Abstract
This chapter draws together theories of creative labor and the concerns of production studies along with empirical research to analyze how screenwriters are made as creative subjects, subjects who negotiate with commissioners and other filmmakers and creative workers, negotiate their relationships with Hollywood, and negotiate their rights and positions. The first section will begin to build a framework for analyzing screenwriting careers in London today, one that is attendant to the various paradigms for media industry analysis that have reemerged in the last two decades: creative labor, production studies, sociology of cultural production, critical media industry studies.1 The following sections will incorporate elements of macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis, first considering some of the historical and structural forces and organizational dynamics that shape and coordinate the possibilities for screenwriting work in London. The chapter will then drill down into the daily working lives of a group of London-based screenwriters. Micro-level subjective experiences of this group of writers will be analyzed using the anchoring term disinvestment, which, I argue, signals a set of strategies and ways of being a screenwriter and doing screenwriting work in the context of macro- and meso-level market dynamics. Disinvestment is a material and subjective response to persistent concerns about the invisibility and marginalization of this form of creative work. But I also suggest that disinvestment may be a productive force, fostering professional confidence, collegiality, and possibilities for “good” work for those who call themselves screenwriters.
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Notes
See Timothy Havens, Amanda Lotz, and Serra Tinic, “Critical Media lndustry Studies: A Research Approach,” Communication, Culture and Critique 2 (2009): 234–253.
See John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008);
Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John T. Caldwell, eds, Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2009);
John Hartley, ed., Creative Industries (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005);
Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke, eds, Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (London: Sage, 2002).
See Angela McRobbie, British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (London: Routledge, 1998); McRobbie, “From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at Work in the New Cultural Economy?,” in Du Gay and Pryke, eds, Cultural Economy, 97–114;
McRobbie, “Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds,” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (July 2002): 516–531;
Gillian Ursell, “Television Production: Issues of Exploitation, Commodification and Subjectivity in UK Television Labor Markets,” Media, Culture and Society 22, no. 6 (2000): 805–825;
Andrew Ross, No-collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (New York: Basic Books, 2005);
Georgina Born, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (London: Vintage, 2005);
Rosalind Gill, Technobohemians or the New Cybertariat? New Media Work in Amsterdam a Decade after the Web (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007), accessed April 14, 2008, http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/ genderinstitute/Amsterdam%20report2.pdî
Mark Banks, The Politics of Cultural Work (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Hesmondhalgh and Baker, Creative Labour.
Drawing for example on Ursell, “Television Production”; Helen Blair, “‘You’re Only As Good As Your Last Job’: The Labor Process and Labor Market in the British Film Industry,” Work, Employment and Society 15, no. 1 (2001): 149–169;
Blair, “Winning and Losing in Flexible Labor Markets: The Formation and Operation of Networks of Interdependence in the UK Film Industry,” Sociology 37, no. 6 (2003): 677–694; McRobbie, “From Holloway to Hollywood”; McRobbie, “Clubs to Companies”; Banks, The Politics of Cultural Work; Gill, Technobohemians or the New Cybertariat?
See also Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992);
Paul du Gay, Consumption and Identity at Work (Cambridge: Polity, 1996);
Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (London: W. W. Norton, 1998);
Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (Routledge: London, 1990), 60.
Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, “Precarity and Cultural Work in the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 7–8 (2008): 19.
Sara Malou Strandvad, “Creative Work beyond Self-creation: Filmmakers and Films in the Making,” STS Encounters: Research Papers from DSATS 3, no. 1 (2010): 1–26;
Strandvad, “Attached by the Product: A Socio-material Direction in the Sociology of Art,” Cultural Sociology 6, no. 2 (2012): 163–176.
This was a qualitative research project involving labor market analysis, interviews, and observations of screenwriting as labor, practice, and pedagogy in the UK from 2007 to 2010. Seventeen interviews were conducted with writers, script editors, consultants, and screenwriting teachers and pedagogical analysis involving the close reading of how-to screenwriting manuals (32 in total) and course materials from masterslevel screenwriting courses. The overall design of the project reflects what Ortner calls “interface ethnography.” See Sherry Ortner, “Access: Reflections on Studying Up in Hollywood,” Ethnography, 11, no. 2 (2010): 211–233.
See Steven Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (London: Wallflower Press, 2009).
See Janet Staiger, “Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio System,” in The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures, ed. Gorham Kindern (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 94–103.
See, for example, E. Buscombe, “Ideas of Authorship,” Screen 114, no. 3 (Autumn 1973): 75–85;
Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985);
and Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).
Susan Christopherson, “Beyond the Self-expressive Creative Worker: An Industry Perspective on Entertainment Media,” Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 7–8 (2008): 85.
For key reportage on the 2007–2008 writers’ strike, in which remuneration for the distribution of screenwriters’ work on new media platforms was a key issue, see Dante Atkins, “The WGA Strike, the Internet and Media Decentralization,” Flow TV, May 22, 2008, accessed February 3, 2010, http://flowtv.org?p=1390; M. Banks, “The Picket Line Online: Creative Labor, Digital Activism and the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America Strike,” Popular Communication 8, no. 1 (2010): 20–33; “The 100 Day Writers Strike—A Timeline,” New York Times, February 12, 2008, accessed February 3, 2010, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/ 12/the-100-day-writers-strike-a-timeline.
Wayne E. Baker and Robert R. Faulkner, “Role As Resource in the Hollywood Film Industry,” American Journal of Sociology, 97, no. 2 (1991): 199.
See Ian W. MacDonald, “The Presentation of the Screen Idea in Narrative Filmmaking.” PhD thesis, Leeds Metropolitan University, 2004. Note that genre is a focus of Born’s discussion of television studies and the sociology of culture. She argues that, in judging agency, reflexivity, and value in the production of culture, we could focus on how “generic possibilities” can be progressed (or not) within given social and structural conditions. See Georgina Born, “Inside Television: Television Studies and the Sociology of Culture,” Screen 141, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 404–424.
See, for example, Marc Norman, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting (New York: Harmony Books, 2007).
M. Banks and David Hesmondhalgh, “Looking for Work in Creative Industries Policy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, no. 4 (November 2009): 419.
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© 2013 Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau
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Conor, B. (2013). Subjects at Work: Investigating the Creative Labor of British Screenwriters. In: Szczepanik, P., Vonderau, P. (eds) Behind the Screen. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_13
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