fact, this cosmopolitan–local persona that I found reflected in my conversations with Vancouver television producers. Whether selling to the national networks or to international distributors, the independent producers underlined that stories that were overly particular to a place were difficult to pitch. In this respect, more homogeneous or universal programs are perceived to be more successful in market terms. However, a caveat was offered by all the producers, in that their choice of stories and the mode in which they told them could not but be informed by their own cultural and social experiences – the phrase most often used was that inescapably vague Canadian sensibility.

What was most interesting about the definition that each one provided when pressed as to the nature of this sensibility was the repeated reference to the experience of marginality, both within the nation and internationally – the idea that control and decisions were always elsewhere. In this respect, regional location was a strong source of identification for these people; but it was not separable from each location being a part of a larger collection of regions that were muddling through together, always in the process of trying to define themselves as a group. As these individuals underlined, the idea of the Canadian nation was still an important reference point, even when they operated in a global context. But within that context they retained the sense of regional alienation and of lack of participation in the larger definition of the national community.

Decades ago, when discussing a definable Canadian identity, the famed literary critic Herman Northrop Frye commented that “contemporary Canadian culture, being a culture, is not a national development but a series of regional ones” (quoted in Mandel & Taras, 1987, p. 211). In fact, unlike broadcasting studies, Canadian literary and anthropological analyses have long emphasized the importance of locality or region as a creative force in the articulation of cultural expression. In this respect, the tensions between the forces of regional fragmentation, national centralization, and the US political and cultural presence have been fundamental to the frameworks of literary and ethnographic analyses.

The global flow of capital, as well as the global reach of popular culture via international media, has redefined the notion of local identity. The British architect Kenneth Frampton's call for a “critical regionalism” is an especially useful framework for the study of Canadian culture and communication. According to Frampton, “local cultures can only be constituted now as locally inflected manifestations of global culture” (quoted in Robins, 1989, p. 161). Therefore, instead of looking for authenticity in local culture, critical regionalism seeks to examine how local identity is constructed through pastiche and bricolage from whatever cultural materials are available or at hand (de Certeau, 1984).

David Morley (1992, p. 282) refers to this simultaneous dynamic of “globalization and localization” as a “politics of space and place” wherein “places [. . .] are perhaps best seen not as ‘bounded areas’ but as ‘spaces of interaction’ in which local identities are constructed out of resources (both material and symbolic) which may well not be at all local in their origin.” The differentiation of place and space takes on new dimensions in the postmodern dilemma of cultural fragmentation. As Harvey (1990) explains, place (local culture) becomes crucial to marginalized groups, both intra- and internationally, as such groups have a better command over cultural definition at this site than they have over space, which is the terrain of national institutions and global capital. Thus, to the extent that fragmentation may lead to an intensified search for collective identity or may “secure moorings in a shifting world,” it should be explored within the context of place (ibid., pp. 301–304).

In this respect, Vancouver provides a strategic location from which to examine the relationships between regional, national, and global cultural productions. Before the 1980s, Vancouver was the largest production center for English Canadian television programs outside of Toronto. However, with the increasing centralization of CBC programming at the network level in Toronto and with decreased access to federal broadcast production funds, regional television producers in British Columbia have felt they were denied the opportunity to tell English Canadian stories for almost twenty years. As a result, the Vancouver production community has taken advantage of the Hollywood presence and pursued co-venture agreements with US producers and co-production projects with other international partners to make programs for global audiences, of which Canadians constitute a small minority. The globalization of the Vancouver television industry can be seen, from one perspective, as the logical outcome of the weaknesses of federal broadcasting policies and institutions that have sought to use nationalism, as defined by central Canada, as a “conscious strategy of pasting over the cracks” of regional discontent (Melville Watkins, quoted in Laba, 1988, p. 82).

National public service broadcasting began in Canada in 1932, with the establishment of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Corporation (CRBC, which became the CBC in 1936) at the recommendation of the Aird Commission Report – the first in a long line of Royal Task Forces on broadcasting policy. The Aird Report was the first government mandate to institute the concept of national unity as a counterforce to US culture in Canadian communications policy. As Wayne Skene (1993) underlines, the Aird commission and subsequent task forces defined national unity as inter-regional communication. Within this model, programming was to originate in the provinces and the central network was to serve a function of dissemination rather than one of production. The committee was sensitive to the fact that a centralized programming system might alienate rather than unite the regionally distinct provinces into a nation. Therefore the foundation of a Canadian broadcasting policy was designed to encourage local producers to share among themselves their communities' cultural narratives and to avoid a single, centralized definition of Canadian culture. However, the economic and technological challenges of developing the sizeable Canadian broadcast distribution system eventually led to the exact form of centralization that the Aird Commission had sought to avoid. By 1968, the year of a new Broadcasting Act, the phrase national unity had been changed to national identity, and television programming (as defined by headquarters in Toronto and Montreal) was seen as the means to create a Canadian identity and at the same time to defend oneself against US cultural domination (Raboy, 1990).

The centralization of decision-making for English Canadian television drama eventually culminated in a political struggle between the regional and national production centers over definitions of programming of sufficient quality to merit inclusion at the national network level. The situation became more acute for regional producers, as the federal government began to divest from national public broadcasting during the economic downturn of the 1980s. Regional programming carried the burden of the federal budget cuts, and by 1989 75% of the CBC program budget was allocated to national programming, while the remaining 25% (which was directed to regional production) was targeted primarily to sustaining local news programming (Hoskins & McFadyen, 1992). What little remained of regional drama production was lost in 1990, when the CBC was forced to address a corporate shortfall of $108 million and did so by closing or downsizing several regional stations and by canceling hundreds of hours of programming. In the end, regional production suffered a loss of $46 million, while only $12 million were cut from the national network.

Consequently, when I first began fieldwork research in the late 1990s, there was not a single television drama in production at the CBC's Vancouver production center.

However, the growing success of the provincial government's effort to establish the city as a primary site for US runaway television and film production provided new opportunities for domestic television producers to explore continental and international creative and financial partnerships that would, to some extent, mitigate their increased marginalization within the national broadcasting sphere.

Constructing Vancouver as Hollywood North

In the 1980s the Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture in British Columbia developed the “Super, Natural British Columbia” campaign, which promoted travel to the province by extolling the beauty and variety of British Columbia's natural landscape in a series of advertisements directed both at US and at out-of-province Canadian markets. While “Super, Natural BC” remains the province's official tourism motto to this day, by the mid-1990s the formula became more closely associated with the fact that Vancouver was the production home of eight of the top US supernatural television series – including The X-Files (1993–2002), Highlander (1992–1998), The Outer Limits (1995–2002), Sliders (1995–1999), Strange Luck (1995–1996), Millennium (1996–1999), Stargate SG-1 (1997–2007), and The Sentinel (1996–1999). The connection here is not meant to appear facetious. The rationale for producing these series in Vancouver is, in fact, largely the diversity of locations available in a coastal province that also contains a glacier mountain range and a dry, rugged interior region. The Lower Mainland's gray, rainy, and foggy winters also provide the natural light and settings that writer-producers and directors of photography (DPs) relish in their efforts to establish the necessary atmosphere for such programs. And it is no coincidence that the BC Film Commission, the organization largely responsible for recruiting runaway US television and film production, was initially established within the Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture.

The connection to small business is, however, misleading. In British Columbia, film and television production and tourism are multi-million dollar industries that are integral components of the province's larger economic globalization strategy and goal to establish Vancouver as a world-class or global city. The financial success generated by runaway productions³ became vividly apparent during the watershed period of the 1990s. In 1997 the television and motion picture industry spent directly an estimated $700 million dollars in Vancouver – an increase of $100 million from the previous year. During that year, the BC Film Commission provided service to $2.7 billion worth of productions (one third of the potential market) and confirmed Vancouver's status as the third largest production center for US movies and television series (BC Film Commission, 1997). In fact, of the approximately 200 television programs and movies shot in the province between 1996 and 1997, only an estimated 20% were domestic Canadian productions (Rice-Barker, 1997, p. 3). By 2000, the spending figure reached by the film and television industry had surpassed the $1.18 billion mark.

This integration of the Vancouver locations industry into the larger Hollywood production structure has led critics to argue that foreign production has not only displaced domestic production in British Columbia but has also erased any sense of place, by commodifying this production or selling producers “an industrial setting (physical sites and services) rather than a cultural and historical site (a source of stories and characters)” (Gasher, 1995, p. 233). This indictment of US and other international productions in British Columbia is partially accurate. Foreign producers do not choose to bring their projects to Vancouver to tell Canadian stories or to portray Canadian settings. In fact, much of their pre-production work consists in finding sites that can stand in for other places, usually some place in the United States, and then in dressing them accordingly (which means removing any physical objects that could identify a location as Canadian in any way). The title of the BC Film Commission's centerpiece promotional brochure, The British Columbia Shooting Gallery: We Can Give It to You for a Song, is indeed the best illustration of the argument that the locations industry commodifies Vancouver as geographical space to be sold to international television and film producers.

The Shooting Gallery is a 30-page glossy magazine that underscores the reasons why foreign producers have flocked to Vancouver over the past decade: the diversity of British Columbia's geography, the inexpensive Canadian dollar (which fluctuated between 79 and 89 US cents throughout the 1990s and declined below 65 cents in 2002), well-trained film crews, and, importantly, the proximity to Los Angeles, the center of the US industry. The discourse of commerce provides the subtext of the publication and uses a play on words and song titles to frame snapshots of Vancouver communities frozen into stage-set vignettes with generic locations identifications: “The Big City,” “Urban Ethnic,” “Deep Woods,” “Industrial,” “Residential,” “The Mountains,” “The Period Look,” “The Railroads,” “The Countryside,” “The Farm,” “The Wild West,” “Small Towns,” “High Tech,” “Coastlines,” “Ranch Country,” and “Wilderness.” Beginning with the subtitle (We Can Give It to You for a Song), the brochure tells foreign producers that “This land is your land” and that, for a fraction of the costs elsewhere, Vancouver can be made to look like anywhere in the world; and it closes with the invitation to “Come and get it. . . .”

However, the goal of attracting commerce – rather than the goal of national cultural development – was the central mandate of the BC Film Commission. The commission was created in 1978 by a provincial government that sought to diversify its resource-based economy by creating an industry that would not be subject to the exigencies of commodities markets. To this extent, the BC government's economic strategy exemplifies Jane Jenson's (1993) depiction of the patterns of post-Fordism in Canada during the mid-1970s and 1980s. At the time, the provinces found themselves increasingly in conflict and competition, in their efforts to restructure, politically and economically, in ways that “often implied abandoning efforts to protect the borders of the domestic economy” and favored “accommodating new regimes of accumulation” (ibid., p. 159). An important aspect of this process were the appeals made by provincial governments, using the neoliberal discourse of globalization,⁴ to encourage “unions to participate in new kinds of tripartite bodies to design programs for restructuring industry and re-locating Canadian production in the new global economy” (ibid., p. 158). The BC Film Commission's mandate exemplifies this strategy. The first step to developing the Vancouver locations and service industry was to negotiate a cooperative agreement with the BC film and television unions and thereby to establish a conducive economic environment for US producers. The next step was to send a team to Los Angeles and convince the studios and producers that Vancouver would be the ideal city for their production needs. One member of the commission summarized the province's initial strategy:

It is precisely these amenities, and the Seymour Demonstration Forest in particular, that made Vancouver home to The X-Files for the show's first five seasons. The series' creator, Chris Carter, needed a forest for an unidentified flying object (UFO) landing scene in the first episode and, as forests are somewhat scarce in Los Angeles, he found what he needed in Vancouver. Carter became one of the city's biggest boosters, with his declaration that he had found the “biggest backlot in North America” (quoted in Leiren-Young, 1995a, p.S12).

Vancouver's capacity to serve as the “biggest backlot in North America” was actually noticed long before The X-Files and the creation of the BC Film Commission. In the 1930s, when Canada was still a British dominion, Hollywood producers took advantage of the fact that shooting movies on location in British Columbia would allow them access to the highly protected film market in the United Kingdom. These “quota quickies,” as they were called, constituted the first stage of the BC locations industry until 1938, when Britain revised its quota system so as to exclude productions from the dominions as domestic content (MacIntyre, 1996, p. 132). The second stage of the BC locations industry did not begin until the early 1970s, when US directors such as Mike Nichols and Robert Altman moved their productions on location, in search of greater “realism” (ibid., p. 133). The development of the BC Film Commission and its ability to capitalize on the positive experiences of the early US directors and producers who had worked in Vancouver can thus be seen as the third and most enduring stage of the city's evolution toward becoming a Hollywood service centre.

However, it is not the BC Film Commission alone that has guaranteed the longevity of the Vancouver locations industry. The provincial government committed to maintaining the necessary infrastructure by investing millions of dollars in the building of studio space, in order not to lose any potential productions for lack of production facilities. To keep the industry growing, the provincial government spent $4.4 million to build studios in 1987. A one-time steel fabrication factory, The Bridge Studios (The Bridge) opened with four sound-stages and the largest special effects stage in North America, all facilities that enabled Vancouver to attract high-budget Hollywood features such as Jumanji (1995), Alive (1993), and the $100-million Disney movie The Thirteenth Warrior (1999) (Leiren-Young, 1995a, p. S7). The government's commitment to maintaining a secure environment for runaway US production led to spin-off effects in attracting international capital investment in other studios and sound-stages. Two years after The Bridge was built, Stephen J. Cannell decided to make Vancouver the production home for his series 21 Jump Street, Booker, and Wiseguy and built North Shore Studios to accommodate his production needs. At the time, North Shore Studios was the largest sound-stage in Canada and Cannell's confidence in Vancouver as a production environment provided the impetus for other LA producers to go beyond using the city as a temporary locations site and actually to move their television series production there. North Shore Studios would eventually become the production center for The X-Files until the show's relocation to Los Angeles in 1998. Later on it would also become the production center for Chris Carter's short-lived series Millennium and for the X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen (2001).

The provincial government further accommodated the interests of international capital investment in Vancouver in 1996, when it agreed to a partnership with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Worldwide Television, which was undertaken in order to build a fifth sound-stage at The Bridge. The agreement allowed MGM a long-term lease on the sound-stage for the television series Stargate SG-1, which began production the following year. The MGM–government agreement met with mixed emotions from local Vancouver producers, who were not so much concerned with the growing amount of US production in the city as with the government's hesitancy to transfer some of the revenue into a fund that would support domestic film and television production. MGM's senior vice-president of television Mel Swopes responded to these concerns by stating: “When you look back at earth from space you see no borders and no boundaries. Let's celebrate our differences and build our global filmmaking community” (quoted in Wilson, 1996, p. C13).

It is statements like this one that fuel the arguments of those who see the locations and service industry as displacing domestic production and denying the sociocultural specificities of place, while Vancouver becomes assimilated into the Hollywood production structure. It is, after all, difficult to “celebrate our differences” when the concentration of effort appears to be directed at helping to produce another nation's stories. If we were to proceed from a purely economic perspective, the sheer number of US productions in Vancouver would appear to reinforce the perception of Hollywood's displacement of domestic production. However, unlike other forms of international capital and resource/production flows, the “globally mobile” film and television industry does not merely “create and use up places for the purposes of production or consumption” (Nigel Thrift, quoted in Morley and Robins, 1995, p. 31). In other words, merely by filming projects in Vancouver, international producers do not first exhaust the labor, resources, or sites needed for domestic production and then move on to the next locations city, leaving Vancouver a depleted resource town, like the “rust-belt cities.” Rather, the production and post-production facilities built to support US runaways, as well as the skills and partnership networks developed throughout, persist and enhance the domestic regional television and film communities.

In fact, before British Columbia was able to attract runaway US production, local producers were dependent on the transitory whims of central Canadian broadcasters and policymakers to support and maintain any level of domestic television and film production in the province. The fact that there were fewer domestic productions prior to Hollywood's arrival in British Columbia further contradicts the implication that foreign television and film industries somehow supplant the domestic. This was, indeed, the common grievance of most of the producers I spoke to during my fieldwork in Vancouver. Neglect from federal decision-makers and disparate access to financing were seen to be far greater barriers to developing local productions than the presence of the Hollywood production machine was. Ironically, many of the producers found that ancillary benefits from working within the US system, at home, somewhat filled the void left by the lack of federal support. In this respect, the training and the income derived from working on US projects were seen to be invaluable to these producers' eventual plans of amassing the capital and connections required to stabilize their own production companies. This is the central contradiction of the US production presence in Vancouver: it absorbs labor and resources while simultaneously creating opportunities for local producers to fund and distribute their own programs independently.

This potential to develop cross-border and mutually beneficial creative networks has been largely overlooked in macrolevel analyses of contemporary global television production strategies. Rather, the emphasis within such production studies tends to reproduce the traditional core–periphery model of political economy arguments, wherein Hollywood's domination in the global circulation of television programming extends now to the transnational colonization of those who labor to produce it. Indeed, placing the focus on what has come to be termed “the new international division of cultural labor” (NICL) tends to create the impression of a seamless regime of governance in which Hollywood (as a monolithic force) regulates the global television production and distribution chain through control over cultural labor, co-production treaties, marketing, and exhibition (Miller, Govil, McMurria, & Maxwell, 2001, p. 18). As the authors of Global Hollywood argue, the volume of runaway productions today is the culmination of a process that dates back to the 1940s and to the strategy of US studio executives to “avoid restrictions on expatriation of profits, [and] exploit government subventions and cheap, docile labor” (ibid., p. 56).⁵ The conceptualization of an emergent NICL provides important insights into contemporary strategies of global capital flows in film and television production. However, it insufficiently articulates the constraints or opportunities that define the experiences of cultural producers working within the transnational television locations production infrastructure. Studios may indeed be searching for “docile labor,” but this does not guarantee that workers are unable to establish alternative networks and to exploit the resources of capital investment to their own interests. As Mark Banks (2007, pp. 26–27) underlines, such political economic analyses tend to “neglect subjectivity” altogether and “overlook the embedded social relations of cultural commodity production.” Indeed, his explication of the trend toward a “craft production style,” wherein smaller companies of creative professionals work both within and outside of the parameters of larger studio control, underlines the contradictions within capitalism – namely that, while executives desire to control labor, they must allow for a degree of autonomy if innovation and artistry are to flourish in the name of profit (ibid., pp. 21, 29). Banks' preference for the qualification “compliant” (ibid., p. 36) as opposed to “docile” labor parallels my own analyses of the ways in which incorporation into the strategic interests of the US locations industry allowed the ancillary networks and the resources for creative professionals in Vancouver to foster the growth of independent production and distribution companies.

It is, nevertheless, important to note that discourses of commodity labor power in the runaway productions industry tend to reproduce the overdetermined dichotomy between above-the-line workers (“creatives”) and below-the-line workers (“crews”) in television production. Here critiques of runaway productions fall into two categories: (1) concern over the displacement of jobs for US technical crews when “Hollywood” goes on location in another country; or (2) a race to the bottom, economically speaking, since second-unit production crews in other countries are regarded as “docile” worker bees as long as they are willing to accept lower wages in exchange for the opportunity of employment on US productions. In North America, pessimistic accounts of runaway productions are thus depicted as extensions of global post-Fordist regimes of flexible labor, which are epitomized by outsourcing and international branch plants. Such characterizations of the negative impact of runaway productions provided a powerful rhetoric that, in turn, fueled a divisive politics, which positioned US and Canadian production unions into a state of competitive – if not combative – relationship with each other. This phenomenon can be witnessed in the intensification of US union lobbying, which followed the rise in actual volume of runaway productions to Vancouver. The extent of inter-city competition between Los Angeles and Vancouver reached its zenith in the mid-1990s, when then Mayor Richard Riordan, in partnership with actor Charlton Heston, announced the opening of the Los Angeles Film Office as part of a strategy to “bring the movies back home” (Haysom, 1996, p. A6).

Although the divisive components of transnational labor issues remain of central concern to our understanding of the complexities and contingencies of global runaway productions, it is also imperative to further explore the grounded micro-politics of the television industry and the more intangible cultural aspects of the new creative networks and geographies that have emerged in the transnational televisual environment. As both Allen Scott (2005) and John T. Caldwell (2008) underline, the current challenges facing Hollywood unions are, directly, a result of the restructuring of the studio system in Los Angeles itself, as opposed to being merely the result of the flight of production to other countries. Over the last 30 years, Hollywood studios have moved their projects “out of house,” to smaller independent companies (even if these latter remain within the larger conglomerate) that form competing networks of flexible production; and such companies are increasingly defined by the use of non-union labor (Caldwell, 2008, p. 80). Moreover, the attempt to “redefine geography through symbolic references to the space of film and television work” (ibid., emphasis added) diminishes the importance of the more intangible cultural dimensions that weave through our understanding of the NICL. Caldwell's fieldwork within the industry specifically highlights the importance of exploring the microlevel practices of production as those members of the industry who fall “below the line” are found to be contributors just as integral to the creative process of televisual storytelling as the writers, the directors, the actors, and the producers who are economically above the accounting “line.” Scott's and Caldwell's studies correspond well with a growing body of literature in the field of media cultural geography that moves beyond core–periphery explanations of global production practices, in an effort to understand the fluidity of, and the tensions in, the new transnational networks that define contemporary television.

Media Capitals, Creative Clusters, and Runaway Production: The Case of Haddock Entertainment, Canada

Curtin's (2009) conceptualization of “media capital” is, arguably, one of the most cogent explications of the synthesis of cultural and economic factors that mutually inform the global television production and distribution landscape. As Curtin argues (ibid., pp. 112–116), today's media industries are driven by tripartite forces informed by the “logic of accumulation,” “trajectories of creative migration,” and “forces of socio-cultural variation.” The concept of media capital accords advantage to those sites – global cities or regions – of media production that not only allow for the expansion of markets and productive resources (“the logic of accumulation”), but also rely on the creativity of a workforce that is equally dedicated to the task of cultural expression and to economic profit (“creative migration”). The significance of the third dimension – sociocultural variation – and the promotion of the “local” as a means to address “niche markets outside of foreign control and competition” are particularly significant insights, which speak to the shortcomings of political economic perspectives that reproduce world systems theory into the field of television production studies. Indeed, through its emphasis on the sustained importance of national and local institutions as driving forces in cultural production, Curtin's explication of media capital contradicts the insinuations or accusations of imperialism, which underline many critiques of locations productions. In all respects, Curtin's depiction of media capital provides a far more compelling framework for understanding the logic of Vancouver as “Hollywood North” than the two other existing explanations of this mode of production do – either the more traditional “outsourcing” explanations or the “branch plant” ones. Illustrative cases in this regard are the story of Vancouver showrunner Chris Haddock and the continental success of his series Da Vinci's Inquest.

Haddock is, in many respects, the face of the contradictory forces that define Vancouver as “Hollywood North.” Haddock grew through the ranks and established himself as a writer on the US runaway production MacGyver in the 1980s. Throughout the process, he became particularly familiar with the creative processes and constraints of both the Canadian industry and the US one. In the late 1990s CBC found itself in a crisis, with a dearth of dramatic series for the network's prime-time schedule, and it began looking at pitches from regional producers to complete the schedule for the new fall. Haddock's pitch for his new crime procedural Da Vinci's Inquest eventually won out against its competitors and, in the process, raised eyebrows as to whether the nation's public broadcaster had sold out to those who worked within Hollywood North. In other words, would this be a recombinant series that merely emulated US procedural ones, such as in the Law and Order (1990–) genre? The concerns were not without credence, given that the head of drama at the time wanted a series that would have “global legs” and thus the potential for international sales (Tinic, 2005). In the end, it was because Haddock was established within the runaway productions industry that he was able to sell to the national public broadcaster a series that was very locally specific – a fascinating contradiction. Moreover, the risks he was able to take while working with a public service broadcaster (PBS) would eventually lead him to sales in the restrictive US broadcast network market and to a subsequent opportunity to develop a series for CBS.

Da Vinci's Inquest drew on the real-life cases of Vancouver's crusading coroner and later mayor Larry Campbell. It was a no-holds-barred examination of the coroner's attempts to improve the conditions of existence for the people living in Vancouver's downtown eastside – Canada's poorest neighborhood – which was marked by homelessness, drug use, and prostitution. In fact the four-block radius of the neighborhood had the highest rate of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in the Western world according to the World Health Organization (WHO). These dark themes were filmed in a visual style that pulled no punches. In fact it wasn't unusual to see characters shooting up in scenes reminiscent of the 1996 British movie Trainspotting. This was not typical network prime-time fare. Yet Da Vinci became a breakout hit for the CBC; and its success was noted by a relatively new Vancouver-based distribution company – Thunderbird Films. Thunderbird was in the process of developing a niche within the “Hollywood North” production sector that would specifically market Canadian domestic programming of sufficiently high production quality worldwide. Although Da Vinci had already been sold to 50 countries, Thunderbird was determined to get it into the US market. The company was relying on the industry's recognition of Haddock's name as a consequence of his experience in Hollywood North; but it was also relying on its own assumption that “American audiences [were] hungry for intriguing dramatic series that can simultaneously stretch the mind as well as entertain” (Thunderbird Films, 2005). Thunderbird Films eventually collaborated with the LA-based distribution company Program Partners to sell the series to CBS, which was facing a crisis in syndicated programming due to an overreliance on reality television programming.

At first CBS was reluctant to take on such a dark series, but Program Partners was able to sell the network on account of Haddock's being a familiar figure within the Hollywood structure, both through his writing of MacGyver and through his development of the critically acclaimed but short-lived US series The Handler. It was this ability to speak to Haddock's cross-border production experiences that solidified the sale of Da Vinci's Inquest, which not only resulted in ratings that exceeded all network expectations (beating out CSI: Miami and Alias in syndication) but also garnered that all important promotional buzz from national television critics such as the New York Times, which hailed it “as like nothing else you've seen on television.” The success of Da Vinci solidified the relationship between Thunderbird and Program Partners to such an extent that the latter now distributes to US networks several Canadian procedurals, under its brand “Crime Watch” (Nordyke, 2006).

Haddock and his production company, Haddock Entertainment, form but one cursory example of the cross-border creative relationships that have emerged through the auspices of the continental runaway productions industry. Nevertheless, it is an instructive case of what Aida Hozic (2001) has described as the move to a “merchant economy” in global television production strategies, whereby the power of distributors increases in the expansion of supply, as opposed to the expansion of production. Although Vancouver, qua Hollywood North, may yet await the ascendance to the status of media capital that Curtin depicts, it very much corresponds to the definition of emergent creative cities and networks, as given by M. E. Porter (2005) and Terry Flew (2007). As Flew notes, it is often within the so-called “second-tier cities” that we see the most entrepreneurial cultural industry practices: these practices draw the most skilled and globally mobile labor into an intersection between creative and economic sectors (Hans Mommas, cited in Flew, 2007, p. 186) that actually extracts resources from the “first-tier” global cities. In a seeming correspondence with Richard Florida's (2005) definition of “creative cities,” Haddock himself articulates the ways in which “production cities” move beyond reductionist core–periphery exhortations:

While Haddock's sentiments speak to the maturation and entrenchment of Vancouver's position within the larger continental film and television production geography, his statements echo several of the problems raised by creative city boosters, including Florida. In this respect, there remains a line between those who are seen to “create” and those who labor to enable the cosmopolitan mobility of show-runners such as Haddock. To a great extent, the production workers “below the line” remain place-bound and dependent on the success of domestic producers, executives, and distributors, who are committed to the continued growth of their immediate communities. Yet, precisely in this regard, case studies that examine the particular circumstances of local–global production practices provide important interventions and elaborations for more macrolevel analyses of the globalization of Hollywood's production strategies. In brief, there are no guarantees, and questions of space and place are integral to our understanding of the contradictions that are inherent in the transnational objectives of global capital. Here, to reinforce Banks' (2007, p. 27) argument, we must remain attuned to the questions of subjectivity, as creators/laborers are active agents in the “personification of class relations and alienation” and thus represent varied and differential commitments to communities of production across the exponential rise of cities competing to be the next “Hollywood North.”

The International Production Ecology

Vancouver is in many respects an anomaly in Hollywood's runaway production sphere. As a center of production, it affords more comparative advantages than most of its competitive cities, states, and countries (ranging from Louisiana, New Mexico, and Michigan in the United States to Australia's Gold Coast and Auckland, New Zealand). Location is the primary advantage, both in terms of proximity to Los Angeles and in terms of locations regarded as physical settings; but the commitment to maintaining state-of-the-art studio space, special effects, and post-production facilities has also betowed upon the city a “home away from home” quality, which enhances the two-hour commuting time back to Hollywood. And, contrary to arguments about inexpensive or “docile” labor, Vancouver continues to draw Hollywood productions despite a global recession and equivalent currencies. Given the combination of highly trained and productive crews (still remunerated under union regulations) and tax incentives, the province saw an increase of $250 million in total spending, to the total of $1.2 billion, from one year to the next (BC Film Commission, 2009). In fact the US network series Fringe (2008–) moved to Vancouver in 2009, after failing to garner favorable production circumstances in New York (Thielman, 2009). To this extent, Vancouver has become a model for other cities and countries that attempt to attract runaway locations productions. In recent years the most striking parallels have been between Canada on the one hand and Australia and New Zealand on the other. All three countries share similar concerns with regard to small domestic markets and national cultural goals for network broadcasting. In fact Australia has followed Canada's lead where the “plasticity” of locations promotion is concerned (Landman, 2009, p. 143). In this respect AusFilm, the equivalent of the BC Film Commission, has created a “map” of the country that substitutes the nation's regions with recognizable international locales, particularly those of the United States, just as The Shooting Gallery does (see above, p. 475). However, it is difficult to trump the success of New Zealand's work on the 2001–2003 trilogy The Lord of the Rings, where the runaway locations industry has shown the global industry that anything is digitally possible. Nevertheless, to end on a cautionary note, Vancouver's apparent success as a global model for the synthesis of global and domestic television and film production should not be seen as an easily replicable formula, or as a panacea for government divestment in the cultural sphere in small-market nations, or as an engine of growth in US states. The story of Hollywood North was a 30-year process that began with economic incentives but only truly came into its own once the technical infrastructure and face-to-face personal networks had been established. Indeed, it was the micropolitics of cultural exchange, on the ground (so to speak), that make Vancouver difficult to pinpoint (or emulate) in larger structural analyses of the new international division of cultural labor in the global television and film industries.

NOTES

1 In 1996 I conducted a one-year fieldwork study of the development of the US runaway locations industry in Vancouver, British Columbia. The central objective of that project was to determine how regional producers reconciled the economic and aesthetic requirements of a globalizing media industry with the nationalist goals of Canadian broadcasting policies. The project integrated three components: (1) in-depth interviews with members of the Vancouver television industry, including locations scouts, broadcasting executives, television development personnel, and program managers; (2) archival research on Canadian television programming and policy and analysis of discourse in the industry trade publications; and (3) textual analysis of television programming. This chapter contains excerpts from work I have published on that study: see Tinic 2005, 2008.

2 Fordism is defined by the system of assembly line manufacturing of standardized, mass produced commodities that dominated the economic systems of Western countries until the 1970s. Post-Fordism has come to designate new regimes of production and accumulation under process of economic globalization, namely the trend toward global outsourcing of production, the growth of knowledge and technology economies, and just-in-time production of specialty products for global niche consumers.

3 Although the phrase “runaway production” has most recently and explicitly been linked to US television and film productions in Canada, there is a long history of economic “runaways” from Hollywood. After World War II, countries throughout Europe found themselves economically disadvantaged in the cultural production sphere and, given the established domestic quotas on imported television programs and films, they established the cost-sharing template for international co-productions that exists today. Moreover, any local subsidiary of a foreign production company was allowed domestic tax incentives and subsidization. As a result, many US productions moved to Europe to take advantage of the economic incentives and bypass import quotas. Aida Hozic (2001, p. 96) notes, it was US unions that first coined the phrase, calling these “runaway productions,” as the number of such productions tripled between 1949 and 1960.

4 Neoliberal discourses maintain that free-market policies – rather than government- or state-sponsored programs and subsidies – provide the most efficient means of delivering social and economic benefits to societies at a global level. These discourses advocate trade and production liberalization in a global economy and regard the private sector as the preferred provider of goods and services. Neoliberalism emphasizes individual autonomy and responsibility and the transference of all risks to the individual.

5 Jefferson Cowie's (1999) historical analysis of Radio Corporation of America (RCA)'s persistent search for inexpensive labor for its radio and television manufacturing plants is an excellent reminder that the issues raised in arguments about the NICL are not new to a post-Fordist global economy. Beginning in the 1930s, RCA moved its factories from New Jersey to Indiana, to the Southern United States, and eventually to Mexico in the 1990s, in response to the workers' capacity to organize and resist exploitation. Not only does Cowie illustrate the micropolitics of laborers' negotiations of economic constraints; he emphasizes that all inter-city competitions for capital might better be described as processes of “transregionalization” than looked at through the more demarcated parameters of “transnationalization” (ibid., p. 2).

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