Runaway Production, Runaway Consumption, Runaway Citizenship: The New International Division of Cultural Labor

Abstract

Think of the Mexican entertainment market, with its young population and fast-growing middle class, as a teenager out looking for a good time after being cooped up for too long. For economically emerging peoples all over the globe, Hollywood speaks a universal language Ð Forbes. (Gubernick and Millman, 1994, p. 95) Worried that free trade is making their indolent lifestyle less viable, the French are blaming sinister conspiracies and putting quotas on American movies Ð Wall Street Journal Ð Europe. (Brooks, 1994, p. 34) It's not the heat, and it's not the humidity: what's really enervating is day after relentless day of news reports about the G-7 trade negotiations in Tokyo. GATT. Market-share targets. The Uruguay Round. Consultations with the Canadian Prime Minister. Drowsy yet? Part of the problem is that trade talks always focus on desperately unexciting commodities; given the choice between reading about tariffs on nonferrous metals and, say, Julia Roberts' marriage, many people will skip the trade-barriers story. So here's an age-of-Clinton hybrid: movie stars and arcane trade issues, together in one convenient package Ð Time.

Frozen in Hollywood: Postwar Film Policy and the New Power-Geometry of Globalizing Production Labor

“…But postwar, post-studio era policies like the Anglo-American Film Pact were redrawing the boundaries of the motion picture industry, with little concern for their impact on below-the-line production labor in Hollywood. The Film Pact confirmed labor's worst fears: that Hollywood and its production process were exportable commodities, independent of labor, in what Miller and Leger (2001) have described as a New International Division of Cultural Labor.…”

Reglocalizationand the rise of the network cities media system in producing telenovelas for hemispheric audiences

“…Along with changes in labor relations, new production strategies have also emerged. Miller and Leger describe runaway production as “location shooting [that] became a means of differentiating stories … [as] studios purchased facilities around the world to utilize cheap labor” (2001: 103). Runaway production has been a strategy of U.S. Hispanic-related media given the need to, on the one hand, lower production budgets to compete with the cheap cost of Latin America programming, and, on the other, showcase culture, talent, and places familiar to their potential Hispanic audience in the U.S.…”

“…However, as Miller and Leger argue, this has reinforced U.S. dominance and global capitalism by:developing markets for labor and sales, and the shift from spatial sensitivities to spatial insensitivities of electronics, [also] pushed business beyond treating Third World countries as suppliers of raw materials, to look on them as shadow-setters of the price of work. (2001: 102)…”

A multilayered transnational broadcasting television industry: The case of Latin America

“…This media scenario reveals a complex industrial reality. Miller and Leger (2001) describe 'runaway productions' as Hollywood's corporate strategies of outsourcing as the most visible example of new transnational corporate ties resulting from 'developing markets for labor and sales [. .…”