Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries : Invisible Hands in Cultural Markets 9780739193143, 9780739193136

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Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries

Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries Invisible Hands in Cultural Markets Edited by Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brokerage and production in the American and French entertainment industries : invisible hands in cultural markets / edited by Violaine Roussel and Denise D. Bielby. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-9313-6 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-9314-3 (electronic) 1. Motion picture industry--United States--History--20th century. 2. Theatrical agents--United States-History--20th century. 3. Theatrical agencies--United States--History--20th century. 4. Television broadcasting--United States--History--20th century. 5. Motion picture industry--France--History-20th century. 6. Motion pictures--Production and direction--United States--History--20th century. 7. Theatrical agents--France--History--20th century. 8. Theatrical agencies--France--History--20th century. 9. Motion pictures--Production and direction--France--History--20th century. I. Roussel, Violaine, editor. II. Bielby, Denise D., editor. PN1993.5.U65B73 2015 384'.83--dc23 2015000321 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

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1 Introduction: Cultural Brokerage in the American and French Film and Television Industries Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby I: Agents, Agenting, Agencies 2 Twenty-Four Years of Agenting Harry J. Ufland 3 Talent Agencies and the Market for Screenwriters: From the Origins of Packaging to Today’s Transformations Denise Bielby 4 The Talent Agent’s Role in Producing Artists’ Symbolic and Commercial Value in France Delphine Naudier 5 The Market for Actresses: Gender, Reputation, and Intermediation in French Pornography Mathieu Trachman 6 The Emergence of Hollywood Agents Tom Kemper 7 “It’s Not the Network, It’s the Relationship”: The Relational Work of Hollywood Talent Agents Violaine Roussel

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II: Behind the Scenes of Production 8 The Choice between a Good Job and a Good Life Bill Mechanic 9 The Importance of Being Ordinary: Brokering Talent in the New-TV Era Laura Grindstaff and Vicki Mayer 10 “This Is the Girl”: The Social Division of Recruitment in the French Film Industry Vincent Cardon 11 Film Offices as Brokers: Cultivating and Connecting Local Talent to Hollywood Candace Jones and Pacey Foster 12 Overlapping Temporalities in Project-Based Work: The Case of Independent Producers in the French Movie Industry Laure de Verdalle

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About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

We thank Michael Curtin, Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Maria Charles, Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, for the assistance they and their staffs provided to make our book possible. Financial support to Violaine Roussel was granted by the Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship for Career Development (European Commission, 7th Framework Program, Project FP7-PEOPLE-2012IOF). The authors and publishers gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Bielby, William T. and Denise D. Bielby, “Organizational Mediation of Project-Based Labor Markets: Talent Agencies and the Careers of Screenwriters,” American Sociological Review 64 (1999): 64–85, reprinted by permission of the American Sociological Association, Washington, D.C. Kemper, Tom, “City of Agents: The Power of Place,” in Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents © 2010 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press.

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Chapter One

Introduction Cultural Brokerage in the American and French Film and Television Industries Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby

This book addresses the role of talent representatives and production professionals in the American and French film and television industries. To explore the interactions and interdependencies between these two important industry groups, our book focuses on their contribution to the crucial stages of preproduction and production of film and television creation. Talent representatives include agents, managers, lawyers, and publicists. Because agents now occupy a central position in the entertainment industry, they are the foremost means for studying the process of representation. On the production side, studio executives and heads, independent producers, casting directors, and financiers are the counterparts of talent representatives. They are talent’s “buyers.” The production as well as the representation of artists encompasses a range of diverse activities and forms of power relations that spans from the most dominant sectors of the entertainment industry, where agents and producers mingle with star-artists, down to the industry’s most modest strata. By examining facets of this complex world of talent representation, our book illustrates the crucial role these middlemen and women play in understanding how popular culture is made and offered to audiences. The talent that representatives and production professionals work with consists of actors, directors, writers, below-the-line technical personnel in film and television, as well as new categories of performers like reality TV celebrities, chefs, and online personalities. Because representatives operate at the core of the film and television industries, they are not only crucial contributors to the shaping of artistic careers, they are pivotal to how cinematic 1

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projects come to life. Despite the central importance of these professionals to the everyday functioning of culture industries, talent representatives remain a vastly neglected topic of study and knowledge of what they actually do is limited in everyday understanding of how cultural industries operate. Moreover, because the work of those who broker talent is crucial to the behindthe-scenes creation of economic value in the film and television industries, the practices of talent representatives are obscured for strategic reasons, and agents are notoriously inaccessible for study. Our collection of original, invited chapters (plus one reprint) is intended to part the curtain that conceals their activity. In doing so, our book provides firsthand insight into the practices of these invisible contributors through empirical examination of their everyday experience. THE FRENCH AND AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES The French System The French cinema world is symbolically structured around the valued role of the director. Legally speaking, in the French system, directors, writers, and composers are defined as authors and owners of their creative work. 1 However, since the 1960s and 1970s, and the Nouvelle Vague, film critics have had a crucial role in making the director, who is often a writer-director, the “auteur” who owns the moral rights to a film, leaving the producer with the economic rights. This symbolic division in the film world would appear to assign the producer to a more obscure, more commercial, and, therefore, a less valued position. However, things are more complex in reality because of the role the state plays in France’s highly centralized regulation of its entertainment industries. As a result, professional industry groups, including producers, tend to be organized and/or consecrated by the state and to draw their identity and legitimacy from its mechanisms of accreditation. For instance, one of the missions of the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (the National Center for Cinema and Animated Image, hereafter CNC) was to deliver professional identity cards to certified practitioners. 2 The state also organizes an important part of the training of entertainment industry professionals through subsidies to prestigious institutions such as the film school, Fondation européenne pour les métiers de l’image et du son (FEMIS), and the national film, photography, and sound engineering school for audiovisual training, École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière (Louis-Lumière College). France’s state institutions do more than just help subsidize the French cinema system; they also help regulate the nation’s cultural markets. Indeed, because these institutions reside at the center of the cultural system, one can even go so far as to say that they directly structure large sectors of these

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markets. This intervention is based on the imperative derived from the notion of French “cultural exception,” and for French film production it translates into strong public funding in the form of aid granted to films the CNC has pre-approved for production. This assistance from the CNC takes various forms which can then be supplemented by funding granted by local authorities or by other European institutions. 3 The importance of public financing to the French cinema system is reinforced further by mechanisms of indirect support from private pre-financing. 4 However, the involvement of private financiers in the production of movies, although not unknown, is much less developed than in the United States. Banks do not directly finance the French film industry, and very little money comes from outside the professional world itself. 5 Another feature of the French film industry that differentiates it from the American system is the practice of pre-financing and pre-sales of its cinematic products based on the principle that “distribution finances production.” French film productions are, for the most part, presold to television, which plays a strategic role by pre-buying broadcasting rights, as well as by coproducing movies. 6 This dilution of financial risk by the French system contrasts with the kind of huge financial investments of upwards of $100M or more and potential loss that American studio heads describe that they are held responsible for (Rothman 2004). France’s integrated organization and financing of film creation sustains the existence of a relatively fragmented system of production. Hundreds of small production companies make one film, or less, a year. Although the distribution world is less atomized than the production side, multiple distribution companies exist to sell to theater programmers and owners, and to retail professionals. Big theater chains are the most powerful players in this market. But here again, the state regulates the relationships, transactions, and power relations between entities in the production, distribution, 7 and release of a film. Finally, the French world of production operates according to a different scale of what “big projects” and “big money” are in comparison to the American system: a $20-30M movie is a middle-range project in the United States but would be regarded as a big production in France. As result, even the larger French production companies cannot compete with the Hollywood studios that remain at the core of U.S. film production and distribution. While France’s majors, Pathé Film Company and Gaumont Film Company, are able to produce as well as distribute their own movies, the other four “big” French production companies (those that produce over four movies per year, according to CNC data for 2012) remain independents who must find distribution for each project on their own.

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Hollywood By contrast, in Hollywood, six major studios occupy the center of the industry at an international as well as a domestic level: Columbia, Disney, Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros. A handful of “mini-majors” attempt to compete with them (with France’s Gaumont Film Company sometimes classified among them). 8 The “Big Six” are structured as institutionalized and compartmentalized corporate entities that integrate production, distribution, and retail, but largely act as backers and distributors of movies produced by independent companies that shoulder the financial risk of production. To increase the diversity of their products, the studios have acquired former independent companies, created their own art-house units (such as Searchlight Pictures at Fox), and set up divisions for genre films. The majors are also part of larger media conglomerates (Columbia is owned by Sony, Fox by 21st Century Fox, Paramount by Viacom, Universal by Comcast/ NBC Universal, and Warner Bros. is owned by Time Warner). Disney is the only major whose parent entity is still located in Los Angeles, as well as the only one that isn’t the successor to one of the historical majors from Hollywood’s “Golden Age” of the 1930s and 1940s. Clearly, major studios continue to dominate contemporary Hollywood, even after the dissolution of the vertically integrated system of the 1930s and 1940s that had enabled the “movie factories” to efficiently concentrate many forms of power, from film production and distribution to control over the careers of the artists they employed on long-term contracts (Schatz 2010). 9 However, the extent of the studios’ influence in the industry has ebbed and flowed over time since their dismantling. Following the dissolution of the historical majors, the erosion of studio dominance progressively led to the emergence of independent production and the rise of autonomous talent representation of stars after they were able to emancipate themselves from studio control (Kemper 2010, Mann 2007). Both contributed, in turn, to an even greater challenge to the monopolistic hold of the studios over film creation. Today, while many active independent production companies assemble small budget films that the studios seek out to distribute, hundreds are left to face on their own the challenge of securing distribution through screenings at film festivals and by other means. As a result, referring to the American film industry just as “Hollywood” makes it easy to overlook the important contribution of the countless small-scale independent production companies, commonly associated with New York City, to the overall vitality of the industry. 10 However, despite the recent phenomenon of runaway production that reveals the globalization process that is in play as the current challenge to the dominance of the industry, Los Angeles remains the center of gravity of this professional world, especially for studio production and talent representation (Scott, 2004).

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Talent Representation in the United States and France The dismantling of Hollywood’s studio system and shift to independent production affected how potential employers were able to gauge the value of creative personnel. In culture industries like film and television, matching artists to specific projects is inherently ambiguous because there is little agreement on what constitutes promising talent among creative workers, and the ordinary notion of professional competence does not sufficiently describe what employers look for. Talent representation plays a key role in defining what “talent” is through a system of brokerage in which agents contribute to establishing reputations (their own as well as those of their clients) through repeated success in matching talent to projects. Given the erosion of the old studio dominance in Hollywood, talent agencies began to grow in influence in the 1950s, and the 1980s and 1990s could be described as their Golden Age. During this period, the film industry became star-centered, and stars’ representatives in core agencies acquired increased leverage in negotiations with buyers. The practice of “packaging”—that is, of agencies putting together various elements of a project (a script or a piece of material, a star actor, a director, a writer, and/or other agency clients) and selling them as a package to a studio—granted a form of “producerial” power to the representation side. A few very large agencies with the critical mass necessary to package came to dominate the industry, forming a group of “Big Five” or “Big Four” (after the merger of Endeavor and WMA in 2009, they were WME, CAA, UTA and ICM 11) to transact with the “Big Six” studios. However, the aftermath of the screenwriters’ strike of 2007-2008 coupled with a shrinking market changed all this by restoring power to buyers when studios began to produce fewer movies (with a new focus on film franchises) and offered fewer and less well-paid jobs to artists. Star power declined simultaneously. Producer Lynda Obst (2013) describes the current period as “the new abnormal.” Nevertheless, giant agencies and studios continue to develop in parallel paths, with agency power and studio dominance varying in interconnected ways. In the United States, talent representation is comprised of several occupations that are clearly identified and differentiated. Agents and lawyers belong to regulated professions, whereas managers form a newer group that has expanded over the past twenty years because their services are more loosely defined. 12 In France, one encounters a less differentiated and specialized occupational system, with elusive boundaries between the professional identity, organization, and division of labor of agents, managers, lawyers, and publicists. American agents thus sometimes describe their French counterparts as overall “business managers,” and, instead, pride themselves with being more creative because the practice of packaging enables them to conceive entire film or TV projects. 13 The French “big” agencies are nothing

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comparable to the large private bureaucracies that are the “Big Four” in the United States and, especially, Hollywood’s two giants—WME and CAA— that now employ hundreds of agents and have diversified their activity well beyond the traditional business of finding jobs for artists in film and television. France’s largest and most prominent agency, Artmedia, and its sister companies VMA and Ubba, total only sixteen agents, 14 Cineart has nine, and Intertalent has two, and yet even these small agencies can play a significant role despite their modest size. Having representation, and often multiple representation—that is, an agent and a manager, which has become the norm in Hollywood, not only for actors but for directors and writers as well 15 —is not as systematically indispensable in France (especially for writer-directors). This does not mean that talent brokerage doesn’t play a decisive role there, but the different structural positions of talent representatives in France and in the U.S. affect their role and power in their respective industry systems. Another difference is the influence of American artists’ guilds and unions, which are important counterparts in negotiations with production companies and agencies. Finally, the unique nature of the French public unemployment system that protects artists between contracts affects in a unique way the strategies of talent representatives when servicing their clients’ interests. Why Compare the American and French Industries? Despite these differences, comparing film and TV industries in France and the United States is not only possible, it is of significant analytic value. On one hand, comparison is possible because both are professionalized systems and strong culture industries with a distinctive history and international outreach. Both have given birth to an organized system of intermediaries— professional groups that are little visible but are powerful and key to understanding the making of artistic careers and products. In both countries, the practices of brokers and middlemen and women are central to making sense of how film and TV markets form and transform the creation of economic and aesthetic value. Finally, the new elusiveness in both the United States and France of the boundary that once strictly separated film from television, along with the challenges of digital and social media, imply more crossing over between various media, formats, and genres for the artists as well as for the professionals who operate behind the scenes. Taken together, these ongoing transformations contribute to reshaping what “talent” consists of and what “making popular culture” means. Because artists’ representatives and production professionals—and their interactions—are instrumental to how talent is defined and evaluated, they stand at the crossroads of material and symbolic power. Their ability to form and maintain relationships is at the heart of their activity, both in the United States and in France, and their

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practices construe the economy of emotion, that is, the structure of emotional exchanges regulating socio-professional relations, in the entertainment industries of both countries. The question that remains to be answered is whether the United States can be characterized as a paradigmatic model representing a more extreme version of what other film industries (including France) are on a smaller scale, or if France constitutes a structurally different model in terms of how the production world is organized. The contributions to this volume provide some elements for advancing this discussion. They also shed new light on the question of cultural globalization. Globalization is usually understood mostly as the penetration of Hollywood products and production practices into foreign markets, and/or as the outsourcing of American productions. The French-American comparison here suggests more complex transactions and a more mutual process. The French model has engendered the concept of the auteur film and promoted national independent cinema, a model that has circulated internationally and has been influential, including in the United States (Schwartz 2007). This model has, in turn, been influenced by Hollywood. Nowadays, the French system of pre-financed projects remains an attractive option for American agents and producers seeking international coproductions, especially since the North American market has tightened and studios develop and produce less. Because globalization often takes the form of the circulation of people, projects, ideas, and techniques, contrasting case studies of the American and French industries thus allows us to question what local and global conditions of cultural production mean, at both symbolic and material levels. The key participation of agents and producers in such processes is therefore of central importance for sociologists to explore. INVISIBLE HANDS: CHALLENGING EXISTING APPROACHES TO CULTURAL PRODUCTION Studying What Is Not Readily Seen Foundational sociological approaches to the study of culture industries attend to the structure and dynamics of institutional, organizational, and industrial fields that produce culture, and they seek insight into how those fields do so by analyzing the consequences of their organizational stratification, institutional logics, advantages, and constraints, and their members’ use of social roles as an organizational resource for career advancement. Our collection builds upon this foundational work and moves sociological scholarship on the film and television industries forward by focusing attention instead on the actual mechanisms and professional practices through which talent representatives and their working partners create economic and artistic value. Sociologists attentive to professional practices and interactions in the production of

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culture or the collective action of art worlds address aspects of art making as work or labor that constitutes markets. We push this approach in new directions, focusing on occupational groups that have been overlooked. This book looks at the constitution of occupational configurations behind the scenes of film and television, and at the existence of specialized professional cultures that shape action by which the worth and the value of people and artworks are defined. Within worlds of production, the studios have monopolized scholarly attention, although primarily among (art) historians and film scholars. Independent producers have recently started to attract more attention (Ortner 2013), as well as below-the-line personnel (Mayer 2011). However, the interrelation between production professionals and talent representatives remains uncharted territory, especially in a comparative light. In recent European research, the notion of cultural intermediaries has emerged and become popular for identifying these professionals and analyzing the function they fulfill in cultural industries (see, for instance, Nixon 2002, Nixon and Du Gay 2002, Negus 2002, and Hesmondhalgh 2006). Although such work is meritorious for shedding light on a neglected set of practices, and on the professional groups whose activity is essential for the making of artistic careers and products, the concept of cultural intermediary is not exempt of limitations in our eyes (Roussel, 2014). It is a catch-all notion rather than a robust concept; it combines heterogeneous groups with diverse histories that have more or less elusive boundaries separating them, that accomplish different types of activity, and that occupy various positions in the division of cinematic labor. Speaking of intermediaries also raises the question of who and what is intermediated between what and whom, implying agents and producers serve as mere go-betweens. Some of the occupations that this book targets foreground the interests of the consumer. Producers, for example, worry about audiences, for the most part, although, within large organizations like studios, some positions are more directly exposed to the consumer than others, and in these instances production executives defer to an extent to their colleagues in marketing and publicity departments to represent what audiences want. By contrast, talent representatives—agents, lawyers, and managers outside of their production activities, but not publicists—do not stand between artists and audiences. Instead, they form a professional triangle with artist-clients and production professionals. Talent agents and their counterparts are therefore more than just brokers and gobetweens. Understanding their structural position calls for a more complex approach to studying entertainment industries. The collection of works we have assembled for this volume reveals that the function of talent agents and their counterparts cannot be reduced to being thought of as simple connectors between artists and buyers, or between artists and audiences; this is because their activity is consequential in many other ways. Besides seeking employment and negotiating deals, 16 which con-

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stitutes the practice of representation, talent brokers shape and influence creative content by what they choose to package as TV shows and films, by advising artists on creative choices, and by giving notes on scripts, among other means. Through packaging, especially, big talent agencies are increasingly involved in production-like activities. As this boundary becomes blurrier, the division between commercial and creative labor becomes more elusive as well. The contributions in this volume explore the ambiguity and complexity of real practices that subvert a number of the seemingly obvious lines of division. To explore this overlap, gaining proximity to participants’ perceptions and actions is a common feature of the chapters in our book. Whether they primarily focus on talent representation or on production, each contributor provides unprecedented insight into the actual functioning of the film and television industries. Each contribution to this volume is strongly empirically grounded through ethnography, interviews, employment records, archival work, or firsthand accounts with experienced industry leaders in the field, all of which allow us to present original insights on what these professionals do. The accent that we put on fieldwork originates in the idea that the word of the participants matters analytically and has thus to be taken seriously by sociologists (Roussel 2010). Not only does that translate into empirically robust studies, it also gives rise to direct conversations between scholars and practitioners in the volume itself: a legendary talent agent, Harry Ufland, and an established producer and former studio head, Bill Mechanic, who share their experience in preambles to each of the book’s two main sections. Far from providing anecdotal accounts for how entertainment worlds function, these contributions illustrate the profitable circulation of forms of knowledge: scholarly work and self-reflexive analysis by professionals provide two complementary dimensions for understanding the systemic dynamics of the film and television industries. Representing Talent and Accomplishing Production Our book consists of two substantive sections. The first, “Agents, Agenting, and Agencies,” reveals the particulars of talent representation in the United States and France, while the second, “Behind the Scenes of Production,” offers firsthand accounts of intermediation processes in various segments of the film and television industries in each of the two countries. The actions and practices of talent brokers have to be viewed in context in order to understand their strategies, actions, constraints, and visions, so the first section elaborates the industrial landscape in which talent brokers navigate. “Agents, Agenting, and Agencies” begins with a preamble by Harry Ufland that gives the reader direct and lively insight into the experience of a top Hollywood agent and his relationships with star-clients. Ufland draws on

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twenty-four years of agenting to unveil various facets of an agent’s practice, from the passion for talent to the transactions with the production side. This preamble is followed by a chapter that includes the foundational study on Hollywood talent agencies by Bielby and Bielby that reveals how the stratification of agencies is consequential to the career trajectories of their clients, in this case, of screenwriters of film and television. Their analysis, which was originally published in the American Sociological Review, shows that the systematic and entrenched gender, age, and race differentials found in the career success of Hollywood screenwriters, as revealed in the Bielby’s other research on Hollywood screenwriters (D. Bielby and W. Bielby, 1993, 1996, and W. Bielby and D. Bielby, 1992), can be partially explained by where a writer’s talent agency places on the all-important core-periphery dimension of the field that distinguishes Big Hollywood from Little Hollywood. Delphine Naudier elaborates the strategies deployed by French talent agents to create and enhance economic value of their clients from otherwise intangible aesthetic qualities. This study focuses on how agents build artistic reputation by untangling the various interconnected dimensions covered by this notion: constructing an artist’s recognition, renown, and image are complementary facets of an agent’s work, inseparable from evaluation of their commercial worth. Mathieu Trachman provides insight into the unacknowledged and largely unspoken intermediation practices within the French pornographic film industry, unveiling their gendered nature. This work explores the double role played by some male actors who act as unofficial representatives for actresses, consequently changing their own position in power relations and gaining leverage with directors and producers. In an updating of his important research on the origins of Hollywood talent agencies, Tom Kemper discusses the historical emergence of “agenting” into an autonomous profession from the late 1920s on, in the context of a burgeoning film industry. He turns light on the pioneer practices of key figures of the industry who laid the foundations for the constitution of the central role held by agents in Hollywood. Rounding out this section, Violaine Roussel questions prevailing analytical approaches to the study of cultural intermediation and offers provocative conceptual emendations to the study of social networks in cultural industry contexts. She draws on ethnographic data to analyze agents’ “relationship work” which is both learned in organizations and performed in configurations tying them to other types of Hollywood professionals. “Behind the Scenes of Production” begins with a preamble, a candid firsthand account of contemporary Hollywood from the executive’s perch by seasoned industry professional Bill Mechanic, who explains why he felt compelled to move from the “great job but terrible life” as a successful head of a major studio to the “great life but terrible job” of independent film producer. Mechanic’s tells-it-like-it-is preamble reveals the ever-heightening tension in Hollywood between creative artistic impulses and the organiza-

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tional culture of contemporary media conglomerates. Laura Grindstaff and Vicki Mayer elaborate the unseen practices of casters who locate ordinary people as talent for reality and talk shows in the United States. They reveal how the work of these industry participants is integral to the creation of value of the gendered, classed, and raced economy of emotion that reigns in American daytime television and reality TV. 17 Vincent Cardon renders tangible the most intangible aspect of talent in the eyes of casting professionals in the French film world: he deciphers the hidden dynamics and interrelations behind the seemingly obvious choice of the “right” actor or actress for a part. Jones and Foster, drawing upon case studies from the states of Utah and Massachusetts, reveal the latent social networks that underlie the business relationships between state film offices and Hollywood production companies that lure domestic production away from Los Angeles. Offering more than just authentic location shoots, these production deals enable states to compete with California for the creation of revenue-generating industry jobs. Laure de Verdalle presents the organizational challenges French producers must mediate as they coordinate the asynchronous schedules of state and industry participants in France’s film industry. She underlines the importance of embedded production timelines and temporalities that structure the activity in this industry and strongly constrain artistic and financial strategies. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS In various ways, this volume challenges existing studies of entertainment industries and the models that are often taken for granted in the study of Hollywood. In particular, our book challenges key dimensions of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural fields, the narrative of market hegemony, the limitations of traditional network approaches, and prevailing notions of the function of cultural intermediaries. It takes readers beyond the Bourdieuian opposition between the commercial pole and that of art for art’s sake. The activity of those who are supposed to be the ultimate incarnations of the business dimension of show business is especially revealing of more complex logics in which the order of prestige does not always follow economic hierarchies, even in the most commercial sectors of Hollywood. In short, our contributors show the complex interrelationship, instead of just the separation, of art and commerce. NOTES 1. See Pacouret 2014 and, by contrast, on copyright laws in the United States, Decherney 2012. 2. The state, through the CNC, was formally controlling film professions and authorizing professionals to practice by issuing a professional ID card to film technicians (below the line

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personnel) and an “authorization to practice“ to producers, distributors, theater owners, and professionals of film import/export. Even though the system is not as formally state-controlled any more, this is revealing of more general logics that persist. 3. Forms of CNC assistance include “automatic support” (soutien automatique), which varies according to the anticipated gross of the movie, and “advance on earnings” (avance sur recette), which is based on an artistic evaluation of the script. 4. The “MG” (minimum garanti), which is an amount of money that distributors give to producers for the making of a project, allows producers to then obtain funding from the CNC. 5. The main specialized private firms financing movies are called SOFICA (Companies for the Financing of Cinema and Audiovisual Industry/Sociétés de financement de l’industrie cinématographique et de l’audiovisuel). Created in 1985, they are investment firms formed to collect private funds exclusively dedicated to financing cinematic and audiovisual production. Film professionals and financiers (banks and financial operators) can take the initiative of creating a SOFICA. 6. For instance, Studio Canal is the production arm of the cable TV channel Canal+. 7. In France, distribution consists of making copies and conceiving publicity and promotion around a product and selling it to diffusion professionals. The process of diffusion combines elements of distribution and retail as they are known in the United States. Diffusion reflects how the film-making process is differently conceived between the two countries. 8. One hundred and eight films were produced in 2013 by Hollywood’s six major studios and five important mini-majors (Dreamworks, Film District, Lionsgate, Relativity, and Weinstein Co.), with the average production budget in this sample being $71 million (Film L.A. Research Report 2013, p. 4). An important and increasing part of this cost goes into the marketing of movies. The majors’ production and distribution activities account for the vast majority of box office revenue in Canada and the United States. The majors totaled 74.9 percent of North American market share in 2013 (with 90 film releases), not including the productions of their quasi-independent specialty divisions. Source: http:// www.boxofficemojo.com/studio/?view=company&view2=yearly&yr=2013&p=.htm. 9. In 1948, the United States Supreme Court held in the ruling United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. that the studios’ existing system of distribution was in violation of antitrust laws and ordered the studios to divest themselves of their theatrical chains. By the mid-1970s, the vertically integrated studio system had been supplanted by a system of subcontracted production by independent production entities that remain to this day. 10. Independent production is characterized as “not Hollywood” by Sherry Ortner (2013). 11. William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, Creative Artists Agency, United Talent Agency, and International Creative Management. 12. Unlike agencies, management companies do not need to be licensed by the state where they settle. Contrary to agents, under the Talent Agency Act, managers are not supposed to seek and negotiate employment on behalf of their clients, but they can produce. In reality, the boundary is not as clear cut. 13. Interview conducted by Violaine Roussel, Los Angeles, 2013, with a former agent, specialized in independent film packaging and international film financing at a large Hollywood agency. 14. Source: http://www.agencesartistiques.com. 15. Announcements of casting deals in Hollywood’s trade publications now routinely list the talent agency and may also include the law firm, management company, and publicists’ group representing the actor. 16. This is what agents do officially and other types of representatives often do officiously as well. 17. While we were writing this introduction, Ted Harbert, the Chairman of NBC Broadcasting, stated “the key to daytime TV is to get [guests] to spill their life” while touting a new daytime talk show being launched on his network (Guthrie, 2014: 57).

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REFERENCES Bielby, Denise D. and William T. Bielby. “Women and Men in Film: Gender Inequality among Writers in a Culture Industry.” Gender & Society 10, No 3, (1996): 248–270. Bielby, Denise D. and William T. Bielby. “The Hollywood ‘Graylist’? Age, Experience and Access to Employment for Television Writers.” In Current Research on Occupations and Professions: Creators of Culture, edited by Muriel Cantor and Cheryl Zollars, 141–172. Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1993. Bielby, William T. and Denise D. Bielby. “Cumulative Versus Continuous Disadvantage in an Unstructured Labor Market: Gender Differences in the Careers of Television Writers.” Work and Occupations 19, No. 4 (1992): 366–386. BoxofficeMojo, accessed July 8, 2014. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/studio/?view=company& view2=yearly&yr=2013&p=.htm. Decherney, Peter. Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Du Gay, Paul, ed. Production of Culture, Cultures of Production. London: Sage, 1997. Faulkner, Robert R. and Andy B. Anderson. “Short-Term Projects and Emergent Careers: Evidence from Hollywood.” The American Journal of Sociology 92, No. 4 (1987): 879–909. Guthrie, Marisa. “The Mouth of Meredith Vierra.” The Hollywood Reporter 37 (2014, August 8): 54–59. Hesmondhalgh, David. “Bourdieu, the Media and Cultural Production.” Media, Culture & Society 28, No. 2 (2006): 211–231. Kemper, Tom. Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents. Berkeley: UC Press, 2010. Mann, Denise. Hollywood Independents. The Postwar Talent Takeover. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Mayer, Vicki. Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Negus, Keith. “The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance between Production and Consumption.” Cultural Studies 16, No. 4 (2002): 501–515. Nixon, Sean. “Re-Imagining the Ad Agencies. Cultural Connotations of Economic Forms.” In Cultural Economy, edited by Paul Du Gay Paul and Michael Pryke, 132–147. London: Sage, 2002. Nixon, Sean and Du Gay, Paul. “Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries?” Cultural Studies 16, No. 4 (2002): 495–500. Obst, Lynda. Sleepless in Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Ortner, Sherry. Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Pacouret, Jérôme. “French and American Filmmakers’ Attitudes Towards Copyright Law. A Comparative and Transnational Approach.” Law & Society Annual Meeting. Minneapolis, 2014. Rothman, Tom. “A Chairman’s View.” In The Movie Business Book, edited by Jason Squire, 148–159. New York: Fireside. 2004. Roussel, Violaine and Bleuwenn Lechaux. Voicing Dissent. American Artists and the War on Iraq, London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Roussel, Violaine. “Les agents artistiques d’Hollywood: des intermédiaires de marché?” In La culture et ses intermédiaires. Dans les arts, le numérique et les industries créatives, edited by Laurent Jeanpierre and Olivier Roueff, 97–112. Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 2014. Schatz, Tom. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Schwartz, Vanessa. It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Scott, Alan J. On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

I

Agents, Agenting, Agencies

Chapter Two

Twenty-Four Years of Agenting Harry J. Ufland

The agency is the hub of the wheel. Agents represent every aspect of the movie business from books, scripts, directors, writers, actors, producers, directors of photography, casting directors, composers, and production designers, among countless other people. Agencies find the bright young talent long before studios know about them. Movies are put together by agencies in the form of packages sold to studios or other types of buyers. There is no room for doubt in agenting. “No” just means not yet. To be an agent, you have to trust your instincts and believe wholeheartedly in your clients. When I was still an assistant at the William Morris Agency in New York, I signed Charles Grodin after seeing him in an episode of The Play of the Week called “Black Monday,” by Reginald Rose, which was telecast live and starred Robert Redford. Chuck’s talent was so versatile that it actually posed a problem for the entertainment industry. In a world that loves to categorize, here was a man who could do it all. He could have you in stitches one moment, and then in the next reveal a startling darkness. His talent was so impossible to pin down that a lot of people were unsure of what to make of it. I was thrilled to have such a talented client, and trusted so completely in his ability that I ran through walls to get Chuck jobs. I was determined that everyone see how terrific an actor he was, and I would stop at nothing to make it happen. As Grodin would often say, I was his kamikaze pilot. When I signed Chuck I was working on Ed Bondy’s desk. Ed was a great agent with a furious and passionate style. If Ed wanted a job for one of his clients he would call the producer, the director, or the executive and scream and yell until he got what he wanted. If they said no or hung up, he would call back and try again and again until they finally said yes. Never once did I see Ed give up on a client. Watching him I learned the value of tenacity, of never stopping until you got what you wanted for your client. The other side 17

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to being a good agent is an understanding that the best negotiations are the ones where both sides leave happy. You don’t want to make the other side so angry that all they want to do is get back at you. Screaming and yelling is fine, but if it’s your only tactic, you won’t ultimately be successful in this business. A good agent is multidimensional not only at the negotiating table, but in their relationships with clients. As my clients’ careers progressed and they became more and more famous, the choices we made became much more important. No longer was I banging down doors to get my clients’ work seen. Instead, as their careers took off, I was constantly advising, arguing, and discussing, and even sometimes begging them to pass on some projects and to take on others. At this stage in the agent-client relationship, it is very important to maintain a sense of objectivity. A lot of agents mistake their client’s fame for their own. They confuse the borders of the relationship, misunderstanding business for friendship, and mistaking a proximity to talent for a stardom of their own. This isn’t to say that having clients like Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Ridley Scott, Charles Grodin, and Jodie Foster didn’t benefit me. Of course it did. Not only did representing such enormous talents put me in arenas with the most important and powerful people at the highest possible stakes, it exposed me to other great actors and filmmakers. During production on Mean Streets, Marty Scorsese, whom I had represented since he graduated from NYU, asked me to meet Robert De Niro. I was blown away by the nuances and complexity of De Niro’s portrayal of Johnny Boy and his ability in previous films of his to go from a state of vulnerable naiveté to a total psychotic to terrifically funny, and I was incredibly excited to meet him. De Niro and I got along well and he committed to be my client at lunch. I ended up representing him, I believe, throughout the most interesting and impressive parts of his career. Bob was amazing in that he had the ability to create characters that would go on to become a part of the American lexicon. Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, Travis Bickel in Taxi Driver, Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, Michael in The Deer Hunter, even Al Capone in The Untouchables—these are characters he managed to immortalize with completely original performances. There are basically two kinds of agents in the business: the signer, which I was, and the servicer. The signers are the ones who become more successful and famous as agents because they are the ones who bring the clients in and are known for whom they represent. When I started The Ufland Agency in 1976, all my clients came with me which made the Ufland Agency the most powerful independent agency at that time. To be truly effective an agent has to put the needs of the clients first. It was not only an immersion in the world of young talent that made my client list so imposing. I stopped at nothing to get my clients jobs and to represent their best interests, and they knew that they could completely trust me. My

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decisions about whom to represent and which projects to suggest were never based on money or the desires of the agency. My clients were the people for whom I worked. They came first. I believe that the kind of agent I was is more difficult to be in today’s corporatization of the agencies, but I know that it is not an anomaly. Today, team agenting is important because the major agencies have grown into large compartmentalized organizations and a client often needs advice and service from more than one specialized department. The downside of team agenting is that if no one on the team has a really close relationship with the client it’s detrimental to the client, which sometimes necessitates the adding of a manager. When I was actively agenting, my team consisted of Jay Julien, the brilliant New York lawyer, and me. We completely trusted each other and had each other’s backs and were completely in sync with how we saw our clients’ careers. While considering whether or not to accept or pass on a project the most important question I would ask my clients was: “Can you score in this?” What I meant by this was, can you make this your own and will it be memorable? Regardless of the quality of the picture, is there something in this that you can make really great? When Brian De Palma was directing The Untouchables, he kept coming back to Bob De Niro to play Capone. Time and time again De Niro said no, until finally Brian asked him to take one final look. Bob did another couple of weeks of research, called me up, and said: “I’m doing it.” When I asked him why, he told me to wait until I saw the picture; in other words, when I saw it I would know why. For De Niro, the scene where he got to cry at the opera was the thing that made him feel that he could score with the role. This scene was something new for him, a way to push the limits of his artistry in a direction he hadn’t yet explored. So I called Brian and Ned Tanen, the head of the Motion Picture Division at Universal, and told them that Bob would do it. The deal was relatively easy to make, particularly since we all wanted it to work immediately by that point. This question was much more complicated for my director clients since there are so many moving parts that they have to deal with. We would take into account the actors, the story, the producers, and the studio executives on the movie; I would ask them what they wanted to say, if they had a clear vision for it, if they could make it great, and, finally, if they wanted to do it more than anything in the world. If they felt they could honestly say yes to all these questions, then they would take on the project. Of course, the further any of my clients got into their careers the more complicated the answers to these questions became. Sometimes people would have to do a job for a paycheck. Other times, we would turn down roles or projects, even if the money was right, if it didn’t feel like something that the client could make great, or perhaps the actor didn’t think the director was right, or the director didn’t think the actor or the script was right, or the budget was too low.

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Marty Scorsese always used to say to me: “One for them, one for me.” And I could always be sure that the “one for me” would be a deeply personal film for him. As an agent you have to remain objective about the changing dynamic of the client relationship. As your client changes, so too must your role in relation to them. I sat with Marty in the editing room on his early pictures. As clients grew more and more successful, my role would be more focused on negotiating, scheduling, discussing, and finding potential material. As your clients grow older and more successful, the success is shared in a way that pulls you in different directions. A lot of agents say that every client eventually fires their agent. I completely disagree with this. To me, this sounds like a cop out, a ready-made excuse for when that phone call does come. Just because I disagree with this way of thinking doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. It is easy to grasp why an agent could see this shift in roles and the major shifts in the relationship as the beginning of the inevitable end. Success requires the relationship to become different as the client is now being pursued by every agency head trying to steal him or her, as well as by the heads of every studio and by producers trying to circumvent the clients’ relationship with the agent for their own advantage. I must say this never worked in my experience, and it would actually hurt the people that tried it because my relationship with my clients was so solid. While my clients’ fame and success led my role in their creative process to change, it gave me a chance to hone my skills as a negotiator and afforded me the opportunity to learn how to package pictures at the highest possible level. Michael Deeley and Barry Spikings, co-producers of The Deer Hunter, approached me with Michael Cimino and asked me to introduce them to De Niro, which I did. When Bob decided he was interested in the role, he commenced his research, which was a major part of his preparation for any part. He traveled around the country visiting steel mills and meeting steel workers using the name Harry Ufland. He used my name because he knew me so well he could be completely comfortable approaching them as me. From what happened next, I learned that one of the most important things for an agent is to trust yourself and ignore the cries of the crowd. When Ned Tanen and Universal saw the final cut of the film, they loved it but were worried that no one would actually go see it in theaters. They hired Alan Carr, the producer of Grease, La Cage aux Folles, and the Oscar telecast, among other things, to spread the word that the film was terrific. The first night the film screened was at a sneak preview in Detroit. Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg got caught in the elevator and the projector broke. Needless to say, the reception was not great. On the way out of the theatre, the Universal executives completely ignored all of us—Cimino, De Niro, Deeley, Spikings, and me—who’d had a hand in the film. The next night, it

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played to a packed house in Chicago and the audience went wild. That night, the executives liked us again. Back in the early 1970s at WMA, I would have other agents asking me: “Why are you wasting your time with Scorsese and De Niro?” I would look at their client lists and see that their clients were not nearly as good as mine. So why would I listen to them? When your clients are young and doing revolutionary work, often people don’t get it. You must wage that fight for them every step of the way both inside the agency and out. Obviously, you want your fellow agents to believe in your clients so that they can promote them as well. The first time Mean Streets screened in Los Angeles at the Charles Aidikoff Screening Room, the head of the William Morris motion picture department walked out while the credits were rolling and asked me: “What’d you waste my time with this for?” Marty was actually better received in Europe than in the United States at the beginning of his career. It was John Cassavetes who became Marty’s first big fan in the United States. But the feeling shared by all of us who were believers and were banding together to ward off the naysayers was exhilarating. I remember when Bill Haber, who later on became one of the founders of Creative Artists Agency, and who then was in the television department at WMA, told me he kept all my memos about Marty and Bob under the glass top of his desk. No one knows what is going to work and what is going to flop, and the only way to ensure failure is to never try in the first place. My most powerful tool as an agent, even when I was quite young, was my obsessive devotion to truth. No matter who I was talking to or what I was asked, I would tell the truth. I was in Australia meeting with the wonderful actress Judy Davis, whom I had never met before, when she asked me what I thought of her film. “It’s like a Cosmopolitan short story,” I told her. By the end of lunch, I was her agent. My honesty helped me inspire self-confidence in my clients. They would watch me fight for them, and listen as I told the buyers how great they would be, and because I believed it so wholeheartedly, they did too. I’m not foolish enough to think that Bobby wouldn’t have been Bobby or Marty wouldn’t have been Marty without my help, but I do know that my totally honest, complete lack of doubt helped fuel the sense of invincibility that they developed about their own crafts and was developed about them in the business. This honesty also helped me when I would meet with executives who were for the most part scared and unsure of what or whom to buy. I would be so confident, so positive that my clients were great that more often than not, they would agree. When I started in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency in 1958, I thought I wanted to produce movies. Little did I know that I was going to love being an agent so much that my producing career would be on hold for twenty-four years. When I finally did produce, in all honesty, it was not nearly as much fun or as exciting as agenting was.

Chapter Three

Talent Agencies and the Market for Screenwriters From the Origins of Packaging to Today’s Transformations Denise Bielby

This chapter, which contains an article that originally appeared in American Sociological Review, establishes how the brokering role of Hollywood talent agencies contributes to the structure of the labor market for film and television writers. The article, which was co-authored by William Bielby and myself, built upon our research that drew on the employment and earnings records maintained by the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW), the labor union that represents Hollywood screenwriters, and documented pervasive disadvantage in the career trajectories of women, minority, and older screenwriters compared to white men (D. Bielby and W. Bielby, 1993, 1996; W. Bielby and D. Bielby, 1992, 1993). In an effort to clarify the mechanisms underlying these differentials, we examined how type of agency representation affects writers’ employment and earnings. We found that writers represented by elite or “core” agencies that transcended their role as market brokers through packaging practices, whereby agencies initiate projects on their own, had substantially higher levels of career success than did writers with comparable track records who were not represented by such agencies. We also assessed whether limited access to mediating organizations marginalized women, minority, and older writers in Hollywood’s networks of recurrent contracting. Over a decade has passed since our findings were published, and in that time packaging has become the dominant practice, Hollywood’s core agencies have merged, mid-sized agencies have all but disappeared, and smaller 23

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non-core agencies continue to trade on their ability to match artists with projects. Corporatization, concentration, and diversification of the industry’s largest agencies has resulted in the emergence and domination of two giants, WME and CAA, greater specialization and compartmentalization within these large agencies, and the need for “bridging solutions” by talent agents to better link and coordinate labor markets in various media. This change in agencies’ organizational arrangements and practices has also had an effect on the status of screenwriters, who now must flexibly cross between the industries of film and television, and deal with the challenges of digital production and distribution. For film writers in particular, the studios’ preference for the production of film franchises, sequels, and reboots within the context of fewer movies being made on an annual basis has devalued the art of the screenwriter, except for the few that are highly sought after. The 2014 Hollywood Writers Report that was commissioned by the Writers Guild of America, West (2014a) to analyze employment patterns for writers working in television and in film during the 2011-2012 season found that “while minority and women writers made incremental gains in employment over the past decade-plus period, current film and TV employment levels remain widely disproportionate to the actual minority demographics of the U.S. population, and diverse writers remain substantially underrepresented on TV writing staffs and in feature films” (Handel 2014). How the consolidation of talent agencies, the deepening stratification between core and noncore agencies, and the importance of packaging to what gets produced, among other developments, continue to (re)shape access to opportunities for employment in Hollywood remains a compelling line of inquiry. The increased differentiation between core and non-core agency representation is equally important for understanding the continuing marginalization of those who have been traditionally under-employed in the entertainment industry. **** ORGANIZATIONAL MEDIATION OF PROJECT-BASED LABOR MARKETS: TALENT AGENCIES AND THE CAREERS OF SCREENWRITERS William T. Bielby and Denise D. Bielby The organization of production within and across firms fundamentally shapes the labor market outcomes and career trajectories of individuals (Baron 1984; Baron and Bielby 1980). Careers are built through interfirm and intrafirm mobility, and organizations condition that mobility through decisions to recruit, select, assign, socialize, promote, and terminate employees (Bridges

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and Villemez 1994; Jacobs 1981; Rosenfeld 1992). Moreover, organizational actions that create opportunity structures are in turn influenced by organizational ecology—the birth, growth, decline, and death of organizations (Hannan 1988; Haveman 1994). Recently, motivated in part by concern about the consequences of industrial restructuring and “downsizing,” labor market scholars have begun to study the “contingent workforce” and the externalization of the employment relation (Belous 1989; Davis-Blake and Uzzi 1993; Pfeffer and Baron 1988). It is widely believed that more and more organizations are finding it economical to rely on part-time workers, temporary employees, and subcontracted labor (Abraham 1988; Abraham and Taylor 1996; Plovika 1996). Moreover, the trend toward externalization of the employment relation is not limited to routine administrative and production work. Increasingly, professional work such as computer programming, engineering, legal services, and even executive-level management is being performed by contingent workers (Frederick 1995; Millner 1989; Plovika 1996; Slaughter and Ang 1996). In light of these trends, what does it mean to “bring the firm back in” for workers who are only weakly attached to the firms in which they work? In this research, we explore how the organizations that mediate between buyers and sellers of externalized labor shape careers. The industrial context we study—writing for television and feature film—is one in which reputation is a key resource for career success and in which the reputational value of an employee’s work product atrophies rapidly over time. Accordingly, we focus on how affiliation with an organization that has the capacity to certify and signal an employee’s reputation affects career outcomes. We examine the evolving role of talent agencies in the organization of production in the entertainment industry and how agencies’ actions shape the labor market for film and television writers. We argue that efficiency-based accounts of entertainment industry labor markets—while consistent with recent theorizing about externalized employment relationships—fail to adequately explain the highly segmented nature of those markets and the role that “brokerage” organizations play in creating and sustaining that segmentation. Specifically, we maintain that brokerage organizations such as talent agencies are more than just efficient solutions to problems of uncertainty in the labor market. As the largest agencies have become more actively engaged in production activities they have transcended their roles as market brokers, and the resulting segmentation among agencies is consequential for writers’ careers. We argue that representation by a “core” agency provides writers with the reputation, legitimacy, and resources that flow from central location in a network of recurrently contracting parties. Accordingly, we hypothesize that writers represented by elite, core agencies have substantially higher levels of career success than do writers with comparable track records who are not represented by such agencies. We also assess whether limited access to

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mediating organizations marginalizes women, minority, and older writers in the networks of recurrent contracting, thus partially explaining gender, race, and age differentials in career success in culture industries (D. Bielby and W. Bielby 1993, 1996; W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1992, 1993; Dates and Barlow 1990; Francke 1994; Gray 1993; McCreadie 1994). We develop hypotheses and test them using longitudinal data on writers’ careers. Our quantitative analysis is designed to evaluate how mediating organizations segment the labor market for a professionalized contingent workforce. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding the dynamics of organizational brokerage of culture industry labor markets specifically and for scholarship on the organizational mediation of externalized employment relations more generally. PROJECT-BASED CAREERS AND SUBCONTRACTED PRODUCTION IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY Historical Transformations: From Hierarchy to Market In the 1930s and 1940s, most screenwriters (as well as actors, directors, cinematographers, and other creative personnel) were salaried employees of the major studios. The studios were vertically integrated motion picture factories—large, hierarchically organized firms engaged in the development, production, distribution, and exhibition of feature films (Christopherson 1996; Paul and Kleingartner 1996; Stanley 1978; Works Progress Administration 1941). Following World War II, rising production costs, declining box office receipts, and the government’s antitrust actions made the studio system difficult to sustain. Filling the void were independent productions initiated by prominent actors, directors, or producers, for whom profit participation and deferred compensation provided substantial tax advantages. Their films typically were produced using leased facilities from a major studio, which also would provide marketing, distribution, and partial financing in exchange for a share of the profits. By 1957, 58 percent of Hollywood feature films were independent productions, compared to just 20 percent in 1949 (Baughman 1997: 79-84). By the mid-1970s, the vertically integrated studio system in both film and television had been completely supplanted by a system of subcontracted production, with risks distributed downward to independent production entities (Baughman 1997; Boddy 1990; Christopherson 1996: 87-92; Faulkner and Anderson 1987; Wasko 1981). The demise of the studio system fundamentally transformed the employment relation. Since the 1970s, most writers and creative personnel have been employed by “single project organizations” (Baker and Faulkner 1991: 283) formed only for the duration of a single film or television project. And even when creative personnel are employed by a major studio or network,

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they are “life-of-project” workers (Belous 1989), temporarily employed for the duration of a single production. Uncertainty, Reputation, and Efficient Institutional Arrangements The shift in Hollywood to project-based employment affected how potential employers gauged the value of creative personnel. Measuring the specific contributions of individual artists to the quality of an aesthetic object is inherently ambiguous, and in commercialized mass culture industries there is little consensus about what constitutes competence among creative personnel (Becker 1982; Hirsch 1972). As a result, the quality of their contributions is assessed post hoc, based on the commercial success of the products they produce (DiMaggio 1977). In film and television, the most tangible signal of a writer’s future productivity is his or her association with prior successful projects (W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1994), and a career can be viewed as “a succession of temporary projects embodied in an identifiable line of . . . credits” (Faulkner and Anderson 1987: 887). 1 In this kind of system, where skill and productivity are not easily measured, reputation is a signal of a professional’s standing in the labor market (Powell 1990). In addition to the uncertainty regarding assessments of competence and product quality, conflict between commercial and creative interests is a distinctive feature of culture industries (W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1994; DiMaggio 1977). Subcontracted production and the associated externalized employment relationship have been described as efficient responses to production under such conditions. Life-of-project employment contracts allow employers to quickly assemble personnel with highly specialized skills for a short period of time (Davis-Blake and Uzzi 1993; Gordon and Thai-Larsen 1969). Producers have no incentive to offer long-term contracts because informationally complex jobs are difficult to monitor, and while the skills provided by creative personnel might be project-specific, they are not firm-specific. As a result, skills and talent can be neither acquired nor tested through long-term employment (Faulkner and Anderson 1987: 888-89). According to DiMaggio (1977), the structural arrangement that economizes on the unique transaction costs incurred in matching creative personnel to specific projects is a “brokerage” system in which brokers establish reputations through repeated successes in matching artists to commercial projects (also see Williamson [1981] on transaction costs, and Hirsch [1972] and Peterson and White [1981] on culture industry systems). This conceptualization of culture industry labor markets provides an efficiency-based explanation for the role of talent agencies: Their brokerage activities allow markets to clear in a business context surrounded by ambiguity, risk, and uncertainty. As Gitlin (1983) notes, talent agencies are a “kind of solution” to the problem

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of uncertainty. “If agents did not exist,” says Gitlin, “they would have to be invented” (p. 144). PACKAGED CAREERS: THE EVOLVING ROLE OF TALENT AGENCIES Legally and technically, a talent agency is nothing more than a state-licensed employment agency. The agency finds work for a writer, actor, or director on a film or television project, and in exchange it receives a 10 percent commission from the client’s earnings. 2 Hundreds of agencies represent artists in the film and television industry, and the majority operate exclusively in this manner. They trade on their ability to match artists with projects, and the way they function is consistent with the market imagery described above. A few agencies, however, operate differently: Instead of seeking out projects for their clients, they initiate projects on their own. They negotiate unique arrangements with the talent guilds and cultivate long-term relationships with those who finance, produce, and distribute new projects. Through strategic moves during times of structural change in the industry and aggressive actions to protect their unique market positions, these “core” agencies have amassed market power in both labor and product markets. Their power, in fact, rivals that of the major studios at the height of the studio system. For example, when it became apparent in the early 1950s that the major studios would not move into the business of supplying programs for network television, William Morris and MCA, the dominant talent agencies of that era, moved quickly to fill the void, packaging series directly for the networks or for the advertising agencies that supplied network programming (Bodec and Jaffe 1955; Gitlin 1983: 147–48; Rose 1995). 3 We maintain that this kind of power segmented the labor market to the substantial advantage of those writers represented by core agencies. The Origins of Packaging Core agencies shape the labor market for writers through a practice known as “packaging.” Rather than representing individual artists, the agency assembles an entire writing, producing, directing, and acting team for a project and presents it to a studio or network as a package. This practice originated in the early years of network television. When it became apparent that the major motion picture studios were not going to develop filmed programming for television, the William Morris Agency (WMA) capitalized on the opportunity to fill the void. WMA would develop the premise, format, cast, and the writing and producing team for a new series and offer it to a network or advertising agency. Instead of earning a 10 percent commission on the salaries of its clients, the agency would receive a packaging fee of 10 percent of

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the entire production budget for the series. By 1960, WMA alone had originated and packaged twenty-six of the series on the network schedule, and according to a November 1959 editorial in TV Guide, a handful of agencies controlled more than 40 percent of prime-time television (Rose 1995: 192–235). The Transformation of Packaging in the 1980s In feature film, agency packaging was relatively rare prior to 1980 and was generally viewed as an unacceptable business practice in the industry. That changed when Creative Artists Agency (CAA), under Michael Ovitz’s leadership, built a clientele of writers, actors, and directors that allowed the agency to shop studios, offering “take it or leave it” packages for film projects (Singular 1996). Ovitz’s strategy was emulated by the William Morris Agency, International Creative Management, and the other core agencies, which began developing film projects around their clients, much like the major studios did in an earlier era when writers, actors, directors, and producers were their salaried employees. Commenting on this transformation, one top industry director observed: “When I’m putting together a project, the only ‘yes’ I need is from one of seven or eight agents. If I get their support I know I can set up a deal anywhere in town” (Brennan and Marx 1993). In the 1980s, to obtain financing in the face of rising production costs, film producers came to rely even more heavily on projects with proven themes and “blockbuster” potential (Baker and Faulkner 1991), making it all the more important to sign the creative talent that only the packaging agencies could deliver (Baughman 1997). Production costs for television were also rising rapidly in the early 1980s (Landro 1994; Robb 1992), creating a new opportunity for the large agencies that specialized in packaging to participate more directly in the profits generated by television projects. The Financial Interest and Syndication (“FinSyn”) Rules, first implemented in the 1970s, placed strict limits on the amount of prime-time programming that could be produced by the networks themselves, so until those regulations were phased out in the 1990s most prime-time series were supplied by the television divisions of the major studios or by independent production companies. When the licensing fee paid by the network for an episode of a prime-time series is less than the producer’s costs, the production company incurs a loss that can be recovered only if the series remains on the network schedule long enough to make it viable for eventual syndication (Cantor and Cantor 1992). While some prime-time series (especially sixty-minute dramas) were incurring modest deficits in the 1970s, by the mid-1980s deficits were averaging over $300,000 per episode (Robb 1992).

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Taking advantage of the production companies’ weakened economic position, the William Morris Agency developed a novel arrangement that other large agencies soon adopted. Under this arrangement, the agency waives commissions on clients’ salaries and receives instead a packaging fee ranging from 3 percent to 5 percent of the licensing fee paid by the network to the series’ producer. The agency typically receives half of the packaging fee up front and the remainder when the series becomes profitable. In addition, the agency receives 10 percent of all syndication sales (“backend profits”), if and when the series goes into off-network distribution (Johnson and Hontz 1997; Rose 1995; Singular 1996). Because, for a successful series, syndication sales can reach hundreds of millions of dollars, the agency’s potential profit from syndication is many times the fee it earns for initially packaging the series. 4 By earning a share of syndication revenues, the large agencies have, in effect, positioned themselves as profit participants in television production while bearing none of the upfront financial risks. By the mid-1980s, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which was formed in 1975 by five of WMA’s top packaging agents, had become the dominant force in television packaging. By the mid-l990s, CAA alone was responsible for packaging about one-third of all prime-time series on the network schedule, while WMA, International Creative Management (ICM), and a few other agencies had a major presence as well (Johnson 1996a; Rodman 1990; Sharkey 1996; Singular 1996). Packaging, Markets, and Conflict of Interest A potential conflict of interest arises as agency earnings become tied more closely to the profitability of a series than to their clients’ earnings. For example, if a client’s salary or creative demands are perceived to threaten the commercial viability of a project, the agency has an incentive to allow that person to be replaced by a different client represented by the agency rather than to negotiate the best possible deal on behalf of the original client. A prominent personal manager in the industry observes: “If you control both sides, where is the agenting? For all intents and purposes, you are negotiating with yourself” (Hollywood Reporter 1993: 8). In effect, as one industry analyst suggests, “the agents are becoming the principals” (Hettrick 1994: 18; see also Barnouw 1962: 29). This potential conflict of interest affects writers directly. An agency’s clientele of writers is the base on which packaging is built because the ideas for new film projects and television series originate with writers and writerproducers (Grover 1993; T. Johnson 1996a). In his analysis of the William Morris Agency, Rose (1995: 435–37) describes the agency’s priorities in developing a writer’s material into a film or television project. Top priority is given to other WMA clients (directors and actors) who are looking for material, and to independent producers who are considered to be aligned with the

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agency. Next in priority are independent producers who are considered neutral and who will do business with any agency. Lowest priority is given to clients of other agencies who are looking for material, and to producers who are closely allied with competing agencies. Indeed, according to Rose, it would be rare for a former WMA client who had joined CAA or a producer aligned with CAA to get a meeting to discuss the material of a writer represented by William Morris. The agency’s philosophy is that “if some producer was going to let [rival agency] CAA negotiate a studio deal for him, let CAA come up with the material” (Rose 1995:436). Trade-paper accounts of competition among the elite agencies for the most highly valued clients, projects, and agents themselves suggest that WMA’s counterparts in the industry follow similar strategies (R. Johnson 1997; Singular 1996). 5 Each of the large packaging agencies employs individuals who specialize in packaging projects for specific networks and production companies, and it is not unusual to hear that an agent has one or more production companies as “franchises” (Rosenfeld 1987). Thus, representation by an elite agency provides a writer with direct access to the dense network of recurrent contracting that defines the market for film and television projects (Faulkner and Anderson 1987), but not to the network in its entirety. Such representation gives a writer a distinct and substantial advantage in having his or her material pitched within the agency’s extended web of business connections, but at the same time the likelihood of the material being considered for projects packaged by a competing agency is virtually zero. Although a large agency’s interests may at times be at odds with its clients, the career prospects of a writer represented by an agency holding the power to initiate new projects are likely to be substantially better than those of an equally capable writer with an agency lacking that capacity. Responding to this reality, it has been increasingly common in recent years for smaller agencies to merge in order to compete effectively with the dominant packagers. Commenting in 1992 on the merger trends among agencies, Joe Roth, then chairman of Twentieth Century Fox (later chairman at Disney, where he reported to Michael Ovitz) observed: This indicates what agents are finding out all around—that talent doesn’t care about a lack of conflict of interest. The stars don’t give a shit about conflict of interest. . . . They’re looking for the biggest gorilla that will help them hold a line against the studio. This is a scary time for everyone. And everyone wants to go with the strongest foot. (New Yorker 1992: 37)

The packaging practices described above are not easily reconciled with market-based accounts of brokerage structures as efficient solutions for economizing on transaction costs in a labor market characterized by uncertainty and post hoc assessments of quality. They are more readily understood from

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a perspective that views core agencies as uniquely situated within intersecting networks of creative professionals (writers, actors, directors, etc.), who seek on the one hand to affiliate with projects, and on the other hand to affiliate with social actors (studios, broadcast networks, independent producers, etc.), who can provide the resources for new projects (cf. Baker and Faulkner 1991). The network of social actors defines a structure of opportunity for creative professionals, most of whom are highly constrained in their capacity to access this structure. Core agencies have almost exclusive access to portions of this structure, and their clients have a competitive advantage even if the principal/agent relationship fails to conform to the pure microeconomic model of agency brokerage. Thus, creative professionals may benefit greatly from a core agency’s capacity to provide access to opportunities, even if the agency is simultaneously representing the interests of both buyers and sellers of creative talent. A direct test of the efficiency-based models of brokerage versus a model that emphasizes core agencies’ structural power (power accruing from their positional capacity to provide direct access to new projects) would require empirical data on networks among creative professionals, among the social actors who can provide resources to initiate new projects, and on the projects themselves and whether each was packaged by a core agency. Unfortunately, these data are not available for television and film writers. 6 However, from the competing theoretical accounts already described we can derive hypotheses about patterns of agency representation, earnings, and employment, and we can test those hypotheses using empirical data on writers’ careers. Thus, while our data are one step removed from the specific social networks and projects that define writers’ careers, they do provide a means to indirectly test which model of culture industry labor markets is more consistent with the observable employment and earnings trajectories of film and television writers. HYPOTHESES Our first hypothesis regards the consequence for writers’ careers of type of agency representation. If agency representation functions primarily to certify and signal a writer’s reputation, then prior career success should largely explain why writers represented by core agencies fare better in the labor market than do writers who lack such representation. In contrast, if core representation represents a kind of agency market power that provides exclusive access to newly packaged projects, then clients of core agencies should fare substantially better in the labor market than do writers with comparable track records but who lack such representation. Our research, then, differentiates between agencies with the capacity to package new projects (“core”

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representation) and those that do not (“noncore” representation). We test the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 1: Controlling for past career success, writers represented by core agencies have substantially better prospects for employment and higher earnings than do writers represented by noncore agencies. If core agencies have the power to package their clients in new projects regardless of a client’s past successes, then the impact of prior career success on employment and earnings should be weaker for clients of core agencies than for writers who lack such representation. Accordingly, we hypothesize: Hypothesis 2: The effect of prior career success on employment and earnings will be smaller for writers with core agency representation than for writers who lack such representation. Finally, the labor market inequalities in the film and television industries generated by differences in types of agency representation may not be neutral with respect to gender, race, and age. Previous research shows that the vast majority of writing for television and feature film is done by white males and that women writers earn significantly less than men throughout their careers (D. Bielby and W. Bielby 1996; W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1992, 1993). Moreover, the expansion of packaging practices by elite agencies coincides with a period in which the earnings of writers in their forties and fifties eroded relative to their younger counterparts (D. Bielby and W. Bielby 1993). If women writers, minority writers, and older writers are less likely than young white males to have core agency representation (or any representation at all), then the packaging practices of talent agencies may contribute substantially to creating and sustaining stratification by gender, race, and age in the entertainment industry. Accordingly, our models test a third hypothesis: Hypothesis 3: Type of agency representation (none, core, and noncore) mediates differences by gender, minority status, and age in employment and earnings. DATA, MEASURES, AND MODELS The data for our study describe the employment and earnings trajectories of 8,819 film and television writers who were employed at least once during the period from 1982 through 1992. These data are from the employment and membership records of the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW). Each quarter, Guild members report their earnings from all employment covered by the WGAW’s major collective bargaining agreement with producers. Because the overwhelming majority of producers are signatory to the agree-

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ment, these earnings declarations cover nearly all writing for television and feature films produced in Hollywood. We have information on agency representation for 1987, 1990, and 1992, and our analyses apply to employment and earnings during each of these three years. 7 For employment, our pooled cross-section time-series specification is a logistic regression of the form: Lit = a + b1Xi + b2 Wit + dt,

where Lit is the log odds of employment as a writer in film or television for the ith individual in year t. Attributes of individuals that do not vary over time (e.g., gender, minority status) are included in Xi, and individual traits that vary over time (e.g., prior years’ earnings, years of experience, type of agency representation) are included in Wit. The term dt captures year-specific effects on employment. For earnings, the specification is: Yit = a + g1Xi + g2 Wit + dt + eit,

where Yit is earnings for the ith individual in year t, and the disturbance, eit, is assumed to have a mean of 0 and constant variance and to be uncorrelated with the other independent variables. We estimate two versions of equation 2. The first version assumes that the specification applies to employed writers and is estimated by ordinary least squares applied to the subset of writers with nonzero earnings in a given year. The second is a censored regression (tobit) model. Under this specification, Yit is replaced with Y*it, a latent variable or “index function” that applies to all writers, both employed and unemployed, in a given year. For employed writers, Y*it > 0 and the latent variable equals observed earnings (Yit = Y*it). The latent equals 0 or is negative for unemployed writers, and the observed earnings measure equals 0 when Y*it ≤ 0. Minority status and gender are represented by binary variables coded 1 for minority (African American, Chicano/Latino/Hispanic, or Asian/Asian American) and female writers, respectively. Work experience is measured as years of membership in the WGAW, and both linear and quadratic terms are included in our models. Age is measured by six binary variables for the following seven age categories: under 30 (reference category), 30–39, 40–49, 50–59, 60–64, 65 and older, and age not known. 8 Year effects are captured by binary variables for 1990 and 1992; 1987 is the reference category. Prior career success in a given year is measured by the writer’s cumulative earnings from work in film and television over the previous four years, captured by eight binary variables for the following nine income categories: no earnings (reference category); $1–$5,000; $5,001–$10,000; $10,001–

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$25,000; $25,001–$50,000; $50,001–$100,000; $100,001–$200,000; $200,001–$500,000; and more than $500,000. We use this parameterization of lagged earnings instead of a dollar or log-dollar metric to allow for the possibility of nonlinearities. Given the premium placed on “fresh new talent” in an industry with dense and relatively closed social networks, a writer who has not worked at all in the industry (and thus has zero earnings over the prior four years) actually may fare better in the labor market than someone who has been employed at the margins (D. Bielby and W. Bielby 1993, 1996; W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1992). At the same time, more so than in most industries, “success breeds success,” so it is almost certainly the case that writers who have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars over the prior four years will have much better access to those with the power to initiate and finance new projects than will writers with more modest earnings (W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1994). Controlling for prior career success is especially important in assessing the impact of agency representation. The elite agencies pursue the most successful and sought-after writers as clients, and an agency may drop a writer if it perceives that she or he has poor earnings prospects (Rose 1995). Accordingly, we estimate the net impact of agency representation among writers of comparable age, years of industry experience, and record of prior career success. Because the market value of prior industry employment depreciates rapidly (D. Bielby and W. Bielby 1993), our measure of prior career success ignores earnings from work in television and film more than four years in the past. 9 Agency representation is measured with two binary variables. The first variable is coded 1 if the writer has any kind of agency representation, and 0 otherwise. The second is coded 1 if the writer is represented by a core agency, and 0 if the writer has any other kind of representation (or no representation at all). Under this coding scheme, the coefficient of the first variable is the effect of noncore representation, and the coefficient for the second is the additional effect of core representation over and above the effect of noncore representation. The core agencies include the 10 largest in 1987 and 1990 (as measured by the number of WGAW writers represented by the agency), and the 8 largest in 1992. They also include 6 small but specialized and high-profile “boutique” agencies in 1988 and 1992, and 7 boutique agencies in 1990. The number of agencies we have classified as “core” changes slightly from year to year because of mergers and dissolutions, but in each year we have identified those that are clearly recognized by participants in the industry and in the industry press as having the clientele and business connections to initiate and package new film and television projects (Blum and Lindheim 1987). 10 We estimate logistic regression models for the probability of being employed in three steps. Model 1 is a baseline model that controls for year, age, experience, gender, and minority status. Model 2 adds the binary variables

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for type of agency representation, and Model 3 adds the binary variables that measure earnings in the previous four years. We use a similar strategy to estimate the determinants of earnings for employed writers. In addition to the variables included in the logistic regressions, the OLS earnings models include two binary variables to denote whether a writer is employed exclusively in film in a given year, or employed in both film and television. The reference category is employment exclusively in television. FINDINGS Descriptive Statistics Descriptive statistics by type of agency representation are reported in table 1. In each year, less than one-third of the writers who lack agency representation find employment. In 1987, most writers with representation were employed, regardless of type of representation. However, employment prospects for writers changed dramatically in the 1990s, and type of representation became much more consequential. In both 1990 and 1992, about one-half of the writers with noncore representation were employed, compared to about 70 percent of those with core representation. Of course, this difference could be attributable to characteristics of the writers represented by core and noncore agencies (like industry track record) and not to the impact of type of representation per se. Our multivariate analyses test whether this is indeed the case. Median earnings for employed writers differs dramatically by type of agency representation in each of the three years. Employed writers with noncore representation are compensated at least 50 percent more than those with no representation, while employed writers represented by the elite core agencies earn (at the median) more than double the amount paid to clients of noncore agencies. In each year, the median earnings of employed writers represented by core agencies is over four times that of writers with no representation. Of course, writers with substantial earnings potential are likely to find it easier to secure representation by elite agencies than are writers who are just breaking into the industry or whose most productive years are behind them. Our multivariate analyses calibrate the effect of type of agency representation after taking into account differences in writers’ experience and earnings capacity. The majority of writing for film and television is done by white males, and thus white men dominate the clienteles of both core and noncore agencies (as well as the ranks of writers without agency representation). By the early 1990s, the gender and racial composition of clients of core and noncore agencies were almost identical—just under one-fourth were female, and 3 to 4 percent were minority writers. In each year examined, writers age fifty and older are less likely than younger writers to be represented at all or to be

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represented by core agencies, and our multivariate models assess whether type of agency representation mediates the earnings gap between younger and older writers. Multivariate Results: Effects of Agency Representation Table 2 reports the results of the logistic regression of the probability of employment for writers who are active members of the WGAW. To facilitate interpretation, in addition to reporting the logistic coefficients (additive effects in a log odds metric), we also report the exponentiated coefficients, which are multiplicative effects in an odds-ratio metric. Model 2 shows that having agency representation increases the log odds of employment by 1.339 (holding constant year, age, gender, race, and experience), while core representation improves prospects even futher, by an additional .733 (again, the co-efficient for core agency representation is the incremental advantage to such representation; the overall effect of having core representation relative

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to no representation is the sum of the two coefficients, 1.339 + .733 = 2.072). These are substantial effects. Compared to writers with no representation, the odds of employment are nearly four times greater for writers with noncore representation (exponentiated coefficient of 3.82), and the odds are doubled again for writers with core representation (exponentiated coefficient of 2.08). 11

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Model 3 adds controls for income over the previous four years. It shows a substantial effect of having agency representation, even when comparing writers with similar levels of prior earnings, although the incremental effect of core representation over noncore representation is not nearly as large. Compared to writers with no representation but with comparable earnings over the previous four years, noncore representation more than doubles the

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odds of employment. Core representation increases the odds of employment by another 25 percent, consistent with Hypothesis 1. 12 Both OLS regression, applied to the subset of employed writers, and tobit analysis, applied to all writers, were estimated to assess the relationship between agency representation and earnings capacity. Table 3 presents the OLS regression coefficients, which should be interpreted with caution because they are vulnerable to selection bias (Greene 1997: 962–64). The coefficients suggest that among employed writers, no earnings premium is associated with representation by a noncore agency but a substantial premium is associated with core representation. Employed writers with core representation earn over $50,000 more than do employed writers who have similar demographic traits and years in the industry but who have noncore agency representation or no representation at all (Model 2). When comparing writers with similar track records (as measured by total earnings over the previous four years), a premium of over $20,000 is associated with core representation (Model 3). 13 The tobit analyses presented in table 4 are based on data on writers’ employment (for all writers) and earnings (for employed writers). The analysis assumes that the employment and earnings are generated by a single underlying mechanism that applies to the entire population of writers (not just to employed writers). The tobit specification models the earnings capacity of every writer, which is unobserved for unemployed writers and equals observed earnings for employed writers. Because tobit estimation produces a single vector of coefficients, it implicitly assumes that the independent variables have the same relative effects on both the probability of being a noncensored observation (i.e., employed) and on measured earnings. 14 The tobit coefficients can be interpreted as effects on earnings capacity measured in a dollar metric. 15 Unlike the OLS estimates reported in table 3, the tobit estimates reported in table 4 show a large and significant net effect of noncore agency representation on earnings capacity. The discrepancy between tables 3 and 4 is attributable to the fact that noncore representation has a substantial impact on the likelihood of being employed (see table 2), which, of course, contributes to a writer’s earnings capacity. This dimension of the monetary return to noncore representation is ignored in the OLS estimates but is captured by the tobit estimates. According to Model 2 in table 4, among writers with similar demographic traits and years of industry experience, the earnings capacity of writers with noncore representation exceeds that of unrepresented writers by nearly $111,000, and according to Model 3 the premium is over $45,000 after prior track record is controlled. Consistent with Hypothesis 1, the additional premium attributable to core representation is statistically significant and substantial: Earnings capacity for writers with core representation is approximately $24,000 greater than that for similarly situated writers with

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noncore representation (i.e., compared to writers who have the same demographic traits, years of experience, and lagged earnings, but who are represented by noncore agencies). Table 5 reports the results of our test of Hypothesis 2: Are the effects of prior career success on employment and earnings smaller among writers with core agency representation than among writers without core representation? We test this hypothesis by adding eight multiplicative interaction terms (core agency representation x each of the eight binary variables representing lagged earnings) to the logistic regression model for employment and the

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tobit model for earnings capacity. Both models in table 5 support our hypothesis: The chi-square tests for interaction are statistically significant, and the parameter estimates show that the effect of lagged earnings on employment is weaker among writers who have core agency representation than among writers who lack such representation. In the logistic regression model for employment, exponentiated coefficients for the interaction terms range from approximately .66 to .75, indicating that the magnitude of the effect of prior career success is one-fourth to one-third lower among writers with core representation. In the tobit model for earnings capacity, effects of lagged earnings are approximately $40,000 to $50,000 lower among writers with core representation. Additionally, the negative interaction terms reported in table 5 indicate, not surprisingly, that the premium associated with core representation is greatest among writers who have no track record in the industry in the previous four years. In short, the reputation that comes from recent career success has a smaller impact on employment and earnings capacity among writers with core agency representation than among other writers, and the greatest benefits from core representation accrue to writers who have no such record to signal their potential contributions. In other words, to some extent recent career success and core agency representation are complementary signals in the labor market. A new writer, or one who has not worked in years, can jump start a career by gaining representation from one of the core packaging agencies. Multivariate Results: Gender, Race, Age, and Agency Representation Model 1 in table 2, the “reduced form” model for the analysis of writers’ employment, shows strong effects of gender, race, and age. Compared to males with similar years of experience, the odds of employment for women are 21 percent lower (exponentiated coefficient equals .79); compared to whites, the odds of employment for minority writers are 27 percent lower; and the probability of finding employment decreases monotonically with age. Adding agency representation to the model reduces the gender coefficient by about one-fifth and the race coefficient by almost one-half, and reduces the age coefficients by no more than one-third. However, as Model 2 does not control for prior earnings, it provides upper bounds to the mediating effect of agency representation. The effects of gender and race on employment are fully mediated when lagged earnings are added to the model (Model 3). However, the effects of age on employment remain substantial, even controlling for agency representation and lagged earnings. Compared to writers under 30 with comparable track records over the previous four years, the odds of employment are nearly 50 percent lower for writers in their forties,

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fifties, and early sixties (exponentiated coefficients of .55, .52, and .51, respectively). The emphasis on fashionable styles in a culture industry that places a premium on reaching a youthful audience places older writers at a substantial disadvantage in finding employment, even when they have agency representation and recent track records comparable to their younger colleagues (D. Bielby and W. Bielby 1993). The tobit estimates reported in table 4 show a similar pattern regarding the extent to which agency representation mediates differences in earnings capacity by gender, minority status, and age. Overall, controlling only for demographic traits and years of industry experience (Model 1), earnings capacity decreases monotonically and substantially with age, while minority and women writers have an estimated earnings capacity of approximately $30,000 to $35,000 lower than writers with otherwise identical demographic traits and years of industry experience. Substantial age differences in earnings capacity persist after controlling for both agency representation and lagged earnings (Model 3). Earnings capacity for writers in their thirties and forties lags behind that of writers under age 30 who have comparable track records over the previous four years and similar kinds of agency representation by more than $30,000. The disadvantage in earnings capacity increases to nearly $50,000 for writers in their forties and fifties, and to more than $65,000 for writers in their sixties. The payoff for recent success is substantial, though, as can be seen from the coefficients representing the upper end of the lagged earnings distribution in table 2 (coefficients ranging from 2.329 to 4.516 for lagged earnings greater than $100,000) and table 4 (coefficients ranging from over $160,000 to nearly $400,000 for lagged earnings greater than $100,000). But beyond that, longevity in the industry is a disadvantage: In both the employment and earnings analyses, more years of industry experience is associated with lower levels of career success, net of lagged earnings. The net disadvantage faced by minority writers is mediated fully by agency representation and track record (comparing Models 1 and 3 in table 4), 16 whereas about one-third of the overall net disadvantage experienced by female writers remains unmediated. The gender disadvantage of nearly $13,000 in Model 3 is consistent with a labor market dynamic described elsewhere as “continuous disadvantage” (W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1992), in which women writers face barriers to full participation in the industry at every stage of their career, regardless of their prior career success. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS It is often said about the entertainment industry that “you’re only as good as your most recent hit.” The results reported in tables 2 through 5 provide

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strong support for this truism. Net of a writer’s earnings over the previous four-year period, length of industry experience has a strong negative effect on both employment and earnings capacity. 17 If anything, years of experience in the industry is a disadvantage to sustaining a career (as is advancing age). At the same time, the strong positive effect of lagged earnings over the

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prior four years (especially among writers who lack core agency representation) emphatically supports the generalization that “success breeds success” in the short run. These findings are fully consistent with theorizing on the nature of culture industry markets (Baker and Faulkner 1991; W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1994; DiMaggio 1977; Faulkner and Anderson 1987). Given changing and unpredictable consumer tastes, there is a high degree of uncertainty over the creative inputs that are likely to generate a commercially successful product. However, reputations fade quickly. Association with a project that has achieved great success in the contemporary marketplace signals the capacity to produce within currently fashionable genres, but participation in successful projects more than a few years old often signals just the opposite (D. Bielby and W. Bielby 1993). These distinctive features of culture industry markets also explain the substantial impact that the elite agencies have on writers’ careers. Representation by an elite agency authenticates a writer’s reputation. While writers build careers by moving from project to project, the system of recurrent contracting among a small network of successful insiders described by Faulkner and Anderson (1987) is organizationally mediated by the elite talent agencies who shape the labor market just as fundamentally as the major studios did in the 1930s and 1940s. Film and television writers build their careers by moving from project to project, so the organizational arrangements and personnel practices of any one employer have little impact on their career trajectories. But in a profession with an unemployment rate exceeding 50 percent, a writer’s access to employment depends strongly on her or his type of affiliation with mediating organizations that provide access to career opportunities. Our analysis of this industry suggests that the transition from long-term to contingent employment is not simply a move from “hierarchy” to “market” as represented in efficiency-based transaction cost models of labor markets. The labor market is highly segmented, but not by mechanisms normally understood to shape labor market dynamics. Brokerage organizations, not employing organizations, structure the labor market, and they do so in a way that is difficult to reconcile with an image of such organizations as efficient institutions for clearing markets under conditions of uncertainty. A small number of talent agencies transcends the brokerage role, initiating and profiting from the production of new television and film projects. These agencies operate as principals, not just as agents. Their influence on writers’ careers can be understood by considering the networks in which social actors or “players” (to use Burt’s [1992] term) at different levels of analysis are embedded. Affiliation with a core agency provides a writer with access to an otherwise loosely connected network of opportunities. From the perspective of writer as player, such representation fills a “structural hole” (Burt 1992),

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providing nonredundant access to information and resources. As a result, representation by a core agency works to the writer’s advantage, even if it precludes having the writer’s work considered for projects initiated by rival packaging agencies and results in the agency’s bottom-line interests being aligned with the entity that pays the writer’s salary. 18 According to Burt (1992: 192), the network relations that define an opportunity structure at one level of analysis should have a causal impact at other levels of analysis as well. We have analyzed labor market inequality among writers, but from the perspective of agencies as players one could analyze the generation of stratification among agencies as some successfully pursue strategies that allow them to provide exclusive, nonredundant access to information and resources. The innovation of “packaging,” which capitalized on opportunities created by the demise of the studio system and the rise of independent production in both television and film, is one example of such strategic action. Another innovation has taken place in the legal arena, as agencies have successfully fended off legal challenges to packaging from the talent guilds over apparent conflicts of interest created both by agencies’ profiting from production revenues and by their providing financial consulting to production studios (Rodman 1990; Turner 1993). Creative Artists Agency has been a leader among core agencies in pursuing what Burt (1992) calls an “embedding strategy,” superimposing new relations on top of constrained relationships by extending their operations into financial consulting, international marketing, telecommunications, and multimedia production (Flint 1994; Hettrick 1994; Hollywood Reporter 1993; T. Johnson 1996b; Singular 1996; Turner 1993). Similarly, at the level of analysis of agents as players, one could analyze how agents within the large core agencies assess their personal locations in networks of opportunities and constraints in order to evaluate whether to stay or move, either to another agency or participate in the start-up of a new one. Such moves by well-connected agents are common and account for several dissolutions and mergers among the organizations that make up the core sector in our study (Johnson 1996a). In short, as Burt (1992) theorized, a network of opportunity and constraint can be viewed as a causal factor creating inequality across levels—in this case among writers (and presumably other creative professionals), among agents, and among agencies. Contingent employment among professionals is expanding rapidly in highly institutionalized industrial sectors such as law (Arron 1995; Frederick 1995), human resource management (Martin 1997), accounting services (Copulsky 1997), high technology (King 1993; Slaughter and Ang 1996; Wysocki 1996), higher education (Plovika 1996), and medicine (Kester-Beaver, Wojciehowski, and Davis 1991). While these trends are relatively recent, in the entertainment industry the transformation from long-term salaried employment to contingent work was completed decades ago, and thus it pro-

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vides a unique opportunity to examine how the role of brokerage organizations evolves and the dynamics of contingent work among professionals in an institutionalized sector. A similar kind of segmentation could evolve in the contingent labor market for professional services in other highly institutionalized sectors. When competence is difficult to assess a priori based on objective technical standards, reputation may depend on a professional’s association with a broker who has a proven capacity to deliver a reliable supply of professional labor (Zucker 1986). As Pfeffer and Baron (1988) explain, in such contexts, brokered, externalized labor markets can provide “viable institutionalized alternatives to internalized hierarchies in dealing with problems of trust, opportunism, and ineptitude” (p. 284). This reasoning suggests that brokering organizations will mediate the labor market for contingent employment of professionals in highly institutionalized sectors. However, it does not necessarily imply that those organizations will structure the labor market to the extent that we have documented in the labor market for film and television writers. Our analyses indicate that mediating organizations segment the labor market for contingent work when the overall network of project-based opportunities is loosely connected and when a small number of brokerage firms is able to provide effective access to opportunities that cannot be easily reached through other channels. But under what circumstances do brokerage organizations gain such an advantage in relational networks? In the case of the film and television industry, several factors changed its highly institutionalized environment. Legal actions, a shift in regulatory policies, and the introduction of a new technology (television) transformed the product market, the channels of distribution, and access to financing in a way that undermined the market power of large production organizations. The most favorably located brokerage organizations took advantage of this opportunity with strategic action to expand and defend their unique structural positions. In short, the experience in this industry suggests that the social history of players’ locations in network structures is likely to be an important component of any explanation of how a small number of mediating organizations displaces core employing organizations as active players in segmenting contingent labor markets within highly institutionalized sectors. 19 In sum, our research shows that even when the employment relationship is externalized, it is important to “bring the firms back in” to understand the segmentation of the labor market for contingent work. When professional work is externalized in highly institutionalized industrial sectors, brokering organizations certify their clients’ reputations as competent practitioners. When mediating organizations bridge “structural holes” (Burt 1992), as can happen when a small number of them has the capacity to participate actively

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on the demand side as well as the supply side of the production process, their actions sharply segment labor markets to the substantial advantage of their clients and disadvantage of otherwise equally accomplished professionals. Our research documents this process in the entertainment industry and suggests how similar labor market dynamics could develop as externalized professional employment proliferates in other institutionalized sectors. 20 NOTES 1. Faulkner and Anderson (1987) analyzed careers in the film industry, but their definition is equally appropriate for careers in television. 2. The 10-percent agency commission is regulated by the Artists’ Manager Basic Agreement of 1976—an agreement between the Writers Guild of America and the Association of Talent Agents. No such agreement regulates commissions charged by personal managers or attorneys who represent writers, but under California labor codes only talent agencies can be licensed to procure employment for their clients (Cox 1996; Davis 1992; O’Steen 1995; Steinberg and Hazzard 1996). 3. MCA went a step further, seeking a blanket waiver from the agreement with the Screen Actors Guild that prohibited talent agencies from entering the business of television production. Guild president Ronald Reagan, an MCA client, signed the waiver in 1952. MCA was the only talent agency ever to receive a blanket waiver from the talent guilds, and according to Rose (1995:194–95), within two years MCA was earning more from the production and distribution of filmed television programming than from their agency business (also see Forbes 1965; Gitlin 1983: 146–47). By 1962, MCA had become a major player in both film and television production, and faced with the threat of antitrust action by the Kennedy administration, the company abandoned the talent agency business altogether (Rose 1995: 236–47). 4. For a successful situation comedy that has a run of 100 episodes, packaging fees would total around $2.4 million dollars. A hugely successful sitcom like “Seinfeld” or “Friends” can command as much as $4 million dollars per episode in syndication, so for 100 episodes, the agency’s revenue could reach $400 million (Johnson and Hontz 1997). 5. Headlines like the following are typical of Variety’s coverage of competition among talent agencies: “ITA Implosion Triggers Small-Agency Fallout” (October 19, 1992); “Ten Percenters’ Tiff Takes Off” (April 12, 1993); “Ten-Percenters in Turmoil: After Mergers Agencies Vie for Talent; Will Stars Realign?” (June 28, 1993); “Partners Get Chewed in UTA’s Family Feud” (January 16, 1995); and “Poaching Piques Percenters: Agents Get Ugly Over A-List Defections” (October 24, 1995). 6. Other research has relied on motion picture credits to analyze project-based careers and social networks among creative professionals (Baker and Faulkner 1991; Faulkner and Anderson 1987). However, credit data are available only for film and television projects that are completed and distributed, whereas most of the projects for which writers receive compensation are never produced (e.g., television series pilots developed by studios but not selected by the networks, and script treatments, rewrites, or screenplays for films that are never produced). For example, in 1990 nearly 1,600 writers received compensation for work on feature film projects, yet fewer than 200 feature films were released that year by U.S.-based studios (W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1993). 7. A complete description of how these data were collected, and their validity and reliability appears in The 1993 Hollywood Writers’ Report (W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1993: 5–9, app. 2). Excluded from the statistical analysis are data from 1987 for about 200 writers for whom data on agency representation and employment were not reliable. These writers were classified as “in arrears” (delinquent in paying their dues), and it appears that agency information was not systematically included in the membership records for these writers.

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8. Data on age are not available for approximately 6 percent of the observations. Representing curvilinear age effects by a series of dummy variables (including “age NA”) instead of linear and quadratic terms allows us to retain these observations in our analyses. 9. Using data from 1990 and 1992, we examined whether there was any impact of prior earnings lagged five to eight years, net of earnings for the prior four years. We found no significant effects on the probability of employment. In the tobit model for earnings capacity, only the top category (earnings of more than $500,000 in years t - 8 through t - 5) had a positive lagged effect. All the other effects were either nonsignificant or negative. Moreover, adding lagged earnings in years t - 8 through t - 5 changed the estimates of the effect of agency representation by no more than 5 percent. 10. Our coding scheme assumes a dichotomous segmentation of agencies into core and noncore sectors. In preliminary analyses, agency representation was measured with four dummy variables based on size (number of writers represented): small, medium, large, and very large, with a fifth dummy variable for “boutique” agencies. Those analyses consistently showed little or no differences between small and medium agencies or among large, very large, and boutique agencies, but substantial differences between the small and medium agencies on the one hand and the large, very large, and boutique agencies (i.e., the agencies we classify as “core”) on the other. 11. In a probability metric evaluated at p = .30 (the probability of employment for a nonrepresented writer in 1990), the effect of noncore agency representation versus no representation is .32 (i.e., increasing the probability of employment from .30 to .62), and the effect of core representation is .47 (i.e., increasing the probability of employment from .30 to .77). These effects are roughly comparable to the bivariate order associations between agency representation and employment reported in table 1. 12. In a probability metric (evaluated at p = .30), the effect of noncore agency representation versus no representation is .21, and the effect of core representation versus no representation is .26. These are net effects, pertaining to writers who have comparable track records over the previous four years. 13. Supplementary analyses replicated the OLS regressions reported in table 3 but used log earnings as the dependent variable. Under that specification, a small premium is associated with noncore representation (b = .065) and a substantial additional premium (b = .391) associated with core representation. Evaluated at median earnings for employed writers, the coefficient of .391 for core representation translates into a premium of about $28,000. 14. The log-likelihood function maximized by the tobit model is a mixture of continuous and discrete distributions and has two additive components. The first is the classical regression likelihood function for noncensored observations, and the second is the classical probit likelihood function for censored observations (Greene 1997: 965–66). Tobit coefficients can be decomposed into one portion attributable to effects on the measured dependent variable for noncensored observations, and another portion attributable to variation in the probability of being a censored observation (McDonald and Moffitt 1980; Roncek 1992). In our data, evaluated at the mean of the independent variables, the relative proportions are approximately 40 percent from variation in earnings for noncensored observations and 60 percent from variation in the probability of being a censored observation. 15. Under this model, earnings capacity, a latent variable, can take on negative values, whereas measured earnings cannot. The probability of a writer’s employment falls as the value of the latent variable becomes increasingly negative. However, the tobit specification does not imply that the writer actually experiences a negative cash flow in pursuing the craft of screenwriting when the latent variable takes on a negative value. 16. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the effects of minority status reported here reflect the career experiences of fewer than 375 minority writers (out of more than 8,900 writers), most of whom are constrained to opportunities within narrowly defined niches for “ethnic” television programming and film genres (W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1993). 17. In the logistic regression and tobit models, the curvilinear effect of years of industry experience net of lagged earnings is negative up to approximately thirty-one years of experience. Evaluated at the median (nine years), an additional year of industry experience reduces

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the odds of finding employment by 8 percent (computed from Model 3, table 2) and reduces earnings capacity by $5,586 (computed from Model 3, table 4). 18. A perspective on culture industry networks derived from Burt’s (1992) theory of structural holes differs from the model of “recurrent contracting” proposed by Faulkner (Baker and Faulkner 1991; Faulkner and Anderson 1987) by placing greater emphasis on causal links across levels of analysis. From Faulkner’s perspective, the role occupied by an individual artist becomes a resource by virtue of repeated collaborations across projects with other artists. But according to Burt’s perspective, what appears on the surface to be a labor market structure generated by the combinatorial patterns of individuals as they move across projects may instead be fundamentally shaped by network relationships among organizations. The packaging phenomenon described here suggests that the recurrent contracting patterns among individuals evident in the film industry are to a large extent sustained by exclusive or semiexclusive relationships between core talent agencies and production companies. In other words, the reason that certain freelance artists tend to work together across projects is because they are represented by an agency that places them as a package in those projects. 19. For a similar analysis, but in a very different context, of the evolution of brokers’ power due to positions and strategic action in network structures, see Padgett and Ansell’s (1993) analysis of the rise of the Medici in fifteenth-century Florence. 20. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Conference on The Social Construction of Markets, Firms, and Careers held at the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis, April 1, 1995. Howard Aldrich, Nicole Biggart, anonymous ASR reviewers, and participants in the University of California, Santa Barbara Comparative Institutions Seminar, provided valuable comments on an early draft. This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 89-10039).

REFERENCES Abraham, Katharine G. Flexible Staffing Arrangements and Employers’ Short-Term Adjustment Strategies. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1988. Abraham, Katharine G. and Susan K. Taylor. “Firms’ Use of Outside Contractors: Theory and Evidence.” Journal of Labor Economics 14, (1996): 394–434. Arron, Deborah. “Well-Chosen Contract Work Is a Springboard; Law Firms and Companies Are Overcoming Earlier Suspicions about ‘Temps.’” National Law Journal, vol.17, no. 50, August 14, 1995, C4. Baker, Wayne E. and Robert R. Faulkner. “Role as Resource in the Hollywood Film Industry.” American Journal of Sociology 97 (1991): 279–309. Barnouw, Erik. The Television Writer. New York: Hill and Wang, 1962. Baron, James N. “Organizational Perspectives on Stratification.” Annual Review of Sociology 10 (1984): 37–69. Baron, James N. and William T. Bielby. “Bringing the Firms Back In: Stratification, Segmentation, and the Organization of Work,” American Sociological Review 45 (1980): 697–711. Baughman, James. L. The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America Since 1941. 2d ed. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. Belous, Richard S. “How Human Resource Systems Adjust to the Shift toward Contingent Workers.” Monthly Labor Review 112, 3 (1989): 7–12. Bielby, Denise D. and William T. Bielby. “The Hollywood ‘Graylist’? Audience Demographics and Age Stratification among Television Writers.” In Current Research on Occupations and Professions, vol. 8, Creators of Culture, edited by M. G. Cantor and C.. Zollars, 141–172. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1993. Bielby, Denise D. and William T. Bielby. “Women and Men in Film: Gender Inequality among Writers in Culture Industries.” Gender and Society 10 (1996): 248–70. Bielby, William T. and Denise D. Bielby. “Cumulative versus Continuous Disadvantage in an Unstructured Labor Market.” Work and Occupations 19 (1992): 366–489.

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Bielby, William T. and Denise D. Bielby. The 1993 Hollywood Writers’ Report: A Survey of the Employment of Writers in the Film, Broadcast, and Cable Industries for the Period 1987-1991. West Hollywood, CA: Writers Guild of America, West, 1993. Bielby, William T. and Denise D. Bielby. “‘All Hits Are Flukes’: Institutionalized DecisionMaking and the Rhetoric of Network Prime-Time Program Development.” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994): 1287–1313. Blum, Richard A. and Richard D. Lindheim. Primetime Network Television Programming. Boston, MA: Focal, 1987. Boddy, William. Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Bodec, Ben and Alfred J. Jaffe. “Talent Agents: What’s the Alternative to Paying Their Price?” Sponsor, 107–109, February 7, 1955: 35–36. Brennan, Judy and Andy Marx. “Biz Bows to Ten-Percenters.” Variety, vol. 353, no. 2, November 15, 1993: 1, 54. Bridges, William P. and Wayne J. Villemez. The Employment Relation: Causes and Consequences of Modern Personnel Administration. New York: Plenum, 1994. Burt, Ronald S. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Cantor, Muriel G. and Joel M. Cantor. Prime-Time Television: Content and Control. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992. Christopherson, Susan. “Flexibility and Adaptation in Industrial Relations: The Exceptional Case of the U.S. Media Entertainment Industries.” In Under the Stars: Essays on Labor Relations in Arts and Entertainment, edited by L. S. Gray and R. L. Seeber, 86–112. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1996. Copulsky, Erica. “Temporary Staffing, a Growth Industry, Is Investment Bankers’ Latest Love.” Investment Dealers Digest Vol. 63, no. 41, October 13, 1997, 20. Cox, Dan. “Managers Rewrite Rules of the Game.” Daily Variety, June 4, 1996, 1. Dates, Jannette L. and William Barlow. Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1990. Davis, Ann. “TV Stars, Managers Tussle; Cases Reignite Criticism of Agent Laws in New York, California.” National Law Journal Vol. 14, no. 42, June 22, 1992, 1. Davis-Blake, Alison and Brian Uzzi. “Determinants of Employment Externalization: A Study of Temporary Workers and Independent Contractors.” Administrative Science Quarterly 38 (1993): 195–223. DiMaggio, Paul J. “Market Structure, the Creative Process, and Popular Culture: Toward an Organizational Reinterpretation of Mass Culture Theory.” Journal of Popular Culture 11 (1977): 433–51. Faulkner, Robert R. and Andy B. Anderson. “Short-Term Projects and Emergent Careers: Evidence from Hollywood.” American Journal of Sociology 92 (1987): 879–909. Flint, Joe. “CAA/Telcos Itching to Compete.” Variety Vol. 357, no. 6, December 5, 1994, 27. Forbes. “MCA: Putting the Business in Show Business.” Forbes, November 15, 1965: 20–27. Francke, Lizzie. Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. Frederick, Samuel R. “Controlling Compensation Costs by Using Temporary Attorneys.” Law Practice Management vol. 21, no. 5 (1995): 34–42. Gitlin, Todd. Inside Prime Time. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Gordon, Margaret S. and Margaret Thai-Larsen. Employer Policies in a Changing Labor Market. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, 1969. Gray, Herman. “The Endless Slide of Difference: Critical Television Studies, Television and the Question of Race.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 (1993): 190–97. Greene, William. Econometric Analysis. 3d ed. Upper Saddle River, NH: Prentice-Hall, 1997. Grover, Ronald. “Ovitz: How Many Fields Can the King of Hollywood Conquer.” Business Week, no. 3331, August 9, 1993: 50–53. Handel, Jonathan. “WGA Diversity Report Finds Declines in Film, Small Gains in TV.” The Hollywood Reporter, April 14, 2014. Accessed April 17, 2014. http://www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/wga-diversity-report-finds-declines-695967.

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Hannan, Michael T. “Social Change, Organizational Diversity, and Individual Careers.” In Social Change and the Life Course, vol. 1, edited by M. Riley, 48–89. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988. Haveman, Heather. “The Ecological Dynamics of Careers: The Impact of Organizational Founding, Dissolution, and Merger on Job Mobility.” American Journal of Sociology 100 (1994): 104–52. Hettrick, Scott. “With Telcos on the Line, H’Wood Follows the Money.” Hollywood Reporter, October 31, 1994: 3, 18, 21. Hirsch, Paul M. “Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems.” American Journal of Sociology 77 (1972): 639–59. Hollywood Reporter. “CAA-Credit Lyonnais Pact: Is It a Conflict or a Coup?” Hollywood Reporter, April 12, 1993, 8. Jacobs, David. “Toward a Theory of Mobility and Behavior in Organizations: An Inquiry into the Consequences of Some Relationships between Individual Performance and Organizational Success.” American Journal of Sociology 87 (1981): 685–707. Johnson, Ross. “Poached: As More Agents ‘Sign’ Clients from Rivals, a Generational War Has Broken Out in Hollywood.” Hollywood Reporter, December 9, 1997: 1. Johnson, Ted. “Agents Getting the Word: TV Scribes New Clients of Choice for Hep Reps.” Daily Variety, August 2, 1996a, 1. Johnson, Ted. “Agents Rep Banks, Trucks, But Where’s the Bucks?” Variety, September 30, 1996b: 15–16. Johnson, Ted and Jenny Hontz. “TV Packages: Agents Share Joint Custody.” Variety, June 9, 1997, 1. Kester-Beaver, Paige, James M. Wojciehowski, and Richard Davis. “Tales from Travelers.” American Journal of Nursing 91 (1991): 50–56. King, Julia. “Invasion of the Body Patchers: No Longer Just Working Stiffs, Contract Programmers Are Helping to Train Permanent IS Staffs in New Technologies.” Computerworld, vol. 27, no. 39, September 27, 1993: 113–14. Landro, Laura. “Television (A Special Report): Where the Money Goes.” Wall Street Journal, September 9, 1994, R4. Martin, Anthony V. “Is Contingent HR for You?” HR Focus, vol. 74, no. 11, November, 1997: 13–14. McCreadie, Marsha. Women Who Write the Movies. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1994. McDonald, John F. and Robert A. Moffitt. “The Uses of Tobit Analysis.” Review of Economics and Statistics 62 (1980): 318–21. Millner, Guy H. “Professional ‘Temps’ in Today’s Workforce.” Personnel, vol. 66, no. 10, October, 1989: 26-29. New Yorker. “The Players.” New Yorker, October 26, 1992, 36-37. O’ Steen, Kathleen. “Managers on the March.” Variety, vol. 357, no. 9, January 2, 1995, 11. Padgett, John F. and Christopher K. Ansell. “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 14001434.” American Journal of Sociology 98 (1993): 1259–1320. Paul, Allen and Archie Kleingartner. “The Transformation of Industrial Relations in the Motion Picture and Television Industries: Talent Sector.” In Under the Stars: Essays on Labor Relations in Arts and Entertainment, edited by L. S. Gray and R. L. Seeber, 156–180. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1996. Peterson Richard A. and Harold G. White. “Elements of Simplex Structure.” Urban Life 10 (1981): 3–24. Pfeffer, Jeffrey and James N. Baron. “Taking the Workers Back Out: Recent Trends in the Structuring of Employment.” Research in Organizational Behavior 10 (1988): 257–303. Plovika, Anne E. “A Profile of Contingent Workers.” Monthly Labor Review 119, no. 10, October 1, 1996: 10–20. Powell, Walter W. “Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organizations.” Research in Organizational Behavior 12 (1990): 295–336. Robb, David. “Primetime TV Producers Running at $500 Mil Deficit.” Hollywood Reporter, June 3, 1992, 1. Rodman, Howard A. “Talent Brokers.” Film Comment 26, no. 1 (1990): 35–37.

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Chapter Four

The Talent Agent’s Role in Producing Artists’ Symbolic and Commercial Value in France Delphine Naudier

Talent agents act as intermediaries between artists and producers. The central aspect of their work consists of finding jobs for actors in the cinema, television, and, to a lesser extent, theatrical industries. Because they intervene at the early stages of artistic projects, agents are, therefore, part of the economy of culture. Although no certified training program exists for working as an agent, and the profession is learned on the job, specific job skills are nonetheless necessary. First, cultivating a network of professional acquaintances is one of the key conditions for entering and maintaining a position within the entertainment industry. Access to this network is essential to being informed about artistic projects, which is attained through specific knowledge about casting directors, and film, radio, and television producers. Second, the industry’s commercial dimension requires know-how in terms of negotiation and value-enhancing strategies that are specific to the field. Mastering public relations is the basis for the long-term fiduciary relationship that links agents to potential employers and the artists they represent. Finally, legal skills are required for negotiating fees, royalties, and commercial rights. In this chapter, we will see how French agents use these three levers to construct the symbolic and commercial value of the artists they represent. This analysis will thus contribute to understanding the production of artists’ commercial and artistic worth by examining the relationship between these two systems of values (Hutter and Frey 2010). Working as an actor means to be known and renowned in the labor market for television, theatre, or cinema. Because building reputation is a “social process” (Becker [1982], 2006: 349), I will show in this chapter how recognition, renown, and commercial 55

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value result from the work of agents to produce belief in the artistic quality of the client. By focusing on agents’ professional practices, I aim to contribute to explaining how agents construct the symbolic value (recognition and renown) alongside the commercial value (price) of their clients. This chapter is part of a broader historical and sociological study of French talent agents. This research is based on over a hundred interviews with agents, artists, ministry officials, lawyers, and producers, as well as ethnographic observations made at three different talent agencies in Paris— one of the biggest agencies, one medium-sized agency long-established in the market, and one small, recently established, agency. AGENTS AND AGENCIES IN FRANCE Actors’ agents work in an industry that is characterized by project-based organization (Menger 1999), just as in the United States. The number of projects has seen a sharp rise over the last decade in France, where film production rose from 125 projects in 1997 to 209 in 2012 (CNC 2002; CNCIA 2013b). In 1990, 711 French films were screened on television, and by 2012, this figure had risen to 1,051 (CNCIA 2013a). These increases—in combination with the rising financial investment of the television industry in cinema—have contributed to reducing production times, accelerating the mobilization of the workforce, and increasing the flexibility surrounding a project-based economy. The number of actors and actresses has also increased, rising from approximately 6,000 in 1986 to approximately 12,000 in 1994 (Menger 1997: 21), and reaching 23,824 in 2013 (Professions culturelles et emploi 2013), while the number of employing producers tripled between 1987 and 2001 (Pilmis 2008: 51). These combined factors have made the labor market for actors more complex and more opaque. Agents— whose professional terrain has been progressively structured since the nineteenth century in relation to changes in the artistic market and to technological developments (Naudier 2013)—have therefore seen their presence in the market reinforced, to the extent that they are now indispensable as a guarantee of professionalism in the cinema and audiovisual industry (Menger 1997; Katz 2005). In France, the professional activity of talent agents was defined legally by the December 26, 1969, Act until the July 23, 2010, Act liberalized the profession and placed it under the control of the Ministry of Culture. The profession’s purview, previously limited to negotiating labor or rights contracts, was extended by the 2010 Act to encompass the representation of artists’ interests as a whole by including placement searches, scheduling, career promotion, legal and commercial negotiation of contracts, and advice, thus ratifying the reality of agents’ professional practice in the field. The link

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between agents and artists established by both acts is based on a verbal or written contract implying the exclusive nature of the relationship. The agency is remunerated to the amount of ten percent of the artist’s fee and from all payments received by the artist, whether fixed or proportional to distribution. As in the United States, talent agents are legally prohibited from producing. A Divided Market: Big Industry versus Craftsmen In 2013, there were 168 agencies in France, seven of which dominate the industry (Artmédia, VMA, UBBA, Adequat, Intertalent, Talentbox/Cinéart, and Zelig). Their annual revenue ranges from 6,371,000 euros to 1,001,324 euros (Mariton 2013: 33). Only one of the seven main agencies is headed by a woman. Among 217 agents in 2013, two-thirds were women, and they are more often self-employed, managing their own agency, or salaried employees in main agencies. The talent agency sector is divided into two main groups. On the one hand there are multi-faceted agencies that employ several agents, are equipped with legal, press, and accounting departments, and represent many different types of clients (actors and actresses, directors, scriptwriters, and authors). These large companies contrast with small or mediumsized agencies staffed by the founder, and sometimes an assistant, which only represent actors and actresses. The larger agencies represent the majority of the most renowned actors, actresses, and directors, while the medium to smaller ones defend the interests of artists who are generally less wellknown. In short, large agencies certify and expand the originality and value of the stars they represent, whereas smaller ones create and build the recognition of potential quality. Agencies thus form a stratified set of organizations ranked according to a hierarchy of prestige (Naudier and Roueff 2013). This structuring results in different professional practices according to the clientele. One of the main agents in Paris explains these differences this way: There are agents who are only concerned with actors’ employment; they are a kind of mini employment agency of the entertainment world. It’s very well, but there, you are in a situation where you chase after any sort of work [vous cachetonnez], and you have to run after Mr. or Mrs. Casting Director trying to say, “But take Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So because he or she is better or because he or she is good for the role.” And, there, it becomes sales blathering. It’s not this job which interests me! (Male agent since 1990, core agency, sixty-two years old)

This agent reveals that those at large agencies view the work of agents at smaller, less prestigious ones as undesirable because, in their eyes, that work entails being the secretary or the assistant of an artist; main agents also reject the model of the “mom” or the “nanny” agent. The power of being a main agent in the market translates to the assertion of a distinctive status, proper to

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those who belong to core agencies. Because they are in charge of negotiating big and complex contracts, and of finding sophisticated means of optimizing artists’ remuneration in relation to various modes of film distribution, they compare their activity to the job of a banker: We have to know all the mechanisms of financing. . . . Sophisticated contracts have professionalized this job. After a while, you are not a secretary of an artist, you have to create an infrastructure around yourself. If you are not a lawyer, you have to have one in your agency. And from this moment that professionalization brings people to realize that there is a possible profitability, an organization, and thus a real job. (Female agent since 1978, core agency since 1986, fifty-eight years old)

The business and legal skills of leading agents allow them to have highly influential power in negotiations because they represent the most famous artists. Sometimes this extends to putting together projects with their clients before looking for a producer, thereby crossing the boundary between artistic and commercial activities: I prefer to take up a project and to be able to be on the inside. . . . For example, when you have an author and when you have the rights to the book that you did not give to “Mrs. Publisher,” you can then attach a director, a scriptwriter, and an actor, and when you have gathered all the essential elements of a production, you can visit “Mr. Producer,” and you are in a rather more comfortable situation because you can say, “Here we are, here are the conditions.” (Male agent since 1990, core agency, sixty-two years old)

The divide in the profession separating powerful core agencies from smaller agencies is also expressed by a female freelance agent who contrasts her everyday experience dealing with casting directors with that of core agents. This agent’s words further reveal the structure of power relations in this professional field caused by this divide and illustrate the resulting heterogeneity of agents’ professional activity: I find that [core agents] are more managers whereas we are craft. Before, I was in the labor union but I left it because it was not possible to get on with these people! I told them, without aggressiveness, “But it’s us who discover all these people and after, it’s you who take them. And they say, “Ah, yes, but that is the way it is!” Do that or die. It is the big industry against the craftsmen. . . . We almost can’t negotiate anymore. [Casting directors] say, “No, that’s it. [if you don’t take this low fee, your artist] won’t get the role, that’s all.” . . . Now, casting calls concern the lead roles and the small roles, but there are no middle-range roles anymore. . . . I have casting directors who give me speeches: “Tell yourself that now we do only the lead roles, we want only famous people!” (Female talent agent since 1978, freelance, sixty-six years old)

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In sum, market segmentation involves contrasting professional practices depending on the status of the client. Core agents have direct access to producers and television channels whereas the function of smaller agents is to identify young artists and build up their initial employability in the eyes of casting directors. Because of the range of services that core agencies can offer, they are able to attract the most successful clients of smaller companies. Choosing Artists and Believing in Them An agency’s clientele contributes to its standing and position in the market, and an essential part of any agent’s job is identifying talent. Potential artists are spotted in theater classes and on stage, recommended by other professionals (casting directors, producers, or actors and actresses), or selected on the basis of application letters. Although each of these routes minimally guarantees that actors are socialized into the profession, agents prefer artists who have the most concrete knowledge of the profession. Undesirable applicants are those who are not aware of the rules of the game. Said one agent: Well, when I meet young people, if all they’re interested in is becoming famous, then it’s, “Thank you and goodbye.” I’ve had some come in or call and say, “Hello, I’d like to be an actor.” And I say, “That’s good, are you in a school?” and they say, “No, no, I don’t need one; everyone says I’m very good at acting.” They think it’s easy! (Female agent since 2002, freelance, thirtyseven years old)

An agency’s client list is its showcase and the way it is structured contributes to regulating internal competition among artists. To build a list, agents use objective criteria (profiles representing categories of age, sex, type, and career path) and one very subjective criterion: instinct—“le feeling”—the impression they have of the candidate’s personality. For instance, one agent hesitated to follow up on a meeting with a young man whose “too unusual physical appearance” looked too much like that of another young man of the same age who had “made her melt.” Finally, she refused to work with the second one because of his “lack of simplicity” and her perception that he was “too affected.” As this discussion suggests, there are multiple dimensions to an agent’s relationship with clients. On the one hand, there is the motivation agents expect from artists; on the other, there is the motivation of the agents, whose firm belief in the actor or actress’s artistic value is essential for an artist’s career development. These dual motivations of artistic and commercial interest that make up the relationship between clients and agents are strongly interlaced with the “emotion work” (Hochschild 1983) of agents that brings an affective dimension to the bond. There is also a temporal aspect to this

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link, because an artist’s career development calls for a long-term commitment. The trust established between agents and artists is put to the test by the structure of the relationship between agents and casting directors. Agents have a long-term interdependent relationship with casting directors, and they put their own reputation on the line when introducing actors and actresses to them. Clients considered unmanageable due to their behavior on set or their fickle approach to their work can therefore be excluded from agencies, even if they are extremely lucrative: Sometimes there are difficult actors who are very good actors but who are difficult . . . so yes, there are one or two people like that who I let go, including one recently because he’s let me down for 18 days in a row on [a hit series]. I had a load of problems with the theater where he was playing, too, because from the start he made things unbearable. So there comes a point where I decide I’m not going to fall out with all the theater directors in Paris, and all the producers, for someone who’s unmanageable! Because that means that next time they won’t take my actors in the theater. They’ll say, “Whoa! If she’s only got people who are a pain in the ass, no!” (Female agent since 2010, salaried employee in Paris, sixty years old)

When an agent believes in the artistic talent of an actor and trusts his or her personality, the agent takes a calculated risk by deciding to sign the artist. While representing an established actor can be a bit of a gamble, representing a beginning actor is an even greater one. At stake with a beginner is the agent’s reputation, because the artist’s potential and ability to successfully go through the ups and downs of an uncertain career are untested. BUILDING AN ARTIST’S REPUTATION Once an artist belongs to an agency, the duty of the agent is to make the client known to entertainment professionals in a positive way. The first step toward building the reputation of an actor is to make him or her visible on the agency’s website. Being publicly visible in this way is like having a professional identity card. Agents then manage actors’ careers through “reputation work” (Zafirau 2008). Zafirau defines this work by agents as “the intentional activities that participants perform in order to create the perception that they are legitimate, according to institutionalized expectations.” Reputation work “highlights how impression management is governed by institutionalized rules that are constructed at the level of the organizational field” (Zafirau 2008: 101). Although Zafirau is referring to the reputation work of agents to accomplish legitimacy in the eyes of their clients, his concept applies equally to the work agents do on behalf of their clients to establish actors’ credibility. While working at building their clients’ reputation, agents’ first aim is mak-

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ing them identifiable on the labor market. To explore what agents do to build the career of their clients, I focus on four components of reputation building that I have identified as key aspects of agents’ work: recognition, renown, image, and commercial value. Building Recognition Lang and Lang (1988) distinguish two dimensions of reputation: recognition and renown. “Recognition refers to the esteem in which others in the ‘art world’ (Becker 1982: 354) hold the artist. It depends largely on evaluations of artistic output by teachers, professional peers, and other significant ‘insiders.’ . . . Renown signifies a more cosmopolitan form of recognition beyond the esoteric circles in which the artist moves” (1988: 84). For most actors, recognition precedes renown, and these two facets of reputation involve specific work to create belief in the artist’s value in the labor market. Recognition is a signal of artistic legitimacy that enables an actor or actress to succeed in finding employment and have effective working relationships. It means that they are known by their peers, and that they are identified by their name and their photo in professional books. Because casting directors have the power to identify and advance young talent, encounters with casters are therefore crucial to furthering recognition. By attending casting auditions, actors and actresses carve a space for themselves within a collective professional memory, or remind others of their existence. They thus increase their chances of people “thinking of them,” as agents often put it, and even the chances of making a casting director’s “short-list.” Being “Pro” Because casting directors are the cornerstone of the relationship between agents and employers, as they are the first “agents of consecration” (Dubois 2008: 107) for beginner-actors seeking supporting roles, it is casting directors who have to be convinced of an artist’s qualities. Agents are in a position of strength with regard to young artists and will prepare their clients for these encounters: They (the artists) think that the casting audition won’t be seen by the public, so they don’t care. And so there’s a whole job of telling them, “If you can manage to get into the skin of the character even just physically, already, that’s going to really help the casting team, the director and the producer, to visualize it. If on top of that, the audition’s good, between two people who are on a par in terms of acting, it’s the one who made an effort in terms of clothing and who looks most like the character who’ll be chosen. (Female agent, twelve years’ experience, freelance, thirty-six years old)

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By choosing an actor for a small role, a casting director integrates him into artistic teams and contributes to legitimizing the artist. These casting choices send a signal to the other professionals who participate in the shaping of reputations in the other artistic markets. However, actors’ qualities involve criteria that are not simply artistic. Beyond the search for the best physical match for a given role (in terms of age, sex, hair color, physical type, figure, etc.), the meetings with casting directors also allow the professionalism of young actors and actresses to be judged. One agent stated: Cinema is an industry so you can’t allow yourself any temper tantrums, otherwise you’ll do one or two films and then you’ll be fired. I’ve mainly got pretty responsible people, pretty mature, who are where they should be, who understand the realities of productions . . . (Male agent, agent since 1986, company manager, fifty years old, interview conducted by Julia Mariton)

Building the Network Self-presentation work, which is performed by artists with casting directors, is part of the professional socialization of artists to which agents contribute. Agents warn their clients about the type of conduct required, and they ask for feedback from both their actors and from the casting directors afterwards. These aspects of the casting process—which continue throughout most artists’ professional life—are crucial during the first two years of an actor’s career, and are comparable to a trial period in this professional world (Cardon 2011: 167–168). Conferring with casting directors allows agents to understand the best approach for working with an actor or actress, but it also provides agents with useful indicators for how to consolidate the trust relationship between the actor and producers, directors, and technicians, among others. The way actors and actresses behave within working relationships, particularly when the pace of their career steps up, contributes to the neverending task of building reputation. Reputational signaling (Jones 2002) then becomes key to accessing to social networks of employment, and the evaluation that follows an artist contributes to furthering his or her symbolic value among their peers before they achieve visibility on a larger scale. In the professional sphere where information circulates both informally at fashionable dinner and cocktail parties, through telephone calls, and at film screenings, and formally through print and broadcast media, the issue at stake is to have people “talk positively” about clients. Gaining access to social circles for reputational signaling outside audition rooms and film sets is a milestone in an artist’s professional life. With a view toward this, agents organize events such as cocktail parties at their agency or dinner parties to which casting directors, film directors, and producers are invited in order to build interpersonal ties. This kind of penetration into professional networks contributes, in turn, to the fluidity of future transac-

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tions and furthers trust between the different partners. It also contributes to constituting social capital, which Bourdieu (1980) defines as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition—or in other words, to membership in a group” whose members not only have common properties but also “produce and reproduce lasting and useful relationships” (Bourdieu 1980: 2). To help facilitate relationships further, agents also intervene when necessary on behalf of their clients in conflictual situations to try to minimize symbolic damage and harmful professional consequences. In sum, being known inside different social networks legitimates the artist and increases the chances of being employed. “Networks are patterns of social ties and create structural embeddedness within the industry, and they become crucial social settings for the dissemination of the signals that constitute the face work that is necessary to secure employment” (Bielby 2009: 32). By facilitating opportunities for clients to prove themselves in a variety of ways across a range of settings, agents are instrumental to affirming the recognition necessary for actors’ future success in the market. Being Awarded The effort to increase artists’ social value through castings goes hand in hand with a strategy of professional elevation, of converting recognition into certified artistic legitimacy. Agents, in collaboration with production teams, try to obtain nominations for their artists from the various awards bodies, whether national, such as the Césars in France, or international, such as the Golden Globe or Academy Awards in the United States, Coppa Volpi in Italy, or Goldener and Silberner Bär in Germany. For novices, the first step in certifying recognition is winning the award for “most promising” actor or actress: For example, for most promising young actors, because casting directors do the shortlisting, I do some lobbying. Obviously, I send them the film again. I try to predict, to get a sense of their feeling, to know whether they’ll vote for this person. (Female agent, salaried employee for a large agency, forty-one years old)

Such endorsements confirm talent, increase market value, make an artist “essential” in future castings, and contribute to his or her renown. Building Renown Renown is the second dimension of reputation, and artists “can be considered to have achieved renown when their names have established currency outside the more intimate world of fellow artists” (Lang and Lang 1988: 85). For

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agents, renown merges the matter of media publicity with that of artists’ visibility on the job market. Agents work hard at enhancing artists’ renown in order for them to gain access to the higher segments of the market. The more artists are known, the more likely it is that they are sought out by directors, producers, and TV channels. While reputation is initially established by obtaining recognition from casting directors and peers, being hired in films by successful directors increases renown and starts a self-reinforcing mechanism. Worth by Association: Selecting the Best Match Building renown entails strategies by agents to bring artists closer to the main roles in small budget films or to be cast in supporting roles in larger budget films with bigger casts. Being associated with the star of a production is another catalyst for name recognition. The following agent recounts how she shaped the career of an actress—discovered as a teenager in an awardwinning art house movie—whose artistic value she was trying to increase by selecting roles that paired her with renowned partners: She started working with me on [an art house movie] and then she did a commercial movie with a lot of visibility and [a bankable actor], and a primetime one-off show for television with [a prestigious bankable actor], and she said to herself: “Finally, this is it, things are happening in my career.” Three films in a year and one play, that gives visibility. . . . That’s why playing with [two bankable actors] is very good. (Female agent, salaried employee in an agency, six years of experience, thirty-five years old)

Being matched onscreen with celebrities enhances the renown of novice actors because of benefits linked to worth-by-association. Agents define this strategy of approaching top-billing actors as two-pronged. Firstly, in addition to the importance of the role (i.e., the number of days of shooting), agents take into consideration the proximity of the fictional characters, even if it is a supporting role; for example, being the “son,” the “mother,” the “bodyguard,” the “boss,” or the “lover” of the leading actor/actress is important. Secondly, agents anticipate the potential benefits for their client’s popularity through exposure to a wider audience that comes with the casting. In this way, agents work toward enhancing the symbolic value of artists by selecting roles that provide them with greater prestige relative to the specific category of films in which they already have experience. All these investment strategies are aimed at creating a better place for their actors in the labor market. In sum, renown is a means to prospective roles as well as a strategy for increasing visibility outside of immediate professional circles. To accomplish this, media strategies are devised to expand the presence of artists beyond the core circles of other professionals and connoisseurs. This implies using forms of

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media coverage that are part of the “machinery for producing renown” (Le Diberder 2006: 230). I turn to this next. Managing Media Planning Appearing in the press or on television increases actors’ and actresses’ visibility. While the production team controls how films are promoted and calls upon the artist’s services to do so, this does not prevent agents from initiating other practical solutions to enhance their clients’ media presence. The following agent recounts how she strategically employed a publicist for a young actress who had achieved critical recognition: She [the actress] had interviews in magazines and on television, and she had a very good article in [big national newspaper], but she wasn’t very happy because it talked a lot about her private life. . . . I said: “I understand why you’re disappointed but it’ll be good for your image.” It will make her even more popular. . . . For producers, what’s important is visibility in magazines. Popularity. You have to be popular. (Female agent since 2007, salaried employee, thirty-five years old)

Agents therefore contribute to the economy of the star system (Benhamou 2002) by generating publicity for the media. Certain core agencies have a department dedicated to publicity, while others outsource this role at their clients’ expense. Media access is gained either by circulating an actor’s or actress’s biographical information or by getting them featured in articles or illustrated reports. Shaping a client’s originality in this way is an important strategy for creating distinction. This work by agents to produce renown contributes to transforming “small differences in talent” into “large differences in revenue” (Rosen 1981). Another strategy agents use to fashion renown and increase actors’ media coverage is getting their names linked to brands in the luxury goods industry or to large retailers. For an actor, representing a brand brings several benefits into play. The first is financial, as the money earned through advertising stabilizes the artist’s financial situation and thereby affords them autonomy in terms of artistic choices. The second relates to the media, as the artist’s reputation will be heightened by national or international press campaigns as a result of the good image of the brand. Finally, the choice of the brands and companies with which the artist’s name is associated allows the agent to model a career trajectory by sending broader signals to potential employers regarding the style, identity, and profile of the client. The most famous and the most recognized artists are requested by luxury brands like Dior, Chanel, or Lancôme to be their “muse.” In short, there are cumulative and mutually reinforcing benefits to associating a particular artist’s name with a particular

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brand. These strategies on the part of agents contribute, in turn, to increasing chances of a client getting future job offers. Making actors’ and actresses’ brand advertising profitable is yet another key strategy for creating renown. This detour through other types of mediums outside the core of the artistic job market itself can reshape a career in beneficial ways by using a marketing rationale that contributes to the creation of symbolic value. These investments outside of the realm of artistic practice per se are aimed primarily at financiers who analyze media visibility before creating budgets. Such appointments send signals to financiers who are looking for actors with the necessary artistic and media renown to help reduce the financial risks of the projects they are funding. Despite the obvious advantages these opportunities bring, they still are tempered by agents so as not to undermine a career: Bad adverts or things like that can keep a director [from hiring an actor] because he has seen the ads all over the place. And it won’t go down well. A prestigious advert, if it’s beautiful, I don’t think anyone will have anything bad to say, people will be more likely to ask themselves who that girl is. (Female agent since 1990, salaried employee, sixty years old)

Managing Artists’ Image Renown as a dimension of reputation implies work at self-presentation by the artist as well. It means that artists, too, actively contribute to creating social signs that are shared within the entertainment industry, and that they strategically manage their self-presentation in relation to the expectations of their occupational environment of directors, casting directors, and financiers that include producers and television channels. Managing one’s image as an artist means trying to create signs of employability and is an important form of career impression management (Zafirau 2008: 103). When agents contribute to building artists’ reputation, they don’t speak about works of art but about human beings who have their own personality and behaviors. Especially for actors, physical appearance is important. “As far as the disqualification of the actor is directly attributable in its physical appearance, his/her election is just as much. This way, the evaluation of the physical resources is the dominant principle of selection” (Katz 2006: 63). Agents therefore encourage artists to anticipate all sorts of occasions on which they could be spotted in public: I just tell them to be careful because [actresses] are always performing, so that means telling them: “Careful when you go out, even when you just go out like that. I mean, you’re an actress, you could run into anyone in the street. You can’t go out looking disgusting if you’re an actress. Try and do your hair, try and have a bit of make-up on, and don’t wear rags. . . . You don’t know who

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you’ll meet in the street. When you go and have a coffee in your local café, you might come upon a director, so keep that in mind.” (Female agent, agent since 2010, salaried employee, sixty years old)

This control over the image of actresses—upon whom standards of beauty weigh very heavily, particularly when they are young and have the most chances of finding employment—is part of the system of judgment that forms the basis of artists’ quality and visibility. Fashioning a public image with a view to gaining reputation goes hand in hand with a strategy enacted by creative professionals themselves. Artists “have to work to open up” the full range of possible roles, said a thirty-four-year-old female agent who is a salaried employee in a large agency. What is at issue is finding ways for artists to cross the threshold from one category of roles to another, so as to gain access to further levels of employment. The agent quoted below illustrates this by describing the case of an actress whose career began when she was a teenager: We foreground the “glamorous” side because she aged, she’s a young woman of twenty-four, she’s very pretty and she’s lost a lot of weight, she’s very beautiful. She lost weight because we found her a muse, she works for [a large international sports clothing brand] that was also part of her work on her image. . . . And that also helped us with the image. Because [she looked] sporty, slimmed down, you imagine a young sporty dynamic woman and then [there are her] more glamorous, more womanly photos in magazines. (Female agent, six years’ experience, salaried employee, thirty-five years old)

Depending on the specialized segment of the entertainment world in which an actor or actress initially gained recognition, moving on to a different type of media, such as television or film, or a different film genre or role, can be difficult. Strategies are implemented to effect this re-categorization by, for example, making an artist’s image more compatible with art house production, as this quote reveals: Did [a successful actor in the 1980s] really know Raoul Ruiz? No, right. I brought [this actor] towards that, but if I took him there, it’s because in his head, he’d already got there himself, I didn’t force him, it was him who, given his career and what he’d done, wanted to go towards something else. . . . It means going from popular cinema to art house cinema, and it wasn’t easy at the time for more politically engaged, more “art house” film makers to go towards [this actor] because for a lot of these people, [this actor] was blue eyes, white teeth, the physical type. No one knew the metaphysical side to [this actor], the anxiety, and his desire for that, and at a certain point he wanted to change that image. (Female agent since 1990, freelance, sixty-nine years old)

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This agent conveys her actors’ and actresses’ aesthetic aspirations by promoting her clients’ new ambitions among the directors she knows. These ambitions are redefined according to the artist’s age and the marks that previous roles have left on his professional identity, which can sometimes stem the tide of new projects. The agent thus puts forward an artist to potential employers along with a discourse about that artist to create belief in his or her artistic quality and versatility. Incarnating a wide range of roles enhances actors’ and actresses’ presence in the professional space but also in the eyes of the public. These artistic choices are interwoven with the logic of the cinema industry that emphasizes the financial benefits of renown to avoid the risk of commercial failure, a logic that is further consolidated by the investment of multiple television channels in project creation. Taking on a very commercially successful artist in an art house movie will therefore have a dual effect. On the one hand, it will allow the actor to access new aesthetic “employment registers” and, on the other hand, for the director labeled as “art house,” it will open doors to funding and television channels. Under the constraints of the market, these alliances that bring together two contrasting types of reputation—in terms of their respective cultural legitimacy—tend to partially dissolve the traditional division structured around the artistic versus commercial dichotomy that prevails over artistic work in France. The increased importance of television channels and private financiers involved in cinema funding contribute to the transversal nature of careers by encouraging renowned actors to cross various genres. Defending the interests of a well-known clientele reinforces the position of agencies in negotiations. They therefore sometimes intervene more directly in project creation, such as, for example, when an actress makes it known that she would like to work with a less well-known director, or when core agencies place several actors and actresses in a cast or even initiate packages that bring together a director, a screenwriter, and several actors and actresses (Bielby and Bielby 1999). Moreover, as I observed in a core agency, consolidating the prestige of a famous actor or actress can mean requesting changes in his or her role in the script to balance his or her presence with that of another artist of the same stature. Achieving renown increases, in turn, the agents’ power of negotiation including where artistic content is concerned: They offered me a film where they wanted [an actress that I represent] to play a girl from the suburbs [la banlieue], a bit trashy. I said that if they really wanted to have her, they had to change some things about the character. . . . We asked them to change her way of speaking, to rewrite the dialogue, because she doesn’t have a problem with playing girls from the suburbs as long as she can, no problem, but it can [should be] be an educated girl from the suburbs, why does she have to be trashy and vulgar! (Female agent, six years’ experience, salaried employee, thirty-five years old) 1

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Artists’ reputations are also fashioned by agents even before films receive media coverage. When dealing in credit placement, agents create and emphasize the status of an artist. An actor’s rank is subject to negotiations that are enacted at the signing of the contract with the producer. The practice of listing all professionals in the credits, category by category, is established through collective labor agreements. However, for actors and actresses, their exact place on the poster and in the credits is nonetheless part of discussions relating to post-production. Having one’s name in larger letters, before the name of another actor or actress, even if the role in the film was smaller, carries very high stakes in terms of visibility. Being at the top of the poster or on the right or on the left, for those who are still moving up in their career, indicates that they have crossed a certain threshold. This hierarchy of participation corresponds to how jobs within the cast are codified, a process closely intertwining artists’ symbolic and commercial value. These semiotics reveal the symbolic struggles in which actors and actresses engage so as to obtain first place, as this agent describes: Seeing where you are on the posters and in the credits, that can create much more fuss than money. Here, it’s about ego and they are all egocentric you know. If a name isn’t where it should be, it’s a nightmare. It can sometimes be worse than questions of money, it can sometimes lead to real drama! (Female agent, female, freelance, ninety years old)

In sum, negotiations by agents concerning rank in the credits or working conditions are crucial elements in transactions that take place. Names have monetary value and the issue at stake for artists and agents is getting as close as possible to the most visible artists. The particular placement of a name in the credits produces recognition for the actor on the labor market, and certifies his artistic qualities. If the film is successful, an increase in the artist’s renown and visibility will play out in future professional transactions. 2 Building Artists’ Commercial Value Reputation allows for the accumulation of the symbolic value necessary to build commercial value. The price of actors varies according to seniority in a career, the number of days of filming, the category of role, and the budget of the production. However, no price is permanently fixed, and the goal in negotiation is to keep the price rising and to make sure that a client is evaluated in comparison to actors of similar status. Converting the benefits of renown and artistic legitimacy into market value is paramount. The agents who represent highly prized actors and actresses, those who are most attractive to movie financiers, produce information about their clients that combine material signs, such as box office earnings or export revenue, and symbolic

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signs, such as a director’s reputation or a film’s critical success, in order to increase the value of their client. The greater the cost of a film’s production, the greater the expenditure linked to actor’s salaries, 3 although these expenses tend to benefit leading artists 4 at the expense of supporting roles: Small actors get no consideration, it is worse and worse! Now there’s a casting call for lead roles in films and a casting call for the smaller roles, and you know from the outset that the small roles will be badly paid. It wasn’t like that at all before. . . . And what has changed now is that making it in cinema now is almost impossible. At the moment they only take people who are well-known, bankable! (Female agent, agent since 1978, sixty-six years old)

Since the 1980s, television channels have been obliged to fund cinema, and this has favored the inflation of actors’ fees. Screening of films on television has encouraged channels to fund film projects that cast the most well-known actors in order to attract advertisers and/or to expand audience. This has led to an escalation in artists’ fees, and those of agents as well. 5 The financial negotiations that underlie these increases remain the main prerogative of agents as they also co-construct the market value of their actors and actresses. Indeed, it is the “contractual establishment of artists’ prices— which essentially reflects their renown or commercial potential—that sanctions strategies and power relations, and therefore constitutes the very heart of this activity” (Naudier and Roueff 2013: 138). The pressure placed on the lowest salaries has sharply divided the market, but negotiating by agents remains a question of power relations, no matter the size of the agency. For agents counting on the sheer volume of artists they place, negotiating contracts means constantly bargaining over rates in order to try and increase artists’ prices from one project to the next. This is especially the case at the mid- and lower levels of the market where fees are the only form of revenue. This contrasts with the capacity that core agencies have to negotiate a percentage of the profits generated by a film on the basis of their clients’ star power. Negotiating strength also goes hand-in-hand with the central position of agencies representing highly prized actors and actresses, but the larger issue at stake for agents is fighting reductions in the fees paid to their artists: A few days ago, I refused something again, but the actor agreed with me completely. I said “We won’t manage to go back up to what you get usually, we shouldn’t do that.” He agreed, so we said no. . . . He was being offered a third of what he usually earns. . . . But it depends if the artistic side is interesting. You can make a concession when the artistic side is really that interesting, when the director is really that interesting. Everyone, including [this bankable artist] can make huge compromises and you don’t have a set price for everything. . . . For smaller [artists], it’s the same thing, you can’t go too far. But afterwards, it’s very hard to fight your way back up again because everyone

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talks to everyone in the profession. (Female agent since 1968, freelance since 1976, ninety years old)

Negotiations surrounding remuneration therefore carry consequences. Every decision to take on a role is a potential risk that must be measured. The commitment made in terms of both image and the price negotiated for the performance in the project has a flip side: one or several commercial failures can then mean an actor being relegated to less prestigious and less lucrative categories of roles and rates. A “star” can take the risk of being paid the union rate to appear in the credits of a film that is important to him or her; however, this choice can have a negative effect for smaller artists who run the risk of loss of value. This is why, when highly prized artists agree to make concessions, there will be compensatory mechanisms, from which less renowned artists do not benefit: If, for example, an actor is considered to be worth 500,000 euros, that would be his salary. If we’re in the case of a production that interests him, but where the production can’t pay 500,000 euros for objective reasons that can be demonstrated, like a funding problem, a film that’s too difficult, and all that, we’ll say that we’ll take 300,000 euros and afterwards we’ll negotiate percentages. That means that if the film does well, we’ll get his initial value back [500,000], and if the film does even better, he’ll get more because he took the risk. It is normal! (Female agent since 1990, freelance, sixty-nine years old)

At the higher levels of the market, according to one agent, “doing the job requires project engineering . . . when you’re facing a problem of underfunding, you have to know all the mechanisms in place, so you have to be a sort of banker to manage to conduct the best negotiation” (female agent since 1978, associate in a big agency, age fifty-seven). The goal of these negotiations is agreements with production teams. In addition to salaries, they concern commissions on profits. These joint decisions are therefore arbitrated on the basis of a financial model—the cost of the film, the defined recuperation threshold, and the revenue expected from the different forms of distribution. Thanks to their expertise in the economy of the cinema industry, talent agents are able to restrict and refine contract clauses by creating new forms of revenue for the most renowned artists. Two major elements have contributed to widening sources of revenue for artists. First, the July 3, 1985, Act, 6 which defined related and ancillary rights, recognized the rights of artists and authors to earn revenue from different forms of distribution of their work. This has encouraged the fragmentation of contracts. Second, the subsequent diversification of distribution modes—with the rise of the DVD format, of opportunities for television screening, of VOD (video on demand) services and of derived products—has increased the opportunities for artists to earn additional revenue. Alongside the increase in the guaranteed minimum wage

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and actors’ fees, there are now also profit-sharing clauses related to the various modes of distribution that increase the revenues of the most renowned artists if the film is successful (Farchy 2007). CONCLUSION Talent agents are an essential link in the chain of the professionalization of the arts. They work toward socializing actors in this labor market according to a logic that is both symbolic and commercial. Where the symbolic facet is concerned, agents create reputations and construct the prestige associated with artists’ names. Shaping symbolic value is also essential to producing artists’ commercial value. Agents, positioned at the interface between art and business, therefore encourage the development of economic interest within the cinema industry, by interiorizing the new market rationalities and by encouraging artists to conform to the economy of renown. Agents are an essential cog in the machinery of the cinema industry and work as market operators “in the sense that they intervene in market transactions to influence them, and contribute at the same time to producing these transactions in a market form” (Lizé, Naudier, and Roueff 2011: 241). By capturing and producing information, their action in the market contributes to regulating the supply and demand of labor. Their efforts to enhance the value of their artists in turn consolidate their own professionalization as they operate the different levers for increasing revenue created by legal opportunities (ancillary rights), socio-economic opportunities (extension of potential revenue to all profitmaking distribution platforms), and technological opportunities (digital outlets). 7 NOTES 1. For bankable artists to attain the power to negotiate which kind of character they want to embody is also a signal of reputation in this market. For example, when actresses like Catherine Deneuve or Nathalie Baye decide to make themselves ugly, play without makeup, or personify lower-class characters, they break with their star image. Their stature allows them to accept small roles, to participate in modest productions, and to be paid less than they usually are without altering their standing. Rather than undermining their prestige, this flexibility enhances their uniqueness and increases their value in symbolic hierarchies. However, these choices involve careful negotiating of their place in the credits, especially when famous artists accept a supporting role. 2. Artistic status can be expressed by the request of dedicated staff in the service of an actor on set—such as a chauffeur, hairdresser, manicurist, make-up artist, or on-set childcare— or the arrangement of professional space, through the provision of a spacious individual dressing room or a luxury caravan. When an actor or an actress achieves renown, it also brings professional autonomy, as scripts may be sent directly to him or her. 3. In 2012, these expenditures averaged 3.7 percent for films with budgets below one million euros, but rose to 7.5 percent for films with budgets above seven million euros. 4. The budget allocated to stars rose 29.3 percent between 2011 and 2012.

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5. The fees of agents and other intermediaries have risen as well by a factor of 2.5, increasing from 0.4 percent to 0.6 percent the total cost of films (Bonnel 2013: 25). 6. The July 3, 1985, Act extended the clauses relating to copyright for audiovisual works and applied to them the regulations applicable to cinematographic works. This Act also established the regulation of audiovisual production contracts and instituted remuneration for private copies. 7. I thank Denise Bielby and Violaine Roussel for their very enriching comments. I thank Daniel Bizeul, Karim Hammou, and David Meacham for their reading of this chapter.

REFERENCES Becker, Howard. Art Worlds, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, [1982] 2006. Benhamou, Françoise. Économie du star system, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002. Bessy, Christian and Pierre-Marie Chauvin. “The Power of Market Intermediaries: From Information to Valuation Processes.” Valuation Studies 1, No. 1 (2013): 83–117 Bielby, William T. and Denise D. Bielby. “Organizational Mediation of Project-Based Labor Markets: Talent Agencies and the Careers of Screenwriters.” American Sociological Review 64, No. 1 (1999): 64–85. Bielby, Denise. “Gender and Creative Work in Culture Industries.” In Travail, genre et art, edited by Marie Buscatto, Catherine Marry, and Delphine Naudier, 23–34. Paris: Mage, 2009. Bonnel, René. “Le financement de la production et de la distribution cinématographiques à l’heure du numérique.” Centre National de la Cinématographie et de l’Image animée, 2013. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Le capital social.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Vol. 31 (1980): 2–3. Cardon, Vincent. Une vie à l’affiche. Sociologie du vieillissement en emploi des artistes interprètes. PhD, Paris: EHESS, 2011. CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie). “La production cinématographique en 2001.” 2002. CNCIA (Centre National de la Cinématographie et de l’Image animée). “L’emploi dans les films cinématographiques. L’emploi intermittent dans le tournage des films d’initiative française de fiction agréés entre 2006 et 2010.” 2012. CNCIA. “Films à la télévision.” Statistiques, 2013a. CNCIA. “La production cinématographique en 2012.” 2013b. Dubois, Sébastien. “La réputation: un outil pour gérer des carrières.” Annales des Mines-Gérer et comprendre No. 99 (2010): 64–73. Dubois, Sébastien. “Mesurer la réputation.” Histoire & mesure 23, No. 2 (2008): 103–143. Farchy, Joëlle (ed.), Caroline Reinette et Sébastien Poulain, Économies des droits d’auteur. Le cinéma, Paris: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, DEPS “Culture études” 2007. Fine, Gary Alan. “Reputation.” Contexts 7, No. 3 (2008): 78–79. Grégoire, Mathieu. Les intermittents du spectacle: enjeux d'un siècle de luttes. Paris: La Dispute, 2013 . Hochschild, Russell A. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Hutter, Michael and Bruno S. Frey. “On the Influence of Cultural Value on Economic Value.” Revue d'économie politique, Vol. 120 (2010): 35–46. Jones, Candace. “Signaling Expertise: How Signals Shape Careers in Creative Industries.” In Career Creativity: Explorations in the Remaking of Work, edited by Maury. A. Peirperl, Michael. B Arthur, and A. Anand, 209–228. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Katz, Serge. Les écoles du comédien face au “métier”: recrutements professionnels, classements scolaires, techniques du corps: une comparaison franco-allemande. PhD, Paris: EHESS, 2005.

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Katz, Serge. “Quand savoir faire c’est savoir être. L’élève comédien à l’épreuve de la perception professionnelle de son corps.” In L'accès à la vie d'artiste. Sélection et consécration artistiques, edited by Gérard Mauger, 49–70. Broissieux: Éditions du Croquant, 2006. Lang, Gladys Engel, and Kurt Lang. “Recognition and Renown: The Survival of Artistic Reputation.” American Journal of Sociology 94, No. 1 (1988): 79–109. Le Diberder, Alain. “Pour une analyse économique de la notoriété.” In Création et diversité au miroir des industries culturelles, edited by Xavier Greffe, 227–236. Paris: La Documentation française, 2006. Lizé, Wenceslas, Delphine Naudier, and Olivier Roueff. Intermédiaires du travail artistique. A la frontière de l’art et du commerce. Paris: Ministère de la culture et de la communication, DEPS, 2011. Mariton, Julia. L’agent artistique: intermédiaire culturel du spectacle français. Dissertation for the Master Degree, IEP de Strasbourg, 2013. Menger, Pierre-Michel. “Artistic Labor Markets and Careers.” Annual Review of Sociology, No. 25 (1999): 541–574. Menger, Pierre-Michel. Les Comédiens. Paris: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, La Documentation Française, 1997. Menger, Pierre-Michel. Les intermittents du spectacle. Sociologie du travail flexible, Paris: EHESS, 2011. Naudier, Delphine and Olivier Roueff, “Le monde clivé des agents de talents.” In Le Cinéma. Travail et organisation, edited by Gwenaële Rot and Laure de Verdalle, 129–146. Paris: La Dispute, 2013. Naudier, Delphine. “La construction sociale d’un territoire professionnel: les agents artistiques.” Le Mouvement Social, No. 243 (2013): 41–51. Pilmis, Olivier. L'Organisation de marchés incertains. Une sociologie des mondes de la pige et de l'art dramatique. PhD, Paris: EHESS, 2008. Professions culturelles et emploi. Chiffres clés 2013. Statistiques de la Culture, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. DEPS, 2013. Rosen, Sherwin. “The Economics of Superstars.” The American Economic Review 71, No. 5 (1981): 845–858. Rouget, Bernard and Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux. Economie des arts plastiques. Une analyse de la médiation culturelle, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Zafirau, Stephen. “Reputation Work in Selling Film and Television: Life in the Hollywood Talent Industry.” Qualitative Sociology 31, No. 2 (2008): 99–127.

Chapter Five

The Market for Actresses Gender, Reputation, and Intermediation in French Pornography Mathieu Trachman

During an interview, a French pornographic film director described his recruitment of actresses in the 1970s and 1980s: Casting was something that did exist. When you make a traditional film, you usually have the opportunity to meet the actors beforehand, or you’ll already have seen them on screen or stage. I didn’t watch porn films, though, so I had no way of knowing who these people were, so I had to turn to guys who knew the context, who were in the business. . . . In fact, what they did wasn’t so much casting as recruitment on my behalf. Recruitment really is the word. I talked about casting because that’s what you could call it, but it was really recruitment. They would present me with a selection of people, and I would choose from them. I would pick who I wanted, but based on the understanding that they were capable of doing what I asked of them, sexually, in the film. (Director, seventy-eight years old)

By underlining the fact that the hiring of pornographic actresses was closer to headhunting than casting, this director emphasizes the highly specific skills required to perform on the pornographic scene: it is less a matter of fitting a role than of being capable of portraying sexuality on film. The specificity of what is a stigmatized activity is also conveyed in his words: unlike other, more desirable activities, hiring is a question of convincing women to make pornography rather than of narrowing down the field of candidates. Performing in the French porn film industry is considered to be more stigmatizing for a woman than for a man, and women’s recruitment is done 75

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by male performers who act as middlemen between actresses and directors, not the other way around. This chapter is devoted to exploring the links between gender relations, the hierarchy of actresses and actors, and intermediation practices in the French pornographic film industry. Is it possible to identify the different values and reputations of its performers, bearing in mind that reputations are sometimes equally fragile for the industry’s directors and producers? How are we to understand the gendered dimension of intermediation practices, which is so taken-for-granted that it is never explicitly stated by its participants? Although the French pornography industry is an informal world, whose members struggle to obtain recognition as professionals, a number of elements distinguish this world from other forms of commercialization of sexuality—sometimes illegal, and often underground—where the relationship between service provider and customer is direct (Agustín 2007; Bernstein 2007). Within the world of French pornographic film, actors and actresses work with film crews with the common aim of creating a satisfactory end product for viewers. This implies certain conventions, visible in the stabilization of a pornographic script, and the collaboration of different people on different tasks (Becker 1982). Although the world of French pornography is socially illegitimate, it does share common traits with more legitimate professions organized as project-based work—for example, the importance of learning on the job and of developing contacts and personal relations, the fact that there is little “routinization” of tasks, and the creative dimension of the work (Faulkner and Anderson 1987; Menger 2009). By contrast, the directors and producers of pornographic films focus on one quite specific task, namely, to produce masturbatory material and transform viewers’ erotic fantasies into images (Trachman 2012). In contexts where work is organized in terms of individual projects, intermediation practices can help reduce uncertainty within the labor market and objectivize skills for which there is little in the way of institutions and qualifications for building reputations (Becker, 1982; Bielby and Bielby, 1999). More specifically, intermediation practices match jobs and talent, define work contracts, and disseminate information (Lizé, Naudier and Roueff 2011). In the world of French pornographic film, it is not obvious to outsiders that actors act as intermediaries, putting actresses in contact with directors. Actors don’t have the necessary legal status to do so, they are not paid for putting actresses and directors in touch with one another, and they do not appear to play a role in defining actresses’ scenes or contracts. Furthermore, their intermediation work generally provides few means of establishing an actress’s reputation, and its practice would seem to suggest that desire for financial gain, rather than skills or qualities, would appear to play a more important role in determining actresses’ employment. 1 The recruitment of actresses by actors seems simply to be a process of matching supply to

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demand with the intention of facilitating the operation of an opaque labor market in which information is not easily accessible, and where there is not an abundant labor force. However, I argue that it is reputations, and, more generally, the value of actresses that makes this matching process into a worthwhile practice. Actresses determine the value of a pornographic film more than any other element (technique, director, etc.), and are therefore in a much stronger position when it comes to negotiating pay, whereas actors are more or less interchangeable. Although actresses actively strive to find ways to stand out from their colleagues, it is actors who struggle the most to differentiate themselves from their colleagues. This asymmetry explains intermediation practices in the world of pornography: the question is not so much what the benefits of intermediation are for actresses as what the benefits of acting as an intermediary in the recruitment of actresses are for actors. The matter at issue here is not just the way the labor market works in the recruitment of actresses, but also how a market for actresses is constituted where they are goods exchanged between actors and directors. 2 My case study reveals the underlying hierarchies structuring this world of pornography. AN INQUIRY INTO THE FRENCH PORN INDUSTRY This chapter is based on my ethnography of French heterosexual pornography, which was conducted between 2006 and 2010, and is composed of interviews, observation of film shoots, and archival work (Trachman 2013). In all, seventy-three individuals were interviewed: ten producers, twenty directors, seven technicians and production assistants, thirteen actors, nineteen actresses, and four specialist critics of pornography. While the majority of those interviewed were still working in the industry at the time of the survey, I also met a number of people who were instrumental in creating the world of French pornography in the 1970s. As the French pornography scene is a small world in which everyone forms personal and professional ties with colleagues, the interviewees I met gave me contact details for friends or key professional partners so that I was able to broaden my fieldwork as widely as possible. I also made new contacts on the film shoots I observed. I observed five day-long film shoots, as well as one photo shoot. I gained access to these film shoots during interviews by asking the director’s permission to come and see their work. I also spent a week observing a film shoot, by following an actress who was performing in her first film, and joined a French production located in Spain. Unlike the day-long film shoots, where participants arrived in the morning and went home in the evening, here the whole team was together for a week in order to shoot two films and a few scenes for a website. I participated not just in the daily life of the team, but

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also in the project itself by writing the script for a film and working as a lighting technician. Among the various activities that commercialize sexuality, all of which are subject to moral disapproval but which vary according to the political regulations in force and the services on offer (Agustín 2005), the production of pornography has a number of unique characteristics that justify my approach in terms of a world of work. 3 Since 1975, the production and distribution of pornographic images has been legal in France. This change in the law enabled producers and directors from the cinematographic industry to become involved in what they considered to be a new genre of cinema, one which appeared to be particularly lucrative. Soon, however, the worlds of pornography and conventional cinema began to diverge: the additional legal and fiscal requirements (higher taxes on pornographic films, the obligation to screen pornographic films in specialist cinemas only), and the social illegitimacy of pornography meant it could not become just another genre of cinema. Ultimately, it was businessmen—in most cases from outside the film industry—who became involved in the pornographic market. They moved away from distribution through 35 mm film and theaters, instead preferring to invest in video and sex shops. Despite claims often made about the huge profits generated by the “sex industries,” pornography in France is, in fact, rather an “artisanal” affair, where the levels of investment are not necessarily very high (a film typically costs around €10,000 to make) and where films are produced in the space of a few days with a small team (filming generally involves around ten people). Although the entry costs of pornography in France are low, the industry is nevertheless organized around a handful of producers and directors who have managed to build up a back catalogue and who are responsible for the majority of films produced in France. Some of these directors and producers work outside France—elsewhere in Europe, occasionally in the United States—but most struggle to get established in an international market and remain limited to distribution channels at a national, or even a regional, level. A number of elements distinguish the work of pornographic actresses and actors from other forms of sex work. Men as well as women are employed primarily to satisfy male fantasies. The work of actresses and actors is governed by contracts, which do not so much define employment and working conditions as they do image ownership and usage rights. Actors and actresses are typically paid per scene, with salaries varying according to the production budget, performers’ reputations, and the sexual practices involved. When performers are featured in several scenes of the same production, a flat-rate fee covering several scenes may sometimes be negotiated. The amount of undeclared work is considerable. Performers’ high level of commitment to their work is understandable given that it is an activity that involves putting oneself (or a version of oneself) on display. Still, performing in a porno-

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graphic scene is not a quick or easy way to make money, although it is often an activity that is preferred to many other part-time jobs where hierarchical relationships are more explicit and the work is uninteresting. As in certain areas of artistic work, the individualization and personalization found in pornographic work relationships might therefore be something that is relatively desirable, but it is also something that makes workers’ situations less stable. This is particularly the case in France where, unlike the United States, there are no unions for actors and actresses to help them defend their rights. This instability, however, affects actresses far more than actors: while the latter are relatively few in number and have relatively long careers, actresses have short careers, and turnover is high. What is at stake here is not just the difficulty of the work but also the differential value of female and male sexualities. Actors and actresses embody different capacities that organize this labor market. THE BABE, THE BEGINNER, AND THE STUD: DIFFERENCES OF VALUE BETWEEN ACTRESSES AND ACTORS In the world of pornography there is, in fact, a clear hierarchy that distinguishes actors from actresses and that also distinguishes among actresses. Three key figures structure this hierarchy: the “babe,” that is, a particularly desirable woman; the “beginner,” who is just starting out in pornography; and the “stud,” a man with exceptional sexual skills. Their respective salaries are indicators of their differences in value. Pornography is one of the rare lines of work where actresses always earn more than actors. While actors’ rates vary between €100 and €300 per scene, actresses can command between €150 and €600, or even more. Above all, while variations in male pay are essentially determined by production budgets, variations in female pay depend in part on the differences in valuation of the actresses themselves. Bodily Capital and Desirability The hierarchy of salaries among actresses corresponds to a hierarchy of sexual practices: anal penetration pays more than vaginal penetration, and both are less than double penetration. This hierarchy reflects the difficulty and the reluctance of actresses with regard to certain practices, anal sex first and foremost. However, this hierarchy does not reflect a difference in terms of skill: such scenes are a standard part of any pornographic film. That said, there is some recognition of skill when it comes to so-called “extreme” practices, double anal penetration especially. A forty-one-year-old director explained to me that a particular actress “has incredible anal skills,” which means she is regularly in demand.

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Although sexual practices have an impact on salaries, other factors influence the value of the actresses themselves. An actress in her early twenties pointed out that “knowing what you’re worth” is not just a matter of knowing what different practices are worth, but also knowing what you are worth compared to other actresses. I have trouble knowing exactly what I’m worth. It’s difficult to compare myself with other girls. I mean, the girls in this business are babes. They’ve had their boobs done, there’s not an ounce of fat on them. And I, you know, I just fuck. (Actress, twenty-one years old)

This actress makes a distinction between sexual performance and “bodily capital.” When she says, “And I, you know, I just fuck,” she means that, from her point of view, all she does is “fuck:” the routine of pornographic work is here accorded less importance than the physical appearance and style of other actresses. As in other professions, such as boxing (Wacquant 1995) or modeling (Mears 2008), the body is raw material that has been the object of investment and hard work in order to meet the demands of a market and to enable its owner to stand out from others working in the same field. For actresses of all kinds, beauty is a form of capital (Kwan and Trautner 2009). Taking care of one’s body, having one’s breasts augmented and following a strict diet are all things than enable actresses to embody fantasy figures that are highly valued in the industry and to stand out from the crowd in the labor market. It is by developing their bodily capital that actresses gradually acquire a certain celebrity that justifies increases in rates, as the following young actress points out: Once you tell them [it is your] first time, that’s it, they know your rates, and if ever . . . because you’ve gone up a bit, done some big films, worked with some really important people, and everyone’s asking for you . . . then when they ask you your rates, you raise them. (Actress, twenty years old)

“Going up” means having the physical attributes and ability to do the job, but it also means being recognized as an actress with value. It is difficult to identify exactly what elements justify differences in value on the market for pornographic actresses. It is, however, possible to show that these differences correspond to reputations and are not just limited to physical differences, but also relate to specific uses of the body (Boltanski 1971). The increase in bodily capital also relates to the number of films in which an actress has performed, the media attention granted to her, and her know-how in terms of creating a fantasy figure. Ultimately, a combination of factors constructs a body that is more highly valued as the object of fantasies.

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On a given film shoot, differences in value among actresses are known and recognized by the actresses themselves and pornographers alike. A week-long shoot at which I was present provided specific evidence of how this hierarchy works. The team included seven actresses. Of these, two, Debby and Julia, stand out from the rest. The team is discussing salaries. Debby, who has not yet arrived for the shoot, is asking for between €2,500 and €3,500 for the week. Alexandre, the producer and director, does not yet know exactly how much; that will be for her to decide. Everyone agrees that it is Debby and Julia who are the two “biggest actresses” for this film. Christelle, another actress, points out that, the cover of the DVD will list their three names first, followed by those of the other actresses. Alexandre notes that, from his point of view, having their names on the film will mean that the buyer—who will distribute the film on the market— “will easily pay 1,000 or 2,000 more for it.” (Field notes, Spain, July 2007).

The importance of the three lead actresses is therefore obvious to everyone, including the other actresses, who were each paid €1,000 for the week, as a flat rate rather than a per-scene rate. This distinction was completely normal to Sophie, a twenty-year-old actress who had only performed in a few scenes, and who pointed out that Debby and Julia are “pros, they know the business, they’ve done it for much longer.” In sum, the determining factor is not just the actresses’ physical appearance, but also the valuation of their professional skills acquired in the course of their careers. While this partly includes sexual techniques, it also refers, as in other kinds of sexual performance (Trautner, 2005), to ways of positioning themselves relative to the ability of others to produce an image that is highly arousing. “Refreshing the Portfolio” Making a pornographic film depends not just upon the development of effective fantasy figures, but also on the creation of original products. In a parallel to those actresses who have acquired a certain capital, pornographers place value on beginners, “new blood,” “fresh talent,” who are relatively young and who also have the novelty factor on the market of fantasies. For example, a director who worked in the industry in the 1970s talked about the need to have “new material that’s a bit different.” “I worked a lot with Marilyn Jess and with Olinka [two actresses who were well known in the 1970s and 1980s], but when there was a new girl, it was good, it meant there’d be something new.” An actor confirmed the need to keep “refreshing the portfolio.” Casting sessions were, above all, for actresses, because you had to keep refreshing the portfolio. The girls didn’t last that long. When it came to the guys,

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Beginners, though to a certain extent less highly regarded than more established actresses because they do not yet “know the ropes” of the profession, are nevertheless valued by pornographers precisely because of their “beginner” status. The value that is attributed to beginners plays a role in weakening the position of actresses who manage to build up a reputation. The short, one-totwo year careers of most actresses reflect this. To put this in perspective, the average age of the active directors interviewed during this study was fortyone, for actors it was thirty-six, while for actresses it was twenty-six. One hypothesis for this difference is that it is the result of competition between “babes” and “beginners.” The difficulty for established actresses in this competition is that raising their rates becomes a key mechanism that can jeopardize the longevity of their careers, even though they want to continue acting. As an actress quoted earlier points out, when an actress “goes up,” she can increase her rates, but this generates a certain reluctance on the part of pornographers “because they don’t want to cough up [the additional money].” This resistance is also mentioned by another actress, who gradually widened the market in which she worked in order to stay employed, and acquired an international reputation because of it. I’d worked in Budapest, I’d worked in the United States, I’d been on several covers, I was starting to do some really hardcore stuff, and everyone thought I performed really well, so I felt that I shouldn’t still be on beginner’s rates. So I was paid a bit more, but not as much as I felt I should be. . . . The highest rate I got up to was €600. The most I was ever paid was in England—£800 for anal. When I returned to Budapest, I asked for a bit more—up to €900 for double penetration. And when I arrived, my agent told me, “Yeah, in the end we reduced your rates, otherwise you wouldn’t get any work. If the first scenes go well, we’ll give you the rate you want.” Everything went really well, but I didn’t get the rates I asked for. I was paid €100 or €200 less. When I was looking to go back to Budapest, I said that people knew me now, that I had a reputation, that I could do more hardcore stuff than most Romanian and Czech girls. Out of all of the girls, I was the only one capable of fisting and being fisted. When I said, “I want these rates,” they told me, “We’re fed up with girls who act like little princesses. If you don’t want these rates, there are loads of girls who’d be delighted to accept them.” (Actress, twenty-five years old)

Keeping rates as low as possible is not just about reducing production costs; it is also about devaluing work, in particular by using competition with beginners willing to accept lower rates as leverage. Ultimately, market mechanisms keep qualified actresses in the same economic position as beginners.

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The Value of an Erection The criteria that differentiate actors are not based on a scale of practices, or on a level of celebrity that enables them to acquire bodily capital. Although the production of male fantasies means that significant distinctions are made between actresses because they are considered products that are both valued and differentiated, ordinariness can be an asset for actors. A fifty-four-yearold director noted, for instance, that he liked to use “average guys, by which (he) means guys who aren’t actors but who are exceptional performers, who might be hairy, someone quite normal-looking that people can identify with.” However, as this director also suggests, an actor is defined by his capacity for performance, which is measured in terms that are not so much aesthetic as sexual. Valued actors are those that “you can count on,” that is, who can obtain and maintain an erection at the necessary moment. An actor mentioned that his problems in maintaining an erection, which are shared by other actors, discredited him with regard to certain pornographers: There was a scene where I didn’t perform particularly well, and so he doesn’t take on me anymore. And, as everyone hears about everything in the industry, that created some tensions, including with other actors. For example, with Guillaume [another, more established, actor], there was a bit of a problem with rumours: he spread the word that I wasn’t a good performer, and that I was a bad actor. (Actor, twenty-eight years old)

In a close-knit world like the pornography industry, reputations are easy to make and break. Actors participate in the construction of reputations, sometimes by suggesting that they are the only ones that can be counted on and by calling into question the skills of others. However, building a reputation on the ability to maintain an erection is not without its risks. First and foremost, because an erection is a sign of desire, the actors’ work is “normalized” to a certain extent. Pornographers may be of the view that a scene is in itself something of a sexual “reward” for the actor, and, indeed, certain actors help to perpetuate this image of their work. For instance, one actor, aged twenty-nine, who is a private tutor by profession and has been working in pornography for three years, points out that what he earns through porn work is pocket money and is sometimes negligible compared to the sexual satisfaction that he gains from performing: “What interests me most is working with girls I find attractive. If you told me tomorrow, ‘You’re going to work with American girls,’ I’d do it for free.” Pornographic work can thus appear to be an opportunity not just to have sexual intercourse, but, above all, to “tap some hot ass,” in the words of another actor. Furthermore, although the ability to maintain an erection is presented in pornographers’ and actors’ professional rhetoric as an essential skill that

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justifies the closed nature of the labor market, established actors sometimes have difficulty staying hard throughout a shoot or a scene. 4 On almost every shoot that I observed, this problem arose at some point, creating tensions within the team. The scene between Debby and Marcelo begins. It takes place in quite a small bedroom in the villa; Alexandre, the director, has difficulty positioning the lights and the camera. Shortly after the start of the scene, Marcelo has an erection issue. He asks for the scene to be stopped several times, making the process rather laborious. He leaves the room, goes to masturbate in the toilet, and asks Alexandre if he can change position . . . Debby helps him by masturbating him and fellating him.

He is in a difficult position: the simple fact of being unable to get hard brings filming to a halt and stops work for the whole team. Although directors, in many interviews, describe situations where actors can’t get hard as catastrophic, Alexandre tries to be reassuring. Later, though, he tells me that the scene was a pain to shoot. An erection problem is often presented as a professional failing, but when such a problem occurs, everyone on the shoot will try to minimize the incident so as not to exacerbate the situation and to ensure the actor regains confidence. On this occasion, however, Debby becomes more and more exasperated by the situation, and makes this clear to Marcelo: she berates him in Hungarian; the discussion is tense. That evening, Marcelo chats with me in English. He talks about his problems that morning and his nervousness. He says that Debby is very harsh when he has an erection issue. For him, his profession is not “fucking normal.” He seems vulnerable to me. Debby joins us and embraces him to comfort him. (Field notes, Spain, July 2007)

Although pornographers present professionals’ erection abilities as an essential skill that is taken as a given during shooting, and an asset that enables well-known and established actors to get work, it is nevertheless something that is managed both individually and collectively. Actors present their difficulties in staying hard throughout a scene as a form of work-related “wear and tear,” rather than a consequence of stress, even though stress can, of course, be a contributing factor during an actor’s first scenes. Although the reputations of actresses and actors are based on different factors—respectively, on bodily capital and the ability to maintain an erection—these reputations are relatively fragile in both cases. Actress “babes” face competition from beginners, who have the advantage of not having been seen yet; established actors are never immune to the risk of erection issues. As a result, actresses in the porn world experience an uncertainty about the value system that distinguishes one from another, while actors must struggle

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to differentiate themselves from their colleagues and as a result experience a more general uncertainty about the value of their work per se. This asymmetry and this uncertainty are key factors in explaining intermediation practices in the world of pornography. “ACTING AS AGENTS” A director who worked in the industry in the 1970s explains his recruitment practices: How did you find actors and actresses? There were some guys who tried to act as agents. It was the actors who would bring them along, and as I was friends with all the actors, they would tell me, “By the way, there’s this new girl, give her a call.” That was it—it worked by word of mouth. As for the actors themselves, they were often recruited at sex parties or in swingers’ clubs. There were guys who asked around. So the girls would find themselves on a shoot with more experienced actresses, who would give them my number. (Director, seventy years old)

To clarify, these men are said to act as agents rather than actually be agents, as pornographic agents are prohibited by French law. They, in fact, act as agents and casters all at once, as is described below. Although actors might pass on contacts, the actors are above all looking for new actresses. Still, intermediation practices do exist, albeit informally, whereby actors put their sexual sociability to use. The question is: why do they seek to “act as agents”? Discredited Middlemen Although pornography agencies exist in other European countries, like Hungary, they are prohibited in France as a result of the law on procuring. In France, procuring falls under the loosely defined category of public policy (Mainsant 2008) that condemns the act of “making profit from the prostitution of others” and “aiding and abetting in the prostitution of others” (Article L. 225-5 of the French Criminal Code). As a result, pornography agencies are not authorized by the law in France. This prohibition also ensures that in the eyes of the public authorities, the boundary between pornography and prostitution is clearly drawn. But this framework is complicated by several factors. Because it is not rare for couples to come into the pornography industry together, the illegal figure of the pimp has a non-illegal, but still illegitimate counterpart in the porn industry, namely, the partner of the first-time actress, who enters into the profession at the same time she does. Indeed, there are a number of

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reasons for the practice of couples entering together, one being that pornography can be seen as an adventure, in particular for couples who are used to multi-partner sexual practices, such as in “swinging” contexts. Another is that certain actresses insist, especially at the start of their careers, on performing scenes exclusively with a preferred partner. Men in the world of pornography consistently offer the same explanation. Because it is difficult for men to get into pornography, beginner actors use their partners to enter the profession. However, producers and directors tend to distrust such men who enter pornography with their girlfriend. This converges to a suspicion toward beginner actors in general, who are considered by directors and producers as unreliable, and incapable, in particular, of getting an erection at the right moment and for the right duration. It also reflects an overall value judgment made by professionals concerning the partner’s control over the actress; the partner is felt to be taking advantage of the actress to get into the profession, or even to make money. Ultimately, the partner is viewed as a pimp, thereby confirming, by contrast, the professionalism of experienced pornographers. Although actresses’ partners are perceived by professionals as a constraint to be worked around, the absence of pornography talent and casting agencies in France is sometimes regretted by directors and producers, such as those who have experience in other pornographic labor markets. In Budapest, for example, agencies propose catalogues of actors and actresses. A director in his early sixties described this practice and its advantages: When I know I’m going to be making a film, I look online, I do my casting remotely, and then they organize a casting session for me when I arrive there, with new girls who aren’t online yet, who are beginners. You choose them like that. . . . They provide an actress—it’s a bit like at a restaurant—and depending on the services you want this actress to perform, there’s a particular rate; and the rates depend on what you ask them to do. For example [he goes to find a catalogue of actresses]: Carla Cox asks for €500 for a normal scene, €600 for an anal scene, and if she does a scene with two partners, a DP [double penetration], it’s €700. Other actresses start a bit lower. (Director, sixty-two years old)

Although the possibility of using pornography casting agencies explains the recent trend of French film shoots to relocate to other countries such as Hungary, this is not occurring for primarily economic reasons. Directors and producers stress that relocating there reduces the opacity of the labor market because it enables them to contact performers who want to work in particular types of scenes and for the relative ease in knowing for how much instead of having to wait for the right contact, as in France, to cast a film. Because of the way the porn industry is organized in France, it is partly the actors who take care of this “matchmaking” work.

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Actors and Middlemen “Matchmaking” is the preserve of established actors in the pornography industry, who collaborate with many different people in the course of their work and thus build up a network of contacts. A young producer and director, who began working in pornography in 2007, described how matchmaking middlemen worked for them. One particular actor became “the company’s patron,” as he enabled them to acquire the connections they were lacking and “gave them quite a few contacts in terms of actors and actresses”; they obtained “quite a few phone numbers thanks to him” (director, thirtythree years old). In this context, actresses’ contact details become objects of transactions. He also provided them with information about rates and helped them find filming locations. His role was not just to provide contacts, but also to put together projects, both financially and aesthetically. In the context of an opaque industry, one without any collective structures, he clarified working arrangements and was thus in a position to hire certain people rather than others. Indeed, taking charge of projects in this way comes at a price. The producer in question points out that this actor was hired in all his films. He also explains how another very well-known actor gave him the contact details of an actress: For his scene, Rémy asked us for €500. On a personal level, we don’t get on very well, and also we don’t make a lot of profit. . . . Nevertheless, we didn’t refuse: it was the first time we’d worked with him, we needed a pro for the film, and he did provide contact details for an actress. It works like that a lot: “I’ll give you a phone number, but you’ll owe me. There’s no agent, but I was the middleman, so you owe me anyway.” After that, he provided us with other contacts, but for nothing. (Producer, thirty-one years old)

This salary is exceptional: it takes into account not just Rémy’s status as one of the rare French actors to have made a name for himself, but also the fact that he provided contact details for actresses. His salary recompenses his work as both an actor and a middleman. Although the frequency of such practices is difficult to evaluate, it is safe to say that it is not rare. For actors with less capital than Rémy, acting as a middleman would seem to be a necessity; in a context where the hierarchy of actors makes a distinction between professionals and beginners, but makes little distinction between professionals, providing contact details for actresses justifies work for actors. An anecdote illustrates this point. It was recounted during an interview conducted in October 2008 with Frédéric and Charlotte, an actor and an actress in a couple, aged thirty and twenty-five, respectively, who were interviewed at various points throughout the study.

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Frédéric tells me about a disagreement with Ludo, an actor more established than he is: On Ludo’s recommendation, I wanted to send some photos to John B. Root [a director] of an actress looking to perform. Ludo had told me, “It’s a friend; we need to find her some work.” John said to me, “No problem, you can perform with her on such-and-such a day.” Then Ludo called me and said, “Hey, what’s going on? That was for me!” He’d more or less staked a claim on this girl. John told him, “Frédéric was smarter than you . . .” Afterwards, I realized that it was actually a really bad way of doing things, and that I shouldn’t have gotten involved, suggesting people for work when the director wasn’t necessarily looking for anyone at that particular time. He might have had more suitable people lined up, and didn’t need to hire me instead of someone else . . . I mean, I’m not a casting agency. (Actor, thirty years old)

The conflict here derives from the fact that providing an actress is a means of obtaining a scene. When Ludo said “That was for me!” what he really meant was “The scene was for me.” By suggesting actresses, actors extend their social control (Boltanski 1973); by putting actresses and directors into contact with one another, they set themselves up as the obvious partners for the actresses in the scenes in question. As Frédéric hints, what underlies this process is the stake of a claim on the actress concerned. Charlotte points out that once an actor has performed with a particular actress, but especially one just starting out, she becomes his “private property.” This is because he considers that he is the “owner” of a beginner, someone he has helped to enter the world of pornography. However, even as pornographers are constantly looking for ways to find new female talent, the idea that intermediation is a necessity in order to get hired is not really true in the view of some actresses. During the interview, Charlotte adds: I’ve been tricked by Ludo like that before. Once, he told me, “Yeah, I called a director, he’s looking for girls, and I said I wanted to perform with you. Cool, right?” Actually, I didn’t want to work with him at all. In my head, I was thinking, I would have preferred it if he (the director) had called me directly rather than arranging it via someone else. (Actress, twenty-five years old)

What is presented as a favor and an opportunity to an actress is actually more of an imposition of working conditions. Accordingly, the disagreement with Frédéric reveals a double deception. Ludo considered the actress to be his “property” without any justification other than the scene he performed with her, yet he presents himself as a vital part of the recruitment process. In fact the actress could have sent her photos to the director herself. In sum, the practices routinely utilized when it comes to managing female talent are based on a presupposition that ultimately transforms the matching of supply

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and demand into a notion of “private property” that then transforms into a right of ownership over actresses. CONCLUSION Setting oneself up as a middleman makes sense in the context of a form of sexual work where, unlike in most cases (Tabet 2004), men are not just clients, they also employees. As the many examples cited above illustrate, actresses are essentially regarded as products during the course of film projects; they are the “raw material” required to manufacture arousing images in which directors and producers invest. Actors, while less highly valued than actresses, are also subject to a process of commodification. In particular, they are to a certain extent reduced to their key attribute, namely, their penis, and more specifically their erection. This is a sign that their masculinity is valued, but it is an uncertain sign, which puts actors and actresses on the same side in terms of the power relationships in play during the production of a film. Acting as an intermediary enables actors not only to obtain scenes, but also to remove themselves from this process of commodification by establishing themselves as the partners of directors and producers. From this point of view, intermediation does not just exacerbate social divisions by marginalizing groups that are already in a minority situation, as in other artistic contexts (Bielby and Bielby 1999), it also reasserts a gender order threatened by working conditions in this profession. 5 NOTES 1. Sharon Abbott (2010) clearly shows that this image is over-simplistic and does not tell the whole story. James D. Griffith et al. (2013) give other elements on actual characteristics of porn actresses and criticize stereotypical perceptions of sex workers. 2. Here I share the view of Gayle Rubin (2011), who shows that masculine domination cannot be reduced to an economic relationship. 3. Heather Berg highlights some of the issues involved in considering pornography in occupational terms (Berg 2014). 4. Certain drugs and psychotropic substances enable some actors to maintain an erection, and more generally would seem to enable young actors to avoid this kind of problem altogether. Information on this subject is not easy to obtain and forms part of the backstage secrets of the profession of pornographic actor. Nevertheless, what I can say is that another form of erection management is possible, which would appear to directly call into question the idea that maintaining an erection should be considered a rare skill. Questions of professionalism and masculinity are intertwined here, and the reluctance to use amateur performers is not merely the result of technical rationalization. 5. Translation by Oliver Waine.

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REFERENCES Abbott, Sharon A., “Motivations for Pursuing a Career in Pornography.” In Sex for Sale. Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry, edited by Ronald Weitzer, 47–66. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. Agustín, Laura María. “The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex.” Sexualities 8 (2005): 618–631. Agustín, Laura María. Sex at the Margins. Migration, Labor Markets and the Rescue Industry. London and New York: Zed Books, 2007. Becker, Howard. Art Worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. Berg, Heather. “Labouring porn studies.” Porn Studies 1, No. 1–2 (2014): 75–79. Bernstein, Elizabeth. Temporarily Yours. Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Bielby, Williams T. and Denise D. Bielby. “Organizational Mediation of Project-Based Labor Markets: Talent Agencies and the Careers of Screenwriters.” American Sociological Review 64, No. 1 (1999): 64–85. Boltanski, Luc. “Les usages sociaux du corps.” Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations 26, No. 1 (1971): 205–233. Boltanski, Luc. “L’espace positionnel: multiplicité des positions institutionnelles et habitus de classe.” Revue française de sociologie 14, No. 1 (1973): 3–26. Faulkner, Robert R. and Andy B. Anderson. “Short-Term Project and Emergent Career: Evidence from Hollywood.” American Journal of Sociology 92, No. 4 (1987): 879–909. Griffith, James D., Sharon Mitchell, Christian L. Hart, Lea T. Adams and Lucy L. Gu. “Pornography Actresses: An Assessment of the Damaged Goods Hypothesis.” The Journal of Sex Research 50, No. 7 (2013): 621–632. Kwan, Samantha, and Mary Nell Trautner. “Beauty Work: Individual and Institutional Rewards, the Reproduction of Gender, and Question of Agency.” Sociological Compass 3, No. 1 (2009) 49–71. Lizé, Wenceslas, Delphine Naudier, and Olivier Roueff. Intermédiaires du travail artistique. À la frontière de l’art et du commerce. Paris: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Département des Études, de la Prospective et des Statistiques, 2011. Mainsant, Gwénaëlle. “L’État en action: classements et hiérarchies dans les investigations policières en matière de proxénétisme.” Sociétés contemporaines 72 (2008): 37–57. Mears, Ashley. “Discipline of the Catwalk: Gender, Power and Uncertainty in Fashion Modeling.” Ethnography 9, No. 4 (2008): 429–456. Menger, Pierre-Michel. Le Travail créateur. S’accomplir dans l’incertain. Paris: Gallimard–Seuil, 2009. Rubin, Gayle S. “The Traffic in Women. Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Deviations. A Gayle Rubin Reader, 33–65. Durham (North Carolina) and London: Duke University Press, 2011 [1975]. Tabet, Paola. La grande arnaque. Sexualité des femmes et échange économico-sexuel. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004. Trachman, Mathieu. “The Pornographer’s Trade: A Discredited Professional’s Group Rhetoric, Control and Know-How.” Sociologie du travail 54 (2012) : 73–87. Trachman, Mathieu. Le Travail pornographique. Enquête sur la production de fantasmes. Paris: La Découverte, 2013. Trautner, Mary Nell. “Doing Gender, Doing Class: The Performance of Sexuality in Exotic Dance Club.” Gender & Society 6, No. 19 (2005): 771–788. Wacquant, Loïc J. D. “Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labor among Professional Boxers.” Body & Society 1, No. 1 (1995): 65–93.

Chapter Six

The Emergence of Hollywood Agents Tom Kemper

When I initially embarked on my research into the otherwise unexamined (at least in serious academic studies) role of the talent agent within the film industry, I assumed that agents remained recent interlocutors in the Hollywood business. Following the standard conception of film history on this issue, from academics to popular writers, namely, that agents only arose around the 1950s with Music Corporation of America, and then surged with International Creative Management and Creative Artists Agency in the 1970s, I envisioned my project as a more rigorous investigation of the big agents, the big deals, the big myths of the 1970s, with some background investigation of the 1950s. When I dipped into 1930s Hollywood to see what agents (if any were around) were doing, I was surprised to find—in a vast amount of archival sources—the substantial and crucial work performed by agents in the earliest stages of the modern Hollywood mode of film production. In the end, I realized that agents arose as part of the earliest developments of the Hollywood business—as early as the 1920s. Moreover, although my work remained historical and based entirely on archival sources (I could not perform interviews or embedded ethnographic studies of the activities of agents), patterns emerged that linked my work strongly to the kind of theoretical and sociological approaches collected in this volume. I was also surprised to find that agents arose from within the developing studio system. One might think that Broadway agents simply followed the money and moved west, like pioneer prospectors, mining the new revenue stream of Hollywood. In fact, very few Broadway agents made such a transition and they played only a minor role in this history. In fact, Hollywood agents emerged forcefully in the late 1920s as these “agents” sprouted from the spreading tentacles of the Hollywood studios. 91

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Crucial to my argument here is my conception of Hollywood as a business world embedded within a social network (and vice versa). This may not be big news; but it adds an important perspective to understanding the business, which, in the case of agents, cannot be extracted from the social culture in which it is rooted. In this conception of the Hollywood social-business nexus, my project has been strongly informed by recent work in economic sociology. 1 A wide, evolving, and heterogeneous field, economic sociology can nonetheless be defined as the study of how markets remain deeply and internally structured as social systems. Challenging principles of neoclassical economics, this field frames economic decisions and performance entirely through and within social systems. In my own work, this influence appears most readily in the way agents harnessed social connections as part of their economic appeal. When I argue that agents sold their interpersonal connections I mean literally just that; in other words, there is no conspiratorial agenda to my argument. Instead, it is an observation about how this particular social world and business structure intersected in classical Hollywood. 2 Moreover, my argument and analysis remains alert to the ways individuals cultivated reputations within the social systems of the Hollywood market and how these reputations were tied to larger industrial structures. In other words, I demonstrate how individual reputations—social “personalities”—developed within systematic practices. Within the Hollywood system, the links set up between producers and agencies, for example, created a place for certain individual agents to gain greater recognition (through processes described below). In this spirit, I outline how particular agents carved out identities for themselves via the routine relationships they established through and within the studio system. Individual reputation, then, is systematic; it is institutional; it is, more or less, industrial. As a more recent practitioner of economic sociology argues, individual reputation arises from “configurations in which there emerge identities from networks of continuing business relations” (White 2002: 207). Harrison C. White’s formulation here, overlooking its clunky prose, rings true with Weber’s definition of charisma and my own perspective on agents in the studio system. Dominant agents in the field established their leadership qualities through the clients they accrued and the transactions—monetary reward, star billing, or creative control over projects, amongst other attractive qualities— they established for those clients. Such “star” clients only drew more stars to those agents, in turn, adding to the agent’s or agency’s power and attraction. As I argue, different agents accrued reputation and individuality—“personality”—through the systematic frameworks and practices of this industry. Thus, “industry”—that is, the vast agglomeration and coordination of standard practices, rules, and organizational structures, all forces seemingly immune to and overwhelming of individual expression—in my argument, actually aids and abets the construction of individuality. Since I occasionally use

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the phrase “social connections” to describe the business relationships harnessed by agents in their work, I need to clarify both the meaning and the limitations of this phrase. On the one hand, the phrase captures the real sense of routine interactions that developed through regular commercial exchanges. On the other hand, these exchanges remained commercial and the social relationships were therefore always contingent upon the needs of the business; the “social” dimension will not trump a bad deal. In what follows below, I first explain how talent agents emerged at the same time as the studio system while gradually gaining importance and autotomizing themselves from studio tutelage. Next, I turn to how agents collectively established their charismatic power by maintaining social connections with two key counterparts—artist-clients and their prospective employers—thus slowly strengthening their presence in the Hollywood market. Finally, I show that their actions led to the stabilizing of the profession which, by the late 1930s, had become an accepted component of the film industry. THE ORIGINS OF AGENTING AND THE RISE OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM The relative absence of agents in Hollywood in the early 1920s suggests a general perception that the movie “industry” lacked the elements required for an agency to thrive: namely, central organization and predictable business strategies and operations. Indeed, the William Morris agency, a Broadway institution since the 1890s, more or less steered clear of the movie business until 1928, when it opened up a Hollywood office; it then struggled for the next decade to gain ground in the film business. However, records reveal that the subsystem of agents evolved with the studio system itself. In 1925, for example, fewer than twenty talent agencies listed their services in industry directories; of this group, we can eliminate at least six merely as publishers of talent directories and not genuine agencies. By 1933, Film Daily Yearbook included over sixty Hollywood talent agencies (and close to twenty in New York). So, the emergence of agents, their alarming “arrival” on the scene in the late 1920s, coincides, almost like an organic outgrowth, with the maturation of the Hollywood studio system. Agents’ presence goes part and parcel with the process of the corporate organization of the industry as one governed by the logic of the firm, wherein companies sought to consolidate multiple transactions under one roof. 3 As the film industry clustered around a hub of Hollywood studios, with integrated distribution firms demanding steady product from the production divisions, a symbiotic syndicate of talent agents developed around these major corporations, servicing business functions that hadn’t been fully inter-

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nalized by the expansionist maneuvers of the corporate mergers that created the five major Hollywood studios. In other words, the film business settled into a centralized number of studios—in terms of both geography and organization—that monopolized production and distribution. This clustering attracted an influx of talent seeking jobs and also routinized the pace of the business. As this steady stream of aspirants focused on these studios, agents could bank on a more predictable business indicating that the increase in the number of talent agencies in the second half of the 1920s and very early 1930s coincides with the emergence of the Hollywood studio system. 4 Hollywood agents emerged only when the studio infrastructure proved steady enough for the success of such a facilitating industry—a subsystem to the studio system. Indeed, when the studios attempted to internalize the process of scouting and managing talent, they encountered a number of obstacles primarily related to cost and conflict of interest. For one thing, managing a surplus of talent, let alone hunting for incoming artists, entailed a tremendous expense. Contracts would need to cover idle periods for talent not at use in particular productions, a pricey proposition (Variety 1931). For another thing, studio control over bids for talent, in the case of an in-house studio-run talent agency, could not guarantee fair play during the negotiation process, for the studio, very likely in practice, and certainly in perception, would always maintain its own interests over those of talent. Variety described this latter proposal as one “operated by and for the benefit of studios under studio control and eliminating outside agents” (Variety 1932: 5). Thus, from an overall market standpoint, independent agents made more sense. Through their commissions, agents absorbed the costs of scouring the field for and on behalf of talent, while maintaining a contractual commitment to their client’s interests. Why did talent deal with agents? Like all brokers, agents offered a service of increasing rewards for their clients whose compensation only came from sacrificing a percentage of the reward’s delivery. Trust came from the contractual agreement that an agent gained only—in theory—when the client gained as well. Furthermore, the mechanisms that established an agent’s significance—opening studio gates, contacting studio executives and producers, knowing which doors to knock on—represented the same ones that an actor, writer, or director needed to pass through as well. An established agent had already connected with these mechanisms and in that sense streamlined the process for incoming talent (while also performing gatekeeping duties for producers). Agents acted as trustworthy guides to the employment environs of Hollywood (and, for this very same reason, quacks, confidence men, and embezzlers fleeced thousands of newcomers as well). 5 Servicing the incoming artists offered their own rewards, so the commercial utility of agents

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sprouted a competitive market linked to the studio system—hence, the surge in talent agencies in the late 1920s. This network of agents translated geographically into the social grid of classical Hollywood. Most agents hung out their shingles in Hollywood proper as the location presented central access to all of the studios, where the agents made their daily rounds of meetings. 6 Beverly Hills drew in a number of agencies as well since the young city offered lower taxes as a way of attracting new businesses. The geographic placement of the agencies supported frequent and spontaneous meetings with executives and clients on the studio lots, or lunches at intermediary restaurants. Like any supplier to industry, agents forged regular relations with their buyers. However, agents sold unique products that required much more frequent discussions with buyers, since a client might change interests or could require a stronger pitch to fit into a particular project, or a studio’s production slate could change. A routine rendezvous between an agent, a client, or a studio executive facilitated important swaps of information. An exchange performed, for example, in the informal setting of a restaurant, within the speculative and contingent manner of gossip (up-to-date details on artists and projects or hypothetical explorations of possible combinations of clients on particular projects) could subsequently translate into serious deals. Serious deal making relied on free-form explorations, on casual, uncommitted conversation, and efficient up-to-date data. At lunch or drinks, an agent could take the temperature of a client or producer before the real brokering heated up. Other industries called this research and development; Hollywood called it lunch, even if no less important exchanges and explorations occurred in these meetings. 7 A quick career survey proves that the agents who emerged as leaders in Hollywood in the late 1920s and early 1930s sprang from within the film business. 8 It shows how much these early agents banked on their previous reputations within the industry, illustrating, in turn, just how much reputation plays a role in legitimizing agents. Prior to their careers as two of the leading Hollywood agents of this time period, Myron Selznick and Charles Feldman, for example, had already established themselves within the business, the former as a producer (under his father’s famous company) and the latter as a lawyer representing contract negotiations for talent; likewise, Leland Hayward banked on his studio background in public relations and production when he moved into the agency business in the late 1920s; Mike Levee started as a prop-man in 1917, became a founding partner of Brunton Studios in 1920, sold the company to Paramount, where he then worked as a senior executive, and became vice-president at First National, before finally opening his Hollywood talent agency in the early 1930s; prior to establishing his own flourishing agency in 1932, Nat Goldstone worked at Universal under Carl Laemmle, as did Ivan Kahn, who set up a relatively successful agency in the late 1920s; Zeppo Marx worked with his famous brothers before estab-

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lishing his own agency in the early 1930s; the Hawks-Volck agency played off the fact that its main partner was the brother and representative of director Howard Hawks; before his accomplished career as a literary agent H.N. Swanson worked as an executive at RKO, whose contacts he exploited in his new enterprise (some of Swansons’s early letters soliciting clients for his agency came on RKO stationery); Edward Small shifted between producing and his talent agency in the 1920s; Bert Allenberg began his Hollywood career as a business manager for film talent in the 1920s before joining forces with Phil Berg in 1932 to establish one of the major talent agencies in the 1930s, a close rival to Selznick and Feldman. And the list goes on. Industry statistics confirm that the leading talent agents grew with (and within) the evolving studio system. By the early 1930s, four agencies represented the majority of members in the motion picture Academy. 9 The JoyceSelznick agency represented eighty-seven Academy members (twenty-three actors; thirty-seven writers; twenty-seven directors); Collier & Flynn represented twenty-two (eighteen actors; three writers; one assistant director); the Edward Small agency represented twenty (eight actors; five writers; seven directors); and Phil Berg represented fourteen (eight actors; one writer; five directors). 10 Granted, many major stars circulated the town without Academy membership; nonetheless, these statistics offer a useful barometer for measuring the significance of an agency. Note that these four agencies materialized through formerly established positions in the industry, with each of its founders evolving from other areas within the Hollywood infrastructure. By contrast, outsiders like New York’s William Morris or Leo Morrison (a Broadway-based agent who moved to Hollywood at this time) retained few to no Academy members amongst their clients. That Broadway agencies found such difficulty penetrating the Hollywood market illustrates how important these early social connections proved to the leading agencies. In all of the above cases, the agents forged significant business and social relationships within the industry before emerging as fullfledged talent representatives. Agents like Goldstone, Small, and Berg tapped connections based on their business dealings in previous incarnations, thereby overcoming barriers of entry (namely, working relationships with producers) that Broadway agents found difficult or insurmountable. BUILDING CHARISMA AND “AGENCY” How agents developed their businesses and sold their services explains why so many of the leading agents in this growth period developed out of other roles in the studio system. Budding talent agents needed to sell themselves to two markets: prospective clients and their prospective employers. The barriers of entry for agents—the costs and obstacles of establishing a business—

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amount to almost nothing in terms of cash outlays: office personnel, a steady working phone number, and some business clothes (some less successful agents worked without offices, though few survived this way). 11 To a strong degree, then, the barriers of entry for agents remained almost entirely “social”—connections to important executives at studios—and perceptual—the appearance of, in the eyes of potential clients, associations with important studio executives. Successful agents, then, built themselves around social networks, establishing connections to talent and to the major studios. The latter depends to a strong degree on the quality of talent gained through the former. But even in pursuit of talent, studios relied on regular contact with trusted, proven entities (agents who steered them successfully to capable or winning talent in the past), so that ties to talent alone might not guarantee entry to a studio for a novice agent. Convincing talent that they needed a particular representative depended on the agent’s capacity to demonstrate some special admittance to important studio executives. In this regard, agents sold their charisma, a peculiar set of skills or prowess difficult, if not impossible, to quantify in the traditional sense of services—for example, the mathematical acumen sold by an accountant with degrees and licenses and demonstrable practice or by a carpenter, whose labor skills were easily measured in performance. 12 One way that agents sold their charisma came through circulating their list of clients to studio executives, to the trade press, and within industry gossip. Agents readily stitched their names to stars in articles in Variety and they drew in new clients through their association with established ones. Agents placed ads in trade papers linking themselves to stars and other talent. Both Edward Small and Myron Selznick, for example, released company pamphlets highlighting their various clients; agents like Charles Feldman frequently took out ads listing their prominent clients in particular productions. Film industry directories also published lists of licensed agents and these publications served as guides for incoming talent. 13 By the time agents became more or less accepted components of the industry scene in the 1930s, studio executives even steered incoming agentless talent (in those rare cases) to agents to avoid any accusations of unfairness in negotiations (for example, David Selznick and his executives at RKO frequently tipped off his brother about unsigned talent). Advertising their associations, both to talent and to studios, through prominent deal-making or client lists, agents created an aura around their enterprises, translating business connections into pecuniary value. The “agency” of certain agents, that is, the power of certain personalities to effect changes or successfully advocate for a client’s latitude of autonomy sprang most often from organizational set-ups that bolstered the agent’s individual power. In other words, institutional frameworks and instrumental practices—the size of the agency and its relationships with studios—surged through particular “personalities.” As Feldman asserted:

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Here Feldman articulated how the leverage generated by a strong client list infused particular agents with a degree of “agency,” the capacity to “do more for a client.” In turn, this potency enhanced the status and charisma of those agents, which attracted more clients and augmented the agency’s reputation with studio executives. These steady relationships constituted an informal syndicate between the agency and production executives. Hunt Stromberg, an MGM executive, for example, practically vowed wholesale allegiance to the agency’s clientele; in 1933, a Selznick agent reported that Stromberg “gave me sworn promises that he would always give us and our people, first consideration when he had to go outside the lot.” 15 An old Selznick family friend, Stromberg worked as an assistant to David at MGM and before that as a publicity director for Lewis Selznick. Myron and Stromberg remained regular gambling partners and the agency file for Stromberg is stuffed with memos on collecting debts, often as postscripts to regular business memos. Social connections blended with business connections. These regular relations between agents and studio executives made business sense. Inter-firm contacts set up a routine exchange of ideas and news (about new clients or new projects) and helped to streamline hiring, preproduction, and production planning. These stable transactional networks supported any changes in the “programming” (the planned productions; the planned casting) through immediate contacts and the flow of communication. These agent-studio assignations illustrate how this industry actually functioned through a diffused operational network as much as through concentrated management within the major studios. 16 Despite Selznick’s inflammatory oppositional rhetoric, despite his posture as an opponent of the studios, Selznick (and many other talent agents), forged strong routine relationships with studio executives, a mutually beneficial and reinforcing network. The relationship with Stromberg exemplifies the reciprocal advantages in this symbiotic syndicate. Dealing regularly with specific studio executives economized agents’ labor of sweeping the studio circuit for new opportunities for their clients. By the same token, habitual meetings with agents—at least those with proficient client lists—streamlined production practices like casting, fishing for screenwriters, and scheduling. A typical meeting between Stromberg and a Selznick agent, for example, accomplished an efficient exploration of possible projects and prospects for

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both sides, as revealed in a talking-points memo from 1934. The memo lists writers, actors, actresses, and directors from the agency’s stable, reviewing their recent productions, their upcoming availability, their strengths and interests. Both parties, Stromberg and Selznick, managed to address their own interests, while at the same time exchanging news and data on upcoming projects and the schedules of both available talent and production plans. In one conference, then, Stromberg surveyed more than twenty Selznick agency clients and almost as many projects. Stromberg productions with Selznick agency clients included 1933’s Prizefighter and the Lady and Penthouse both with Myrna Loy, the latter written by Dashiell Hammett, and many more on through the end of the decade, including 1939’s The Women featuring clients Norma Shearer and Katharine Hepburn directed by client George Cukor. Producer-client Monta Bell made 1930’s Behind the Make-Up with clients William Powell, Fay Wray, and Kay Francis, from a screenplay by client Howard Estabrook, and Laughter the same year featuring client Fredric March, written by client Herman Mankiewicz. Associate producer and client Kenneth MacGowan oversaw director-client George Archainbaud’s 1932 film Penguin Pool Murder; writer-client Ben Hecht’s 1933 Topaze; 1933’s The Great Jester written by client Samuel Ornitz; director-client John Cromwell’s 1933 film Double Harness, featuring clients William Powell and Ann Harding and, the same year, Cukor’s Little Women with Hepburn. David O. Selznick regularly hired Cukor and his agency stable-mates Gregory La Cava and Wesley Ruggles at RKO, along with Hepburn and Fred Astaire. The list goes on and on. DEFINING AND STABILIZING THE PROFESSION With their successful alliance with the Screen Actors Guild and the other major guilds in the late 1930s, agents strengthened their presence in the Hollywood market. As agents’ utility grew and issues of accreditation and evaluation arose, franchise agreements between guilds and agencies honed in on the issue of agents’ “character”—that is, specifying procedures and definitions of behavior, services, and even identity (the agent as distinguished from the producer, for example). Agents, however, defined their profession through moments or occasions—the negotiation, the transaction—and through relationships—with the client, with producers—so the ephemeral nature of their profession, a definitive part of their character, raised suspicions. Delimiting the job clearly escaped the understanding of most, and regulating agents necessarily turned to defining and confining behavior at certain moments, an effort made all the more complicated because the “character” of agents shifted for different occasions. For the immediate representation of a particular talent, agents worked according to a service-logic, ad-

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dressing the needs of their clients and performing intermediary work. For their operations as a multifaceted business structure tailored to the complexity of their market, namely, serving myriads of executives at a variety of studios, agents fashioned and refined their function in terms of a transactional network of activities, passing on responsibilities to the nexus of the agency as a whole. Each characterization served different demands of their enterprise, dealing with clients and dealing with studios, in these respective cases. Through these negotiations, agents fashioned and firmed up their role in the industry. Still, agents’ legitimacy to represent talent and be the main counterparts to the buyers was not readily established in the eyes of the studios. Problems on the part of studios in dealing with the role of agents stem from efforts to define the proper balance of the firms, and how or in what way their logic would operate or govern the business practices of this industry—essentially a conflict over the free “agency” of talent. In this sense, the early 1930s battles over agents’ power represent industrial growing pains as the various components of the business struggled to establish places for themselves within the expansion and stabilization of the business. 17 In spite of these struggles, agents served a maintenance function at the most basic level of organizing, managing, and tracking contracts that was crucial to the industry. On any average year in the 1930s, the six to eight major and minor studios retained over six hundred contracts with key talent, stars and supporting players, writers, directors, and producers. Each contract came through negotiation by agents, and was updated, revised, and monitored by agents in their client notebooks (controlling information amounts to one of the key job tasks of agents and agencies). To top it off, one industry survey calculated that between 1933 and 1939, the major studios loaned to each other a little over 2000 actors, directors, and writers. 18 Even if these loans did not involve some level of negotiation and bargaining—handled by agents by and large—they required a diligent accounting, patrolling, and monitoring of contracts. Even at this turnkey level—steering contracts, maintaining records, updating files, recording new contractual deals in the loans— agents provided a service in organizing the flow and smoothing connections to such humdrum work involved in the coordination of trades and loans, let alone maintaining the original contracts. By 1938, Fortune magazine confidently described agents as fulfilling a crucial managerial position within the Hollywood infrastructure. The agent, this journalistic arbiter of business culture determined, “performs a valid economic service—that in any business as sprawling, loose, and disjointed as show business there must be an intermediary between the possessors of talent and the users of talent” (Fortune 1938: 71). Sprawling. Loose. Disjointed. The agency syndicate made the system more concentrated, tighter, and conjoined. By networking with the studios through regular and routine interac-

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tions, agents organized the otherwise unorganized. They provided a set of contact mechanisms—client lists, phone calls, routine meetings with studio executives—that concentrated the channels of communication between creative talent and studios. Incoming talent—at least those with less stardust in their eyes—knew where, for example, to focus their efforts in gaining entry into the studio gates: talent agents. And studios turned to agents as gatekeepers to direct the process of weeding out talent or focusing their interests and developing them for the system. More significantly, studios relied upon agencies to keep track of talent, to fulfill components of their productions, and to aid in managing and controlling the contracts that constituted the development of film productions. Outside and within, loose and linked, the monumental Hollywood studio system, and its vast array of contracts, relied upon another system: the subsystem of talent agents. 19 NOTES 1. For example, Harrison C. White (2002) and Mark Granovetter (1995). 2. Late in the process of my research, I discovered the work of Mark Granovetter. Granovetter essentially argues that “job-finding behavior is more than a rational economic process— it is heavily embedded in other social processes that closely constrain and determine its course and results” (1995: 39). Agents, of course, provide a service to job-finding, but equally to the gatekeeping function that helps to streamline the employment process for employers (producers and studios). On either side of this equation, agents sell their social connections. 3. Coase’s Nobel Prize winning work (1988) defined the firm as a corporate structure that reduced the costs of transactions. Harold Demsetz (1977) critiques Coase’s definition for ignoring other factors that might better define the firm. Regardless, my point here works in that reducing transaction costs remains an undeniable goal of firms, even if not singularly definitive. 4. Most historians agree that the Hollywood studio system fully matured in the late 1920s and early 1930s. 5. On the fleeced flocks, see Leo C. Rosten’s sociological survey of the film business (1941: 19). 6. In 1935, around twenty agencies clustered between the 9000 and 9400 blocks of Wilshire Blvd., and close to another twenty operated between the 8900 and 9100 blocks of Sunset Blvd. This clustering pattern remained throughout the 1930s and 1940s. 7. On the economic concept of clustering—how otherwise competitive businesses congregate in particular geographic areas in order to expedite the exchange of valuable information and other advantages—see, in particular, Scott (2005). 8. Culled from General Collections–Biography files at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (hereafter AMPAS). In addition, I consulted the Ivan Kahn Collection and the Samuel Morrison Collection, as well as the Sam Jaffe Oral History (all AMPAS). 9. Academy Archives, “Agency” Files, AMPAS. 10. From a survey included in the research documents of the “Agency” files, Academy Archives, AMPAS. 11. This discussion of the competitive strategies of agents—from barriers of entry to staking out claims in the market—draws from Chandler (1977) and Porter (1980). 12. For a more sustained and original discussion of “charisma” as an economic factor, see Weber (1994: 32–37). 13. See, for example, the annual editions of Film Daily Year Book.

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14. Feldman to the Artists Managers Guild, Article 15, pages 2–3 of the October 12, 1938, transcript in Folder 1904, Charles Feldman collection, American Film Institute. 15. “Stromberg” Folder, Agency Files, Myron Selznick collection, Harry Ransom Center. Subsequent references regarding Stromberg’s dealings with the agency come from this source. 16. Recognizing these relationships as important functions within the studio system helps to counter more reified visions of this era. This network model of Hollywood resonates with Harrison C. White’s contributions to economic sociology. White demonstrates how even the most rationalized capitalist markets remain deeply structured as social systems. These relationships often emerge as market niches or cliques (White 2002). On routine, cooperative relations between organizations as an important component of the market (in contrast or addition to competition), see also Granovetter (1974). 17. In The Film Spectator’s attack on agents (Beaton 1930: 4), the article isolated the agent problem as “the product of the general lack of stabilization that is characteristic of the whole industry,” indicating that the agent problem represented another symptom of the industry’s “growing pains.” 18. The data comes from an amended complaint, dated November 14, 1940, to the United States v. Paramount Pictures et al. lawsuit (Civil Action No. 87–273). Mae D. Huettig includes these figures in her valuable study Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry (1944: 94). 19. Adapted from Tom Kemper, Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents. © 2010 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press.

REFERENCES Beaton, Welford. “Pay Agents Only for What they Do.” Film Spectator, May 10, 1930, 4. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977. Coase, Ronald H. The Firm, The Market, and The Law. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988. Demsetz, Harold. The Economics of the Business Firm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Fortune, “Put Their Names in Lights,” September, 1938, 67–73. Granovetter, Mark, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Huettig, Mae D. Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944. Kemper, Tom. Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Porter, Michael E. Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. New York: Free Press, 1980. Rosten, Leo C. Hollywood: The Movie Colony, The Movie Makers. New York: Harcourt, 1941. Scott, Allen J. On Hollywood: The Place, The Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Variety, “New Star Pooling System—Inter Studio Co-Operation.” May 31, 1932, 5. Variety, “Propose Life Contracts as Check Against Star Grabbing and Skyrocketing of Salaries.” January 28, 1931, 2. Weber, Max. “Charismatic Authority” in Sociological Writings, 32–37. New York: Continuum, 1994. White, Harrison C. Markets from Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Chapter Seven

“It’s Not the Network, It’s the Relationship” The Relational Work of Hollywood Talent Agents Violaine Roussel

If you want to call up David Geffen and say: “this studio guy really hurt my feelings and he really betrayed me, and I’m mad, I want you to call his boss and make his life miserable,” that shit can happen. But you don’t want to do that. The knowledge that you can is enough. So, what matters is the connection and the network? It’s the relationship based on history and experience and trust. We do everything by a handshake, and by these words. It’s not like there’s papers coming over here tonight. It’s just all what I say, and what he says back to me. That studio head and I. That’s what we said to each other. Neither of us would say: “that’s not what happened.” We know what happened. (Interview conducted in Los Angeles, 2013)

In the above quote, a senior agent at one of the biggest agencies in Hollywood comments on his phone conversation with a studio head with whom he just negotiated a deal for a client, and on the reason why this production professional is not likely to betray the word he gave him. He dismisses the reference to industry networks in favor of an insistence on his long-term relationship with this counterpart. Similarly, the crucial importance given to one’s relationships and the definition of agenting as a relationship business are omnipresent in the agents’ words. This chapter takes this observation seriously: it explores what “having and building a relationship” exactly means and covers. The practices, interaction, and interdependence 103

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games here in play are investigated in the light of what scholars have often constructed and identified as Hollywood networks. This study is based on 109 open-focused interviews with agents, former agents, and assistants, as well as a smaller number of other industry professionals: managers, lawyers, producers, studio executives and heads, publicists, actors and directors. In situ observations in various types of talent agencies were also conducted in Los Angeles between 2010 and 2014. Legally, the profession of talent agent is based on the monopoly of soliciting work on behalf of the agency’s clients and selling talent to buyers, namely to the studios and other producers. At this level, the agent appears as a market intermediary in the transaction of artists and of projects. The agency traditionally receives 10 percent of the contract amount as a commission for its service. In the United States, agents co-exist and collaborate with other categories of talent representatives with whom the division of labor is relatively well-defined. For example, entertainment lawyers are responsible for the legal formatting of the transaction details, so that this technical dimension is often removed from the work of agents. Agents have also differentiated their profession from the more recently established and less strictly regulated activity of managers, who have multiplied in the past two decades. A manager usually handles fewer clients than an agent and acts more as a general career advisor, without being legally allowed to procure employment for artists. Today, there are thousands of agents working in Los Angeles, whether it is within what Faulkner (1983) defines as Little Hollywood or Big Hollywood. Big Hollywood refers to the individual and collective entities who dominate the entertainment industry today—the Big Four agencies (Creative Artists Agency, CAA; William Morris Endeavor, WME; United Talent Agency, UTA; and International Creative Management, ICM Partners) and a few mid-sized agencies (e.g., Gersh, Paradigm, Verve)—who gather star-clients and enter into business (alongside the most reputable managers and lawyers) with the executives and heads of the big studios for negotiation of the most lucrative projects. In contrast, Little Hollywood is a galaxy of small(er) players. Hundreds of boutique agencies with only a few employees, sometimes as little as one or two self-employed agents, interact daily with casting directors in charge of more modest projects, often in television, and with independent producers. They tend to represent emerging artists or artists who have fallen out of favor. In both cases, the triangular relationship between artists, talent representatives, and production professionals is at the heart of the making of cultural products and artistic careers. But agents are more than a hub connecting the production side to talent by procuring work for their clients. In Big Hollywood, they tend to act as de facto producers by orchestrating and coordinating entire film and television projects from an early stage through the prac-

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tice of packaging. Studios typically buy such packages that already include most key elements of a project, from a script/concept and a writer to a star director, a high-profile lead actor, and possibly other agency clients, as well as sometimes complementary financing. In Little Hollywood, in contrast, agents function more like gatekeepers in that they assess the level of preexisting relationships that a potential client may have in the industry (e.g., being known by producers, casting directors, and studio or network executives) that grant him or her enough professional credit to be potentially sellable, and therefore worth signing with the agency. In turn, the agent’s activity on behalf of Little Hollywood clients and the choices agents make in terms of submission for jobs lead to the reconfiguration of client ties that reinforce and develop some rather than others. Because Little Hollywood agents enter the process of cultural production at a later stage, mostly when a television show or a movie has already been green-lighted and when casting choices are being made, their activity is much closer to the mission formally and traditionally assigned to talent agencies (that is, placing artists in jobs). Their work is clearly distant from the capacity to orchestrate projects and demonstrate producerial power that senior agents possess in Big Hollywood. In that sense, agents in Little and in Big Hollywood almost practice different professions. However, in Little and Big Hollywood alike, the analysis of their relationships with buyers is key to understanding how they contribute to “doing Hollywood.” Within this as a backdrop, talent representatives and production professionals develop long-term exchanges, far beyond their occasional collaboration on one particular project. This chapter focuses on the significance of this particular type of tie—without of course suggesting that the ones connecting agents and artists would intrinsically be of lesser importance. “Forming relationships” and “networking” are both folk categories that agents use to describe various dimensions of their practice. I will question below what this implies and means, without assuming that network analyses are ipso facto the most relevant approach to understand it. 1 My goal here is not to oppose ethnographic approaches with network theory, or to criticize network analyses in order to promote ethnography, by contrast. It is rather to expand the agenda by reflecting on how to use them in interconnected ways, to better understanding of how Hollywood works. In the domain of relational thinking, qualitative and quantitative approaches offer complementary angles for explaining social action. The discussion below puts network studies of Hollywood to the test by suggesting how ethnography could inform the construction of networks as well as offer additional insights at levels that quantification cannot access and describe. To do so, this chapter introduces the main lines of an approach focused on the relationship work that agents learn in organizations and perform in configurations. By exploring how the boundaries between personal and professional matters, formal and informal rela-

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tionships, and economic and aesthetic value are negotiated by industry participants, I aim to contribute to turning new light on the relational making of cultural products. AGENTING IS NETWORKING? HOW ETHNOGRAPHY CHALLENGES NETWORK ANALYSIS How Hollywood Networks Are Made Network theories have inspired illuminating works aimed at analyzing careers and star power in Hollywood. To understand how these theories model networks, we must pose two distinct but related questions: what are the basic units (individuals and collectives) forming clusters? And, what counts as a relevant link between units? This determines the manner in which such ties will then be interpreted; in other words, what we think they mean. Constructing networks, of course, implies constructing relevant categories and encoding data accordingly. It thus implies predetermining what will be the basic units whose correspondences and connections one is interested in. In various works about Hollywood networks, such basic units refer to different kinds of entities; they may be people, such as entertainment professionals considered individually or collectively, as well as places (see CurridHalkett 2010; Currid-Halkett and Ravid 2012), or something else. As far as ties between people are concerned, most studies have placed artists (be they writers, musicians, directors, actors, or others) at the center of the analysis, with a focus on their ties with other categories of artists or with industry “middlemen” (producers and talent representatives, among others). 2 The preference for artist-centric networks accentuates the conceptualization of careers and work organization in the film and television industries as projectbased systems, which in turn reinforces the idea that network theories are the most relevant method to explain action in such loosely institutionally structured worlds. However, as I will show, not all professions in these industries are organized following such a project-based model and, consequently, this professional world as a whole should certainly not be described as projectdriven. Talent representatives mostly respond to other logics of action, that is to the building of long-lasting interrelations within the context of highly institutionalized (if not bureaucratized) organizations. A focus on how agents form networks with producers or other talent representatives suggests significantly different results from the artist-oriented option. This perspective also reveals how the ambivalent nature of certain professional definitions and boundaries, such as the double face of managers who also produce, is bound to create overlapping and ill-defined clusters. Network studies also rely on assumptions regarding what counts as a tie between units, what circulates; in other words, what makes a network. Such

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choices often lead to a preference for the exploration of information networks over exchange networks (or vice versa), both rarely being combined and jointly analyzed, as Foster, Borgatti, and Jones (2011) have judiciously noted. 3 Networks can also be constructed without any focus on communication, information circulation, or transaction happening between units and clusters. 4 The question of how to recognize ties that matter and how to attribute a specific weight to a given form of communication or exchange is also at stake. Are two apparently similar types of exchange between agents and artists, or between agents and studio employees, really “weighting” in the same way in the making of projects and careers? Are we not at risk of privileging the most formal, the standard, and the visible (connections made official in a contract, interactions in public) over the informal and the discreet that make up most of the day-to-day reality of agents’ work and are not any less consequential? In short, how can we avoid creating and objectifying in networks the fiction of average ties, except by going back to the perceptions and practices of “real agents in real settings”—to paraphrase Garfinkel (2002: 117)—to fully grasp the varying meaning and significance of different modes of relation in context? Network analysis, as with any quantification, intrinsically requires that units or ties be treated as analytically identical to each other so that counting becomes possible. However, such a methodological fact only reinforces, in my view, the need for vigilance in the definition of valid units and in the interpretation of objectified ties, all of which can directly benefit from being ethnographically informed. Does Hollywood Have a Core? Center-Focused Models and the Reduction of Complexity Apart from this first series of remarks, research on Hollywood also inspires another level of precaution about the use of network analysis. One of the prevalent characteristics of network studies of the entertainment industry is to bring up the question of what stands at the center of this space: networks tend to produce center-focused models. More generally, even though equating centrality and importance is not intrinsic to network theories, it is widely assumed that highly central actors are more powerful, especially in information networks (the highest degree of correspondence making up this centrality). Consequently, who or what occupies a central position becomes a key preoccupation affecting how one interprets the relational structure that networks form. In short, the core seems to represent the most consequential ties and the most dominant entities. It is in that sense that Big Hollywood and, within it, the core largest talent agencies stand at the center of concentric circles of which Little Hollywood and its countless boutiques constitute the periphery (to borrow Faulkner’s [1983] and Bielby & Bielby’s [1999] notions). Indeed, for Faulkner, Big Hollywood is the center of an echelon-like

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organization of activity, forming a recurrent set of interlocks among specialists, whereas Little Hollywood is typically made of an isolated series of nonrecurrent ties among one-shot participants in film creation. Both spheres pile up in a concentric structure in which Big Hollywood fulfills the general function of stabilizing the game and reducing uncertainty within it. However, what such a representation suggests is not confirmed by ethnographic observation and may therefore be misleading. As far as agents are concerned, even though the composition of professional clusters differ in Big and in Little Hollywood, the activity in the later space does not show less cohesion, or looser, more erratic, and isolated ties. Rather, what is striking is the relative autonomy of each of these spheres toward the other regarding the organization of key recurrent interactions, and the mutual indifference stemming from the social, professional, and cognitive distance between the players on both sides. The very question of what stands at the center of the Hollywood system and governs it has in fact a lot of affinity with the historical narrative that we are familiar with regarding the central place that the studios once occupied in the film industry and then progressively lost (Schatz 2010). 5 It is a common perception in the film and television industries themselves that the dissolution of the studio monopoly and the fragmentation of the activities that they initially concentrated led to the rise of the agency centrality and power, at least until the glorious time of the 1980s and 1990s. However, today’s reality proves to be even more complex. In what industry participants describe as a “tight market,” several professional groups (structured in various organizational forms, with an exponential rise of managers) compete for talent representation, while the power of the buyers on the production side is enhanced by the diminution of the number of projects and job opportunities offered to artists. The traditional distinction between the “incoming phone call business” of the biggest agencies, constantly receiving offers from the studios/ producers, and the “outgoing phone call business” of smaller companies, that need to be more proactive, has become less relevant than it used to be since the extremely lucrative deals once granted to the stars no longer happen, and the status of stardom itself has changed accordingly. In other words, the complexity, density, and depth of the configurations that structure the entertainment industry are always at risk of being flattened out when modeled and represented solely as networks. In short, the effects of professional differentiation and hyper-specialization in this social space, where power and hierarchy are simultaneously institutionalized in compartmentalized organizations and inscribed in highly individualized relationships, may get oversimplified in several intertwined ways. As a result, the established distinction between Little and Big Hollywood does not fully account for the much more complex division of labor that combines with other variables to determine how agents can engage in exchanges and trans-

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actions with counterparts. The boundaries between the two are also porous and subject to struggles among the concerned professionals. The notion of being a “big” player (as a person or an organization) is primarily a problem for the participants attached to a relational definition of worth. Even at a time when perceptions converge to identify and label the Big Four agencies (and two giants among them, WME and CAA), the agents of the companies that follow closely behind (Paradigm and Gersh, among others) sometimes try to subvert and rearrange this symbolic order of domination by including themselves in an extended circle of the Big Five or Big Six agencies. Such classification struggles often replicate in individualized forms, and they become partly objectified in the rankings and reports distinguishing the “Agents of the Year” published by The Hollywood Reporter or industry blogs, for instance. Industry professionals thus perpetually (re)define practically and symbolically this boundary between “the big” and “the little”—what I take here into account in my own use of the categories of Little and Big Hollywood, without reifying them. In addition, the attempt to measure the intensity and frequency of communication that forms groups in network analysis always tends to reduce such a multilevel complexity to explicit bilateral exchanges of equal impact. It implies that we think of ties in terms of degree of strength—weaker or stronger—without saying much of what a “weak” or a “strong” tie means for the participants, in context. The danger is not only to shade parts of a complex system of practices, but to propose an inaccurate representation of connections that matter in action and for the participants. 6 Those perceptions matter because the meaning of linkages and the prevalence of some of them in the eyes of the participants directly result in their engagement in action. Watching agents’ activities at the most granular level allows us to grasp in 3D the interactions and interdependences in which they are inscribed and to account for their ambivalence. It gives us access to informal and discreet forms of relationships, to modes of bonding that agents sometimes perform semiconsciously, to associated learning and socialization processes, and to the varying and time-sensitive meaning and importance that agents attribute to different types of connection, all of which would be otherwise invisible and, in any case, remains extremely difficult to categorize and encode systematically. It also prevents us from artificially separating, in the analysis, the television from motion picture businesses, and middlemen from one another. Here again, ethnographic study provides important complementary insights to an approach in terms of networks. Underlying Markets? Finally, the analysis of Hollywood networks often goes hand-in-hand with a market approach. The articulation between networks and markets in the en-

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tertainment industries or other art worlds is often presumed but rarely elucidated and discussed per se. 7 As a common ground, many works rely on the supposed affinity between a given organization of artistic careers (projectbased), a particular market structure in film and television (characterized by uncertainty, instability, and opacity), and a specific sociological method to approach professional paths and practices in this field (network analysis). I have already suggested that the assumption of project-based activities and trajectories is not equally relevant for all types of industry professionals, or at all times in that world. The same vigilance should probably prevent us from adopting too quickly the vocabulary and conceptualization in terms of market(s) (and its niches or sub-markets). Professionals in that domain may indeed talk in such terms, although not exclusively, as agents oscillate between various types of mental repertoires, including references to the logics of emotion or inspiration (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006). Of course, agents can describe how they consciously “make markets” by naming and pricing “talent.” However, this does not mean, in our eyes, that the analytic model of the market, which ultimately points to the question of the equilibrium between demand and supply, is the most valid conceptualization to understand what drives the action of the participants. On the other hand, exploring film and television markets as networks has indisputably given rise to stimulating and sophisticated work, especially when combined with the use of ethnographic methods. The study that Foster, Borgatti, and Jones (2011) conducted, exploring how nightclub talent buyers in Boston select bands to perform in their club, illustrates this. The use of interviews to collect data leads the authors to go beyond the usual focus on ties between buyers and sellers in social network analysis, and to look at ties among buyers as an important dimension of their decision-making process. They show that search strategies vary across market niches for local rock bands. In a market niche featuring bands playing original music, gatekeepers maintain arm’s length relations with many bands but are embedded in dense information-sharing networks with each other, whereas in a market niche containing bands playing familiar popular tunes, buyers develop close ties with a small number of bands but have the most distant relations with each other. The attention paid to musical genres, defined here as market niches, is critical to preserve and elucidate the social complexity of what networking means for talent buyers. Differentiating spaces and situations in which ties vary in relevance and strength is what going back to ethnography allows for. The methodological complementarity derives from the fact that network studies cannot describe relationships or account for their perceptual and cognitive dimensions. On the contrary, social actors can, and so does the sociologist who observes them. My empirical investigation has allowed me to ask key questions regarding the relational nature of agenting and the materiality of such activities,

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which network analyses paradoxically leave out. What do agents mean when they say they “have a relationship”? How do such connections emerge and develop within the organizational structures and hierarchies in which agents’ activities are inscribed? How do agents understand the difference they make between strong and weak ties? What does the “history of one’s relationships,” that professionals often refer to as being public knowledge in this “small world,” exactly mean? How does time affect not only the objective (objectifiable in networks) making of configurations, but also the perception of relationships? What forms of power derive from being perceived by other industry professionals as “owning” relationships (you often hear that “the agent’s job is to own the studio(s)” and “to own the clients”)? How does it impact each agent’s professional self-definition, as well as his or her contribution to the collective evaluation of talent? Finally, agents (like other film and TV professionals) very consciously strategize and debate about “networking.” How does this self-reflexive dimension of their practice matter? When do they act candidly or not, and with what effect? As much as relationships seem to refer to intrinsically personal matters and affinities, they must be thought of as systemically and structurally determined. This is not to say that agents just follow conventions or formulas. Nor does it undermine the relational focus of my approach either. But it does mean that what interests me is understanding how the personal, the emotional, and the relational are structured, both organizationally and configurationally, over time. In other words, it implies that we shift our attention toward the learning and the performance of relationships: how ties are built, maintained, experienced, and interpreted in ways that lead to certain courses of action. Key socialization mechanisms take place within the biggest agencies and especially the Big Four. Relationship work as agents learn it there first focuses on their interactions with other agents and representatives before being crucially directed at artists and production professionals. AGENTING AS RELATIONSHIP WORK In many social spheres, the interpersonal and relational aspects of professional definition prove to be important; the world of agencies is no exception in that regard. However, the forms they take here seem rather paradigmatic. Indeed, being involved in personal relationships is what makes the agent: being an agent is first and foremost being able to create and maintain close interpersonal ties with other professionals spread throughout different functional domains of the entertainment world. Agents interact and become interdependent with other agents, with other categories of representatives (mostly managers and lawyers, and publicists to a lesser extent), with professionals involved in production, and with current or potential clients. This occurs

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within varying relational systems depending on whether one looks at Big Hollywood or at Little Hollywood. There are therefore different practical variations of what “to be bound” or “to stay in touch” can mean in specific situations. It goes from knowing an interlocutor by voice and by name (by telephone or email) to creating a connection through repeated face-to-face encounters, and from the establishment of business transactions (i.e., truly working on common projects or clients) to the creation of a gift-debt relationship, often attached to the mutual and repeated sharing of information. The making of such ties is the result of genuine relationship work, that is, an effort specifically oriented toward the binding of people, which is an integral part of the agent’s job. This signifies that the participants develop a strategic and reflexive rapport with this activity that they can articulate. To “befriend people” and make friends amongst one’s peers, and “being nice to everyone,” especially for young agents, is an imperative to professional growth that manifests itself in conscious, systematic, and organized ways and generally takes up almost the entirety of agents’ personal and social lives. The capacity and inclination to actively carry out this work is often conveyed as natural by those concerned, who also point to the “Type A personalities” that supposedly populate the agency world. By contrast, placing this work in the organizational logics and configurations of the agencies that preside over it allows me, firstly, to denaturalize it and, secondly, to go see what makes it up. This relational work is based on both an activity constantly in need of renewal and a cumulative dynamic over time; as a result, relational capital accumulates and strengthens. One of the theoretical stakes of this chapter is therefore to shed light on the constitution, sustenance, and transmission of a specific professional form of social capital (Bourdieu 1980; Coleman 1990). Understanding this particular form of capital allows me to then explore its linkage to the production of economic and symbolic capital in Hollywood. Learning Relationships in Organizations Stephen Zafirau (2008)—who approached the activity of agents in the closest way to mine by introducing the concept of interactional reputation work performed by these professionals—recognized the importance of reintegrating this work into an organizational setting to make sense of it. However, he did not fully show how agents’ work stems from this structural context, how it operates within it, and how it affects it in return. Agents’ relationships are firstly those which are created within the agency itself, with their peers and their superiors; they condition the acquisition of personal and institutional resources regarding the entertainment industry at large. The actual learning process of becoming an agent shapes the different aspects of relationship work. This process first materializes within the organizational framework of the agency, through mentoring arrangements that are institutionally equipped

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and that lead to the formation of ties between the young agent and a whole series of work partners. In the absence of a university curriculum in agenting, the hiring and training of future agents involves, for the most part, going through the mailrooms and training programs of the biggest agencies. 8 The many assistants of the big agencies serve as a pool from which are hired, not only those who will be promoted to junior agents, whether it be within those companies or in smaller agencies, but also future managers and production professionals. The learning process can be relatively formal, as with the classes and exams organized within the UTA University, but it is much more than that. The initiatory process that begins in the mailroom and follows a succession of well-organized steps will allow those who were nothing to be “made” by the organization. Thus, the beginning agent is dependent on the agency as a place of accreditation and of professional socialization. He or she 9 who came into the agency as an intern or mailroom trainee typically becomes a “floater” for a while (delegated to stand in for assistants who may be absent for a few hours or a few days), before being appointed as an assistant “on a desk” at the service of a specific agent, then being selected for the training program and possibly promoted, after a period of about one to three years, to junior agent. Each stage constitutes a possible exit from the process, as only a small proportion of mailroom trainees are ever granted the status of agent. What is more, the private bureaucracies that are the largest agencies organize a true apprenticeship system. For the assistant who aspires to be promoted to junior agent, being noticed and accompanied by a mentor as highly placed within the organization as possible (ideally partner or department head) is decisive. These trajectories create commitment and dedication to the agency and to those who embody it, as new agents feel like they owe them everything. Interviewees often express such an intense and unconditional loyalty to their mentor: I definitely wouldn’t be sitting here today if it weren’t for [my mentor]. I owe pretty much everything I am as an agent to [him]. . . . He’s like a brother to me. We’re incredibly close. And I still go to him for advice. He comes to me sometimes for advice. And we work incredibly well together. I’d trust him with any client. I’d trust him with anybody in my life. I’d take a bullet for him. (Agent, Big Four, Los Angeles, October 2010)

A woman, who became a talent agent at one of the Big Four agencies, also insists on the key importance of forming such initial bonds from which an agent’s professional existence stems. The validation process that ensues takes forms that are felt as both extremely personal and as inscribed in collective and institutional settings in each agency.

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However, “to relate" and “to have a relationship” do not simply ensue from being objectively put in contact or introduced to someone, or from the attendance at networking events. The practical knowledge of how to create longterm relationships is gradually learned and framed in the organizational context of the agencies. With this relational work, we are therefore far from the naturalizing and spontaneous vision of emotional connections. We are also distant from the focus on visible social events, often associated with Hollywood. The interviewee below evokes the socialization to relationships in a revealing way, that is, the process of learning how to “work relationships,” how to get people attached and engaged in interactions, and the shaping of “styles” that govern the way this work is carried out: You’re learning who the clients are. Who [and] which agents represent what clients. It’s osmosis. . . . And what you have to quickly understand is: every agent has a different relationship with their clients. And when you’re a firstyear agent, you don’t have any clients. You’re put on teams to service other people’s clients. So you have to understand instantly how that senior agent deals with their clients, what that relationship is like. That’s what helps you define how to build your own relationships with these clients. You have to follow their lead, right? . . . You’ve got to follow that model. Understand their approach when they give them material. Understand their relationship, you know. And everyone is so different with their clients. And, at the same time as you’re doing this, you’re learning about what type of agent you want to be. Some agents, every time a client calls, they talk to them for one hour. Some talk to them for one minute. And you’ve got to define yourself, who you are, as an agent. (Agent, Motion Picture, Little Hollywood, Los Angeles, September 2010)

What is at stake here is to learn how to be an agent as much as how to do the job—a savoir-être, as much as a savoir-faire. It is the definition of a distinctive professional identity: its rapid stabilization and early signalization to one’s entourage are conditions of professional success. 10 These identifications are constructed as individualized styles distinguishing each person, all the while being inseparable from the institutional configurations within which the agents are situated. These styles get adjusted, though mostly strengthened in the course of one’s career, as the agent may move from one

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company to another. The inertia of individual styles that turns into a matrix of perceptions and practices partly explains some failed attempts of (wellestablished) agents at finding success as studio executives or heads: this is because their styles reveal themselves to be maladjusted to the new context. I am here drawing attention to the making of individualities in relationships in a professional world that not only values, but also generates singularization (for artists and agents alike) and, in a very profound way, defines singularity itself. 11 Styles thus tend to diffuse from mid-size and large companies, where agents were often trained, to smaller ones and to connected activities in which they pursue their career (management and/or production, especially), contributing to the formation of transversal professional conventions and models. However, once caught into the particular type of configuration characterizing Little Hollywood and established at this level of the business, an agent has very little chance for upward mobility of a major kind. The Little Hollywood agent whose client suddenly meets success with a hit TV show, for instance, typically loses the artist to a larger agency, as opposed to being promoted and crossing over to Big Hollywood. “All Boats Rise with the Tide” 12: The Constitution of Professional Configurations If such socialization mechanisms are so important, it is also because the mailrooms and training programs of the big agencies serve as a pool for recruiting not only talent representatives, but also production professionals. The consequence is to form groups of peers who were trained at a given moment in time in similar conditions. Those who share such comparable initiatory paths experience the same modes of generation (Bourdieu 1984). This process forms groups of mutual recognition and identification, made up of individuals who have simultaneously progressed in their careers and remain bound by a common history. It’s important when you start to know who everybody is obviously, and you sort of all mature together, so the [other] assistants mature into studio executives as you become an agent, so everyone kind of grows up together, and it’s almost like, you know, the generation, and so you have all the freshmen, and at another time you’re all seniors, you’re a big agent, your friends run the studio, then it’s just about maintaining those relationships, and welcoming the new people. (Former agent, female, Talent, Big Four, Los Angeles, February 2013)

Those who cannot rely on such systems of relationships built up over time have to compensate for it by mobilizing other types of resources, but social events and networking lunches never fully replace it. 13 Conversely, for those who have been made through such modes of generation, further interactions

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activate latent forms of solidarity which stem from mutual recognition and the feeling of belonging to a community with a shared destiny over time. The intrinsic quality (and not only the degree of strength) attributed to this type of tie is therefore different, and the contrast between relating and networking is here obvious. However, the social strength of a relationship is not established indefinitely; it must always be renewed in context and adjusted to the constant arrival of newcomers. As a result, sustaining a situation of ascendancy comes at a specific cost, similar to what Bourdieu (1976) noted regarding “traditional modes of domination” stemming from personal dependence (re)generated through repeated face-to-face interaction, rather than based on institutionalized positions durably materialized by titles and statuses. There’s definitely a core group of people that I’ve grown up with that are also in the business, and we’re all still very good friends, we have each other’s back, we know each other, I see them all at events, all the time. I remember when I was a new agent, I’d get nervous when I’d have to go to a premiere or something by myself. . . . Now I go by myself to events all the time and, as soon as I walk in the door I know fifteen people. And it’s just easy. I think that there’s a core group that I kind of started out with, our generation, and we’ve all kind of come up together and we’re all still working in the business. But you know, there’s a younger generation and there’s an older generation, and you’ll get introduced to someone, and then you’ll sit a lunch or talk on the phone and so there’s always new people to meet, that never gets old, that never changes. (Agent, female, Talent, Little Hollywood, Los Angeles, April 2012)

At the same time, relationships form in a very small world in which reputations “stick” (to borrow G.A. Fine’s term [2012]), trajectories and histories are known, and ties are expected to last. Insiders face a relatively transparent world at the level within which they operate: everyone tends to know the career paths of his or her counterparts and, more importantly, the debts and obligations that one may have accumulated along the way that create informal professional hierarchies, and sometimes hierarchies that differ from those defined by presently held titles and positions. This leads me to approach the making of trajectories in ways that do not reduce it to the occupation of successive institutional positions, but underlines the importance of the systems of mutual (re)cognition within which such paths take meaning and can carry out social effects. Similar learning processes and common past experiences progressively form a shared professional spirit made up of converging representations and the use of a common language by agents and their counterparts. It allows for the internalization of shared conventions that frame how to communicate, negotiate deals, evaluate talent, and so forth, in a world where the participants often feel that “there are no rules.” There’s still a relatively small group of agents and lawyers who do these deals, it’s like a big fraternity, you know. You get to know the five hundred or one

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thousand people who are really important to know; and you know, you trade phone calls and emails and we all work together, and sometimes people hop jobs and change agencies or change studios, or [TV] networks, it’s the same group of people. I’m having lunch with a guy I’ve known for thirty-five years today—or thirty years—he’s a lawyer I’ve been in business with forever. We just do a lot of business back and forth, and you know, you can pick up a conversation with somebody two, three, four years later, and it’s like, you know (snaps his fingers), yesterday. . . . You know the shorthand, you know that they understand the language, that you’re in the same mind-set of what it is deal-wise that you’re trying to do, or representing a client or the steps that have to be made, and . . . everybody knows them. But, if you’re not in that club, you don’t, and it takes years to be involved in that, and to make those connections and have those relationships, so that you can get them on the phone, so when you call them, they don’t ignore you, they call you back. (Agent, Scripted TV, Big Hollywood, Los Angeles, March 2013)

This agent suggests that what is professionally at stake is nothing less than to be acknowledged as a player, to be taken seriously in order to stay in the flow of work exchanges. This primarily means, in practice, having one’s calls and emails taken or (quickly) returned. The challenge is therefore to be and remain a credible counterpart in the negotiation game. In the agent’s own words, it is to be perceived and labeled as “real,” and to be able to recognize who and what is “real.” Relationships are at the source of agents’ performative power (Austin 1962): what is in play is the realization of the capital of relationships, in other words, the process by which people and projects are made “real,” translated and objectified (through transactional mechanisms that eventually get legally formalized) into commercial and artistic value. As an interviewee pointed out: “the best way to network is to work on something [and] at making things happen” and, “until you’ve done that, you haven’t really had that connection.” 14 The materialization of the exchanges with production professionals (meaning that some actual collaboration occurs, not necessarily that it always concretizes as a financial transaction) is at the heart of this realization process. Repeated shared experiences involving talent representatives and their counterparts on the production side over long periods of time lead to the formation of a game of mutual reliance where collegial currency is produced and attributed to relationships. 15 This process of mutual evaluation based on recurring cooperation over time is described by this senior talent agent this way: When I say that the relationship is everything, it does not mean that it has to be deep and best friends. It has to be one of collegial currency where you’ve got enough in their bank and they’ve got enough in your bank, not leverage, history: there’s enough experiences [with me] at Paramount Pictures for them to appreciate my power with the client, my power with the agency, the lever-

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This is also how the difference between strong and weak ties acquires meaning and consequentiality in Hollywood. As a result, the fact that the various participants in the transaction of talent and projects do not all think of themselves as pursuing a project-based career should not come as a surprise. Artists, independent producers, and managers who also produce may share such a perception. By contrast, as shown above, agents put the requirement of managing durable ties and common futures first; they do not conceive their action or their career as project-driven, with the subsequent discontinuity between projects and exclusive focus on one main endeavor at a time. While agents simultaneously juggle a higher number of clients, projects, and tasks that they deal with at a fast pace, they also develop a vision of their activity as inscribed in a more stable and lasting system of practices. 16 The vocabulary of “trust” is often used by the agents to express this engagement in relationships that are intended to last. Evaluating Artists and Projects in Relationships The lexical field of emotions also appears when agents evoke the connections they build with their (top) clients. Agents’ relationship work toward artistclients simultaneously takes enchanted and strategic forms. Creating and maintaining this kind of bond resembles the performance of “emotion work” insofar as it connects the realm of intimacy and the domain of strategic behavior (Hochschild 1983). However, since it must be maintained over a long period of time, this emotional engagement is not likely to remain a pure facade. Regarding clients, agents tend to be subject to a double bind: on one hand, the risk of losing successful clients who do not feel bound by trust encourages the development of intimate connections. On the other hand, the experience of feeling betrayed when a client “leaves you” causes one to learn the need to practice a subtle form of “boundary work” (Lamont 2000) in order to keep the relationship “friendly” without it being experienced as a “friendship.” Managing relationships with clients means playing on the commitment and the detachment from personal connections that sometimes closely tie the fates of the concerned. Indeed, the client’s success is intrinsically linked to that of the agent. Agents’ status and influence derive largely from the belief that successful clients would remain loyal to them and follow them throughout the various career choices that they may make (mobility between organizations being a common practice for agents). With regard to artists as clients, agenting also implies recurring operations of evaluating “quality” and estimating someone’s (economic and aesthetic) “value,” from the initial bet that agents take on a person that they sign

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to all further moves tying the client’s career to the agent’s. Agents often talk about the critical importance of the “professional taste” and the “sense of talent” that they will execute in the daily practice of their activity throughout the duration of their career. The learning processes described above contribute to shaping this aspect of agents’ practical knowledge. At the same time, defining the value of people and projects is primarily a collective process in which talent representatives and production professionals engage. By doing so, these professionals form evaluation communities that remain distinct in Big Hollywood and Little Hollywood. In each of these communities, the participants acquire and develop a “sense of the game” enabling them to identify the counterparts who have “good taste” and can be “trusted,” that is, those whose professional history and past successes have proven the ability to “guess right,” and whose judgments have passed the test and received validation (be it through commercial and/or artistic success). The relationships an agent builds in such contexts, in the long run, allow for the production and the implementation of shared criteria of professional (e)valuation that affect artists as well as middlemen and -women themselves and measure their worth interdependently. They fuel self-reinforcing dynamics that contribute to the making of identities, trajectories, and organizations. CONCLUSION In sum, even though professional achievement is often experienced by agents as an individual struggle within a competitive environment, the agencies are places where mechanisms and arrangements that further the effectiveness, the solidity, and the durability of relationships get institutionalized. In that sense, the biggest agencies may metaphorically be thought of as reservoirs for professional social capital: one of the interviewed WME agents mentioned the “conversion” process that being at one of the Big Four makes possible, referring to the ability to transform superficial acquaintances into actual cooperative involvement. This capital is objectified in the three letters making up the acronyms of the Big Four (CAA, WME, UTA, ICM) that their employees can draw on in their relationships with producers and studios. A junior agent in the (then) new digital department at UTA confessed having been surprised by not only being able to negotiate directly with a powerful studio head but also, to a certain extent, being able to dictate the terms of the transaction in this brand new field of digital media. He was indeed drawing on the agency’s credibility and his organizational accreditation to obtain that his counterpart be willing to take the risk of cooperating. The Big Four agencies therefore provide institutional guarantees for the conversion of forms of social capital into economic and/or symbolic resources. These large agencies also organize, divide, and rationalize the relationship work and the

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circulation of information, first and foremost, with the interlocutors on the production side. At the bottom of the agency hierarchy, the position of the covering agent is dedicated to the maintenance of relationships with the executives of one or two major studios. By contrast, in Little Hollywood, the agencies organize the construction of long-lasting ties with independent casting directors, or those in charge of smaller projects (for television networks especially) who are typically the agents’ counterparts. Relationship work is therefore organizationally structured. It is also configurationally performed and constantly reshaped. Professional configurations emerge from the combination of the organizational logics of agencies and the constitution of cross-cutting circles bringing together different types of participants within the division of labor of entertainment production. Relationship work is acted out transversally, in interrelating circles that cross through organizations and link the agent to usual counterparts outside of the agency: clients, other talent representatives, and production professionals. At the same time, the various participants gathered in these crosscutting circles remain part of largely distinct systems of cultural production, depending on whether they belong to Little Hollywood or Big Hollywood. Such professional circles bring to mind the image of an artist’s entourage, sometimes portrayed in movies or television shows. In these crosscutting circles, the practices of various professionals driven by different specialized logics of action intersect and converge without ever destroying the boundaries separating them. Clients, producers, managers, and lawyers: “everyone has their own agenda,” as an interviewed agent pointed out. In the end, the ethnographic observation of agenting allows me to dismiss preconceived ideas regarding the making of film and television products, pointing to all-powerful directors or stars, or to the absolute control and power of a few industry moguls. It is at more collective and day-to-day levels that agents and other talent brokers are decisive participants in the relational (re)shaping of popular culture. 17 NOTES 1. I am well aware that network approaches do not intend to describe what social actors call “networking.” However, existing analyses of Hollywood networks are often implicitly in line with this folk category because they rely on the assumption that practices in the entertainment industry are primarily governed by interrelations around projects—which I will show not to be true as far as agents are concerned. 2. Among pioneering work, see Faulkner and Anderson (1987), and Bielby and Bielby (1999). More recently, see Rossman et al. (2010). 3. The need for modelization and mathematicized objectification also weakens the definition of “information” and “exchange” in play here. 4. In Currid-Halkett’s (2010, 2012) work, for instance, networks do not indicate the existence of communication or the circulation of information between its basic units.

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5. For an historical account of the emergence of talent agencies from the gradual dismantlement of the “studio system” see Kemper (2010). 6. Or, more precisely, to disconnect such perceived ties from those constructed by network models. Admittedly, network analysts don’t intend to account for individual perceptions of ties as strong or weak while claiming to explain action on the basis of the intensity of ties. The analyst’s interpretation of the strength and the nature of links or nodes is what prevails. The challenge remains to combine, in the structure of analysis, the role respectively played by the objectification of such ties in networks (i.e., what do they exactly explain?) in contrast to the experience of bonds on the part of Hollywood professionals. 7. For a notable exception, see White (2004). 8. In Getting a Job, Granovetter points out that weak ties can have major effects. Here too, far from the image of the “Hollywood heirs,” most candidates to the entry positions of the agencies have no direct familiarity with the industry and its players but obtain a recommendation from a distant connection. The use of recommendations is so ingrained in ordinary social exchanges that it is also easy for ethnographers to get some in their favor. Superficial connections, as quickly activated as they dissipate, are a common form of sociability in Hollywood. However, this is different from the construction of strong relationships, that is, the long-term building of a mutual disposition to cooperate, through repeated work experiences, in a world in which little is put in writing and one has to rely on counterparts’ word. One of the agents’ learned skills consists precisely in distinguishing the two types of ties (see Granovetter 1983 and 1995). 9. More often “he,” as this is a profession of predominantly white males of middle-class origin. Generally speaking, holding a BA is nowadays a minimal requirement to be hired at the bottom level of an agency. 10. Investment in the “signalization” of people allows this world to be compared to that of traders. See Abolafia (2001) and Godechot (2001). 11. On “markets of singularities,” see Karpik 2010. 12. Agent, Motion Picture, Little Hollywood, Los Angeles, September 2010. 13. This mostly concerns a limited number of agents with specific profiles, often those in charge of financing for independent cinema. 14. Digital media agent, Big Four, Los Angeles, April 2012. 15. It is worth noting that relationships are never purely dyadic. One-on-one interpersonal connections are always inscribed in larger systems of interrelations that ethnography can also reveal. A senior talent agent at a big agency describes his relationship with a studio head as follows: “He will never betray me overtly, because then he would get crushed by someone who is more powerful than him who also loves me” (Los Angeles, February 2013). 16. Lawyers and managers who do not usually produce and some studio employees tend to share comparable experiences. 17. I would like to thank Denise Bielby and William Roy for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter. I am also immensely grateful to the agents and industry professionals who have agreed to participate in this study.

REFERENCES Abolafia, Mitchel Y. Making markets. Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Ed. Urmson, 1962. Bielby, Willian T. and Denise D. Bielby. “Organizational Mediation of Project-Based Labor Markets: Talent Agencies and the Careers of Screenwriters.” American Sociological Review 64, No. 1 (1999): 64–85. Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot. On Justification. Economies of Worth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Les modes de domination.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, No. 2-3 (1976): 122–132.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. “Le capital social. Notes provisoires.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, No. 31 (1980): 2–3. Bourdieu, Pierre. “La jeunesse n’est qu’un mot.” In Questions de sociologie, 143–154. Paris: Minuit, 1984. Burt, Ronald S. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Coleman, James. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth. Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity. New York: Faber and Faber, 2010. Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth and Gilad Ravid. “‘Stars’ and the Connectivity of Cultural Industry World Cities: An Empirical Social Network Analysis of Human Capital Mobility and Its Implications for Economic Development.” Environment and Planning A 44, No. 11 (2012): 2646–2663. Faulkner, Robert R. Music on Demand. Composers and Careers in the Hollywood Film Industry. New Brunswick/London: Transaction Publishers, 1983. Faulkner, Robert R. and Andy B. Anderson. “Short-Term Projects and Emergent Careers: Evidence from Hollywood.” The American Journal of Sociology 92, No. 4 (1987): 879–909. Fine, Gary A. Sticky Reputations: The Politics of Collective Memory in Midcentury America. New York: Routledge, 2012. Foster, Pacey, Stephen P. Borgatti, and Candace Jones. “Gatekeeper Search and Selection Strategies: Relational and Network Governance in a Cultural Market.” Poetics 39 (2011): 247–265. Garfinkel, Harold. Ethnomethodology’s Program. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Godechot, Olivier. Les traders. Essai de sociologie des marchés financiers. Paris: La Découverte, 2001. Granovetter, Mark S. Getting a Job. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1974] 1995. Granovetter, Mark S. “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited.” Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201–233. Hochschild, Russell A. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Karpik, Lucien. Valuing the Unique. The Economics of Singularities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Kemper, Tom. Hidden Talent. The Emergence of Hollywood Agents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Lamont, Michèle. The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. New York: Harvard University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Rossman, Gabriel, Nicole Esparza, and Phillip Bonacich. “I’d Like to Thank the Academy, Team Spillovers, and Network Centrality.” American Sociological Review 75, No. 1 (2010): 31–51 . Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. White, Harrison C. Markets from Networks. Socioeconomic Models of Production. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Zafirau, Stephen. “Reputation Work in Selling Film and Television: Life in the Hollywood Talent Industry.” Qualitative Sociology 31, No. 2 (2008): 99–127.

II

Behind the Scenes of Production

Chapter Eight

The Choice between a Good Job and a Good Life Bill Mechanic

After twenty years of working in, building, and rebuilding three different studios (Paramount, Disney, and Fox), I decided to leave the relative security of the major film studios to fulfill my original goal of becoming an independent producer. When Larry Gordon, the former head of American International Pictures and Fox and at the time a leading producer, heard of my decision, he called and said: “Running a studio is a great job but a terrible life, while being a producer is a great life but a terrible job.” Simple, yet prophetic. The greater realization for me, however, was learning that there is no such thing as an independent producer. There are only dependent producers. Making movies is a business and no one works independently unless, of course, they are filthy rich. The term producer is uniformly misused if not completely misunderstood. Herein a producer means the person who develops the material, arranges the financing, oversees production, post-production, and the release of a movie. The producer stands out from the multitude of people who are called (or call themselves) producers, but whose real contribution is financing and/or selling a movie, those who act mainly as middlemen with the rights of a movie and thus should be called “mailmen,” line producers who help create and manage the budget, or managers of stars who take the title because they can. It’s not that these other types of producers don’t contribute value; it’s only that they aren’t filmmakers. A real producer in the filmmaking process is second in importance to only the director. One would think that the roles of a studio head and a producer would closely resemble one another, but increasingly that isn’t the case. The business, with the digital universe coming at it like a storm in space, is at a point 125

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where change is coming quickly: the interests of the studio are really more managerial than creative, and the producer is forced to choose whether to be a part of the studio machinery or to act more like an artisan. The goals and ambitions of the two roles, running a studio or creating a picture, are diametrically opposed. This wasn’t the case in the past, when the studios were self-owned and their sole business was making movies. By the 1930s, arguably the best decade of Hollywood films, the studios were virtually all vertically integrated; that is, they financed, produced, marketed, and distributed their films to theatres they also owned. Producers, directors, writers, and actors were all under exclusive contracts, so they were assigned to the movies the studio felt they best fit. Talent agents had only a minimal role in the process. MGM, under Irving Thalberg, helped define the process. He set up the socalled factory system to develop material and then created producing units to make specialized films within genres (e.g., musicals or westerns). To Thalberg and other studio heads, quality meant what it should always mean—the best movie of its genre. The best comedy. The best costume film. The best piece of fluff. It meant glossy blockbusters as well as serious films, often one in the same. A serious film like The Old Man and The Sea wasn’t cast into some low-budget category, nor was a massively scaled Gone with the Wind treated like something that didn’t matter whether audiences liked it or not. In point of fact, in 1939, Gone with the Wind was the Titanic of its era and won the Best Picture award over such commercially minded as well as critical hits as Goodbye Mr. Chips, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, Dark Victory, Love Affair, and Of Mice and Men. Compare that to the last three Oscar years with ten nominees. Less than a third of the nominees would be considered major productions. This is because today’s studio owners are conglomerates, which for the most part have little or no interest in movies. Films scare them because they are not predictable. When I was the Chairman of Fox, I once brought a movie in to discuss with my boss, Peter Chernin. He said it scared him. I asked if it scared him any more than normal, since every movie scared him. He said no. With all the best intentions and talent in the world, a movie can fail and lose money. Over the last decade, the conglomerates want their studio to operate as a “content provider,” not as a stand-alone business. They have thus focused on lowering the risk by manufacturing known commodities. If they can minimize the chance of failure by making something the audience is already familiar with, then they can make real money in the other “pipes” they own, whether that’s internet (Disney), cable (Time Warner, Universal, Viacom), broadcast (Disney, Fox, Universal), hardware (Sony), theme parks (Disney, Universal), and even occasionally theaters (Viacom). Quality or even absolute profit within the film space itself thus means less to them than creating content to help maximize the profits in their other spheres. That means trying

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to make only franchise material, even when it implies rebooting failed franchises with the hope of getting it right the next time. It’s not that Hollywood hasn’t long been on that slippery slope, only that it has gotten worse. In fact, when I was starting out in development, Dawn Steel, then the senior production executive at Paramount was told to teach me the ropes. In our first pitch meeting together, the acclaimed novelist and former screenwriter Leon Uris pitched Mila 18, one of his novels. He and I discussed how the film could be made by referencing several other films. When the meeting was over, Dawn said: “Never speak movies in front of me again.” While she had many other skills, knowing movies wasn’t one of them. And she wasn’t alone. A little while later, I was asked to generate a list of the 100 films every development executive should know. My guess is the list was used for fish wrap. **** By the time I took over Fox ten years later, it was a ghost town of a studio. No development, not enough funding, and an owner who was considering selling off the studio lot (“Why do you need it?” he asked. “Because without it,” I answered, “we’re nothing more than a bank.”) The studio barely had a hand in producing the pictures it distributed, choosing either to acquire films or assign them to production companies. I was hired to rebuild the studio but, ostensibly, my real job was to make money. My goal, however, was to make good movies, so that when I executed my job at the highest level, we made good movies that made money. Easier said than done. In order to reach that goal, I had to change the culture of the studio before I could hope to get better films. In sports terminology, that meant building a winning team, a group of people at least as interested in a larger goal as they were in self-interest. As hard that is in sports, where athletes can pad their numbers in order to make more money, it’s harder still in film because the people are smarter and perhaps even more self-obsessed. Taking my cue from Thalberg, I replaced virtually every department head and all but one of the production people. I restructured the studio into four production units, primarily to specialize in certain types of films (family, art films, tent poles, and films primarily aimed at women). I brought in producers to run two of the units, and traditional executives to run the other two. I hoped, by doing so, that we would have the best of both worlds. I also weeded the studio of non-productive production deals; that is, deals that paid overheads of producers with little commitment in return. Most of these deals were non-exclusive to the studio, which meant that we had too many producers who were making movies at other studios while we were paying their overheads. There was also the wrong mix of producers. The

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biggest ones were earning gross participations, and I found their interest to control costs antithetical to the studio. Essentially the bigger the budget, the more they felt the studio would spend to market the movie and thus theoretically the more money they would gross. It didn’t matter to them if that meant the studio lost money. There were also a number of vanity deals; that is, production deals given out to stars with the hope they would make movies at the studio. The problem was that most of the stars weren’t serious about producing, so the companies were populated with former executives or producers with too little skill and no supervision. They bought projects with the studio’s money the actors had little interest in. To remedy the situation, I cut off two-thirds of the production deals, saving several millions of dollars annually, and began recruiting what we referred to as “baby producers.” These were young up-and-coming producers who had no credits of their own (or just minor ones), and I paired them up with more experienced hands. A decade later, some of these producers have become industry leaders, responsible for such films as The Fast and the Furious series, the Twilight pictures, and Little Miss Sunshine. In essence, I wanted Fox to be the producer. I felt we should decide not only what we wanted to make but also remain active in the filmmaking process. That didn’t mean Fox was the only creative voice—far from it. It just meant to create equilibrium between the studio and creative talent in order to see our vision through. For example, I felt movies worked best when the suspension of disbelief was the highest. Although I wasn’t opposed to star vehicles, I felt often better movies came about when the audience didn’t know the star and was thus watching the movie, not the performer. It also made economic sense, since new talent was cheaper and could be signed for multiple pictures. Thus, a signature of the studio became breaking new or relatively unknown talent, whether that was Sandra Bullock, Hugh Jackman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, Hilary Swank, Natalie Portman, Will Smith, or Ewan MacGregor. In running the studio, I understood one basic truth, also taken from the sports world: you are hired to be fired. I never got carried away with Fox being my studio or that my situation could last forever. Instead I used the impermanence of it to try to make me better at my job. I knew I could get fired for any movie I greenlit, so I took it upon myself to only make films I believed in. That didn’t equate to a perfect record, but I thought even the commercial failures like Office Space were ambitious films, and those like Fight Club, X-Men, Cast Away, and Minority Report succeeded both critically and commercially. Big wasn’t bad and big wasn’t dumb. The studio heads today, on the other hand, seem more concerned with keeping their jobs than they do in some ephemeral quest for making good movies, and have taken on the objectives of their owner by narrowing the range of movies they commission. They make far fewer, far bigger movies

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than at any time in history, believing that such films are “clutter busters”; that is, they give consumers who today have seemingly unlimited entertainment choices something they can be marketed into. Review proof, almost word-ofmouth proof, these branded films are really more marketing juggernauts than they are creative works. **** When I left the studio executive rolls to launch my own production company in 2000, it was to gain greater creative freedom, but that’s not very easily achieved. The alternatives to the studio system are, in many ways, more difficult. As I said in the opening, the greatest lesson in producing has been in the talent level and number of people one has to deal with in order to get a film made. And while the studio ranks are filled with executives without the experience to really do their jobs properly, the salesmen, attorneys, and financial types that rule the independent world can tell you all day long what has or hasn’t worked recently but, in truth, lack the ability, knowledge, or experience to do anything different from what’s already been done. They can tell you precisely what happened yesterday, and not a thing about what might happen tomorrow. That’s the oddest lesson of the recent period for me: The independent world, which should be aiming to do things better and different from the studios, doesn’t see that as a mandate at all. If anything, the only things independent distributors and financiers look for is the same. They want what the studios want, or, in Fight Club speak, they want copies of a copy. Only they want it for less. As the head of a studio, I could make movies without stars. The difficult thing was to figure out what value the picture had so an appropriate budget could be made. As an independent, I’m continually asked to offer an actor a role in which he or she is miscast, in order to get the film made. A fifty-yearold actor playing the romantic lead opposite a twenty year-old? Why does anyone think that’s the right type of casting for a predominantly younger filmgoing audience? I could cast Cate Blanchett, Rachel Weisz, Hilary Swank, Natalie Portman, or Kate Winslet in their first Hollywood films, but when I wanted to cast Kaya Scodelario in The Moon and the Sun, a film scheduled for release in April 2015, I had to run through a laundry list of other actresses. I had to wear down the investors in order to get her approved and then listen to territory buyer after territory buyer complain no one was in the movie. Only someone great. As a studio chief I could make X-Men, the first comic book movie in years, or The Thin Red Line, the first WWII picture in a decade, or There’s Something About Mary, the first gross-out comedy in ages, or Braveheart, the first large-scale period film in years, but I now would be fighting for

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years to get any of those films made. Why? Because they didn’t look like what was selling at the time. It thus takes longer and is actually harder to make what I consider a good movie outside of the studio system. Even though the studios have narrowed their production rosters to only the big movies, the talent agents would rather shoehorn their clients into a big dumb movie, because it’s more likely to not only pay more but actually get made. The agents, even in this narrowing world, don’t seem to understand more buyers are better. A wider array of films is better. But despite those indisputable truths, the agencies continue to be subservient to the studios and gatekeepers to the independents. **** So, then, you might ask, where is the hope? While the studios would love to short-circuit the current sequential distribution model, the future is further off and perhaps less lucrative than they think. They might learn that multiple chances to earn money on a film (theaters, video, video on demand, cable movie channels, etc.) are actually better than the single bite of VOD. They might pay attention to the cultural force cable and internet programming has had in the last few years, where The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead, just to name a few, are more talked about than the empty-headed movies they are making. Maybe a billionaire who grew up watching movies might have not only the resources but also the ambition to build a vibrant independent movie company. Or, perhaps, filmmakers inspired by the Christopher Nolans, David Finchers and Peter Jacksons of the world will just force the big movies to be better. Hollywood all but crashed in the 1960s with some of the same issues and out of the ashes of failed big dumb movies came the films of the 1970s, an era rivaled only by the 1930s in terms of creative excellence. Maybe that will happen again.

Chapter Nine

The Importance of Being Ordinary Brokering Talent in the New-TV Era Laura Grindstaff and Vicki Mayer

Television entertainment in the post-network era is hardly homogeneous. At the same time that pay-for-view cable and other on-demand delivery systems are increasingly populated by high-concept dramatic series featuring some of the biggest names in Hollywood, on the other side of the tracks we find infotainment, talk shows, and reality programming, which trade in the production and performance of “ordinariness.” While the former moves us closer to a cinematic experience, the latter presumably moves us farther away. We focus here primarily on reality programming, widely assumed to occupy the low end of the status hierarchy characterizing contemporary U.S. television. Reality programs, like daytime talk shows before them, have generated new labor practices, new programming strategies and production aesthetics, more “ordinary” forms of celebrity, and, most important for our purposes here, new definitions of “talent.” 1 Our interest in these genres turns on the concept of “talent” and how talent is brokered in the context of realitybased media. If such media are largely defined by the use of ordinary people instead of professional actors, and by loosely structured scenarios or “situations” in lieu of formal scripts and rehearsals, then of what does talent consist, and who/what is responsible for cultivating it? Who/what is the reality TV equivalent of the Hollywood caster and talent agent? How do workers behind the scenes navigate the culture of reality TV to find, package, and sell “ordinary talent”? To address these questions, we draw on ethnographic research on realitybased genres, including daytime talk shows and reality shows. For two years in the mid-1990s, I (Laura), worked full-time as an unpaid production assistant behind the scenes of two different daytime talk shows, one “respectable” 131

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and the other “tabloid,” in order to conduct ethnographic research into the process of incorporating ordinary people into the limelight of television (Grindstaff 2002). Then in the early 2000s, I had the chance to interview the onscreen participants of MTV’s Sorority Life, a docusoap modeled loosely after The Real World, the first season of which was filmed on my home campus (see Grindstaff 2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2014). In the mid-2000s, I (Vicki), engaged in a four-year field study of reality cast work as part of a larger study of television production. During that period, I observed and interviewed reality casters, a category of worker responsible for both recruiting talent and managing the infrastructure required to attract talent (see Mayer 2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2014). On the basis of these research experiences, we chart the meaning of ordinary talent and various norms and practices required to broker it. We argue that ordinary performances on-camera necessitate ordinary production practices off-camera in ways that blur traditional distinctions between professional and amateur, producer and performer, and visible versus invisible labor. The reconfiguration of talent in reality programming requires new strategies for brokering talent, and this in turn requires talent brokers to embrace the very aspects of ordinariness that they prize in participants—notably the expenditure of emotional labor, often marginalized or rendered invisible in more traditional, higher-status production sites. A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORDINARINESS ON TELEVISION The appearance of ordinary or real people on television is hardly new; indeed, representing lived reality has been one of the guiding principles of news and documentary production since the advent of television itself, and before that radio and film. Until the late 1980s in the United States, the participation of ordinary people on television was limited primarily to news reports, game shows, and quiz shows, as well long-running shows like Candid Camera (1948–2004) and the Phil Donahue Show (1967–1996). Ordinary people also got occasional exposure on documentary television, including, in 1977, the twelve-part PBS series titled An American Family, considered a forerunner to MTV’s hit reality series, The Real World (1992– ). A little more than a decade later, as the dominance of the original three networks began to crumble under federal deregulation policies and increasing competition from cable and satellite technologies, the emergence of early reality shows such as Cops (1989– ) and The Real World, together with a new spate of daytime talk shows, gave ordinary people visibility on television like never before. By the mid-1990s, there were more than two-dozen different daytime talk shows on the air, prompting a shift to more sensational fare as shows struggled to distinguish themselves and gain a foothold in the market (see Grindstaff 2002).

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Reality television then eclipsed talk shows in the new millennium as the genre of choice for ordinary people. Starting with the debut of Survivor and Big Brother in 2000, reality television reconfigured television schedules, expanding opportunities for ordinary participation from daytime to primetime and across multiple distribution platforms, such as mobile phones and home computers. As Ouellette (2014: 1–2) notes, “by the mid-2000s, major broadcast and specialized cable channels alike were awash with make-over shows, dating shows, every manner of lifestyle and self-help program, reality sitcoms, talent contests and game shows, adventure competitions, docusoaps, and more.” Developed simultaneously for mass audiences and niche markets, reality shows have irrevocably transformed television culture on both aesthetic and economic grounds. Aesthetically, viewers now take for granted the link between ordinary people and the creative treatment of reality accomplished by hybridizing traditional entertainment genres (documentary, soap opera, sitcoms, dramas, game shows, and confessional video diaries), just as they take for granted the ability to interact with programming by voting, texting, tweeting, liking, and commenting via cell phones and the Internet (Ouellette 2014). Economically, reality TV is attractive because, like other “participatory” media that involve viewers in directly giving content and feedback, it offloads key production and marketing costs onto audiences and consumers, notably the price of employing professional actors and screenwriters. It is no secret that the Writers’ Guild strike of 1988 did much to galvanize the growth of reality programming insofar as it steered production companies toward unscripted programming, allowing them to shed the hefty price of screenwriters in their budgets. Reality programming has dominated mainstream television in the United States over the past decade in large measure because of the ascendance of “flexible” modes of production in which the non-union, widely available, and unpaid or under-paid labor of ordinary people (and below-the-line production workers) generates new avenues of profitability for media institutions (Raphael 1997; Andrejevic 2004; Magder 2004; Deery 2014; Ross 2014). ORDINARINESS AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF “TALENT” So what is “talent” in the age of reality TV? As implied above, talent is inextricably bound up with ordinariness and the political economy that foregrounds the low cost of ordinariness as a lucrative production strategy. Although in everyday parlance talent typically refers to skill (“she’s a talented artist”), and although this meaning is certainly employed by media critics when they castigate reality TV for its mediocrity, the categorical meaning of talent as applied to professional actors and entertainers (“don’t keep the

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talent waiting”) is rarely applied to reality TV participants, irrespective of their skill. In the world of reality programming, where participants are supposedly performing as themselves and thus drawing on a skill-set that differs from the professional training acquired by actors in dramatic productions, the term “cast” is used more often than “talent.” Even in talent-based competition shows such as American Idol or The Voice, where participants might indeed be highly skilled, they are more likely to be called contestants rather than “the talent,” the latter term reserved for the celebrity judges or hosts. In our own research experiences, we rarely, if ever, heard production staffers even use the term “talent” in association with the ordinary people featured in the programs we observed. 2 The terms “cast” and “contestant” thus preserve traditional distinctions between professional and amateur statuses, the latter only one step removed from audience members or viewers. Indeed, it is precisely the amateur (aka ordinary) status of reality participants that establishes their value and makes them technically eligible for participation. Complicating the picture is the fact that the skill of the professional actor may or may not garner celebrity, and celebrity—particularly media celebrity—may or may not be based on talent. The perceived presence or absence of talent is crucial to the way celebrity gets narrated. Celebrity based on skill, heroism, or accomplishment is said to be earned and deserved, unlike celebrity acquired through publicity and clever manufacturing (Gamson 1994). The tension between these two narratives of celebrity—deserved versus undeserved—goes back a long way, but has been amplified dramatically by the rise of reality-based genres because these genres are widely presumed to augment the “undeserved” end of the continuum. This is why Gamson insists that reality television has done more than any other genre or medium to reinvigorate discussion and debate over the meaning of celebrity, and related discussions of talent. In his words, the push toward ordinariness is “the most prominent development in American celebrity over the past two decades” (2011: 1061). As a result of this push, there is a new and growing layer or stratum of “ordinary celebrity” that exists somewhere between “real” ordinariness (located outside of media visibility and the potential celebrity it confers) and “real” celebrity (stardom that has sticking power because it is liberated from particular projects; it is talent-based and achieved through traditional media channels). 3 The concept of “ordinary celebrity” is an oxymoron, of course, because ordinariness in reality-based television genres is defined largely in contradistinction to celebrity. Celebrity is, by definition, extra-ordinary. For example, producers of daytime talk shows would speak of ordinary guests as a designated category of guest separate and distinct from either expert guests or celebrity guests. Likewise in reality TV; although one can find plenty of celebrity judges and hosts, as well as high-profile therapists, fitness gurus, and fashion consultants in auxiliary roles, featured participants with previ-

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ously acquired celebrity status are typically confined to their own subgenre in order to distinguish from the truly ordinary, non-celebrity participant. 4 But the oxymoron nevertheless works because it invokes a new structure of opportunity in which one can potentially transcend the boundary between ordinariness and celebrity, which is precisely the basis of the appeal of reality TV. For better or worse, the line between these boundaries is thinner and more permeable than it used to be. Graeme Turner (2006) calls the rise of ordinary celebrity the “demotic turn.” By this he means both the proliferation of constructions of “the ordinary” in contemporary media of all sorts, and the expectation on the part of the general population that celebrity is accessible and open to all, extending beyond the purview of established elites. Whether the expectation is reasonable or plausible is less important than the fact that the expectation exists and is now a part of everyday life, especially for young people (Turner 2006). The basis of “talent” for participants in reality programming, then, inheres in their ordinariness—their amateur, non-professional status. At the same time, membership in the category “ordinary person” or “ordinary celebrity” has implications for what, exactly, gets performed on screen. Ordinary people must play themselves in particular ways because of, not despite, their amateur status. Here, “talent” is less about a structural location within the production hierarchy and more about following implicit cultural scripts about who ordinary people are and how they should act/perform on television. To be ordinary embraces particular forms of performativity: in addition to signaling non-professional or non-elite status, ordinariness in reality-based genres also indexes qualities such as genuineness, realness, intimacy, and authenticity. In communicating these qualities, emotion plays a crucial role. Hosts, experts, and professional actors are generally friendly and animated but not overly demonstrative, whereas ordinary people are expected to be unfiltered, spontaneous, and emotionally expressive. Emotion puts “the real” in reality TV. It is the master trait that differentiates ordinary participants from their professional counterparts, 5 and has become a generic expectation across different subgenres, shows within subgenres, and roles or characters within shows, notwithstanding variation in the specific nature of its display. If ordinary people are understood to play themselves (or a close approximation of themselves) on screen, they are assumed to be most themselves, to reveal their “true natures,” in the throes of heightened emotion. Performances of heightened emotion—elsewhere called “the money shot” (Grindstaff 2002)—are therefore paramount in reality-based television, and they are paramount precisely because they are assumed to channel realness and authenticity. Unfiltered, uncensored, open—this is the brand of talent that reality television cultivates just like daytime talk shows before them, and this brand of talent is the basis upon which ordinary people parlay their

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participation into potential celebrity. Consider the qualities identified in Snooki by the casting director who first cast her in Jersey Shore: “She had no self-editing at all. She was self-deprecating in the best possible way” (Wallace 2013: 97). Similarly, in a television interview posted on YouTube, reality casting director Scott Salyer affirms that the best participants for reality television are “the kind of people that are, like—I can’t believe I’m saying this, but—blaaaagh (he mimics vomiting). They let it all out. They don’t have a filter and they don’t care.” Over and over we, too, heard some version of this definition of “talent” when asking producers, casters, and other production staff what ordinary people bring to the table that professional actors do not. Whatever you do, do it BIG, is the mantra. BE YOURSELF, ONLY MORE SO. Don’t hold back, don’t put up walls and censor yourself, be open about your personal life, warts and all. Exactly why unfiltered emotionality of an intimate and personal sort is what ordinary people bring to the table is the topic of a separate paper. We note here only two influences. The first is the historic connection between emotion, the body, and social inequalities. Historically, emotion management has been the purview of the white middle classes, whereas emotional expressivity is associated with women, people of color (especially African Americans), and the working classes (see Hochschild 1983; Torgovnik 1991, Goldberg 1993; Bourdieu 1984; Levine 1988; Kasson 1990). The more excessive or over-the-top the emotion, the less “classy” the performance is understood to be, in a cultural if not socio-economic sense. One can see these associations at work on talk shows, denigrated initially as a “women’s genre” because of its emotionality and primarily female audience, and then later as “trash TV” because the shift to a more sensational, tabloid style went handin-hand with an increased reliance on poor and working-class guests. The race/class/gender inflections of reality TV are less obvious, partly because the imperative to perform the emotional self in public has become increasingly normalized across the whole of the class/gender spectrum and across a range of creative industries (Banet-Wieser 2012; Bryman 2004; McKenzie 2001). Even so, some performances (think Jersey Shore, Mob Wives, Wife Swap) are clearly less dignified—less “civilized”—than others and thus continue to reinforce class, race, and gender distinctions. Moreover, to the degree that “ordinary” signifies a non-professional, non-elite status in the discourse of reality-based media, the ordinary participant is, by definition, occupying a different (lower) stratum than the professional actor in a performance hierarchy in which “lowness” is communicated at least partly through a closer association with excessive and “uncontrolled” emotionality. The second reason is the challenge of performing the self, which requires more intimate, personal forms of expression compared to acting in a professional setting. Actor-trainer and self-described “performance specialist” Robert Galinsky, founder of the New York Reality TV School, spoke to this issue

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in a recent phone interview. He said that while both acting and performing require honest expression of emotion, acting requires greater distance between person and role: “[With] acting, you’re throwing a veil over yourself, or a filter, that you’re communicating honestly through. Performing, there’s less of a filter, there’s less of a screen there. Performing is one layer before acting. Every actor performs but not every performer acts.” 6 Put another way, performance precedes acting and presumably requires less training (and potentially less skill) because there are fewer layers involved in negotiating and communicating meaning. Indeed, as we have seen, the ideal performance in reality programming has virtually no filter at all. The challenge of performing a dramatic version of the unfiltered self consistently and over sustained periods of time, especially in serial-format docusoaps, is enormously stressful for participants and production staff alike (see Grindstaff 2009). Lacking professional credentials and specialized media training, ordinary people use the tools of last resort—their bodies and emotions. The pressure to craft an interesting persona and sustain it over time also helps explain the ubiquity of clichés and stereotypes in reality programming. Stereotypes, archetypes, and clichés are important resources in unscripted programming because they have what sociologists call “cultural resonance” (Benford and Snow, 2000); they are familiar and predictable to all—efficiently incorporated into storylines by production staff, readily donned by novice performers, and easily digested by audiences. At the same time, taken too far, clichés undermine the very qualities of realness and authenticity that ordinariness supposedly stands for. Performing ordinariness is therefore a balancing act, one that draws upon recognizable traits but also allows for spontaneity. That clichéd performances of the self are a form of talent, and a potentially lucrative one at that, might rightfully rankle professional actors but is increasingly undeniable. At the top end, participants on popular multi-season shows and talent competitions command high salaries and lucrative industry contracts, as well as numerous money-making opportunities through public appearances, product endorsements, and spin-off business ventures (clothing and cosmetic lines, books, workout DVDs, etc.). 7 Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino of Jersey Shore reportedly has a net worth of six million, while Kim Kardashian is said to be worth 35 million (Monson 2012). These figures are exceptional, of course: very few reality TV participants make the leap from “ordinary” to “real” celebrity with the financial rewards the leap implies. When participants do undergo this transformation, it simultaneously has the intended effect of making reality TV easier to produce (participants having proven marketability within the conventions of the genre), and the unintended effect of undermining the cost-cutting practices at the heart of the genre’s business model. Hugh Curnutt (2011) calls such individuals “durable participants” because their talents not only generate value for a specific program, they can be repurposed to spin-offs and franchises and therefore grow

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the genre as a whole. The emergence of durable participants indicates that the television industry recognizes some participants as having “a specific kind of talent with a use-value that directly corresponds to the process through which it was cast” . . . or, in other words, “these participants, like any readied material, are, once assembled, inherently valuable” (Curnutt 2011: 1065). The brand of talent represented by reality participants plays a crucial function in the new economy of ordinary celebrity, resulting, on one hand, in the individual’s value to stand out among a sea of erstwhile competitors, and, on the other hand and more significantly, in the studio and network’s brand value among a sea of possible television outlets. Indeed, the real beneficiaries of the genre’s neoliberal business practices are not individual performers, despite the high price of a Snooki or Kim Kardashian; the real beneficiaries are the network and cable companies and the multinational media conglomerates in which they are embedded. 8 TALENT BROKERS IN THE AGE OF REALITY-BASED MEDIA To recap, cultural and economic forces have pushed ordinariness to the forefront of mainstream television production as a lucrative programming strategy, such that the “ordinary person” is now understood as a category of performer associated with a particular brand of performance. This prompts a consideration of how producers, casters, and other production staff recognize, operationalize, and in some sense even create ordinary talent. Contrary to popular belief, “being oneself only more so” on television is no easy feat, a fact underscored by tremendous effort expended on ordinary-people participants by production staff behind the scenes, as well as the numerous instructional resources that have cropped up online to guide ordinary people in their pursuit of ordinary celebrity. With reality-based television, ordinary people seeking entry typically do not have agents; they must represent themselves—to producers, in the case of talk shows, and casting employees (“casters”), in the case of reality programming. Putting oneself forward can mean as little as leaving a voicemail or as much as undergoing a series of intense auditions and interviews. As we shall see, although the majority of prospective participants are actively seeking to get selected and have responded to an advertisement or call of some sort, sometimes ordinary people get scouted and recruited by production staff outside of the formal, routine process. The brokers of ordinary talent for reality-based television genres follow in the historical footsteps of the brokers for professional film and television, including agents, managers, publicists, and casting directors, in at least three important ways. First, the jobs associated with brokering reality-based talent emerged from the industrial demand to streamline the flow of labor to pro-

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duction studios. Brokers evoke considerable cost savings simply by managing expanding talent needs according to an economy of scale. For every ordinary participant on a talk or reality show, there are thousands of aspirants who are turned away. Second, in the case of reality TV especially, brokers have come to do more than find, collect, and manage talent. The professionalization of the field has entailed packaging new production projects, bringing reality talent brokering closer to the job roles associated with marketing. Finally, as talent brokers have become more established, potential performers seek them out in order to become a part of their social network of connections. Taken together, this history replicates the movement of media celebrity from what Gamson (1994) calls a “discovery model” to a “breeding model,” in which talent is not innate, waiting to be found, but the product of controllable forces such management, strategic positioning, publicity, and timing. In this trajectory stretching from professional film agents to the reality talent broker, we follow Gitlin’s (1983: 143) observation that “in any industry, competition breeds middlemen who specialize in drawing together the loose strings of influence, centralizing a marketplace that would otherwise be more chaotic, bidding up the value of scarce goods.” At the same time, talent brokering in reality-based genres is subject to the specificities of television’s political economy in an age of media abundance. The sheer number of short-lived and low-budget reality-based programs puts the disposability of new talent at a premium. This makes the reality broker’s job more precarious than those who can build a career based on representing sustainable talent or casting for programs whose durability could last for decades. Perhaps in part due to these externalities, brokering reality talent, like reality-based genres themselves, lacks the recognition or prestige accorded to those doing similar jobs for other kinds of media production. Just as significant are the inequalities internal to the reality field itself. Like talkshow production jobs before them, reality casting jobs are overwhelmingly dominated by women, and secondarily by gay men (Mayer 2011a, 2011b; Monson 2012). While the casting profession more generally is female-dominated, the numeric over-representation of women in reality and talk shows seems to have resulted in the gendering (and sexualization) of brokering for those genres. That is, our research interviewees tended to stress the organizational and “emotional labor” (Hochschild 1983) of their jobs over those aspects more related to managerial authority and market expertise. By emphasizing work already historically associated with femininity, reality brokers both perpetuated their low status in relation to other media brokers, such as motion picture casters, while creating job entry barriers to those less likely to be seen as having feminine skills.

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The Talk-Show Producer In the world of daytime talk shows, now much smaller than it used to be but still part of the reality universe, producers and associate producers on any given show are the key brokers involved. Working in-house as regular employees, they find and book the guests, prep them for their performances, and are responsible for what happens on stage. In effect, they are scouts, agents, casting directors, acting coaches, and producers all rolled into one, with a dash of therapist for good measure (see Grindstaff 2002). They are sometimes assisted in their work by other in-house staff, including production assistants, interns, and even, on some shows, designated “travel coordinators” and “talent coordinators.” The former take over the mundane tasks of making airline, hotel, and limousine arrangements for guests, while the latter serve as an escort of sorts on the day of taping. It is the producer-associate producer team, however, that undertakes the critical behind-the-scenes labor of ensuring that ordinary people are ready to deliver emotionally expressive on-stage performances. They broker the relationship between ordinary people and the performance space, and thus between ordinary people and their potential for ordinary celebrity. Producers employed metaphors like “planning a wedding,” “making a salad,” and “conducting an orchestra” to capture the sense of having to pull off a complex production with many moving parts. There are both structural (contextual) and interpersonal (interactional) dimensions to this labor. In terms of the structural elements, first and foremost producers must develop reliable conduits to ordinary people. Because most production companies air at least 200 shows per season, with each show (episode) typically featuring anywhere between six and twelve guests, this process must be streamlined through routinization. For social-issue topics such as “Teens With HIV” or “Inter-racial Adoption,” producers, like journalists, rely on established groups and organizations to find both potential expert and ordinary guests (e.g., LGBT resource centers, adoption support groups). For more tabloid, volatile topics focused on interpersonal conflict (“Honey, You’re Busted!” “Secrets Revealed!”), producers solicit participation directly via on-air or online advertisements called “plugs.” Plugs eliminate much of the labor involved in finding talent, since people responding to plugs are essentially volunteering to participate, but they can create more work during the actual production phase because recruits can get cold feet and reconsider, or because others involved in the conflict refuse to cooperate. When shows produced from plugged topics fall through at the eleventh hour, producers are forced to rely on “stringers”—freelance scouts paid to find willing participants wherever and however they can. Even before the search for guests, however, producers are laying the groundwork for a successful (dramatic) show. In effect, producers create an

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infrastructure or a scaffolding for shaping and guiding the expression of ordinariness in particular directions. They do this by pitching certain topics and not others to their bosses (opting for sensitive, controversial, or divisive subject matter), by casting to maximize the potential for drama (bringing victims and their perpetrators together, juxtaposing people on opposite sides of a conflict), and by orchestrating either highly structured situations (contests or competitions) or potentially stressful or volatile situations all-butguaranteed to elicit emotion (revelations, ambushes, surprise encounters). This infrastructure or scaffolding, which is similar to that constructed for certain subgenres of reality TV, helps ensure emotional expressiveness from ordinary people. It is the reason why talk and reality shows have been characterized as “self-service” television: creating the conditions of possibility for an emotional performance out of the performative context rather than the specific content of formal scripts and rehearsals enables ordinary people with no professional training to serve themselves, cafeteria-style, to their roles (Grindstaff 2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2014). In addition, the physical setting of production in the case of talk shows can facilitate performative competence. Most shows are produced in enormous studios complete with stage, lights, cameras, and live studio audience, which clearly announces to everyone, guests included: “this is a performance.” Although the theatrical setting can be intimidating and serve to inhibit the occasional guest, as a general rule it has the opposite effect, encouraging guests to “go big” with their emotions. Given this infrastructure, one might wonder what’s left for producers to do. A considerable amount, it turns out, for establishing the proper context is, in itself, typically insufficient for ensuring performative competence. Here is where the interactional elements of producers’ labor come into play. Having sifted through mountains of eager voicemail messages left in response to onair or online plugs, or having struggled to penetrate the worlds of social workers, counselors, therapists, and professional experts of various sorts who effectively serve as gatekeepers to the sorts of ordinary people they want, producers reach out to prospective participants to ascertain the person’s suitability for the role. Once they find the right ordinary people, producers begin what can be a long, arduous process of convincing them to participate, or to remain committed to participating in the face of fear, suspicion, or indecision. Finally, producers work hard to prepare (“fluff”) the guest without over-preparing, hoping to achieve on camera that sweet spot between scriptedness and spontaneity: “this is your life, you’ve lived it, so there are no wrong answers. Just tell it like it is, straight from the heart! Don’t hold back on those emotions, because this is your big chance to show millions of people you really care about this issue!” (Grindstaff 2002: 3). Despite the best-laid plans, working one-on-one with guests is critical because, at the end of the day, they are not professional actors. “The blessing and the curse of talk shows is that they involve real people and you never

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know what’s going to happen,” said one associate producer, “they’re real people and ultimately you can’t control them” (Grindstaff 2002: 78). Moreover, these real people are going through some sort of heartache, challenge, or trauma in their lives (divorce, illness, homelessness, abuse)—which is what makes them attractive from a production standpoint in the first place, but also more difficult to manage behind the scenes, particularly on shows that traffic in conflict. According to a producer at a well-known conflictbased show, “people get suspicious, they worry we’re going to bring up something negative, and yeah, that is what we want to bring up! So it’s not easy keeping that balance together until show time” (Grindstaff 2002: 77). The instability felt by producers here stems less from concerns about the performative potential of guests on stage and more from the behavior of guests leading up to the moment of performance. The range of the emotional labor required of talk-show producers and reality casters is partly why these brokers experience their occupations as uniquely challenging compared to other industry jobs. Feeling the time crunch to generate “talent” where none existed before, the broker must make a resource out of feeling. Every step of the process by which real-people guests are found, vetted, and prepared for their roles requires varying amounts and degrees of emotional labor. This includes the work of connecting, bonding, sympathizing, befriending, cajoling, mollifying, pressuring, cheerleading, and guilt-tripping guests. Thus, the very thing that makes reality-based media “real” and presumably interesting to watch—the emotional performances of ordinary people on screen—requires emotional performances of a different sort behind the scenes. This emotional labor, combined with long hours and workplace speedup, leaves producers exhausted and vulnerable to burn-out. In assembling a show about giving a child up for adoption, for example, an associate producer spoke with 30 different women over the course of two days, after which she said: “every person I interviewed cried, and I would hang up the phone and feel lousy, I just felt terrible, I was crying too . . . I’m, like, ‘I can’t do this anymore. Why am I doing this?’” (Grindstaff 2002: 138). At the same time, the source of producers’ considerable stress is also its ultimate reward. “You love those moments when the audience is genuinely shocked for a second or the guest gets really emotional,” said the same associate producer. “But you know, people don’t cry on cue. They cry because they get to that place emotionally. They come here ready to get to that emotional level. And that’s not just a total accident, that’s part of producing” (Grindstaff 2002: 78). Interestingly, an additional challenge for producers began to assert itself as talk shows evolved throughout the 1990s and became more popular and formulaic: the challenge to spontaneity posed by familiarity with the genre in tandem with a solidification of its conventions. Casters in the world of reality TV face the same challenge today. Talent brokers of reality-based genres

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need participants who come across as genuine and spontaneous rather than slick or rehearsed, yet the more popular a genre and the longer it airs, the more elusive these qualities may become, both because popularity will attract aspiring actors who tailor their biographies to match producers’ or casters’ needs and because increased familiarity with a genre’s narrative conventions on the part of viewers shapes the potential talent pool. Speaking to the former scenario, a Ricki Lake producer estimated that upwards of 30 percent of the ordinary guests on that show were faking their stories at the height of its popularity in the mid-1990s. Although the majority were reportedly young people wanting to appear on television just for kicks, a related problem is the “professional ordinary guest” who does the talk-show circuit using multiple pseudonyms in order to assemble a portfolio of on-camera performances in the hopes of attracting an agent and breaking into show business (Grindstaff 2002). Such individuals, when discovered, are shunned by producers, but there remains the more diffuse problem of finding guests who are “fresh” and not jaded or overtly media-savvy when even a casual viewing of reality-based genres provides some level of instruction for how to act on one. The executive producer of a high-profile talk show well-known for its emphasis on conflict put it this way: “if you watch talk shows, you pretty much know what the producer is looking for . . . you sense that you’ve gotta be a good talker, that you’ve gotta have a dramatic story, that you’ve gotta point fingers, express outrage, things of that sort.” He added emphatically, “television has taught an entire generation, millions and millions of people, mostly women 18-34, how to act on a talk-show” (Grindstaff 2002: 126). The challenge of finding “fresh” prospects for the reality caster is even greater, because of the sheer volume of shows coupled with the lure of celebrity afforded by the genre. Tellingly, one of the goals of the erstwhile New York Reality TV School was to get students to unlearn their assumptions about reality programming so that they could play themselves with greater authenticity. As Galinsky, the School’s founder, explains in a television interview with CBC news (Canada), “what happens is that people watch these shows and they lose their spontaneity . . . [so I help] pull away the layers of cynicism and skepticism, pull away the layers of what they think they should be doing, and actually just be relaxed, just be themselves, so we can we enjoy watching a true and spontaneous reaction to what’s happening on the show.” 9 The Reality Caster In the world of reality programming, the key talent brokers work in casting, understood to be the continuous process of finding new ordinary people to go onscreen. The work of reality casters is similar to that of talk-show producers in many ways. Despite the fact that ordinary performances on reality pro-

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grams are pre-structured to a certain degree just as they are on talk shows, casters, like producers, emphasize the emotional labor of their jobs, especially the give and take between themselves and the people they hope will eventually deliver the goods. Like producers, they talk about doing this work as fun and pleasurable, but also as operating under extreme time pressure and with little formal recognition within the larger industry. Yet the job of reality casting is organized somewhat differently from talk show production, which has implications for how brokering gets done. Whereas talk show producers act as the caster/producer/director rolled into one insofar as they assemble a lineup of guests and oversee the development and execution of the show itself, reality casting involves a network of people with multiple titles, hierarchically arranged, within any given production. Casting teams may consist of casting directors, casting producers, assistant casting directors/producers, casters, production assistants, etc. Bigger budget productions typically generate more levels of hierarchy, but an increasing number of programs opt for a skeleton crew of casting freelancers (Mayer 2011a, 2014). As a result, reality casters typically work for a number of program projects at any given time. Some work only episodically, especially considering the number of programs that never run a full season. Reality casting agencies are split between in-house departments and independent, full-service agencies. In the latter case, casters can be employed by a network that is developing its own in-house programming, or an independent studio, or even an independent casting firm that services a variety of studios and format developers. The various degrees of separation between casters and producers mean that, as a general rule, casters are more focused on preproduction and tend to be invisible once production starts. This does not mean casters have an easier job. More so than talk-show producers, reality casters epitomize the transition to the post-network era, or “television after TV” (Spigel 2004: 2), characterized not only by changes in technologies, platforms, and delivery systems but also by increasingly flexible and contingent labor. The full-service model means that casters need to be at hand to do whatever is needed, which, as one agency website proclaims, “encompasses pre-production creative involvement, media coordination and outreach, thorough, exhaustive recruiting, [and] screening, which continues until the hand-off of the final cast.” 10 Meanwhile, the contingent casters are always searching for their next gig. They build capital within the industry not only through a portfolio of successful reality cast members, but also a deep roster of ready-to-be-deployed aspiring reality participants. Not knowing producers’ potential needs, reality casters rise through the ranks by anticipating the future directions of the format and having talent at the ready to meet those needs. Thus seasoned reality casters have made a lifetime out of making interpersonal connections and managing personal relationships with participants, both actual and potential. In this, they exemplify larger shifts in the

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economy that have pushed middle-class workers to be both perpetually oncall, not just for the current job, but also in search of future work (Gregg 2011; Neff 2012; Nolan 2014). At the organization level, casting work involves three sets of processes: event planning, cast selection, and cast promotion. For relatively known programs, casters may orchestrate mass auditioning calls, which simultaneously recruit participants while generating buzz for both the program and its sponsors. Sponsors include network television affiliates, radio stations, newspapers, and the venue that hosts the call. Over the course of a typical public casting event, for example, casters manage communications with venue administrators, such as shopping mall events staff, local soft-news reporters, and the marketing representatives for branded swag associated with the program and its celebrities (Mayer 2011a, b). All the while, they are coordinating teams of casting assistants, interns, and volunteers to enroll and collect data from every applicant and potential applicant in the vicinity of the event. As casters are quick to note, the success of these events cannot be measured by the number of actual reality participants, but instead by the synergistic demonstration of public interest in the program to this group of national and local event sponsors. In this sense, the caster is not just brokering talent but also brokering the mass of demographic data generated by the event for the program, the local media, the mall, and so on. Beyond assessing and communicating the commodity value of ordinary people, casters are in search of ordinary-people participants. Participants have to be found, and they have to be pitched to producers. In many ways, these are “self-service” roles to the extent that everyone involved in the production knows the elements of the format and thus the performance expectations. Reality TV shares with daytime talk shows the penchant for casting along type or cliché, and casting to maximize the potential for conflict. This is especially important for serial docusoaps shows such as Jersey Shore, Duck Dynasty, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, or the Real Housewives series because of the greater pressure on participants to sustain entertaining performances over long stretches of time. Franchising facilitates predictability as well, ensuring not only the replication of basic formats across different geographies but even, in the case of the Real Housewives, basic character types and personality styles. Even without the benefit of franchised formats and character-types, reality TV participants, like talk show guests, tend to be viewers and fans and thus are pre-schooled to some degree in a program’s performative requirements. Personal knowledge can also be reinforced through an infrastructure of hundreds of internet-accessible instructional videos, training tips for aspiring participants, reality news, message boards, fan sites, and advertisements for countless local, regional, and national casting calls. Together with the reality shows themselves, this infrastructure constitutes an “emotion economy” whose growth is both cause and conse-

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quence of the increased visibility of ordinariness on television (Grindstaff and Murray, 2015). As with talk shows, the more substantial the scaffolding, and the more transparent the recipe for ordinariness, the more difficult it becomes for casters to satisfy producers’ need for a stream of fresh, “unschooled” participants. This is why casters rely on a variety of informal as well as formal avenues for scouting participants. In addition to recruiting prospective talent online and at public casting-call events, casters also recruit one-on-one in a variety of everyday interpersonal encounters. This approach is especially effective when they need a specific persona to round out a cast, or when searching for unusual, hard-to-find, or against-type performers that might be useful in some future project. This is where casting most obviously bleeds into everyday life, and the caster is positioned as an “ordinary” person just like the prospective talent. In interviews, casters would describe approaching people in laundries, restrooms, bars, and restaurants, and even while standing in line to purchase groceries or other goods. They made contact, became friendly, and tried to establish open-ended relationships to build up their roster of casting possibilities. Casters described checking in with favorite contacts over months and even years to maintain their network. Additionally, as with talk-show production, every step of the casting process involves emotional labor of varying kinds and degrees. Casters have to set aside the sheer economy of scale required by television industries and focus on each participant as an individual, persuading him or her to embark on a process that may separate the participant from family, job, and social life, sometimes for months at a time. Casters may act as close friends by texting, sending birthday messages, or hanging out with a potential participant. They may also act as benefactors with promises of gifts or employment. Most importantly, casters, like talk-show producers, seek to be emotional confidants, putting themselves in the role of understanding friend or wise older sibling. They speak of themselves as therapists, helping recruits overcome separation anxiety or performance fright, while also describing recruits as onions to be peeled to reveal their inner core. In all these ways, casters, again like talk-show producers, align themselves with participants, underscoring similarities and shared interests in order to exert influence. “I’m an ordinary person just like you, I can relate to what you’re going through,” is the approach. Once casters find someone who they think producers will want, however, the intimate nature of making a connection with someone evolves into more of a sales deal between the cast member and the producer. The emotional labor of the caster’s job is rooted in the ability to manage the boundary between making friends and making the deal. One caster described giving a producer decoy participants in order to make her favorite ones even more appealing to the producer (Mayer 2011a: 128). Another made mock tapes

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that emphasized to producers how dysfunctional a family was in their private lives (Mayer 2011a: 127). Then, the process of convincing a highly sought participant can take weeks, even months. One African-American woman described her increasing value to casters once they realized she was the rare college-educated, middle-class applicant for a program that overwhelmingly elicited poor and working-class black women, because they specifically wanted to cast against type. Initially they asked her if she had ever been to “the ghetto” and whether she knew any “home girls who are on welfare.” When it became obvious she had and did not, casters staged a full-court press, promising a stipend and offering to pay her car loan, her lease for the next year, and the remainder of her schooling (Mayer 2011b: 190–191). Although some casters are jaded about making these deals, others, like talkshow producers, feel the emotional toll of sharing an intense bond with someone only to sever it once the casting process is complete (in the case of reality TV) or once the show is taped (in the case of talk shows). The break between pre- and production processes in reality TV is particularly hard for casters who feel their expertise is key to the genre’s success, but who also feel forgotten by producers and invisible in the industry as a whole. Casters get little credit for this relational and emotional expertise. Like screenwriters for reality programs, who set up the scenarios for “unscripted” action, casters’ names rarely appear in the final credits of a program. Until recently, their work was not even recognized by the Casting Association of America (CAA), which requires members to have listed credits and be sponsored by more senior colleagues, thus excluding reality casters who go unlisted and work far more sporadically for different companies. Membership in industry guilds such as CAA confers recognition of one’s creative contributions as well as certain worker benefits, both of which reality casters are typically denied. As one prominent reality caster lamented, “I’ve cast shows where I don’t even get invited to the final wrap party” (Mayer 2014: 71). TRAJECTORIES FOR TALENT BROKERING: TELEVISION AND BEYOND The case studies of talk show producers and reality casters illustrate broad transformations in the new television economy. Especially in the case of reality casters, the subtle shifting of creative functions into occupations with little career stability or recognition lessens the financial risks carried by television studios and their distributors, while keeping a monopoly on the intellectual properties that the brokers themselves are key to creating. Moreover, the increased organizational burdens encompassed by brokering positions, such as being always on-call and keeping data records, blur the lines

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between creative positions and those associated with low-status service employment. In this and in other ways, the skill set of the reality caster is both specialized (extra-ordinary) and mundane (ordinary). Especially important from our perspective is the aforementioned slippage between casters and ordinary people they aim to recruit, even to the point where some number of reality casters emerge from the ranks of the talent pool itself: savvy applicants who fail to get cast on a reality program use the experience gained through the application process to repurpose themselves as “insiders” with potentially valuable brokering skills. In other words, landing a job as a reality caster may be the result of, instead of or in addition to a precondition for, the casting process. In this way, the television industry creates a low-cost labor continuum between the ordinary people who become talent and the brokers who find and promote them, further highlighting the link between the performance of ordinariness in front of the camera and the performance of ordinariness behind it. Related to these transformations in talent brokering are the implications for the brokers themselves, many of whom are young and female. The presence of emotional labor in brokering occupations is neither unique to television nor to media as a whole. Kemper’s (2010) history of the talent agent tells us as much by showing how making business deals can never be disentangled from making personal connections. In the case of television talent brokering, however, this core job skill, a.k.a sociability, is feminized to the extent that it is both sexualized and differentially rewarded by gender. This feminization not only hinders cross-role solidarity (for example, between masculinized agents and feminized casters) but it also puts television talent brokers in an impossible bind between their labor and their identity. By building a labor career into a lifestyle, television talent brokers lose the ability to separate the profession from the person, and their job skills from something inherent and organic to the self. The collapse between work and being puts television talent brokers in a heightened version of the dilemma faced historically by women in female-dominated occupations, whose “natural” competence at caregiving, relationship maintenance, and emotional management prevents them from claiming these as professional certifications in a wage relationship (Hochschild 1983, 2003; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). In conclusion, the emerging emotion economy of reality programming, comprised of both the shows and the infrastructure surrounding them, speaks to that thickening space between “real” celebrity and the ordinary, nonmediated person against which celebrity has traditionally been defined. Whether through formal routines or informal tactics, the occupational class of casters, scouts, recruiters, and other brokers of unscripted performance must find, cultivate, and promote a talent pool that seems already present in diverse and democratic societies. This involves layers of mediation between

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expert and ordinary, professional and amateur, and performer and audience, across a range of players from the branded ordinary celebrities who have emerged from the genre to the jaded executive at the network who needs the next new star. All the while brokers, too, are reinventing themselves as ordinary experts. NOTES 1. The scare quotes we use around common terms are meant to signal the constructed nature of these terms in the television industry. 2. However, recurring reality participants could be referred to as “talent” by their agents in order to indicate their durability on the road to a professional career. 3. Other terms for “ordinary celebrity” include “dispensable celebrity” (Collins 2008), and D-list and DIY celebrity (the last two being common terms not associated with any particular source). 4. This subgenre would include shows such as Dancing with the Stars (2005– ), Celebrity Survivor (2006– ), I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! (2003– ), Celebrity Rehab (2008–2012), and Celebrity Wife Swap (2011– ). 5. Of course, celebrities sometimes do give us real human drama, but these occasions are noteworthy precisely because they are exceptions to the rule. 6. Personal communication between Grindstaff and Galinsky, February 7, 2014. Galinsky founded the School in 2008 as a training vehicle for people aspiring to get cast on reality shows. It is no longer consistently operational, but continues to have an online presence, serving as Galinksy’s personal “brand” for promoting his services as a private coach. 7. The cast of Jersey Shore reportedly earns $100,000 per episode, while the women of Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise reportedly earn up to $250,000 per season (Ouellette 2014). 8. Consider the following statistics compiled by Alison Hearn: Viacom, home to MTV’s Jersey Shore, saw its profits soar by 33 percent in 2011, while CBS, which owns Survivor (now in its 28th cycle) posted an 8 percent increase in advertising sales in 2012; the success of the Real Housewives franchise has boosted the earnings of NBC-Universal (parent company to Bravo) by 38 percent in 2010 while American Idol has made Fox the number one network among eighteen to forty-nine year olds for eight years in a row (Hearn 2014: 437). American Idol commands roughly $800 million in advertising each season and earned an all-time high of $903 million in 2009 (Hearn 2014: 437–438). All this during the worst economic recession experienced in the United States since the Great Depression. 9. Interview with Robert Galinsky by Dianne Buckner of CBC News Today (Canada); a video of the broadcast is uploaded on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM1gnSLmmNM. Accessed February 4, 2014. 10. Doron Orfir Casting, http://www.doronofircasting.com/about-us. Accessed June 1, 2014.

REFERENCES Andrejevic, Mark. The Work of Being Watched. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Benford, Robert and David Snow. “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 611–639. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bryman, Alan. The Disneyization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.

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Collins, Sue. “Making Most of 15 Minutes: Reality TV’s Dispensable Celebrity” Television & New Media 9, No. 2 (2008): 87–100. Curnutt, Hugh. “Durable Participants: A Generational Approach to Reality TV’s ‘Ordinary’ Labor Pool.” Media, Culture & Society 33, No. 7 (2011): 1061–1076. Deery, June. “Mapping Commercialization in Reality Television,” in A Companion to Reality Television, edited by Laurie Ouellette, 11–28. Malden MA and Oxford UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Gamson, Joshua. “The Unwatched Life is Not Worth Living: The Elevation of the Ordinary in Celebrity Culture.” PMLA 126.4 (October 2011): 1061–1069. Gitlin, Todd. Inside Prime Time. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Goldberg, David Theo. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Gregg, Melissa. Work’s Intimacy. Malden, MA and Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2011. Grindstaff, Laura. The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Grindstaff, Laura. “Self-Serve Celebrity: The Production of Ordinariness and the Ordinariness of Production in Reality Television,” in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, edited by Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell, 71–86. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. Grindstaff, Laura “Just Be Yourself—Only More So: Ordinary Celebrity in the Era of SelfService Television,” in The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives, edited by Marwan Kraidy and Katherine Sender, 44–57. New York: Routledge, 2011a. Grindstaff, Laura. “From Jerry Springer to Jersey Shore: The Cultural Politics of Class in/on US Reality Programming,” in Reality Television and Class, edited by Helen Wood and Beverly Skeggs, 197–209. London: The British Film Institute, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011b. Grindstaff, Laura. “DI(t)Y Reality-Style: The Cultural Work of Ordinary Celebrity,” in A Companion to Reality Television, edited by Laurie Ouellette, 324–344. Malden MA and Oxford UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Grindstaff, Laura and Susan Murray. “Reality Celebrity: Branded Affect and the Emotion Economy.” Public Culture 27, No. 1 (2015): 109–135. Hearn, Alison. “Producing ‘Reality’: Branded Content, Branded Selves, Precarious Futures,” in A Companion to Reality Television, edited by Laurie Ouellette, 437–455. Malden MA and Oxford UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Kasson, John. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in 19th Century Urban America. New York: Hill & Wang, 1990. Kemper, Tom. Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010. Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Magder, Ted. “The End of TV 101: Reality Programs, Formats, and the New Business of Television,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, edited by Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, 137–156. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Mayer, Vicki. Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011a. Mayer, Vicki. “Reality Television’s ‘Classrooms’: Knowing, Showing, and Telling About Social Class in Reality Casting and the College Classroom,” in Reality Television and Class, edited by Helen Wood and Beverly Skeggs, 185–196. London: The British Film Institute, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011b.

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Mayer, Vicki. “Cast-Aways: The Plights and Pleasures of Reality Casting and Production Studies,” in A Companion to Reality Television, edited by Laurie Ouellette, 57–73. Malden MA and Oxford UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Monson, Sarah. Me On TV: The First Ever Kick-Ass Guide to Get You on Any Reality Show! The Dream Factory, LCC. www.meontvbook.com, 2012. Neff, Gina. Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. Nolan, Hamilton. “The Grim Realities of Reality TV: Workers Speak.” Gawker.com. http:// gawker.com/the-grim-realities-of-reality-tv-workers-speak-1598101524/+hamilton_nolan. Accessed July 3, 2014. Raphael, Chad. “The Political Economy of Reality-based Television,” Jump Cut 41 (1997): 102–109. Ross, Andrew. “Reality Television and the Political Economy of Reality Television,” in A Companion to Reality Television, edited by Laurie Ouellette, 29–39. Malden MA and Oxford UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Spigel, Lyn. “Introduction,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, edited by Lyn Spigel and Jan Olsson, 1–34. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Torgovnik, Marianna. Gone Primitive. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991. Turner, Graeme. “The Mass Production of Celebrity: ‘Celetoids,’ Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn,’” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9, No. 2 (2006): 153–164. Wallace, Benjamin. “Diamond in the Mud,” New York Magazine, September 23, 2013, 97.

Chapter Ten

“This Is the Girl” The Social Division of Recruitment in the French Film Industry Vincent Cardon

In a scene from Mulholland Drive (2001), the Castigliane brothers enter the room as if they owned it. We already know that one of them loves good espresso. Adam Kesher, a movie director, and his manager are already there. Adam has to recast his lead actress and his manager asked him, before the arrival of the two men, to keep an open mind. One of the Castiglianes slides a picture across the table. It’s a picture of a blonde girl: Camilla Rhodes. “This is the girl,” the espresso lover says. Adam shouts there is “no way” to hire that girl when six stars are already interested in the part. The Castigliane brothers reply he does not have the choice: this is no longer his movie. Adam storms out of the room. Later, after a rough day, he meets a cowboy in a corral, who convinces him to accept the deal. The rest of the cast remains his call. When the audition comes, Adam says “this is the girl” and Camilla Rhodes is hired. There are countless movies depicting, to various degrees of realism, how movies are made and actors recruited. That aspect of Mulholland Drive evokes without ambiguity the power of money and of “external forces” on the movie industry. What becomes interesting with that particular movie is its labyrinthine structure. By the end, Camilla Rhodes has switched identities. She is now played by the dark-haired Laura Harring, formerly known as “Rita.” And Adam is in love with her. The movie is based on the representation of circulating identities in a universe in which names are randomly assigned to bodies, characters, and actors. In other words, Camilla Rhodes could very well be, but actually is, someone else, even though everybody 153

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states: “this is the girl.” Of course, Mulholland Drive’s director, David Lynch, plays with the fact that in real life the name of an actor sums up his or her identity. But the point of interest here is the ambiguity between necessity, randomness, and external constraints: Camilla Rhodes “is the girl.” But who is the girl who is perfect for the part? This kind of tricky question is the one a director has to face when helping build a cast. Of course, in the movie, “This is the girl” sounds like an imperative, but it is also associated with a kind of artistic necessity. It suggests that she is “the one,” which means “irreplaceable.” While in other professional worlds recruitment aims at finding a good match—the quality of which being diversely measured (Jovanovic 1979; Miller 1984)—the recruitment of actors in the movie industry is shaped by an artistic ideology expressing itself through the idea that, under economic constraints, the match has to be “obvious” to be good. In France, and in the live performing arts elsewhere, the recruitment process is based mostly on professional inter-individual networks, and in the French movie industry, it primarily involves two intermediaries—casting directors and talent agents. It has been shown before how, in artistic worlds, intermediaries play an important part in the crystallization and valuation of professional identities. Middlemen and women also have an effect on cultural content: the cast of a movie, for instance, is an important aspect of what makes a film unique. I will focus here on casting directors in order to reveal how this intermediary—meaning his or her activity, judgment categories, and professional constraints—influences the composition of casts. Casting directors’ work is based on their ability to play with actors’ identity, as defined by Zuckerman (Zuckerman et al. 2003) in his study of typecasting. The market identity of an actor is a complex compound of past collaborations (belonging to a genre or a segment of the movie market such as independent or mainstream film, etc.), “box office power,” and physical appearance or characteristics. Some actors have univocal identities, due to a past career strongly marked by a genre, or simply because of their youth. Some have a more multivocal one. My purpose is to explore how actors’ identities support the building of a film cast. I do this by examining how actors’ identities are negotiated in casting directors’ interactions with film producers and directors within an economic system in which an artisanal mode of production—located in a very flexible and economically fragile work setting—is embedded in a market where all the participants involved in the project have the dual goal of originality and risk reduction in a context where success is highly uncertain. This chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork comprising semi-directive in-depth interviews with twelve casting directors (about 10 percent of all the casting directors registered in the French professional directory, Bellefaye), two talent agents, and forty actors. 1 I also conducted participatory observation, in May and June 2008, of the casting of a movie that is extreme-

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ly different from Mulholland Drive: a French comedy, Bogus (a pseudonym), produced with 9 M€. 2 The average budget of French feature film has increased over the past twenty years, mostly because of the dramatic development of the television channels’ economic role in this industry. 3 However, film budgets are still relatively small (5.1 M€ in 2012, on average) when compared to American films. This average hides huge disparities, though. One can distinguish three segments regarding the film industry’s budget and overall economy (De Verdalle 2013). In 2008, films costing 2 to 4 M€ represented 42 percent of overall production. These productions rely mostly on various public sources of funding. The share of “intermediate” films (4 to 7 M€) has reduced (making up 18.4 percent in 2008), due to the increased difficulty of that segment to attract private sponsors, whose investments concentrate on the high-budget films segment (more than 7M€). Bogus belongs to that last segment—it is supported by two TV channels—and is rather representative of the films of its category (in terms of budget and genre). It is the eleventh film by a director of at least two hits. To examine the contribution of casting directors to French film production, I first study the impact of the role structure of production on the casting of lead actors. Then I focus on the way a script is translated into casting proposals. The final part examines the power of production intermediaries on casts and actors’ professional identities. FINANCING MODES, LEADING ROLES, AND ACTORS Usually, everything starts with a script. The story and the textual material it contains allow the hiring and coordination of the cast and the crew involved in the project. In a perspective following other work on the role of scripts in the world of theater (Davies and McKenzie 2004), I propose that the French movie industry is “textually mediated.” By this I mean that the script literally and figuratively binds different social spheres and enables communication among professional roles. It is at the source of the work tying together the producer and director, and it is augmented with various documents (pictures, draft agendas, suggestions, etc.) submitted by the different professionals involved in the production. A movie script is thus a “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer 1989), read from the point of view of each profession involved in the production, with the story and scenic indications “translated” (Akrich et al. 2006) into each profession’s own perspective. A location manager does not read the script as a casting director does; instead, he thinks “landscape,” and the plot is mentally translated into his own world of objects, places and scenery (Rot 2013), while the casting director starts reading with actors in mind. In fact, each “translation” is doubled since most of roles and functions are artistically subordinated to the director; each professional has

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not only to interpret the script but also to understand the director’s interpretation of it, its tone, its narrative stakes, as well as the aesthetic he wants to develop. The casting director is thus involved in a complex role structure, in which each participant has his own categories of perception of what the script implies, but also must follow specific and sometimes rival interests. Agents want their clients to be hired, which assures income for both the agent and the actor, but it also creates the opportunity for developing the career of their clients by cultivating and shaping their artistic identity. In so doing, agents perform one aspect of their “reputation work” (Zafirau 2007), and actors are willing to go along to show the extent of their expressive capacities and to collaborate on successful films that will improve their reputation. At the same time, a film’s casting director wants to avoid miscasting and to build a coherent and credible crew, which can curtail an agent’s aspirations for his client. The producer, who is less involved in the definition of artistic aspects of the movie in the French context than are producers in the United States, targets financial profit or at least economic viability, knowing that a failure could very well ruin him, further constraining an agent’s aspirations for his client. The director, who is considered in France to be an author (Darré 2000; Mary 2006), has the mandate on artistic aspects of the project, and over all the personnel on a film project. He works to get his movie to look like what he has in mind, aided by the television channels, that massively finance the movie industry in anticipation that revenue will be generated, and funding institutions such as the National Center of Cinematography (CNC), whose mission is to help low-budget quality “author movies.” The director is therefore central to implementing expectations of the future artistic quality of the movie. Who is cast is key to that quality. Focusing on a Triad The recruitment of actors in the movie industry involves many roles and professionals. In this chapter, we focus on the triad of the director, the casting director, and the producer and, more specifically, on the activity of the casting director (see figure 10.1). Casting directors are a recent import from the U.S. film industry. Traditionally, the director and his first and second assistants take on the recruitment of actors. The usual account of the birth of the function in France centers on Margot Capelier, who started her career as Jacques Prévert’s script assistant. She “imported” the function to France after a stay in the United States, where she worked for directors like Otto Preminger and Sydney Pollack (Benousilio 1987; Cardon and Lizé 2013). Since then, the young profession has been progressively acquiring its autonomy and organizing itself. A professional association of casting directors was created in 2004. Its fifty members represent about half of the regu-

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Figure 10.1.

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Relational Structure of Recruitment in the French Movie Industry

* Sources of public subsidies include the French National Center of Cinematography, various regions and cities, and other institutions. ** SOFICA stands for Societies for the Financing of Cinema and Audiovisual Industries. The societies are investment companies specifically dedicated to the collection of private funding to finance movies or audiovisual projects.

larly working casting professionals in France. The movie industry is projectbased and so is the work of casting directors. They are hired by the production in two contexts reflecting two distinct missions: “consultancy,” during the phase of pre-production, in order to help cast the lead actors, and more generally to help with the recruitment of the rest of the cast. Only the most successful and best-connected casting directors are hired as consultants. Directors and producers collaborate on few movies and many are not sufficiently well-known 4 to have access to high-profile talent agents and bankable actors. More generally, most directors and producers are unfamiliar with the world of actors—the population of actors having been multiplied by four in twenty-five years (reaching about 24,000 in 2009) and that of agencies by fifteen (there were around ten in the early 1970s, and one hundred fifty-two in May 2014) (Cardon 2011) by fifteen. Well-established casting directors

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have recognized and established connections and can be considered as brokers, capable of leading bankable actors to still-unknown directors and producers. But they have no decision power and are hired only to make propositions. Nor do they have a mandate to negotiate actors’ wages. This kind of bargaining power is limited to the producer. Casting directors share no contractual relationship with talent agents but they have recurrent competitive as well as cooperative relationships with them. At the same time that casting directors broker bankable actors, they prospect for “new” talent that is not represented yet. 5 Ultimately, though, the choice of lead actors depends on the consent of a production’s main sponsors, such as television channels, and the recruitment of actors follows the hierarchy of characters. Lead roles are cast before supporting roles. Building a Movie on the Leading Roles “One knows that the magic of a designer label, when applied to any object, a perfume, shoes, and even, it’s a real example, a bidet, can extraordinarily multiply its value. It is a magical, alchemical, act” 6 (Bourdieu 2002: 219). The designer label that a film director puts on his movie, though decisive, is seldom powerful enough in France to attract TV channels’ funds, nor is the name of a famous producer. Instead, the catalytic action of at least one famous actor’s name is necessary to fund the movie. Many directors also prefer to work with famous actors because of the great talent they generally credit them for, and because of the professional consecration implied by that kind of collaboration. But those artistic and professional aspects are mingled with economic ones. Indeed, a director’s or producer’s reputation is not sufficient to gain the trust of private sponsors. The participation of one or several “bankable” actors is required to reassure television executives, which is crucial in an era of growth in film budgets, for a whole segment of films that cannot count entirely on public subsidies for funding. 7 In consultancy, a casting director’s worth relies more on his or her knowledge of actors’ economic value than on their own ability to influence the imprecise scale of fame by discovering rising stars. Instead, his worth depends mostly on his ability to reach actors and to persuade their agent to engage their talent in the project. As a result, the career success of casting directors is marked by their strategy for managing the unpredictability of the market. Inequalities among casting directors are less related to their daily wage than to their ability to obtain numerous contracts, which implies they cruise between very different genres and segments of the film market, defined by their budgets, and at times also work for television. Sometimes, they can act as brokers, bringing “new” casting ideas to the director but also bankable actors to poorly financed films.

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The increasing share of distributors and television channels in the financing of movies has intensified the demand for bankable actors. These participants target guaranteed economic outcomes and want minimal uncertainty. To do so, they push for entire casts of bankable actors. However, there is considerable evidence that the relationship between having an all-star cast and an assured income is highly undetermined. Most econometric models, even when finding a positive effect of stars, conclude that casting is insignificant when advertising budgets are factored into the analysis (Prag and Casavant 1994). Instead, most studies that try to isolate the elements of the success of a movie and the specific role of stars in it show that the effect of casting is at best low (Simonet 1980; De Vany and Walls 1999; De Vany 2004), and that too many stars (including actors, directors, and producers) in a same movie can even be counterproductive (Faulkner and Anderson 1987). In short, the success of a movie remains highly uncertain although advertising can reduce the risk of failure for the movies with the largest budgets (Beuscart and Mellet 2012). However, the use of stars or at least bankable actors is still considered to increase the chance of success of a movie (Bidaud 1994; Caves 2002; Morin 1972; Powdermaker 2013). The Lack of a Shared Metric of Fame Paradoxically, despite this perceived necessity to bring bankable actors to the cast, there is no precise valuation system and metric to estimate a name’s economic worth. With a project-based organization, metrics are blurred, although there are some marketing tools such as those proposed by the website “Cinema Box Office,” which offers decision-support tools developed by the European marketing giant GfK. They are based on an objectification of an actor’s box office power measured by the number of tickets sold for all the movies he appeared in, in what kind of roles, and by his “popularity.” But ethnographic observation and interviews show that fame resists commensuration, that is, the reduction of qualities to quantities (Espeland and Stevens 1998). At that level of the project-based organization, and even when casting directors are mandated in consultancy, they do not know with certainty who is bankable and who is not. There is no consensus on the number of bankable actors, nor is there a core list, shared, and regularly updated. Who is bankable and who is not is shared knowledge based on no universal definitions or criteria, and is transmitted informally. In fact, its very definition is twofold: a first set of distinctions refers to a simple dichotomy: “bankable/not bankable.” The other is a differential evaluation, based on comparative rankings without a common metric: one actor is “more bankable” than another. Indeed—other than box office records and the budget of the movies they were involved in, the number of hits they are credited for, and other “objective”

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elements—the label “bankable” is attached to an actor in a very informal way during the interactions and deliberations involving the casting director, his assistants, and the main partners, the producer and the director. Those discussions are the core of consultancy casting work. Florence: Well, that’s how I proceed to make a proposal. Different combinations of couples, well, of possible families. Of possible families. I organize a meeting with the director and the producer and we discuss. That’s it. Then, we discuss and we decide who we’ll send the script to, in order to set a reading with the director. So, you see, I’ve done different combinations, different proposals, a kind of family picture. And then, with the director, we decide who we target first. Investigator: Ok, director plus producer, I assume. Florence: Yes, both of them. They both have to agree. Of course, because, after, the producer is going to have to go down the line to finance the movie and he . . . you see, when I propose [name], for instance, he tells me: “nope, not bankable. Distributors won’t agree.” Casting Assistant: [name] is not bankable? Florence: Gee no. Investigator: Why? Florence: Because. Not bankable. Because she has not been in hits, in films that sold well. [Other name], it’s the same: not strong enough. And so is [name]. So, it’s combinations to make, you see. . . . So you have to get the good level to . . .” (Florence, Casting Director, female, fifty-two years old) In sum, this assessment of a name’s value is strangely imprecise—given the importance of such choices for the participants present—and is built into the course of conversations with other casting directors, talent agents, and producers. This level of the project-based organization has little contact with the funders—TV channels. Consequently, this relative autonomy introduces a new level of uncertainty that is “judgment over judgment” (Knight 2009) but it does not deter decision-making or curtail the harsh assessment of actor’s economic value.

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TRANSLATION AS A RESOURCE: ACTORS The professional mission of casting directors is also to propose alternatives to an actor thought of by the screenwriter (or the director) when he or she wrote the script. 8 The Cumulative Logic: Converting Names into Funds The following episode happened during the preproduction of Bogus. It reveals that, although not precise, the valuation system of the market coexists with a presumed additive property of names to reach the “good level” of fame that raises the financing of the movie up to the expectations of the production. Because a famous actor is expensive, his presence brings money to the movie. In this instance, the director wanted a very famous elderly French actor—famous enough to have worked in the United States—and had written the lead part for him. He appears in the first propositions made by the casting director, and the cast was initially built around him. Ultimately, though, he refuses the part. Another actor is proposed. He would be, according to the casting director and director, “perfect for the part.” A second best thus becomes a new artistic perfect match. But he is considered less bankable by the producer as well as by the casting director: “Paul is less strong than Jacques,” says Florence, the casting director. Paul agrees to read the script and meet the director. But since his “credit” is not big enough to raise enough funds to produce the movie, the producer, along with the director, try to “expand” the number of lead actors. As a result, three other important parts appear in the script: a forty-year-old couple and an editor-in-chief who is also a seducer. The actor envisaged to play the seducer (Lionel) is bankable—he has appeared in many hits and has also played abroad. But once again, he is not “load bearing” enough. The situation is problematic and is solved with the addition of an actress (Sylvie) who is considered bankable by Florence. Yet, Sylvie’s status (i.e., bankable or not?) is the topic of several long conversations with the executive producer, who is not convinced of her box office power. Moreover he thinks Sylvie has too much of a TV identity. The objection—debated at length—is reversed into a positive argument by Florence, who predicts that Sylvie will be an asset in promoting the movie, since “TV channels love her.” The Script’s Shortcomings Studies of recruitment (Eymard-Duvernay 1997) and head-hunting for high profile executives (Gautié, Godechot, and Sorignet 2005) describe how a very vague profile established by the recruiting company is often trans-

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formed and reduced to standard criteria of age, diplomas, and experience to help the employment search. Casting directors cannot format the demand the same way because they are recruited to make realistic but also original proposals. The certification of competence is always problematic in this labor market (Menger 1997; Paradeise 1998) but one can find a point of comparison with head-hunting because there are very few “objective characterizations” of parts in movie scripts. Moreover, with Bogus, a systematic inventory of those elements shows that they are reduced to notes on the gender, approximate age, and sometimes skin color (for one character, who is “darkskinned, without being black”). Characters are relationally defined by the situations they are involved in and, besides, what matters for the casting director is less his interpretation of the script than what the director has in mind, which sometimes leads to difficult translations of his desires and blurred definitions of what kind of actor he wants. So, after reading the script, you have to dig into your director’s brain. And you try to decode what’s in it. Decoding is particularly touchy when the director tells you: “so . . . she is young but old. He is blond but ginger. He is Czech but Swedish. All those contradictions. . . . It’s amazing. . . . That’s what I call “the decoder” (mimics the sound of a retro electronic machine “tiguidiguidi”). [Quoting a director] “So, this character, for instance, it’s my baker. I mean, it’s really her.” Or they simply cannot express things with words. They give you explanations that are just nonsense on the way their character talks, acts, lives. You propose them exactly that but it will never be good enough because they just don’t know how to tell you . . . well, after years, I’ve come to understand that it’s sometimes difficult to say: “in fact, it’s my father” or “it’s my sister.” So, I’ve been very often to such-and-so director’s home on Sundays to have a cup of tea and to look at pictures, family pictures. And on Monday, you arrive at the office and you understand that . . . that’s it . . . you understand what he meant and couldn’t tell you. It makes us, I don’t know, not some kind of experts but. . . . We do some kind of policing, of investigation work. (Casting director, male, thirty-nine years old)

Sharing an aesthetic, movie references, and personal bonds helps to build communication conventions and routines, and explains the recurrence of collaboration between a casting director and a director when the latter succeeds in making more than one movie. The matching process requires a common language between the casting director and the director. The casting director has to understand the story behind the categories used by the director. Most of those categories are adjectives. That is how characters and their relationships are defined and qualified in their discussions or in the conversations between the casting director and his assistants. Beautiful/ugly, transparent/charismatic, intense/cold, gloomy/joyful, brave/cowardly are the kind of categories that are discussed in casting sessions. As Wittgenstein (2006) noted, aesthetic judgments very often reduce themselves to adjectives. Cast-

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ing directors are specialists of the judgments that they use to match with actors’ professional identity. These adjectives are practical categories, which, as any classificatory system, bring order (Bowker and Star 2000), to the market of talent, and allow action, communication, and decision to follow. Most of the time, when I’m alone, I note the first lines dealing with the part, to sketch the way they are represented, how they arrive in the script. Afterwards, I write down the number of sequences. And then, most of all, I talk with the director and the producer, in order to make sure there’s no misunderstanding. . . . So, I don’t write much when reading, except for my inventory and characteristic lines. And then, after my meeting with the director, I note keywords. It can be anything, like “ardent” [burning]. “Ardant,” like “Fanny”? [I ask, misunderstanding, because Ardant is also the name of a French actress]. [She laughs] No! “Ardent.” [Burning]. The adjective. Burning, brave, shy. Adjectives. And references to movies. Sometimes, directors ask us to watch movies in order for us to get immersed in a “universe of actors.” Most of the time, they are foreign movies. . . .” (Casting Director, female, thirty-two years old)

My misunderstanding is not insignificant. It led me to the idea that casting work was adjective-based, while my prior hypothesis was that this world was specifically identity-based, in a “full name-based” sense—I expected that full names would be used as metonymies of identities. Indeed, many conversations in the world of movies involve names of actors, directors, casting directors, and producers in professional exchanges expressing their belonging to a specialized world. But during the casting process, the matching involves both names and adjectives. Adjectives, Identities, Pictures The first thing that a casting director has to do when casting a production is to match the adjectives describing a given part to specific segments of the actors’ labor market. For instance, during the casting of Bogus, Florence had to find an actress to portray a young journalist intern: “For that part, I want a girl between twenty and twenty-five, fresh, spontaneous, sparkling, cheerful.” And the young mixed-raced photographer should be “mysterious without being too dark,” which led to many Internet searches of pictures of young actors matching those requirements. This task was carried out by the casting director’s assistants. She gave names and they looked for the right picture, regularly submitting what they had found to their boss, who gave her verdict. “Too dark. Can’t you find a more cheerful picture of him?” “Yeah, this one is pretty much okay. Ok, let’s keep this one but we should have another one,”

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and so on. They finally make proposals that are, in the work documents transmitted to the producer, pictures placed side by side, with the names of actors and the part they would play. Photos support many exchanges among the participants in the casting process. Their primary purpose is to give a good sense of the cast. In order to help the director and the producer visualize the potential final product (and prospective box office receipts), some casting directors produce intermediary posters of the movie. Taken from other contexts (film, photo shoots, etc.), these photos are intended to be good indicators of what an actor can express, of what his identity is, in other words. However, adjectives are not the only matching mechanism used in the communication between casting directors and directors. Adjectives are very ambiguous and their interpretation leads to frequent disagreements, as observed in the course of my fieldwork. That’s why adjectives are generally clarified in reference to aesthetic objects and full names to specify their meaning and nuance. The translation of the director’s artistic desires sometimes leads to statements that sound strange to a lay observer: “I mean, we’re looking for an actor who would be . . . I don’t know . . . somebody who would be able to be as intense as De Niro in Raging Bull but with more casualness, less dark and crazy.” Or: “I’m looking for a black guy who’d look like the devil in a Mexican fight movie” (these are examples given by two male casting directors). The shared image of the aesthetic that the director wants to develop helps reduce uncertainty concerning the directions the casting director should explore to propose an credible embodiment of characters that are still, in this phase of the project, just “beings on paper.” PLAYING WITH SITUATIONS AND STEREOTYPES: CHARACTERS The relational definition of characters implies a game with rules of credibility, those rules being supported by social stereotypes, of which casting directors are specialists. Casting directors aim at providing a solution to a narrative problem. They have not only to match an actor with a role but also to build a coherent “family picture” with the proper tonality. That construction relies on judgments over the physique of actors, which is an important part of their professional identity, and of their acting identity, based on past productions. Reading as Framing: The Strength of Aesthetics Most directors in France are looking for the actor who “is” the character. This naturalistic aesthetic, which is viewed by many actors as a denial of their professional acting skills, is extremely widespread. Nonetheless, the

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strength of naturalistic constraints varies, depending on the actor’s level of artistic credit. Casting directors cannot always follow to the letter the strict “objective” elements in the script, even when a precise age is mentioned. If sex is a firm, dichotomous variable, age, which is the other element defined as “objective” by my interviewees is, in fact, subject to interpretation, the accuracy of which is vital for the general likeability of the cast. In other words, an error in age can lead to miscasting, and is envisaged as potentially disastrous. But the biological age of a character does not have sense in itself. It’s the intrigue, and what it implies in terms of relationships among characters that injects meaning into age or physique. Casting directors want a match between the social expectations implied by the script and what they can find among the actors they know or meet. These social expectations relate to acting, physique, and age. However, casting directors have interpretations of those constraints or indications that depend on the importance of the role, and thus, on the reputation of actors they can propose, and of the gender of the character. Most bankable actors in the movie industry are at least forty years of age. Professional reputation, let alone being bankable, constitutes a release from naturalistic constraint, particularly that applied to age, and it opens a wider spectrum of roles to actors. In contrast, young actors, with fewer acting credits, will be more vulnerable to naturalistic arguments. Differential Realism The census of the parts of Bogus shows that phenomenon. Among the five lead parts, three are ten years older than indicated in the script. The “forty year old couple” consists of a forty-nine-year-old actor and a fifty-one-yearold actress. The credibility of those ages was not a matter of discussion during the casting process. However, the age of the young female lead was a serious concern for the casting crew and the director. They were looking for a twenty-five-year-old intern. A first round of trials involved twenty-five-yearold actresses. The director, who was “looking for the truth of the character”; found them “too old” for the part. He wanted “more youth, more freshness.” Some twenty-two and twenty-three-year-old actresses were then called in. This time, “they looked too young.” Back to the twenty-five year olds. The director wanted to hire an actress who declined the part because she had been cast in an international movie. Finally, after four afternoons of trials, a promising twenty-one year old is hired. She had already appeared in several movies and won two awards. In discussions, the choice of that young actress soon became “obvious.” The director is reassured to work with an already professional actress. Florence, the casting director, knows that the career of a rising young actress derives from these kinds of small but important parts, and this young actress has interest to get a credit, even small, for that evolu-

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tion. Very soon, all the trials and errors are forgotten, due, in part, to the high tempo of the recruitment process: new tasks are waiting and other parts need to be cast. More generally, judgment of the identity of actors with shortest or least successful careers is based on their physical or social identity in “real life”—what Bourdieu would call their hexis (Bourdieu 1980: 117). That identity is very often the basis of the matching for small parts, and this kind of social judgment is a convention shared by both casting directors and their regular correspondents, talent agents. In an interview, a talent agent of middle importance, representing low-to-medium rank actors, told me that using actors’ biographies to make them appealing to casting directors was a good strategy. There are so many talented people in Paris that talent is not enough. We all say more or less the same thing to defend our actors. They are “great,” he is “extraordinary,” he made such movie. Well, here we are, we all have the same adjectives. Thus I develop them or I coat them in personal qualifiers. I play on their course of life a lot to have access to certain roles. I have an actor who was peacekeeper. When I hear about a movie dealing with war, I call the casting director, and I tell her: “well, you have to see him. This guy, he saw wars, death, companions who fell. He knows what that is, bullets that whistle, he knows what that is. You can take any comedian, if he has not lived that, he is not going to be able to give it to you.” And that kind of argument, very often: bull’s eye! Because you’re no longer in art. This is real life. (Talent agent, male, forty-two years old)

For a small part where not much acting credit is required, casting directors look for a direct, obvious match between the character and the actor to submit to the director, and some “objective” details strongly orient the search. Florence had a hard time finding an actress for a “young Indonesian, not too pretty, maid.” Indeed the director insisted on an Indonesian actress with an Indonesian accent: he was committed to “the truth of the character.” But no such Indonesian actress is represented by a talent agent in Paris. Florence had to extend the search to the Internet using specialized forums and websites. After auditioning more than twenty young actresses, a Chinese-born actress was finally chosen. Farewell, strict realism. But more generally, it is very difficult for an actor to exceed the boundaries of his social identity or hexis if he has not played important parts when young. Risks in the Business: Brokers and Hierarchies The more multivalent an actor’s identity, the more numerous the possibilities of casting him in different roles. In other words, multivocal identities can escape the logic of typecasting or can span different typecasts, which will in return increase the multivocality of the identity, if the actor shows he is able to play parts outside his usual typecast or genre. Conquering a multivocal

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identity enhances professional experience but requires a good amount of it: competence is certified only by past collaborations on the artistic labor market. That is where the role of intermediaries is crucial. Univocal identities are easier to value on the market but they can become a professional menace when the actor ages, his typecasting category changes, and available parts become fewer. This is particularly true for actresses (Cardon 2011), and this is where intermediaries and brokers become centrally important. Filmed auditions have become routine, except in the case of very famous actors—in which case they are called “to read” for the director. This was not the case until the 1980s. The invention of video and the change in the way movies are financed contributed to that evolution, and directing auditions has become part of the casting director’s professional mandate. Auditions enhance a casting director’s autonomy and power over the final outcome of the casting process. Auditions enable casting directors to give the director their best first interpretation of the character “in situation.” The consequence of naturalistic aesthetics is illustrated here too, and actors are expected to take that into consideration when doing a filmed audition. For instance, they are expected to come with proper outfits: an actor auditioning for the part of a banker is expected to wear a suit and an actress auditioning for the part of a bride will maximize her chances by wearing a wedding dress. This kind of convention is ridiculed by talent agents or actors but is part of the reputation work agents have to help their clients perform. The constraints of realism encumber actors, and sometimes they oblige casting directors to improvise. For instance, the “not too pretty young Indonesian” who serves soup to an old man in the beginning of the movie is supposed to be pregnant. Florence does have a tray on which she can put a bowl but she does not have a fake belly. She can’t find an appropriate cushion and after trying different solutions for fifteen minutes—teddy bears, pillows—she opts for a big wool pullover she rolls under the actress’ shirt. This incident not only gives clues to the subordinate position of casting directors but also to Florence’s creativity. On another level, casting directors have a power that is due to their position. As already shown with pictures, they can “push” an actor they consider better than others or who, they think, has potential. Florence thus spent one hour on an audition tape directing a young actress she had cast for a TV show two years earlier. She had her redo her scene ten times (while others had two shots) in order to have at least one good one. Many casting directors want a reputation as discoverers of new talent. As a matter of fact, they bet, along with talent agents, on new talent they find promising. Being more frequently in contact with actors than anyone else in the production team, they are in a position to do so. However, the level of risk they take varies with the time they are given: the more time they have, the more they audition and make risky propositions.

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The main imperative of casting directors is to avoid “miscasting” or any trouble linked to actors they could be blamed for. They have to be aware of bad or unprofessional behavior, personal incompatibilities with the director or other members of the cast, and lack of availability of an actor that could delay the casting process. Good access to gossip, built through numerous informal exchanges with actors, directors, and talent agents, is a professional asset. Through argumentation, picture manipulation, auditions, and montages of audition footage, they have a decisive impact on casts and on the opportunities open to actors in the movie industry. CONCLUSION The recruitment of actors in the movie industry involves two intermediaries that cooperate on a regular basis but who have no contractual relationship: the talent agent and the casting director. Both are specialists in actors’ identities. When hired by a production, and working with the director, the casting director makes suggestions that are very often inspired by propositions from talent agents. The casting director can be considered a filter, reducing for the director the profusion of information available on the talent market. His work requires a good knowledge of actors who are on the market in addition to an ability to translate the director’s desires into propositions of casting, under economic constraints. Even though the casting director has no power over the final decision, he can deeply influence the casting, especially for small parts that can lead to careers. The casting directors’ position makes them brokers: due to the nature of their participation and structure of their income, they work regularly in the movie industry but also for television and, when working exclusively in cinema, they cross over different segments of the industry (big budget productions, independent films, etc.). They thus have the possibility to bring (or not) an actor from one world to the other and thus give him the possibility (or not) to expand the multivocality of his identity. Finally, the intermediation of recruitment prevailing in the movie labor market has ambiguous effects on the content of casts and on hierarchies in the actors’ labor market. Their constraints and professional interests, and their necessary avoidance of miscasting, make casting directors the instrument of a reproduction of casting compositions and market hierarchies among actors. But, for the same reasons, and because the job of the casting director implies that they circulate between media and market segments, they are the instrument of a renewal of cultural hierarchies and cultural content.

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NOTES 1. This chapter focuses on one particular aspect of my PhD research, which was dedicated to performing artists and includes statistical analysis on and interviews with musicians and dancers. 2. The title of the movie and the names of the interviewees have been changed to preserve anonymity. 3. Between 1990 and 2012, TV channels’ investment increased from 47.3M€ to 359.61M€, which represents a factor of 7.6. The number of feature films has less than tripled during the same period. 4. Half of the movies produced in France are a director or producer’s first or second movie. 5. New talent comprise about half of the population of actors (Cardon 2011). 6. My translation. 7. In 2012, more than half (51.7 percent) of the less than 1 M€ films were documentaries. 8. Scripts are almost always written by directors in France and many of them declare that thinking about an actor when writing helps the writing process.

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Eymard-Duvernay, François. Façons de recruter: Le jugement des compétences sur le marché du travail. Paris: Métailié, 1997. Eymard-Duvernay, François. (Ed.) L’économie des conventions, méthodes et résultats. Paris: Découverte, 2006. Faulkner, Robert R. and Andy B. Anderson. “Short-Term Projects and Emergent Careers: Evidence from Hollywood.” American Journal of Sociology 92, No. 4 (1987): 879–909. Gautié, Jérôme, Olivier Godechot, and Pierre-Emmanuel Sorignet. “Arrangement institutionnel et fonctionnement du marché du travail. Le cas de la chasse de tête.” Sociologie du travail 47, No. 3 (2005): 383–404. Jovanovic, Boyan. “Job Matching and the Theory of Turnover.” Journal of Political Economy 87, No. 5 (1979): 972–990. Karpik, Lucien. Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Knight, Frank H. Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. Kissimmee: Signalman Publishing, 2009. Mary, Philippe. La Nouvelle vague et le cinéma d’auteur: Socio-analyse d’une révolution artistique. Paris: Seuil, 2006. Menger, Pierre-Michel. La profession de comédien: formations, activités et carrières dans la démultiplication de soi. Paris: Ministère de la culture et de la communication, Département des études et de la prospective/La Documentation française, 1997. Meyer, John W. and Brian Rowan. “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.” American Journal of Sociology 83, No. 2 (1977): 340–63. Miller, Robert A. “Job Matching and Occupational Choice.” Journal of Political Economy 92, No. 6 (1984): 1086–1120. Morin, Edgar. Les stars. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. Nelson, Philip. “Information and Consumer Behavior.” Journal of Political Economy 78, No. 2 (1970): 311–29. Padgett, John F. and Christopher K. Ansell. “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 14001434.” American Journal of Sociology 98, No. 6 (1993): 1259–1319. Paradeise, Catherine. Les comédiens: Profession et marchés du travail. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998. Powdermaker, Hortense. Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers. Mansfield Centre: Martino, 2013. Powell, Walter W., and Paul DiMaggio, eds. The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Prag, Jay and James Casavant. “An Empirical Study of the Determinants of Revenues and Marketing Expenditures in the Motion Picture Industry.” Journal of Cultural Economics 18, No. 3 (1994): 217–35. Rot, Gwenaële. “Décors et Territoires.” In Le cinéma. Travail et organisation edited by Gwenaële Rot and Laure de Verdalle, 167–83. Paris: La Dispute, 2013. Simonet, Thomas Solon. Regression Analysis of Prior Experiences of Key Production Personnel as Predictors of Revenues from High-Grossing Motion Pictures in American Release. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Star, S. L. and J. R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, `Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social Studies of Science 19, No. 3 (1989): 387–420. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Translated by Georg Henrik von Wright. Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 2006. Zafirau, Stephen. “Reputation Work in Selling Film and Television: Life in the Hollywood Talent Industry.” Qualitative Sociology 31, No. 2 (2007): 99–127. Zuckerman, Ezra W., Tai Young Kim, Kalinda Ukanwa, and James von Rittmann. “Robust Identities or Nonentities? Typecasting in the Feature Film Labor Market.” American Journal of Sociology 108, No. 5 (2003): 1018–73.

Chapter Eleven

Film Offices as Brokers Cultivating and Connecting Local Talent to Hollywood Candace Jones and Pacey Foster

Brokerage has been a widely recognized, but rarely studied, phenomenon in the scholarship on cultural industries (Hirsch 2000; Hirsch 1991; Peterson and Berger 1971), creative industries (Caves 2000), and art worlds (Becker 1982). Despite the central function of brokerage in these industries, most research has focused on the project networks among producers, musicians, directors, screenwriters, editors, and other talent that makes cultural products (e.g., Faulkner and Anderson 1987; Jones, 1996; Peterson, 1997; Bechky, 2006) rather than on the brokers who connect talent (for exceptions see Bielby and Bielby, 1999; Foster, Borgatti, and Jones 2011). When brokerage roles are addressed, they are defined in relatively narrow structural terms as gatekeepers who belong to one group and span organizational boundaries to engage in search and selection (Gould and Fernandez 1989). As a result, we know relatively little about brokers like liaisons, who facilitate exchanges among disconnected groups but do not belong to either group (Gould and Fernandez 1989), and who may engage in cultural and cognitive work as well as bridging structural holes (Burt 1992). In this chapter, we focus on an important and largely overlooked brokerage role in film production: regional film offices that connect diverse local networks to Hollywood film productions. Regional film offices focus on economic development and cultural policy within their states, and are usually housed under state economic development and tourism offices. As brokers, film offices interact with a diverse set of individuals including legislators, educational institutions, local talent and service firms, and the Hollywood organizations; film offices are part of the complex production chains that are required to support film and television productions. Because this industry 171

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contains mixtures of economic, cultural, and social exchange and is organized through latent project networks, they contain both market and structural conditions likely to generate network forms of governance (Jones, Hesterly, and Borgatti 1997). In their role as brokers, film offices may act not only in a structural capacity connecting otherwise disconnected alters, but also may serve as cultural and cognitive conduits for exchange that spur economic activity and enhance cultural development in their states. We compare the creation and evolution of two state film offices—Utah and Massachusetts—and the way they enacted their roles as brokers. To do so, we rely on diverse sources such as books on the history of film production in the respective states, media accounts from the major newspapers, and our interviews and exchanges with the film offices. The Utah Film Office was founded in 1974 and the Massachusetts Film Office in 1979. These two regional film offices, as intermediaries, developed similar and also highly differentiated practices that grew into an emphasis on distinct types of film and television production in their respective states. Our case comparison reveals new insights on brokers. First, we find that the dominant structural view of brokers as unitary actors in a structural position that bridges distinct groups is not sufficient to capture the complex roles that regional film offices play within a system that contains a myriad of broker roles. Second, for liaisons to be effective, they manage not only relationships between structural positions, but cognitive and cultural connections as well. They often develop strong and embedded relations with other brokers such as representatives and/or gatekeepers who also serve as organizational boundary spanners. Thus, film offices as liaisons are often brokers to other brokers. Third, we verify Stovel and Shaw’s (2012) insight that although brokerage is enacted at the personal level, it has important effects on macrolevel social structures. The same type of brokerage role may evolve in fundamentally different ways, either as embedded or as isolated bridges in the cultural production chain, which in turn shapes how economic and social policies are enacted. In this sense, we find that our cases extend recent calls to focus on brokerage as a process, as much as a position (Lingo and O’Mahony 2010; Obstfeld, Borgatti, and Davis 2014). After introducing the cases of the Utah and Massachusetts film industries, we return to the brokerage literature and argue that few theoretical and empirical pieces examine the relations of brokers to other brokers, focusing instead on brokers as node in a network or specific actor that bridges two distinct groups. We explain how our cases extend the network literature, and suggest that when a broker is socially, cognitively, and culturally embedded in one or more groups, it enhances both trust and access to relations. Relational and structural embeddedness does not dissipate a broker’s role or importance because cultural industries are large, dynamic, and complex systems that change rapidly with a variety of projects and players.

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UTAH AND MASSACHUSETTS FILM OFFICES: EMBEDDED AND AUTONOMOUS BROKERS IN CULTURAL PRODUCTION Research on film and television production has long recognized the importance of co-located networks of talent, money, material, and institutions in helping to coordinate complex, project-based productions like feature films and television shows (Bielby and Bielby 1999; Starkey, Barnatt and Tempest 2000; Manning and Sydow 2011). In the United States, these networks have historically been co-located in Hollywood and New York. Indeed, the physical co-location of these networks is an important part of what makes it possible to coordinate shifting labor networks and complex organizational partnerships over multiple projects Over the last twenty years, the U.S. film and television industry has continued its progression toward a decentralized, and increasingly mobile, network-based production system that began with the disintegration of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s. This process accelerated in the late 1990s with the proliferation of regional tax incentive programs designed to lure productions out of historical centers of production in California and New York. In this changing landscape, regional film offices are playing an increasingly important brokerage role in connecting Hollywood productions to local talent, material, locations, and financial incentives themselves. However, even before the emergence of incentive programs, regional offices played important, and largely overlooked, brokerage roles in the U.S. film industry. Comparing the way that these roles evolved in Utah and Massachusetts can help us develop a more nuanced understanding of brokerage in creative industries more generally. Utah Film Office: Embedded Liaisons Utah has a long history of Hollywood film and television production in the state. In fact, Paramount Pictures, a distribution company started in 1914 by Utah theater owner W. W. Hodkinson, still uses the original logo of a Utah mountain peak. In the 1920s, the Parry Brothers persuaded major studios such as Fox and Paramount to film in Utah, which continued when John Wayne brought John Ford to Utah to film westerns (D’Arc 2010). From the 1920s through the 1970s, entrepreneurial individuals, particularly in areas around Moab and Kanab where Western genres were filmed, trekked to Hollywood to build relations with and entice Hollywood studios to film in the state. In the 1960s, Utah’s Division of Industrial Promotion made films starring Robert Redford to promote Hollywood film production in Utah. Redford was keen on Utah not only for its natural beauty, but also as a state in which filmmaking is made easy. Utah is a right-to-work state; thus, movie studios can avoid dealing with unions—another broker between labor and

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movie executives—which can be expensive and may become contentious. Finally, Utah is a conservative state whose political party agenda foregrounds helping to grow businesses. In 1974, these informal efforts and probusiness attitudes were institutionalized with a formal organization and efforts: the creation of the Utah Film Commission. The story of the Utah Film Commission, the state’s film office, is unique in that it involved the creation of three complementary broker organizations within a short time founded by individuals who graduated from a common school—Brigham Young University. These brokerage organizations shifted Utah’s focus from Hollywood to independent productions. The first broker organization was the Utah Film Commission and its first director was John Earle, an independent filmmaker who graduated with a film degree from Brigham Young University (D’Arc 2010), and ran the Film Commission from 1978 to 1985. The choice of an independent filmmaker shaped future choices. As a broker, one of John Earle’s first acts in 1978 was to link movie studios to talent and services in the state. He identified and published a directory of all talent and services in Utah that were available to Hollywood filmmakers; the Utah Film Commission has continued this practice and regularly updates its roster of talent and companies to support production in the state. The second key act was the creation of another broker organization in 1978: the Utah/U.S. Film Festival that focused on regional, independent films, and classic Hollywood films. The film festival was the brain child of John Earle, as head of the Utah Film Commission, and his two staff members, Sterling Van Wagenen, who also graduated from Brigham Young and had worked for Robert Redford’s Wildwood production company, and Cirina Catania. Sterling Van Wagenen’s sister, Lola Van Wagenen, was married to Robert Redford from 1958 through 1985. Thus, Sterling had access to Robert Redford and invited him to chair the festival. Redford accepted. The Film Festival brokered opportunities for independent filmmakers to meet with and be exposed to Redford’s Hollywood connections and distribution channels. The third key organizational broker was the Sundance Institute, founded in 1981, for which the original grant was written to the National Endowment of the Arts by Lory Smith, the programmer for the Utah/U.S. Film Festival, and Sterling Van Wagenen, also an independent filmmaker and former employee of Redford’s. These three broker organizations complement one another and support the production process, particularly for independent films. The Film Commission supports film production in Utah by connecting Hollywood studios (and anyone who wishes to film in Utah) with local production talent, and support services such as food, logistics, permits, and scouting for locations. The Film Festival exhibits regional and independent films. It helps them find distributors and exposes film audiences to a wide array of productions. The Sundance Institute cultivates the development of film scripts for and talent of

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independent filmmakers and connects fledgling talent to experienced Hollywood scriptwriters, directors, and actors. Sundance Institute also offers some financial support to a few films. Films from Sundance Institute are often entered into and emerge from the film competition to be shown at the festival. In sum, these broker organizations are relationally embedded with one another through common institutional affiliation with Brigham Young University, kinship ties, and movement of personnel among the three organizations. These structural positions connect disconnected people and opportunities, as well as put Utah onto a trajectory of independent filmmaking, which complements but does not compete with Hollywood. The center of the originating web of relations resided around Robert Redford and Sterling Van Wagenen; it still resides around Redford, although Redford is not Mormon and grew up in California, where he met and married Lola Van Wagenen, who is Mormon. Lola’s family had moved from California to Provo, Utah, and she graduated from Provo High School in 1957. Lola Van Wagenen and Robert Redford married in Utah in 1958. Subsequently, Utah, specifically Provo Canyon, became Redford’s adopted home. Redford actively promoted Utah as a location for his films such as Jeremiah Johnson and The Electric Horseman (D’Arc 2010, 267). Redford was so enchanted with Utah that he purchased a large swath of land (formerly a small ski resort) for himself in 1969 and for raising his family. This land became Sundance Resort (named after his character in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). Robert Redford was and continues to be key broker for film production in Utah, connecting Hollywood and his adopted home state. Since Redford belongs to both the filmmaking world of Hollywood and to Utah as a resident, it is not clear whether Redford is a gatekeeper for Hollywood to Utah and independent filmmakers everywhere or a representative of Utah to Hollywood. In 2012 and 2013, Redford expanded the arc and reach of Sundance by creating a Sundance Film Festival in London during April. The second key person was Sterling Van Wagenen, who, similar to John Earle, is an independent filmmaker and moved among the various broker organizations helping to knit relationships and focus for support of independent film. Van Wagenen initially worked for Redford’s production company, Wildwood Enterprises, before joining the Utah Film Commission as the arts representative for Utah and launching the Film Festival in 1978. In 1979, he left the Film Commission and the Film Festival to work for Sundance and remained there until 1992 (D’Arc 2010; Smith 1999; Sundance Institute’s online archives, accessed 2014). This kin and working relationship, with a common love for and focus on independent film, provided Utah ease-ofaccess to Redford and reinforced the focus on independent films. In short, Redford’s informal and active promotion of Utah during the 1960s was transformed and strengthened into formal roles and relations with the creation of

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the two broker organizations—the Film Festival and Sundance Institute— with which both Van Wagenen and Redford were involved. These embedded personal relations among the broker agencies enabled one to be founded—the Sundance Institute—and another to weather trials and tribulations—the Utah/U.S. Film Festival. The Utah/U.S. Film Festival had a good but somewhat rocky start as it struggled to realize its mission and identity. Lory Smith recounts how the film festival went through repeated name changes from 1978 through 1981, and started as both a retrospective of classic Hollywood films and an independent/regional film event (Smith 1999). By watching audience response, they found that independent films were attracting the most attention from attendees. In 1979, they added the Independent Filmmakers Seminar (precursor to Sundance), which became very popular and well attended. In 1980, Sydney Pollack, a director and close friend of Redford’s, suggested that they change the venue of the festival from Salt Lake City to Park City, and move it from September to January to attract a Hollywood crowd (Smith 1999). From the beginning, with Redford’s connections, the Film Festival involved top Hollywood brokers such as Michael Medavoy (executive, first at United Artists and then at Orion Pictures), Sydney Pollack, and a veritable list of Hollywood’s top actors, directors, and producers along with top film critics such as Roger Ebert and the national press. By doing so, the Film Festival anchored itself in the Hollywood and national media power players to provide prestige, connections, and resources. In 1983, Lory Smith and John Earle asked Sundance to help with the Filmmakers Seminar and in 1985 to take over the Film Festival. From 1985 through 1990, the festival was called Sundance/U.S. Film Festival and, in 1991, it became the Sundance Film Festival. The Utah Film Commission still provides staff to help with the film competition and coordinates the film festival with screenings, volunteers, panels, and other infrastructure. Thus, the broker organizations not only support one another, but also retain their focus on specific broker roles such as the Film Commission connecting Hollywood production with local talent, the Festival connecting independent movies with Hollywood distribution channels, and the Sundance Institute cultivating relations among aspiring newcomers to established directors, screenwriters, and producers. Utah’s governor and state policymakers supported the Film Commission launching the Film Festival, enabling the movement of key personnel among the three organizations. For example, when Sterling Van Wagenen decided in 1980 to return to Redford’s employment, Governor Scott Mattheson called Cirina Catania at the Utah Film Commission and offered her six months leave of absence with pay from the Film Commission to replace Van Wagenen as the film programmer for the Festival (Catania n.d.). Lory Smith programmed the film festival from 1981 through 1985 and then moved to the Utah Film Commission as head of film location and production in Utah.

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Moreover, there was leadership stability in the Utah Film Commission with only three directors in over thirty-five years. Redford has been at the helm of Sundance since its inception. The organizational and leadership stability enhances making and embedding ties among organizations. The embedded relations among the broker organizations in Utah not only facilitated coordinated action, but they also strengthened ties with important stakeholders such as Hollywood studios and the National Endowment for the Arts. For example, Cirina Catania left the Film Festival and went to Hollywood to work for MGM in publicity (Catania n.d.). To replace Lory Smith, the Festival hired Sandy Stafford from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C.; she took over the film festival programming from 1986 to 1992, then moved on to working for major Hollywood studios such as New Line Cinema, then Miramax, and on to 20th Century Fox (Smith 1999). These embedded relations created a revolving door among key groups—Utah broker organizations, Hollywood studios, and arts funding organizations. Utah’s three film broker organizations, founded within a short period of one another created an ecosystem that supported the entire production chain, primarily for independent films—from cultivating ideas and talent, to production services and locales, and to distribution and exhibition. In an interview in 1990, Redford told the Salt Lake Tribune that: “[Sundance] completes the connection, we have development in June, exhibition in January. We’re the only organization that offers the independent filmmaker that symbiosis between development and exhibition” (Shephard 2012). The organizations that brokered connections among disconnected others were tightly embedded with one another, and used their extensive relations to build a new center for independent film in a place that has neither the artistic resources of New York City, nor the production facilities and abundance of talent of Los Angeles. Utah’s early history is of individual entrepreneurs cultivating Hollywood connections for filming in Utah and a pro-business environment for film companies. All of this started with the funding of the Utah Film Commission, and the intrepid and well-connected individuals who brought it to life. The story evolved into one of embedded broker organizations that focus on and help support, in particular, independent film making, driven in large part by the interests and relations of early organizational leaders such as John Earle, Sterling Van Wagenen, Lory Smith, and particularly Robert Redford, who used his Hollywood connections to benefit Utah. The embedded relations among organizations and actors enabled these organizations to become brokers that connected the disconnected—independent filmmakers from Hollywood distribution, aspiring film talent from opportunities, and government agencies and bureaucrats from Hollywood studios and powerbrokers. The development of a rich ecosystem in many ways depended on the tightly knit social relations that held the web of business relations together. Two impor-

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tant questions arise about this web of affiliations: (1) can it be enacted and replicated in other cities and states that are more diverse and less closely knit than Utah? And, (2) these embedded relations helped launch a new industry that came to focus on independent film, but can it help to grow and sustain that industry along with Hollywood production over time? Massachusetts offers a different story of evolution, an interesting comparison to Utah, and offers insight into how easy it is to replicate embedded relations and their influence on macro policy. Massachusetts Film Office: Autonomous Brokers The history of the Massachusetts film and television industry, and its relationship to Hollywood in particular, illustrates the complex and varied brokerage roles that regional film offices play in coordinating local networks of labor, material, locations, policy makers, and industry representatives, and connecting them to increasingly mobile creative film and television projects. As the home to one of the largest non-commercial educational television producers in the United States (WGBH) and several of the country’s most famous documentary film makers, Massachusetts has been more important as a location for non-fiction film and public television production than it has been for Hollywood features or dramatic television. Although Boston was the setting for several popular television shows over the years (e.g., Spenser for Hire, Cheers, and St. Elsewhere in the 1980s, and Boston Legal and Ally McBeal in the 1990s), only Spenser for Hire was produced locally and until recently, the number of Hollywood features shot in Massachusetts had remained relatively small. Originally opened in the mid-1970s, and since it began receiving significant funding in 1979, the Massachusetts Film Office (formerly Commission) has played an important, and sometimes very challenging, brokerage role in marketing Massachusetts as a location to Hollywood productions and coordinating local resources to support them once they arrive. In the 1980s, this brokerage activity required numerous trips to Hollywood for its director Mary Crane who focused on advertising Massachusetts in Hollywood trade publications, contacting producers after a film project had been announced to try and persuade them to film in Massachusetts, and to support crews who came to Massachusetts with hotels, police protection, and licensure processes (Karagianis 1985). This kind of marketing activity is typical of most regional film offices, and reflects the tertius iungens (third who connects) (Obstfeld 2005) that collapses structural holes rather than maintaining and benefitting from them as does the tertius gaudens (third who benefits) (Burt 1992). Thus, the tertius iungens is closer to the cognitive and cultural network governance functions identified by Jones, Hesterly, and Borgatti (1997) and the liaison role which we find in the activities of regional film offices.

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Because Massachusetts has always had strong film and television labor unions, almost every large feature film or television production is produced under contract with one of their local offices. So called “above the line employees” (writers, actors, etc.) are organized through their own unions and trade groups that include the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), the Writers Guild of America (WGA), and the Directors Guild of America (DGA). The “below the line employees,” who perform the technical aspects of film and television production, are represented by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). Because these local unions control access to the freelance labor markets from which films are staffed, their own brokerage roles with key Hollywood decision makers are a critical aspect of the hidden social infrastructure that connects Massachusetts workers and service firms with Hollywood projects. When representatives of Teamsters Local 25 were convicted for placing fake names on the payrolls for several movies and television productions in Boston in 1977 and 1978, one of which was the Dino De Laurentiis production The Brink’s Job, word began to spread among Hollywood decision makers that Boston had a problem in one of its most important film unions. As a result, from very early on, one of the most important brokerage roles for the film office was to help repair networks with Hollywood decision makers and convince them that Massachusetts had solved its labor problems. Thus, the film liaison role in Massachusetts demanded network repair and involved sense-making about previous ruptures caused by the brokerage activities of others. In 1980, the director of the film office traveled to Hollywood with former Massachusetts Governor Edward King for a two-day “Make It in Massachusetts” marketing trip. In 1984, “she coordinated another trip for Governor Michael S. Dukakis, who spent four days in meetings with studio executives at Orion Pictures, MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, Tri-Star Pictures, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney Productions, and Columbia Pictures. Dukakis also served as host at a reception for producers and directors at The Bistro, a Hollywood restaurant, and appeared, as himself, on a segment of St. Elsewhere” (Karagianis 1985). By repairing relations with Hollywood, Massachusetts saw a doubling of local film and television spending between 1982 and 1984 that generated a boom in production (Karagianis 1985) and continued with production of the TV series Spenser for Hire from 1985–1988. The late 1990s and early 2000s were a slow period for the Massachusetts film industry. As documented in the 2006 “Lens on the Bay State” report (Laubacher 2006), the Massachusetts film and television industry had been on the decline in the 1990s with total employment falling one-third between 1990 and 2006. During this period, the Massachusetts Film Office maintained ties with creative decision makers in Hollywood, and helped them

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with location scouting and connecting with local labor and material resources once they arrived. However, before the arrival of the tax incentives program in 2005, the office had a relatively small budget and limited resources with which to lure out of state productions to the state. As of 2005, only two Hollywood features had been filmed primarily in Massachusetts (Chesto 2005) and both had a strong pre-existing Boston connection. One was directed by Newton, Massachusetts, resident Sam Weisman (What’s the Worst That Could Happen?); the other, by Clint Eastwood (Mystic River), was both set in Boston and based on a novel written by Massachusetts native, Dennis Lehane. Unfortunately, limited marketing resources were not the only factor hampering connections with Hollywood. During this period, the relationship between Hollywood productions and the Teamsters again generated a large public dispute which, this time, led to the closure of the film office itself. In 2000, the Massachusetts Film Office was placed in the difficult position of having to report industry complaints to the Governor’s Office about unethical and illegal activities reportedly being conducted by the Teamsters (Kurkijian 2000). Amid public controversy and accusations of political vendettas, the funding for the office was cut and the office closed in 2002 (Kimmel 2005). In an effort to continue operations and maintain ties with Hollywood, the recently departed director, Robin Dawson, opened a privately funded, notfor-profit agency called the Massachusetts Film Bureau to continue her work. Although she had the support of local film vendors and service companies and continued her marketing, location scouting, and coordination activities with Hollywood, her office was not formally connected to the state’s economic development activities and leading policy networks. In 2004, the Massachusetts Sports and Entertainment Commission, a nonprofit, publically funded agency was given the official mandate to represent Massachusetts to out-of-state film productions. However, because this office was responsible for both sports and other entertainment events, it was not solely focused on the film industry. More importantly, with two different offices now serving in this important brokerage role, communication with Hollywood became confused. Producers with close ties to the state, like Matt Damon, complained that it had become unclear which office to contact about filming in Massachusetts. Conflicts between the offices finally came to a head over location scouting for Martin Scorsese’s Boston-based film, The Departed. Both offices claimed responsibility for the film, generating a letter from one office to the governor accusing the other office of threatening to withhold permits for The Departed. In addition to exposing the network governance problems associated with having two offices representing Massachusetts to out-of-state productions, The Departed also alerted local policy makers to the growing inter-regional competition for Hollywood film projects. When it was reported that The

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Departed (whose narrative was set in Boston) was being filmed largely outside Massachusetts, momentum started building for a tax incentive program to rival those being offered in other locations. This effort was spearheaded by a network of well-positioned political figures and industry representatives, including the director of the soon to be reopened state film office. The primary coalition included four people: (1) Hollywood producer Sam Weisman, former Massachusetts State Representative Nicholas Paleologos, Kingston, Massachusetts resident and actor Chris Cooper, and native son (of Cambridge, Massachusetts) Matt Damon, who had recently worked on The Departed. At about this time, an industry group called the Massachusetts Production Coalition was formed and helped to lobby behind the scenes for passage of the credit. Implemented in 2005, this program has increased overall production activity in the state, and in particular, the proportion and size of Hollywood features and television shows being produced in Massachusetts. It was also followed by the official reopening of the Massachusetts Film Office and appointment of Nicholas Paleologos, the former state representative and onetime theater and film producer, who was anointed the state’s “film czar.” Similar to past Film Office directors, Paleologos was traveling to Hollywood to market Massachusetts as a location and help repair relations with the Teamsters. In the summer of 2007, Paleologos was joined by a delegation of Massachusetts executives and union representatives—including the new head of Teamsters Local 25—to market Massachusetts as the new Hollywood East and convince decision makers that the state’s union problems had been solved for good. From 2005 to 2011, the film office underwent both success and turmoil, often because of shifting tides of support driven by distinct factions and interests within the state. Initially, coordination among broker organizations—the Film Office, the Massachusetts Production Coalition, and more cooperative unions—led to a dramatic increase in both the number and size of productions in the state. The incentive program, however, had powerful critics both in the state Department of Revenue and in the legislature who argued that the credit would cost much more than it would generate in new economic activity (Chesto 2005). In 2010, a rumor circulated about proposed legislation to cap the film incentive program, and industry members heard about and criticized the possible cap before the film office had been able to warn them. The Massachusetts Film Office, in coordination with the Massachusetts Production Coalition and the local film unions, lobbied to oppose the cap and explained that it would drive away Hollywood just as the industry was re-establishing itself and repairing Boston’s bad reputation. Although the legislature did not pass the cap, the public disagreement between the administration and the film office damaged relations with Hollywood and other state agencies alike. In 2011, the Massachusetts Film Office was once

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again defunded, leaving the state with a functioning tax incentive program, but no office to manage it or serve as a broker for locations, networks, and other resources. Shortly thereafter, the Massachusetts Film Office was once again reconstituted as a public agency under the Massachusetts Department of Travel and Tourism, which is part of the overall state economic development apparatus. Historically, the key broker organization for film in the State was missing important connections to aid filmmakers. Unfortunately, because the Massachusetts Film Office was not always formally part of the state and also saw its role as advocating for a program that was seen as important to the industry, it was not always informed about, nor aligned with, state policy and planning about the industry it represented. The key organizations—film office, unions, state administration—developed autonomous relations that often pulled in tension rather than embedded relations where they could coordinate action. Unlike Utah, in which networks were well coordinated internally and well-connected externally, the story in Massachusetts is a much more complicated one, involving some successful traditional brokerage activities, but also including network breaches caused by other brokers, ongoing attempts at network repairs, and a shifting set of representatives, networks, and public policies. There are also important differences between these locations caused by underlying challenges with labor in Massachusetts that Utah did not experience as a right-to-work state. Most importantly, the similarities and differences in these cases illustrate important aspects of brokerage in creative industries that have not been well addressed in the existing literatures. DISCUSSION Film Offices as Brokers in Cultural Industries: Liaisons and Representatives Research that explores gatekeepers tends to emphasize three different roles: search and selection (Caves 2000; Peterson and Berger 1971; Foster, Borgatti, and Jones 2011), coordination or translation of production (Foster and Ocejo 2013), and taste-making and promotion (Hirsch 1972). However, when explicitly addressed in cultural industries scholarship, a broker is usually narrowly viewed as a gatekeeper who acts as an organizational boundary spanner that “selectively grants outsiders access to members of his own group” (Gould and Fernandez 1989, 92). Thus, the literature tends to highlight only the search and selection brokerage role (Foster, Borgatti and Jones 2011; Foster and Ocejo 2013; Gould and Fernandez 1989; Stovel and Shaw 2012). In contrast to search and selection, which grants access to organizations or to intimate contact with cultural production processes (see, for example,

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Lingo and O’Mahony 2010), our cases of film offices illustrate that some brokers enact coordination and translation, which they accomplish through facilitation; that is, they are groups and individuals who organize the exchange of information. Thus, they are properly defined as liaisons (Gould and Fernandez 1989). Film offices that act as liaisons enhance these processes by establishing workshops and acting as mentors and shepherds to emerging ideas and talent. In addition to these liaison roles, film offices act in a third way, as representatives that are implanted within other organizations to translate the organization’s benefits to others (Gould and Fernandez 1989). As extensions and representatives of state economic or tourism offices, for example, film offices market the state to Hollywood and educate outsiders about the opportunities for locations, sets, and talent in upcoming productions. In their role as representatives, film offices act as translators and taste makers who promote locations, emerging local talent, or new trends. For example, state offices in Utah read scripts and then show locations and shots that may provide viable backgrounds and settings for production. In addition to this overt marketing, film offices may engage in even more subtle forms of representation such as initiating activities at a given location or supporting educational institutions. Finally, brokers may function as tastemakers who promote, highlight, and connect producers and audiences through mass media or other forums (Bielby 2011; Foster and Ocejo 2013; Hirsch 1972). Hirsch (1972, 642) views cultural industries as organization sets in which “artist and mass audience are linked by an ordered sequence of events: before it can elicit any audience response, an art object first must succeed in (a) competition against others for selection and promotion by an entrepreneurial organization, and then in (b) receiving massmedia coverage in such forms as book reviews, radio-station air play, and film criticism.” Although Hirsch recognizes the importance of selection, his discussion of brokers focuses on their role as critics who evaluate the output of cultural industries and help promote specific products to audiences. While film offices, through film festivals, may not be the critics, they facilitate connecting mass media and cultural producers. For instance, the Sundance Film Festival involves high profile film critics as well as major media outlets, thereby providing critics the access to new products and cultural producers the opportunity to be reviewed. In this sense, film offices, which house film festivals, are brokers who engage in taste-making and promoting through the selection of cultural products to be shown at the festival. Our cases demonstrate that the same role—the film office—may enact a multitude of brokerage functions. They enable the search and selection of other brokers such as local labor unions, talent agencies, and public officials for licenses and permits on specific locations. They act as representatives that coordinate and translate venues for directors, scriptwriters, and others before production process begin. Acting as tastemakers, they may determine what

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cultural products are available to critics and the media through selection processes at film festivals. In contrast to broker roles in the literature that operate at different points in the production process (search/selection, coproduction, and promotion/translation) and rely on different actors fulfilling the brokerage role, film offices play all these roles. Therefore, the brokerage role should not be treated as a single undifferentiated role, because it in fact may require multiple actors to enact brokerage. As such, brokerage may be a complex system rather than a structural link between two groups. The complex system of brokerage, rather than a unitary link between organizations or cliques, goes unrecognized in brokerage literature. Liaisons facilitate, support, and interface with other brokers all along the processes of cultural production. Liaisons may interface with legislators, universities, and colleges to establish training and arts programs to develop and promote talent. Liaisons aide gatekeepers who scan and select local talent for productions. Once a product has been finished, liaisons may run film festivals that enable producers with finished cultural products to find audiences and distribution channels. Hence, state film offices play a vital but almost invisible and rarely studied role in the cultural production process. Autonomous or Embedded Brokers in Cultural Production Brokers’ embeddedness in a cultural scene is central for understanding with whom they connect and how, and yet we know little about how brokers’ embeddedness shapes what they do and how they enact their role. Brokers are by definition not structurally embedded with diverse groups (Burt 1992; Gould and Fernandez 1989; Stovel and Shaw 2012). The embeddedness research, however, demonstrates that the structure of exchange relations shapes both the content and the performance outcomes of those exchange relations (Granovetter 1985; Uzzi 1997, 1999; Uzzi and Spiro 2005). With film offices, this performance aspect should influence macrolevel policies such as the amount of revenue available or the number of production days possible in a respective state, the ease of passing state tax exemption programs, and the ability to attract Hollywood talent and national media to the state for key events such as festivals. As we saw in our Utah case, the embeddedness of Redford with Hollywood, and the embeddedness of the state’s three broker organizations with each other, facilitated a focus on independent film, which developed Utah’s reputation for this type of production. However, it is not clear that this led to a greater relocation of production from Hollywood. In contrast, Massachusetts’ autonomous and often conflicting organizations inhibited production, which was then compensated by tax credits and increased marketing. Future research can assess whether bridging structurally isolated groups is most important to the rate of network regeneration and which types of brokers help to spawn new activities and link differ-

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ent cliques into an expanded network. Liaisons may have some degree of structural and relational embeddedness because they operate amongst many connections across time and space. We know from the literature that structural embeddedness is likely important for cultural products, given increased variation in product attributes and ambiguous, socially constructed performance criteria (Bielby and Bielby 1994). Since independent films are by nature more variable and uncertain in their artistic and financial performance, the embeddedness of Utah’s broker organizations may function well for this type of cultural product but poorly for more predictable and mainstream cultural products of Hollywood productions. Indeed, the variations in brokers’ structural, cognitive, and/or cultural embeddedness may influence their ability to connect effectively distinct groups. For example, the Utah case enabled embeddedness among distinct stages of production of independent film—development, production, and exhibition/distribution—because of structural embeddedness of actors into related and complementary organizations; cultural embeddedness through shared educational, religious, and kinship ties; and cognitive embeddedness through an understanding of the distinct demands of independent film. Network governance theory integrates both structural governance and cognitivecultural functions of social ties (Jones, Hesterly and Borgatti 1997), and helps to bridge the gaps between structural (Uzzi 1997) and cognitive-cultural (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Dacin, Ventresca and Beal 1999; Dequech, 2003) views of embeddedness. By integrating cognitive and cultural theory with existing structural governance approaches to embeddedness, we can better answer what brokers do and how they perform their roles when they connect distinct groups. Embeddedness research also fails to address one of the central predictions of network governance theory (Jones, Hesterly and Borgatti 1997): the role of ties among actors in spreading information, managing uncertainty, enforcing norms, aligning incentives, and coordinating action. The cultural similarity through common education, kin, and religious ties in Utah likely facilitated norm enforcement and managing uncertainty that was difficult to replicate in the more diverse and contentious environment of Massachusetts, which was characterized by conflict among broker organizations such as film office and union representatives. This cultural similarity and relatively smaller, more homogenous population in Utah also likely facilitated a stable and supportive environment for broker organizations. This environment was absent in Massachusetts, where the Film Office went through cycles of funding and defunding and groups were in open competition, such as state tax groups versus the film office, and even competing film offices at one point. In spite of this lack of structural and cognitive coordination, Massachusetts was able to spur film production in the state due to tax credits and a small group of actors engaging in network repair, which we describe next.

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Broker as Process and Structure: Network Creation and Repair The literature on brokerage has focused on structural perspectives (Burt 1992; Gould and Fernandez 1989; Stovel and Shaw 2012). Brokers, however, must actively work to manage and maintain relations that enable production and facilitate key connections (Obstfeld, 2009; Long and O’Mahony, 2010). In Utah, Redford created the Sundance Institute with a board of advisors that linked key stakeholders together in a common goal—to promote and develop independent film—and the film festival provided a venue by which diverse cultural production members—producers, critics, exhibitors, and media—could meet and extend their own network. Utah focused on creating networking venues to maintain relations among the occupants of diverse roles in the processes of cultural production. Massachusetts, in contrast, focused on network repair created through contestation among broker organizations and stakeholders, such as unions, the state tax agency, and the state Film Office. The processes of brokers are relatively under-emphasized in the literature, and our cases demonstrate that the processes are critical because they not only facilitate enacting the broker role, but they also create path dependencies that enable or constrain future action. In Utah, the processes and interests of embedded brokers launched it onto a path of independent film production whereas Massachusetts had to repair damage and holes in its relations before it could enact its broker role effectively. CONCLUSION Our goal in this chapter has been to illuminate, through comparing film offices, the important broker role that film offices play, and the poorly understood complexity and dynamics of liaison broker roles. By being a broker to other brokers, these liaison brokers have intense coordination efforts. Network governance theory argues that embeddedness provides not only structural, but cognitive and cultural advantages to coordinate action. In Utah, network governance was enacted through movement of personnel among the key broker organizations that developed a unified focus and complementary roles. Importantly, a key broker, that of unionized labor, was absent in Utah, lessening coordination demands and potential conflicts over control. Most decisively, Utah governors and state legislators were culturally homogenous in terms of religion and race, and also cognitively aligned in their pro-business stance, providing a relatively stable environment in which these liaison brokers operated. In contrast, Massachusetts’ film office in its liaison broker evolved in the context of independent broker organizations that often were not aligned with one another. The Film Office had not only the substantial challenges of coordinating multiple stakeholders, but that of repairing damage from one key broker, the labor union. Moreover, its support from the

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state infrastructure was tenuous and episodic, going through multiple closings and revisions, culminating in competition with the former director and her non-profit operation that created confusion about with whom Hollywood was supposed to broker. Just as importantly, at one point, the film office was disconnected from the state political infrastructure. By comparing Utah and Massachusetts, we revealed that brokerage is not simply connecting two distinct groups, as the structural view of brokerage highlights, but rather involves a complex system composed of chains of relations among brokers and also processes of creation and repair. We also demonstrated that where embedded relations occur, as in the case of Utah, they ease coordination among broker organizations that support the entire film production process. Finally, our cases demonstrated that the individual who enacts these brokerage roles has substantial influence on macrolevel policies that contribute to establishing amenable or difficult conditions for film production in the state. REFERENCES Beam, Alex. “Action: For Years Hollywood Producers Steered Clear of the ‘Celluloid Pariah’ Known as Massachusetts.” Boston Globe, August 25, 2007. Living Arts, C1. Bechky, Beth A. “Gaffers, Gofers and Grips: Role-Based Coordination in Temporary Organizations.” Organization Science 12 (2006): 3–21. Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. Bielby, Denise D. “Staking Claims: Conveying Transnational Cultural Value in a Creative Industry.” American Behavioral Scientist 55 (2011): 525–40. Bielby, William T. and Denise D. Bielby. “‘All Hits are Flukes’: Institutionalized DecisionMaking and the Rhetoric of Network Prime-Time Program Development.” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994): 1287–1313. Bielby, William T. and Denise D. Bielby. “Organizational Mediation of Project-based Labor Markets: Talent Agencies and the Careers of Screenwriters.” American Sociological Review 64 (1999): 64–85. Burt, Ronald. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Catania, Cirina. http://splicecommunity.com/artists/cirina-catania/ Accessed June 23, 2014. Caves, Richard E. Creative Industries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Chesto, Jon. “Reel Attraction: Local Film Industry Hopes Generous New Incentives Will Lure Business Here.” The Patriot Ledger December 3, 2005: 37. Clayman, Steven E. and Ann Reisner. “Gatekeeping in Action: Editorial Conferences and Assessments of Newsworthiness.” American Sociological Review 63 (1998): 178–99. D’Arc, James V. When Hollywood Came to Town: A History of Moviemaking in Utah. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 2010. Dacin, M. Tina, Marc Ventresca, and Brent D. Beal. “The Embeddedness of Organizations: Debates, Dialogue and Directions.” Journal of Management 25 (1999): 317–56. Denison, D.C. “State Film Czar Loses Job amid Reorganization.” Boston Globe, 2010. http:// www.boston.com/business/articles/2010/12/04/state_film_czar_loses_job_amid_ reorganization. Accessed July 27, 2014. Dequech, David. “Cognitive and Cultural Embeddedness: Combining Institutional Economics and Economic Sociology.” Journal of Economic Issues 2 (2003): 461–70. Emirbayer, Mustafa and Jeff Goodwin. “Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency.” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994): 1411–54.

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Faulkner, Robert R. Music on Demand: Composers and Careers in Hollywood Film Industry. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1983. Faulkner, Robert. R. and Andy B. Anderson. “Short Term Projects and Emergent Careers: Evidence from Hollywood.” American Journal of Sociology 92 (1987): 879–909. Foster, Pacey, Stephen P. Borgatti and Candace Jones. ”Gatekeeper Search and Selection Strategies: Relational and Network Governance in a Cultural Market.” Poetics 39 (2011): 247–265. Foster, Pacey, Stefan Manning, and David Terkla. “The Rise of Hollywood East: Regional Film Office as Intermediaries in Film and Television Production Clusters.” Regional Studies: published online June 2013 DOI:10.1080/00343404.2013.799765. Foster, Pacey and Richard Ocejo. “Cultural Intermediaries in an Age of Disintermediation: Brokerage and the Production and Consumption of Culture.” In Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries edited by Candace. Jones, Mark Lorenzen, and Jonathan Sapsed (published December 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199603510.013.012). Gould, Roger V. and Roberto M. Fernandez. “Structures of Mediation: A Formal Approach to Brokerage in Transaction Networks.” Sociological Methodology 19 (1989): 89–126. Granovetter, Mark. “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.” American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): 481–510. Hirsch, Paul. “Cultural Industries Revisited.” Organization Science 11 (2000): 356–361. Jones, Candace. “Careers in Project Networks: The Case of the Film Industry.” In The Boundaryless Career: A New Employment Principle for a New Organizational Era, edited by Michael B. Arthur and Denise M. Rousseau, 58–75. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Jones, Candace, William S. Hesterly, and Stephen P. Borgatti. “A General Theory of Network Governance: Exchange Conditions and Social Mechanisms.” Academy of Management Journal 22 (1997): 911–945. Kimmel, Dan. “Mass Pix Confusion.” Daily Variety March 21, 2005: 11. Kurkijian, Stephen. “Ex-Judge to Examine Teamster’s Dealings.” Boston Globe September 21, 2000, A1. Lingo, Elizabeth Long and Siobhan O’Mahony. “Nexus Work: Brokerage on Creative Projects.” Administrative Science Quarterly 55 (2010): 47–81. Manning, Stephan and Jorg Sydow. “Projects, Paths, and Practices: Sustaining and Leveraging Project-Based Relationships.” Industrial and Corporate Change 20 (2011): 1369–1402. Obstfeld, David A. “Social Networks, the Tertius lungens Orientation and Involvement in Innovation.” Administrative Science Quarterly 50 (2005): 100–130. Peterson, Richard A. and David G. Berger. “Entrepreneurship in Organizations: Evidence from the Popular Music Industry.” Administrative Science Quarterly 16 (1971): 97–107. Ryan, John. “The Production and Consumption of Culture: Essays on Richard A. Peterson’s Contributions to Cultural Sociology: A Prolegomenon.” Poetics 28 (2000): 91–96. Shephard, Wylie L. “Robert Redford: The Creation of the Sundance Institute and Film Festival.” Utah Communication History Encyclopedia, 2012. Downloaded June 23, 2014. http://utahcommhistory.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/robert-redford-the-creation-ofthe-sundance-institute-and-film-festival/. Smith, Lory. Party in a Box: The Story of the Sundance Film Festival. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1999. Starkey, Ken, Christopher Barnatt, and Sue Tempest. “Beyond Networks and Hierarchies: Latent Organizations in the U.K. Television Industry.” Organization Science 11 (2000): 299–305. Stovel, Katherine and Lynn Shaw. “Brokerage.” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (2012): 39–58. Uzzi, Brian. “Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness.” Administrative Science Quarterly 42 (1997): 35–67. Uzzi, Brian. “Embeddedness in the Making of Financial Capital: How Social Relations and Networks Benefit Firms Seeking Financing.” American Sociological Review 64 (1999): 481–505. Uzzi, Brian and Jarrett Spiro. “Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem.” American Journal of Sociology 111 (2005): 447–504.

Chapter Twelve

Overlapping Temporalities in Project-Based Work The Case of Independent Producers in the French Movie Industry Laure de Verdalle

In art and culture, where many professional activities are project-based, time patterns are a crucial issue, and artistic creativity yields goods that are unique. For example, each of Monet’s Nymphéas is different, although it belongs to a series where all the paintings share perceptibly common features. The time it took for Monet to paint each one—first to see it in his imagination and then to actually put brush to canvas—can be analyzed within the time frame of his entire career, but also as part of the more condensed time span of the series of which it is a part. Examining the question of time in creative work therefore supposes we understand the relationships existing between those different temporalities. Far from being linear, an artist’s evolution and professional itinerary correspond to the logics of an “erratic, splintered temporality that espouses a series of projects which all have different properties and durations” (Jouvenet and Rolle 2011). In some art forms that suppose a considerable amount of collaboration, such as the performing arts or various sectors of the culture industries, another important question is what is at stake in the succession of projects and their synchronization, that is, how the various people participating in the show, performance, or film, are coordinated. In France, project-based workers benefit from an unemployment insurance system based on freelancing (intermittence) that indemnifies artists, and some technicians too, during the time they are off work, that is, between two periods of paid employment. Being constantly in a deficit, this insurance system is regularly questioned, 189

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but it corresponds to what participants in the art world demand because it helps them organize their work and stabilize their income in a context marked by discontinuity of employment (Bureau and Corsani 2012). It is also necessary to consider how the various participants in the same project cope with the “uncertainties of an artist’s life,” both individually and as a group (Menger 2009). It is therefore especially important to understand how, in a collective project, the various participants work together and how, to do so, they must carry out the arduous task of coordinating their own individual time constraints. Implementing an artistic project requires a whole series of adjustments that will permit the collective undertaking to materialize. That is precisely what I will be addressing here, using the French film industry as a case study. Though there is no doubt that making a movie implies intense collective activity (Rot and de Verdalle 2013), the question of coordination has not been looked into much from the point of view of what is at stake in the overlapping temporalities of production. Yet they are decisive when it comes to understanding how professionals adjust their involvement in a particular project, or how the interdependencies among them function, to the point that sometimes truly “coupled careers” are the result. I will broach these questions from the point of view of the profession of producer whose role in the filmmaking process is central, even though it remains insufficiently documented to this day in the French context. The producer is often the primary partner of the director whom he will subsequently accompany throughout the entire project, even though he is part of those “invisible professionals” (Pasquier 2008) whose contribution to the creative process is routinely doubted. I will be analyzing what constitutes the activities of production based on data collected between 2008 and 2012 among sixty-six independent producers. How do producers intervene, exactly, in the filmmaking process? This chapter will offer a description of their role and contribution in the French context. Because producers are strongly involved in the coordination of all the professionals working on a film project, my analysis will mainly address the question of the time frames surrounding a film project. In a project-based economy, controlling heterogeneous temporalities represents a major issue for producers, not only for the organization of their activity, but also for the trajectory of their careers. THE ACTIVITY OF INDEPENDENT PRODUCERS IN THE FRENCH CONTEXT Before I introduce my data and methodology, it is important to provide some general comments about the process of production, and to specify what defines these activities within the framework of the French film industry. In

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French film production, producers occupy a somewhat paradoxical position. In common representations and discourses, they are placed in opposition to the director, who is supposed to be the “true” creator and “author.” Tasked with “handling the purse strings” and controlling film crews financially, those working in production are often viewed skeptically by other film professionals because their image closely resembles that of another category of intermediaries in the movie world: talent agents (Naudier and Roueff 2013, Roussel 2014). This occurs because producers share the same authority as agents—finance and administrative oversight. Producers are therefore, like agents, cast in the role of the questionable figure, even if directors praise the qualities of a producer who gave them the means to achieve their film project. In light of these contradictions, it seems appropriate to question what production actually means. The issue has rarely been explored, even though a few foundational works have laid out the contours of this profession. 1 Broadly speaking, a producer’s activity and responsibility consist of accompanying the director in the conception and production of the film. More precisely, the producer provides the resources—financial, of course, but also material and human—which are needed so that filming can proceed as it should. But unlike other intermediaries such as agents, who share with the producer the expertise of “introducing people” (crucial in a project-based world), producers also possess a very special quality: they stand by the director throughout the entire process of production. It is not uncommon for them to be involved in a project from the outset. It is important to note here that in France, production activities are embedded in a very particular context. The legacy of the Nouvelle Vague—the experimental style of film introduced in the 1950s and 1960s—established the figure of author-director (Marry 2006, Darré 1999) who shoulders a film project from day one. 2 As a result, author-director films predominate in the French film industry. So-called “producers’ films” are few and far between, and can be found mainly among the major companies who finance screenwriters and develop a project before entrusting it to a director. In the world of independent film production, the most common figure is that of a writerdirector who writes the script alone or with a co-writer and submits the project to a producer who then decides whether or not to join the project. In some cases, producers may get actively involved in the writing process, especially when they intervene in the initial stages of development. This may occur when a producer has produced a director’s previous film and then starts discussing the director’s next project with him or her very early on. In other cases, the producer’s intervention will come later and take place on the basis of an already existing script, presented by the writer-director (de Verdalle 2012). In this case, the producer is clearly not part of the project from the beginning, although if he or she decides to accept the project, they may (and probably will) comment on the script. Either way, the producer must in

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one way or another make the project “his own” or “her own,” since it will be up to them to defend it before potential backers, whether they are institutional sources such as the Centre national du cinema [CNC] 3 or Régions, 4 or private ones such as distributors, international sales agents, and TV channels. In short, the crux of a producer’s activities resides in convincing and enlisting others: the producer progressively lines up the various partners who will allow the project to become reality. First and foremost are the financial partners, since the independent French movie industry is part of an economic system of pre-financing where production can begin only when the producer has managed to assemble the necessary funds. Of course, adjustments are possible and frequent, often leading to the recalibration of a project to the available budget so that it can still be made. Other times films are made in very restrictive conditions of under-funding. But the producer’s role remains to gather the amount of money deemed necessary according to the type of film that is to be made (for example, a historical movie in period costumes costs more). If the producer manages to create a relationship of trust with a sufficient number of partners in the project, production can then enter the second stage, in which teams in charge of shooting and post-production are organized. At this point the producer’s job becomes one of collaborating with the director in choosing the people to fill the main positions, who, in turn, will be responsible for recruiting their assistants, following the logics of a pyramidal hierarchy (Blair 2001, Lamberbourg 2010, Lamberbourg et al. 2013). Negotiations may ensue in case of disagreement between the director and the producer, especially in cases where an experienced producer is managing and assisting a director with little experience. In other cases, the relationship is more balanced. Most producers give special attention to this step, for the composition of the teams can have a strong impact on how the shooting will proceed and therefore on whether or not the work schedules and budgets will be respected. Clearly, the producer’s activity is thoroughly relational since their role is mainly one of bringing together the essential partners who will be making the film, the financial ones first, followed by the members of the shooting and post-production crews. To complete this brief overview, we must take into account the expansion in the number of producers in the French context. “Over the past ten years, the number of active production companies has increased by an average of 2.5% annually” (CNC 2013, 83). As a result, production companies come in many forms. Some have only a single permanent worker, their founder, and the amount of work handled by the various companies is very diverse. In 2012, one hundred ninety-one companies produced the two hundred nine films launched in France and approved by the Centre national du cinéma. Among them, only six companies produced just over four films. That very active small group of big producers includes two

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large companies, Pathé and Gaumont, who also control the distribution of their films, and a handful of independent companies. At the opposite end, one hundred fifty-four companies produced only one film, while others went through periods of variable length during which they had no activity at all. Studying French production means taking this fragmentation into account, as well as the diversity of the films produced and the variability in the volume of activity. METHOD My analysis is based on a qualitative survey in which sixty-six independent producers were interviewed (forty-three men and twenty-three women). Most worked in partnerships, frequently as co-founders of an independent firm. They are mainly concerned with cinema (short or feature-length films), but some are also interested in audiovisual productions (fiction or documentary) and new media. To investigate this professional universe, first I made contacts inside the Centre national du cinéma—the main public body regulating and supporting the French film industry—which allowed me to draw up a preliminary list of producers, mainly beginners, the majority of whom concentrated on short films. At the end of this first round of interviews, the producers I met suggested other names, and I gradually diversified my sample using a snowball method by including feature-length movie producers with as yet little experience. At the same time, my survey received the support of one of the three French trade unions of independent producers, which allowed me to contact better known and more experienced producers. Taken together, the semi-structured interviews make up an ensemble of data that is satisfactorily representative of the sex, age, senority in the profession, type of films produced, and volume of activity of the profession of producers in France. The two- to three-hour-long interviews were aimed at reconstructing these producers’ professional work histories with an eye to having them describe their past and ongoing projects and talk about their various activities in detail. FINDINGS Production Time Frames and the Constraints of a Project-Based Industry Being an independent producer means creating or joining a company; in France this means bringing together two or three partners, on average. Larger companies may also hire other producers, but we will be looking here into the more frequent case of partnerships where the producers are the founders

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or co-founders of their own business. It is less common for a producer to join a company that already exists than to create his own. Producers are emotionally involved with their companies and typically their activities bear their own, very personal stamp (Cailler 2008). A considerable part of what is at stake in their enterprise is thus tied up with the company, which is both the indispensable tool for carrying out their work and what marks a producer’s activities. Producers see themselves as entrepreneurs and must constantly adjust the limited time and hazards of a project to the longer time-span of the development of their company. Their relation to time therefore truly defines their professional experience. A first characteristic shared by the companies I studied was that they were lightweight and rather inexpensive structures when starting up, but that they are also remarkably durable. The extent of production activity varied considerably depending on the stage of a firm’s development. Although the firms tended to be small organizations with low overhead, every business generated overhead—rent, assistants’ or interns’ salaries, taxes, and so forth—that their principals tried to keep down as much as possible. Some of these companies were therefore, at least for a while, housed in the producer’s own home; others sought to share an office in order to reduce expenses. The producer’s ability to generate income, when starting out, of course, but also even as time goes on, remains very uncertain. It hangs on the more or less regular sequence of projects waiting to be developed but also, and above all, on the number of projects actually followed through to completion. Short films are not very lucrative, but even feature-length movies rarely bring in sufficient income for producers to make any money on them at all (Bomsel and Chamaret 2008). To meet their running costs and pay themselves a salary, producers can therefore only really rely on the money they are able to deduct from ongoing production(s). The survival of a production company thus depends on the fact the producer manages to bring a sufficient number of projects into production. However, the temporal development of a given project remains very uncertain, which complicates production timelines. Production will depend, on one hand, on the dynamics of the writing process, which can be more or less laborious, and on the other hand, on the enthusiasm of the potential financial partners contacted by the producer. These financial partners, regardless of whether they are institutional or private, have their own schedules organized by the pace of their committees’ meetings. The producers are very dependent on these schedules, and must wait for the go-ahead of the committees’ experts before they engage in the production process. Steadfastly accomplishing the tasks involved in development is thus difficult, as stressed by a young female producer. The company that she manages in collaboration with a partner still produces only a very irregular number of feature-length films:

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Some years we have three films, others we have none. That’s always a problem, but it’s hard to keep on an even keel because writing sometimes takes longer than other times. It’s very rare for it to go faster than we expected, and when there are more than three films, with only two producers it’s hard to make do. (Paris 2009)

Though it is hardly possible to evaluate precisely how many projects never make it through the development stage, a significant number never get as far as production. The producer will therefore be unable to take out of a film’s budget what is needed for the company to keep going. In that case, even though the company is indispensable, it may be seen as an impediment, as was explained by a female producer approximately forty years of age who was managing the production company she founded by herself twelve years before. At the time of the interview she was toying with the idea of partly shelving her company. She had by then produced three feature-length films, two shorts, and about a dozen documentaries: What I often feel in fact is that having a production company by oneself is a drag because it ties you down. It means you can’t say, “Hey I’m going to leave for a month to do this or that.” See, I’ve got obligations. (Montreuil 2008)

Producers described several strategies they called upon to deal with these problems. Some producers set up their own company and also work part-time in other film companies. These forms of pluri-activity are very frequent in short-film companies but can also be found in companies producing fulllength movies whose volume of activity is shaky. Working two jobs can be lucrative and, above all, it allows producers to qualify for unemployment benefits between contracts. But it is also very time consuming and does not always mesh well with unsteady production schedules. Therefore, producers who take on work outside their own firm may find themselves unavailable for additional work because one of their own projects finally obtains the funding to start a production. In a production company run by several partners, the question of how to collectively manage their pluri-activity often crops up due to the difficulty of synchronizing their available time. Versatility becomes an important strategy for managing pluri-activity, or at least producers perceive it as a less restrictive alternative for managing asynchronous work timetables. For the newest companies, versatility often means making corporation movies or accepting special commissions. More prominent companies can diversify by mixing fiction and documentaries, or cinema and television. In some cases, the company’s double profile is presented as transitory “for lack of something better” or “while waiting” for a more worthwhile project to come along to finance the company and its founders. In other instances, diversification is seen as a survival strategy that is a positive and long-term alternative. But like pluri-activity, versatility has

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its limits because it requires an investment in terms of time, and, as a result, producers are less available for the projects they would like to be spending more time on. A contrario, certain producers working alone consciously limit their activity in order to preserve the long-term development of their company. Such a strategy means they go without so-called “bread and butter” projects to keep their company afloat. The interviews I conducted show that this method of survival—although exceptional—can only function when a considerable amount of family support is forthcoming: a spouse’s salary or free housing because the residence has been inherited or totally paid off. On the whole, the producers I spoke to preferred to see their company’s development tending toward a rise in the volume of activity and the diversification of projects. They point to the example of companies that are successful today that started out in the short-film sector and managed to eventually enter full-length feature films, giving their producers the opportunity to leave all forms of pluriactivity outside their own company behind and to limit their use of versatility so they could concentrate on the projects nearer and dearer to their hearts. The Producer’s Career As soon as producers manage to stabilize their own activity, the question arises as to how the various projects handled by their company merge into a producer’s distinctive and recognizable identity. This process may take different forms. A producer’s identity, which is sometimes labeled the “producer’s personal touch,” is apparent in a company’s catalog, as well as in the detailed descriptions of its film projects. The catalog is a symbol of the production company’s resumé and, by association, of the producer’s and of his or her eventual partners. By listing in chronological order the number of finalized projects, catalogs reveal the producer’s preferred approach to the survival strategies mentioned above. By looking at the chain of projects a company actually carried through to their logical conclusion, it is also possible to see how the company’s organization of production evolved. For instance, it is extremely common for a company to continue producing short films because, even when it has already switched over to full-length films, it is unable to produce enough of them to make ends meet. It is of interest to note that in their interviews producers consistently insisted on the importance of their last project as key to the development of their career. One producer stated: In this line of work you’re worth what your last film is worth, that’s all there is to it. True, there may be different degrees; today it’s a bit different because with time you get more recognition, but on the whole that’s it in a nutshell. You’re worth what your last film was worth. (Paris 2010)

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However, that focus, which is important to scholars who study the evolution of project-based careers (Jones 1996), masks, at least in part, the importance of work accomplished over the long term. The importance attributed by producers to their last film refers to their firm belief in a career model based not on strategies that require endurance but on a “hit,” a sensational success. To some extent this belief is valid. However, studying producers and their companies’ catalogs shows, in fact, the coexistence of several ways of keeping one’s head above water in the professional realm of production. Some producers experienced extremely rapid and sometimes spectacular turnabouts. Some, on the verge of bankruptcy, were able to start over again and invest in new projects thanks to the (often unexpected) success of a film. But for the vast majority of French producers working today, their activity seems to be relatively stable over time, though slow-downs and accelerations can be observed at different moments. A producer’s credibility grows gradually among his partners, according to the projects he has chosen to take on. Careers based on “hits” are the most vivid and belong to the legend of the profession, but careers based on long-term effort over an extended period of time cannot be discounted when examining the construction of professional identities and reputations. A producer’s catalog of films can be instrumental in other ways to the perception of his or her career. While catalogs are important indicators of the way collaborations develop, they also play the role of “business cards” for producers, by proclaiming their identity through attachment to a type of film or illustrating their distinctiveness by showing the unique list of the projects they have produced. The impact of this sort of identification is considerable: writer-directors who bring a project to a producer pay careful attention to the ones the producer already carried out and to the resumés of the directors and financial partners involved. The catalog is widely available for evaluation by others in the field, and it identifies producers positioned in specific niches. These niches, though not hermetic (Duval 2006), are part of a system of evaluation that affects financial outcomes. Beyond the intrinsic value of a screenplay, prior cooperative ventures and the type of films already produced (from the double standpoint of genre and budget) are determining factors that affect a producer’s ability to convince a particular partner to join a project, and consequently his or her capacity to collect the funds needed for it to be produced. In short, in choosing projects, producers must anticipate how their potential partners will rate it. Selecting which films to back in order to build one’s catalog calls for many different, sometimes competing, considerations. A full-length film producer who specializes mainly in popular comedies and prefers working with directors generally acclaimed by critics put it this way:

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Laure de Verdalle When someone comes to you with a project, your first reaction is to ask yourself if you’ll be able to foot the bill . . . I invest to sell. So you constantly have to say to yourself: “If I do this film, what branch of the economy will it fit into? Will I be able to see it through and will it earn money so the company can stay alive?” It’s not cultural sponsorship at all, it’s business. (Paris 2010)

From the producer’s point of view, a thorough evaluation of a film’s potential, particularly of its financial viability, is especially crucial for better control of a project’s time frame. Having this information in hand gives a film a better chance of approval by the expert committees of the financial partners because it makes them more confident in the project. Because their decision to fund a film does not only depend on its aesthetic characteristics, it must also be viewed as economically sound, in terms of both the type and genre of the project and the profiles—or careers—of the professionals (director and producer) defending it. If a producer wishes to increase the number of projects he or she makes and improve the quality of their productions, it is of course easier to do so when one of his or her earlier films was successful in the box office, making it more likely that, the next time around, the strongest financial partners will once again pitch in—especially if the new project involves the same director. These considerations by funding committees are all the more applicable when the producer’s career has been within the small budget category up to that point. To move into the upper brackets, he or she will have to give up some of their long-time partnerships, especially those in distribution. A female producer looking for backing for a historical film estimated to cost 4 million euros, and whose catalog up to that point had contained very few feature-length movies in partnership with small distributors, made this quite clear: So, to get a television channel to come in, I’ve got to have a distributor. There are the really big ones, who talk about selling a million tickets. For them my project is really good because in a way it’s a classic, there’s no great risk it’ll fail since it doesn’t contain any particularly special point of view, but still for them it might bring in all of 300,000 viewers at best. That won’t even cover the moleskin seats. So, you go to see the mid-level distributors, but they’re already up to their necks in projects. So I’m waiting for an answer. I do have one [distributor] who’s smaller, but I’m afraid the channels will tell me, “Ok, but that’s a lot of money for such a small distribution.” (Paris 2009)

The degree to which producers are identified with their catalog, with the directors they’ve produced, and the type of film attached to them, is thus part of a general economy of relations within the movie world. In order to change their scale of production, producers must be able to change the relational system that they belong to. 5 Thus, producers’ catalogs reflect both their choices and their limitations, so that along with the positive side of identification comes a more negative one: labeling. Getting labeled may sometimes

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prevent a producer from working on projects that are different from the ones he was initially identified with. That is what happens when a producer wants to undertake a film de genre (e.g., thriller or science fiction) without ever having made one before. Thus, though being identified with a certain type of film may help a producer by vouching for his know-how in the field, it may also be a drawback by casting doubt on his ability to manage different sorts of projects. This mechanism has been well described by Zuckerman et al. (2003) concerning Hollywood actors: an identity that is too specific is a value in the short run and a liability in the long term, whereas a more open identity is hard to manage in the short term but more productive in the long run. Coupled Temporalities: Producer and Director The collective dimension of cinematographic work has been stressed by several sociological studies insisting on the importance of reputation to access employment. Since Howard Becker’s (1982) pioneering work, artistic sectors have often been called upon to illustrate the importance of shared norms for a collaboration to run smoothly. Such conventions, which are aesthetic as well as organizational, facilitate the coordination between the various professionals involved and reduce uncertainty. They explain why collaborations are recurrent even though they take place in worlds dominated by project work where it would seem logical that partnerships should, on the contrary, change. The need to be able to count on dependable and immediately operational collaborators, typical of the film industry—especially when it comes time to start shooting—favors existing partnerships. Though work relations may seem ephemeral at the project stage, if one considers the careers of the central players in the film industry, they are in fact often marked by forms of stability in the mid- and long term. This is illustrated by the special partnerships directors entertain with their chief cameraman or editor and by the pairs those same directors may form with a producer, as many examples in French cinema demonstrate: Anatole Dauman and Alain Resnais, George de Beauregard and Jean-Luc Godard, more recently Patrick Sobelman and Lucas Belvaux, or Pascal Caucheuteux and Arnaud Desplechin. These partnerships give birth to actual “coupled careers” (de Verdalle 2011, Thévenin and Alexandre 2011) that become obvious when studying the catalogs of production companies. For producers who started out doing shorts, a recurrent practice consists of initiating a long-term collaboration with a writer-director whom they will gradually guide into full-length films. It is therefore not infrequent that a director’s first full-length feature film is also the producer’s first full-length film. For the latter, such a relationship with a director is like a bet, leading him, as one project leads to another, to “gamble” on that director’s potential. The producer can build on these partnerships to develop his own activities.

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The example of a young female producer I interviewed, who started out by being employed in a large production company, is illustrative here. Having begun by shooting shorts, the company then went over to feature-length films, but the firm’s two manager-producers chose to keep producing shorts even though they had no time to do it themselves. The young female producer was recruited to be put in charge of the short films. After a few years, she wanted to become independent and create her own company. Her produceremployers agreed to let her go and, since at the time they had decided to give up doing shorts, she left with some of the ongoing projects, among which was a medium-length film by a young director with whom she had already produced when she was an employee. This film was to be the very first product of her fledgling company. She then obtained a fellowship that allowed her to spend the capital needed to shoot a full-length film (46,000 euros vs. 7,500 euros for a short). She went on to develop and start making the first full-length film of the director she had stuck with from the beginning. The film came out in 2005 and was the first full-length film experience for them both. At the same time, she struck up a close relationship with another director, with whom she won the César for the best short film, before she went on to produce in 2008 his first full-length film. Since then, she has continued producing the films of these two directors, but has also attracted projects by more experienced ones. She keeps up a continuous and regular production of short films, for which she has hired a young female producer. Though she still prefers developing full-length feature projects with directors she had first accompanied in shorts at their debuts, her growing notoriety in full-length film production today permits her to set up projects which are not, like the first, born of long-term partnerships. The point for producers is to progressively lead their directors—and their production companies—from short to full-length films. But they can keep on producing shorts even after the shift to full-length films, as the example above illustrates. This allows producers to enlarge their catalog and keep the cash flowing, while directors, who are generally freelance, can earn their living in between projects thanks to the unemployment benefits they collect, all the while working on their next full-length film. Supporting a director by having him make short films may also be a strategy by a well-established production company to test their potential for a long-term working relationship. The point is to see how directors, given a modest, short-film budget, behave during development and shooting. A producer, whose company has been in existence since the mid-1990s, explained this to me as follows. Having produced his first full-length film in 2002, he has continued bringing out from one to three shorts a year, even though his activity in full-length features has also stabilized:

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We continue producing short films but what we want to do is lead our people from there into feature films. We’ve got a full-length film in stock that we want to make but we want to test our relations with the director first, to see what he’s capable of doing. . . . I think it’s interesting for a short-film director to know there are companies where they can learn a lot by shooting shorts but that there’s a real possibility to get into full-length films, because sometimes they feel it’s out of reach, like reaching for the moon. (Paris 2008)

From this producer’s point of view, running short films is also a way to ensure the loyalty of a director who might be tempted to go over to a competitor offering a better contract. However, a lasting partnership between a producer and a director is not always a successful strategy. The reasons for failure are many. It may be due to conflicting views concerning the direction a project should take. For instance, in case of a conflict surrounding their financial partners’ demands, a producer may tell the director to change something in the project to satisfy their private or public backer, but the director disagrees. To this must be added the inevitable uncertainties when managing human relations, as well as directors’ feeling that producers do not have the necessary wherewithal to support them and their projects efficiently, especially in the smaller production companies. That is where the question of the temporalities appears most decisive. As we have seen, producers encounter very specific temporal hazards connected to their responsibility as businessmen and -women and to the need to control the way their financial partners identify them. This influences their evaluation of projects. The logics of gambling also prompt them to take on several projects at once, in order to try and reduce the uncertainty inherent in development and, if possible, to avoid time-lags when starting to shoot. In contrast, though they may be involved in projects in various stages of development, a director’s logic is more linear. Taking advantage of the unemployment system allows directors—when not on set—to wait and see, an attitude that may conflict with producers’ calendars, as, for instance, when funds finally granted hasten the launching of a project, whereas the writer-director would have preferred to have more time to rewrite the script. Or, when the dates proposed by the producer do not allow a director to call upon his usual collaborators (chief cameraman, sound engineer, editor) already busy on other sets. In other cases, the director wants to speed up the production, whereas the producer, careful not to get in the red, keeps pushing back the deadlines to await the decision of a commission that could bring in the necessary extra funds. In sum, to the various hazards the producer navigates must be added constraints that derive from the need to adjust the temporalities that organize the different activities of all of the participants. Furthermore, the perceptions of time characterizing producers and directors depend on the stage of their respective careers. These partnerships and the difficulties that may occur will thus take different forms depending on the

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characteristics of each partner. The situation will be very different if an inexperienced director deals with a famous producer or with someone sharing his incoming position in the movie industry. In the same way, the success of a film—however important to establish or confirm reputation—does not always bring the same credit to all its contributors, especially in the French context, where the producer often plays the part of an “invisible” participant. Capitalizing on the success of the films he or she produces might therefore prove to be difficult. A successful director can leave for a more established producer who will more readily raise substantial funds. Producers who are not yet sufficiently established tend to operate as head-hunters for the industry. They will often see the bigger projects slip through their fingers, going to producers more fully embedded in finance networks and, in some cases, linked to major companies. CONCLUSION For independent cinema producers in France, it is crucial to develop and shoot one film after the other on a regular basis; it permits them to enlarge their catalog and guarantees the company’s visibility and increase in revenue. A succession of films also calls on the independent producer’s capability as an entrepreneur to innovate, on the one hand, and limit the risks, on the other. Since the movie industry is part of a project-based economy, generating enough activity, defining the profile of the films produced, and managing the temporality specific to each project represent major challenges. As we have seen, the catalog serves to identify the company, but also more specifically the producer’s particular “touch,” which will be significant for future projects. At the same time, pursuing partnerships with investors gradually produces a sufficiently substantial address book to make sure the business continues to run well and to have a regular filming schedule. Finally, taking on a continuous series of projects goes hand-in-hand with partnering with a writer-director. Producers “bet” on directors to develop projects capable of increasing their own reputation and giving them more comfortable means of production. The various dynamics that accompany the development of an independent producer’s activities in the cinema industry means they must constantly shuttle between short- and long-term demands. The temporality of a producer’s entrepreneurial responsibilities links up with the more or less limited time of a given project, as well as with the temporalities of a career that can go in many different directions. It is therefore necessary to reconsider production in all its temporal aspects so as to grasp how producers manage the insecurity inherent to project work, as well as to understand—as they align their time

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constraints with those of their different partners—how they confront uncertainty. 6 NOTES 1. See the pioneering work of Hortense Powdermaker about Hollywood producers (Powdermaker 1950) or, concerning TV producers, the study by Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley (Newcomb and Alley 1983). 2. The term Nouvelle Vague refers to a group of French directors (among them Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Agnès Varda) of the late 1950s and 1960s. While experimenting with new film forms, they introduced more spontaneity into their films, favoring a documentary style with shootings in real settings. 3. Created by the law of 25 October 1946, the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC) is a French public administrative organization, under the authority of the ministry of culture and communication. Its missions are to regulate and support the film industry but also to promote film and television productions to all audiences. 4. France is divided into twenty-seven régions (twenty-two in metropolitan France and five overseas). These territorial entities have no legislative authority but levy taxes and receive a budget from the central government. Therefore they are able to make their own investments and some of them are very active in funding the film industry. 5. In the 1980s, American research (Faulkner and Weiss 1983) worked to quantify selective matching and brought to light its stratified nature; a given professional is likely to work with partners at the same reputation and “productivity” level. But qualitative surveys introduce a dynamic perspective, revealing that while some collaborations enable partners to climb the reputation ladder together, others require them to change partners. 6. Translation by Gabrielle Varro, revised by the author.

REFERENCES Blair, Helen. “You’re Only as Good as Your Last Job: The Labour Process and Labour Market in the British Film Industry.” Work, Employment & Society 15, No. 1 (2001): 149–169. Bomsel, Olivier and Cécile Chamaret. “Rentabilité des investissements dans les films français.” Research note Contango2, Cerna, Mines ParisTech, 2008. Bureau, Marie-Christine and Antonella Corsani. “La maîtrise du temps comme enjeu de lutte.” Temporalités [Online], 16 (2012). Accessed February 11, 2014. URL: http://temporalites.revues.org/2218. Cailler, Bruno. “Les producteurs indépendants à l’oeuvre: Stratégies et facteurs de décision.” Théorème 12 (2008): 133–148. CNC. Results 2012. CNC Report, 2013. Available online: http://www.cnc.fr/web/en/publications/-/ressources/3610918. Darré, Yann. “Les créateurs dans la division du travail: le cas du cinéma d’auteur.” In Sociologie de l’art, edited by Raymonde Moulin, 213–222. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999. Duval, Julien. “L’art du réalisme. Le champ du cinéma français au début des années 2000,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 161–162 (2006): 96–115. Faulkner, Robert R. and Paul R. Weiss. “Credits and Crafts Production: Freelance Social Organization in the Hollywood Film Industry,” Symbolic Interaction 6, No. 1 (1983): 111–123. Jones, Candace C. “Careers in Project Networks: The Case of the Film Industry”. In The Boundaryless Careers, edited by Michael Arthur and Denise Rousseau, 58-75. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Jouvenet, Morgan and Christiane Rolle. “Des temporalités à l’œuvre dans les mondes de l’art.” Temporalités [Online], 14 (2011). Accessed February 11, 2014. URL: http://temporalites.revues.org/1967.

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Lamberbourg, Adeline. “Parcours croisés de Dominique Cabrera, cinéaste, et de ses proches collaborateurs.” Temporalités [Online], 11 (2010). Accessed February 11, 2014. URL: http:/ /temporalites.revues.org/1218. Lamberbourg, Adeline, Gwenaële Rot, Laure de Verdalle, and Antoine Vernet. “La constitution des équipes techniques.” In Le cinéma. Travail et organisation, edited by Gwenaële Rot and Laure de Verdalle, 111–127. Paris: La Dispute, 2013. Marry, Philippe. La nouvelle vague et le cinéma d’auteur. Socio-analyse d’une révolution artistique. Paris: Le Seuil, 2006. Menger, Pierre-Michel. Le travail créateur. S’accomplir dans l’incertain, Paris: Le Seuil/ Gallimard, 2009. Naudier, Delphine and Olivier Roueff. “Le monde clivé des agents de talents.” In Le cinéma. Travail et organisation, edited by Gwenaële Rot and Laure de Verdalle, 129–146. Paris: La Dispute, 2013. Newcomb, Horace and Robert S. Alley. The Producer’s Medium. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Pasquier, Dominique. “Conflits professionnels et luttes pour la visibilité à la télévision française.” Ethnologie Française 38 (2008): 23–30. Powdermaker, Hortense. Hollywood: The Dream Factory. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950. Rot, Gwenaële and Laure de Verdalle. Le cinéma. Travail et organisation. Paris: La Dispute, 2013. Roussel, Violaine. “Les agents artistiques d’Hollywood: des intermédiaires de marché?” In La culture et ses intermédiaires. Dans les arts, le numérique et les industries créatives, edited by Laurent Jeanpierre and Olivier Roueff, 97–112. Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 2014. Thévenin, Olivier and Olivier Alexandre. “Une production “du milieu”: Philippe Martin et les Films Pélléas.” In Les producteurs. Enjeux créatifs, enjeux financiers, edited by Laurent Creton, Yannick Dehée, Sébastien Layerle and Caroline Moine, 173–198. Paris: Nouveau monde éditions, 2011. Verdalle (de), Laure. “Une analyse lexicale des mondes de la production cinématographique et audiovisuelle française.” Sociologie 3, No. 2 (2012): 179–197. Verdalle (de), Laure. “Enchaîner des projets de films: enjeux croisés autour de la construction d’une carrière de producteur.” In Les producteurs. Enjeux créatifs, enjeux financiers, edited by Laurent Creton, Yannick Dehée, Sébastien Layerle, and Caroline Moine, 159–171. Paris: Nouveau monde éditions, 2011. Zuckerman, Ezra W., Tai-Young Kim, Kalinda Ukanwa and James von Rittmann J. “Robust Identities or Nonentities? Typecasting in the Feature-Film Labor Market.” American Journal of Sociology 108, No. 5 (2003): 1018–1073.

Index

Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, 96 actors as middlemen, porn industry, 85–89. See also brokerage age, and artistic careers, 33, 42–43, 165. See also time agency, concept of, 97–98 agency mailroom, 113 agency structuration/stratification, 10, 108–109. See also core/non-core agencies agents’ training program, 21, 113, 115 author, director as, 156, 191 awards for talent, 63, 200 bankable artist, bankability, 64, 70, 72n1, 158–160 below the line, technical personnel, 1, 62, 179 big talent agencies, USA: Big Four agencies, 5, 104, 109, 119; CAA, 5, 21, 29–31, 91, 104; ICM, 5, 30, 91, 104; MCA, 28, 48n3, 91; UTA, 5, 104, 119; WMA, 5, 21, 28–31, 93; WME, 5, 104. See also core/non-core agencies big talent agencies, France (Adequat, Artmedia, Intertalent, Talentbox/ Cinéart, UBBA, VMA), 5, 57 Big Hollywood/Little Hollywood, 10, 104–105, 107, 119 bodily capital, 79–81

Bondy, Ed, 17 brands, branding, 65–66 brokerage, talent brokers, 27, 31–32, 43–47, 171–187. See also actors as middlemen; casting directors; gatekeepers; talk-show producers casting directors, casters, 11, 62, 143–147, 153–170. See also brokerage celebrity, 80, 83, 131, 134–137, 139. See also ordinariness; reputation charisma, 96–99 Chernin, Peter, 126 Cimino, Michael, 20 contingent workforce, 25–26, 45–47, 133, 144, 148 core/non-core agencies, and artistic careers, 23–47, 58–59, 70. See also agency structuration coupled careers: agents/artists, 20, 64, 119; producers/directors, 190, 199–202 cultural intermediaries, concept of, 8, 11 Damon, Matt, 180 Davis, Judy, 21 De Niro, Robert, 18, 19, 20, 210 digital media, 6, 24, 72, 119, 125, 193 Earle, John, 174–177 economy of emotions/emotion economy, 6, 11, 145–146, 148 205

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emotion work, 59, 114, 118, 136, 139, 142, 144, 146 evaluation communities, 118–120 Feldman, Charles, 95, 97–98 film festivals, 174–178. See also Sundance film financing, France: CNC (National Center for Cinema and Animated Image), 2, 11n2–12n4, 156, 192–193, 203n3; pre-financing, 2, 7, 12n5–12n6, 155, 156, 192, 203n4; state support, 2–3, 155, 156 film genres: art-house, 4, 64, 67–68; porn film, 10, 75–90; short film, 194–195, 200–201; western, 173. See also independent production; Nouvelle Vague film offices, 11, 173–182; Massachusetts Film Office, 178–182; Utah Film Office, 173–178 Foster, Jodie, 18, 210 Galinsky, Robert, 136, 143, 149n6 gatekeepers, gate-keeping, 101, 105, 130, 141, 171–172, 182. See also brokerage Geffen, David, 103 gender (division of labor, hierarchies), 42–43, 75–90, 136, 139, 148 globalization, 4, 7 Gordon, Larry, 125 Grodin, Charles, 17, 18

MGM, 98, 126; Paramount, 125, 127, 173. See also independent production; mini-majors managers, talent, 5, 8, 12n12, 104, 106, 111, 113, 118, 120, 121n16, 125, 138 market uncertainty, 25, 27, 31, 45, 76, 84, 108, 110, 159, 185, 199 matchmaking (work), 64, 86–87, 162, 163–168 mini-majors, Hollywood, 4, 12n8, 177. See also independent production; major studios miscasting, 156, 164, 168. See also casting directors networks: embeddedness (of brokers in networks), 92, 95, 172, 177, 182, 184–186; geography, 95, 101n7, 173; Hollywood, 32, 43–47, 106–111; liaisons, 171–172, 178, 182–184; network repair, 178, 181–182, 186; structural holes, 45–46, 171, 178, 186; weak/strong ties, 106–107, 109, 121n8 Nouvelle Vague, 2, 191, 203n2. See also film genres ordinariness, ordinary celebrity, 11, 131–151. See also celebrity organizations/firms, 24–25, 47, 57, 93, 98, 112–115, 120, 174–177, 184–185, 193–194 Ovitz, Michael, 29, 31

The Hollywood Reporter, 109 image-making, artists’, 66, 69. See also publicity; typecasting independent production, 4, 7, 26, 125, 129–130, 174–178, 185, 189–203. See also film genres; major studios; minimajors labor market segmentation/niches, 25, 45–47, 110, 197 lawyers, entertainment, 5, 8, 19, 104, 111, 120, 121n16 major studios: France (Pathé, Gaumont), 3, 193; Fox, 127–129, 173; Hollywood, 4, 12n8, 93–96, 125–129, 177, 179;

packaging, 5, 9, 24, 28–32, 68, 105. See also big talent agencies production catalogs, 196–199 professional socialization, 62, 111–115 project-based economy/career, 26–27, 106, 118, 159, 160, 172, 189, 197, 199 publicity, artists’, 64, 65, 134, 139. See also image-making race/minority, and artistic careers, 33, 42–43, 136 reality programming, television, 131–151 Redford, Robert, 17, 173–177 relationship work, 10, 105, 111–119. See also networks

Index reputation, 25, 45, 76–77, 92–93, 114, 116, 197; recognition, 10, 61–63; renown, 10, 63–66; reputation work, 60, 112, 156. See also celebrity Scorsese, Martin, 18, 19–20, 210 Scott, Ridley, 18, 210 Selznick, Myron, 95, 97–98 Sheinberg, Sidney, 20 singularity, markets for, 114–115 social capital, 63, 112, 119 Steel, Dawn, 127 Stromberg, Hunt, 98 studio system, history of, 4, 5, 12n9, 26, 91–102, 126, 130 Sundance Institute and festival, 174–178. See also film festivals symbolic value/power, 6, 55–56, 62, 64, 69, 72. See also valuation talent, definition of/reconfiguration of, 131, 133–138 talk-show producers as brokers, 140–143. See also brokerage; casting directors Tanen, Ned, 19, 20 taste-making, 182–184

207

team agenting, 19 Thalberg, Irving, 126 time: generations, 115–116; long-term relationships, 60, 103, 105; production timeline, 11, 193–203. See also age; relationship work; socialization trust, 18–19, 60, 63, 94, 118, 172, 192 typecasting: clichéd performance, 137, 145; multivocal/univocal identities, 154, 166, 198–199; typecast identities, 154, 161, 164–168, 196–199. See also image-making unemployment indemnification, France, 6, 189, 195, 200 unions, Hollywood, 5, 33, 99, 173, 179, 186–187 valuation, commercial value, 6, 10, 69–71, 77, 118–119, 159, 161. See also symbolic value Variety, 48n5, 94, 97 Van Wagenen, Sterling, 174–177 Wasserman, Lew, 20

About the Contributors

Denise Bielby is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Film & Media Studies. She is the co-author of Soap Fans (1995) and Global TV (2008), and coeditor of Popular Culture: Production and Consumption (2001) with C. Lee Harrington. Her most recent book, Aging, Media, and Culture (2014) was coedited with C. Lee Harrington and Anthony R. Bardo. The author of numerous scholarly publications and a recipient of national awards for her research, she studies the culture industries of film and television, audiences and popular criticism, and aging and the life course. Vincent Cardon completed his PhD in sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)/School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris, in 2011, with a dissertation devoted to the careers and aging process of performing artists. A postdoctoral researcher at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Sciences en Société (INRA, SenS) in Paris, his research now focuses on economic sociology. Pacey Foster is assistant professor of management at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His research explores how social and organizational networks help individuals and businesses manage complex decision-making and selection processes in creative industries. His particular interest is in how networks among individuals affect the structure of networks among organizations and industry sectors. Laura Grindstaff is professor of sociology and director, Consortium for Women and Research, at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses broadly on American popular culture and its role in constructing 209

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gender, race, and class relations. She is co-editor with John Hall and MingCheng Lo of the Handbook of Cultural Sociology (2010). Her book, The Money Shot (2002), is an ethnographic account of daytime television talk shows. Currently she is writing a series of articles on cheerleading based on more than ten years of ethnographic research and on the sociological implications of the rise of ordinary celebrity as an important transformation in public discourse. Harry J. Ufland is professor at the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, Chapman University, as well as president and founder of Ufland Productions. Prior to that, he worked for twenty-four years as an agent for some of the most prominent Hollywood talent agencies, including William Morris, CMA, and the Ufland Agency, representing names like Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Ridley Scott, Jodie Foster, Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Bertrand Tavernier, Ben Gazzara, and Harvey Keitel. He has packaged films such as Raging Bull and Blade Runner and produced films including Crazy/Beautiful, One True Thing, and The Last Temptation of Christ. Candace Jones is associate professor of management at Boston College in Massachusetts. Her research interests focus on cultural frameworks, cultural meanings, and social structures. Her particular interest lies in analysis of vocabularies to locate social actors’ logics and cultural meanings within professions and creative activities and how these depend on and shape social actors’ social networks. She is co-editor with Patricia Thornton of Transformation in Cultural Industries: Research in the Sociology of Organizations (2005). Tom Kemper is associate professor of cinema practice at the University of Southern California. He is author of Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents (2010), which received a 2011 Outstanding Academic Title award from the American Library Association. A second book will chart agents from the 1950s through the 1970s. His current research interests include the relationships between Supreme Court cases on major civil rights issues and film censorship decisions in the 1950s and 1960s, international art cinema, and contemporary animation. Vicki Mayer is professor of communication at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. Her areas of interest include production studies and communication labor. Her publications include Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (2011), Producing Dreams, Consuming Youth: Mexican Americans and Mass Media (2003), and Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (2009, co-

About the Contributors

211

edited with Miranda Banks and John Caldwell). She is editor of the journal Television & New Media. Bill Mechanic is an American film producer. He is the chairman and CEO of Pandemonium Films. He serves on the board of counselors for the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, and has served on the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He has been honored with the Showman of the Year Award by the Producers Guild of America. He has served as an executive for Paramount and for the Walt Disney Company, as well as chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment. Delphine Naudier is research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Cultures et Sociétés Urbaines-Centre de Recherches Sociologiques et Politiques de Paris/National Center for Scientific Research, Urban Cultures and Societies-Center for Sociological and Political Research of Paris, which is co-affiliated with the University of Paris VIII and the University of Paris Ouest. Her research focuses on cultural and intellectual professions and, in particular, on the careers of women writers and French cultural intermediaries. She is co-author with Wenceslas Lizé and Olivier Roueff of Intermédiaires du travail artistique: A la frontière de l’art et du commerce/Intermediaries of Artistic Labor: At the Boundary between Art and Commerce (2011). Violaine Roussel is professor of sociology at the University of Paris VIII and adjunct professor of political science at the University of Southern California. She is a recipient of a Marie Curie International Fellowship from the European Commission and is affiliated with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Centre de Recherches Sociologiques et Politiques de Paris/National Center for Scientific Research, Center for Sociological and Political Research of Paris, which is co-affiliated with the University of Paris VIII and the University of Paris Ouest. Among her recent publications is Voicing Dissent: American Artists and the War on Iraq, co-authored with Bleuwenn Lechaux (2010), and she has a forthcoming book on talent agents in Hollywood. Mathieu Trachman is research fellow at the Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques (INED). He is author of Le Travail Pornographique: Enquête sur la Production de Fantasmes/Pornographic Work: Investigating the Production of Fantasy (2013). Laure de Verdalle is research fellow at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Laboratoire Printemps, University of

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About the Contributors

Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Her research interests focus on artistic work and occupations. She recently co-edited a book with Gwenaële Rot about French film production, Le Cinéma: Travail et Organisation/Cinema: Work and Organization (2013).