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Dear FILM-PHILOSOPHY
Subscribers,
I hope the following title will be of interest to you:
Please email me at the address below if you are interested
in receiving an inspection copy of Production
Culture. Let me know where you teach and for which courses you are
considering the using the text.
Production
Culture
Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and
Television
John
Thornton Caldwell
“John
Thornton Caldwell’s study of ‘production cultures’ adds
enormously to our knowledge of a larger media culture. Descriptions of proper
‘uniforms’ for ‘pitch meetings,’ executive
autobiographical narratives, trade press accounts—such details, large and
small, become sites for rich analysis. The result is a distinct perspective on
how television and film are created and, more significantly, on how the
creators understand and explain their work.”—Horace Newcomb,
Director of the Peabody Awards and Professor of Telecommunications, University
of Georgia
“Production
Culture is a stunningly original contribution to film and television
studies. John Thornton Caldwell’s argument—that we can learn a lot
about the production of culture by looking at the cultures of
production—is borne out in an analysis that ranges across texts,
populations, and institutional and physical spaces. This is a superb
book.”—Anna McCarthy, author of Ambient Television:
Visual Culture and Public Space
In
Production Culture, John Thornton Caldwell investigates the cultural
practices and belief systems of Los Angeles–based film and video
production workers: not only those in prestigious positions such as producers
and directors but also many “below-the-line” laborers, including
gaffers, editors, and camera operators. Caldwell analyzes the narratives and
rituals through which workers make sense of their labor and critique the film
and TV industry as well as the culture writ large. As a self-reflexive
industry, Hollywood constantly exposes itself and its production processes to
the public; workers’ ideas about the industry are embedded in their daily
practices and the media they create. Caldwell suggests ways that scholars might
learn from the industry’s habitual self-scrutiny.
Drawing on interviews, observations of sets and workplaces, and analyses of TV
shows, industry documents, economic data, and promotional materials, Caldwell
shows how film and video workers function in a transformed, post-network
industry. He chronicles how workers have responded to changes including media
convergence, labor outsourcing, increasingly unstable labor and business relations,
new production technologies, corporate conglomeration, and the proliferation of
user-generated content. He explores new struggles over “authorship”
within collective creative endeavors, the way that branding and syndication
have become central business strategies for networks, and the
“viral” use of industrial self-reflexivity to motivate consumers
through DVD bonus tracks, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and
“making-ofs.” A significant, on-the-ground analysis of an industry
in flux, Production Culture offers new ways of thinking about media
production as a cultural activity.
Duke University Press
April 2008 464pp £17.99 PB 978-0-8223-4111-6
SPECIAL
DISCOUNTED PRICE OF £12.50 to FILM-PHILOSOPHY Subscribers
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QUOTE REF NUMBER: FP1811081PC for discount)
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