3.2: Craft World, Brand World

The studio, the TV network, the director—such neat, clean, expedient categories for cinema and media studies research. Yet these categories are not innate, self-evident, unproblematic, or clearly bounded. The question of labor complicates the place and utility of each category in media production’s para-industrial root system or “rhizome.”⁶ Rapid changes in how creative work is done and marketed provide one key to mapping the “nodes” of the studio, network, and director within a networked para-industrial system. Productive recent attempts to generalize about “digital labor” or “creative labor in the digital era” tend to overlook the fact that we are almost always dealing with blended labor systems in contemporary film and television—even within the same institutions (studio, network, director). Presuming that digital technologies have cleanly eliminated old-media labor in the new media overgeneralizes and disregards how old-media labor somehow keeps adapting to new-media technologies even as new-media entrants disrupt the resulting blended media labor field. As such, media scholars are stuck with the difficult task of explaining how the same current screen form or genre might result from very different or contradictory work arrangements or organizational partnerships. This predicament—one result, many causes—muddies the water for anyone hoping to systematically research or isolate causal industrial factors behind a cultural form.

Head-scratching by others over my previous production studies suggests that I may be researching from a largely craft-labor orientation, while others have leapt ahead to focus on narrow new creative entrant perspectives as somehow more symptomatic of contemporary media and culture as a whole. Many in the transmedia industry seem less interested in the physical work or labor economics of professional screen workers than in the conceptual artistry of the newcomers from marketing-and-art, who are currently displacing the old-style craft labor. Of course, this innovation/craft split may seem commonsensical. Corporate sponsorship and academic politics—when married—make innovation bias apparently the only goal worth pursuing in media studies (and digital corporations). At the same time the stability-seeking continuity practices I continue to run into on a wide scale in film and TV industries have been simplistically linked—by both scholarly transmedia theorists and corporate start-ups—to the culturally outdated, the technically obsolete, and the industrially dead. Critical theorists and entrepreneurs (once considered strange bedfellows) both tend to view continuities as leaden, as intellectual and economic cul-de-sacs. This erasure of craft is shortsighted. Instead, I suggest that blended labor systems—enmeshed in different economic conditions—might be best understood according to the three-part model that scholars, media students, investors, and producers alike must now constantly negotiate: the “craft world,” the “brand world,” and the “spec world.”

1. Craft World. Production studies must address one question before theorizing broadly about contemporary film and television in the digital era. To what extent does physical production matter anymore? As the first of the three dominant labor modes in the blended labor systems we now face, the craft world still generates considerable value via “quality” physical production. Yet many executives and producers disregard this, since physical production can always take place somewhere else, for less money—in their minds.

The characteristics of the traditional craft world are familiar. Production usually takes place in urban centers with dense agglomerations of skilled workers, physical resources, and para-industrial feeder organizations. As Allen Scott and Michael Curtin both demonstrate, this geographic resource massing (of infrastructure, finance, and creative labor) creates resilient media industrial synergies and helps keep film/TV corporations from decentralizing, from casually moving away.⁷ Craft workers use unions and guilds to negotiate hourly or daily wage labor and work collectively to build content in concentrated physical spaces rather than distribute work and harvest it from outsiders elsewhere. This labor scheme, associated with larger-budgeted studio films and national networks, still aims to produce film/TV as a durable artifact that can be controlled and monetized through sequential distribution windows. Media corporations persist in partnering with craft labor, since this guarantees a high level of quality and predictability in production. The key to this first labor regime, the craft world, is scarcity. Unions and guilds manage and police scarcities in labor (through high barriers to entry) on the input boundaries, at the same time as studios market and police scarcity by controlling access to screen content (via exclusive exhibition rights) on the output boundaries (see Table 3.1).

Table 3.1 Three Warring Paraindustrial Labor Regimes

	Craft World	Brand World	Spec World
Physical Production	Agglomerated, centralized	Outsourced, regionalized	Disaggregated, dispersed
Labor Protocol	Wage labor	Licensing	Virtual pay
Aesthetic Goal	Durable artifact	Flexible reformatting	Brainstorming
Production Process	Building content, plantation farming	Concept-iteration, sharecropping	Concept strip-mining, gleaning, scavenging
Key	Engineering scarcity	Marketing scarcity	Excessive disclosure
Instigators, Enforcers	Guilds and unions	IP lawyers	Film schools, online tech corporations
Examples	Studio feature films, quality network TV	Reality TV, high-concept feature	UGC, Kickstarter, Vimeo, YouTube

2. Brand World. A second labor regime threatens but coexists with the first: the “brand world.” This world—obsessed as it is with engineering corporate psychological signatures capable of animating long-term “interpersonal” synergies with fans—now dominates the warring blended labor systems economically. This may be because the brand world allows for considerable flexibility transnationally on both production’s front end (the craft-world sector that feeds “high-concept” blockbuster films) and production’s back end (the spec-world sector that monetizes user-generated content to promote reality TV). An ecumenical, counterintuitive logic drives the brand world. That is, as blockbuster budgets go higher and higher for fewer and fewer feature films, considerably more cheap screen content must be produced within the same corporate conglomerate to sustain it, buffer the risks, prop it up, and cover the conglomerate’s high-stakes feature bets. Brand-world economics, that is, require fairly wide-ranging complementary screen practices, from expensive high-concept features, transnational coproductions, and franchises on the big stage to cheaper, ubiquitous forms like reality TV, licensing, reformatting, merchandizing, and product placement, scattered across endless, unremarkable side stages. This is why contemporary screen content is best understood within the mixed conglomerate economics that I have detailed elsewhere.⁸

Like the craft world, the brand world cultivates and manages scarcity. Crafts associations cultivate scarcity by establishing high barriers to professional entry and by standardizing proprietary high technologies. By contrast, branding executives largely ignore traditional, restrictive labor arrangements in favor of harvesting the results of effective (and effusive) conceptual R&D. That is, rather than limiting the physical supply of expert labor and high-end technologies, the brand world initiates, stimulates, and then manages the scarcity of the conceptual supply of screen ideas, which can be policed and monetized through affiliation, contract, and litigation. If the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) locals and studios agree to coexist in the craft world as “signatories,” then transnational conglomerates and regional broadcasters agree to coexist in the brand world as “licensor-licensees” through the haggling of IP lawyers. The craft world presupposes a win-win for labor and management by constricting content pipelines and monetizing costlier production values. The brand world, by contrast, presupposes a financial win-win for IP rights holders and IP rights licensees—but simply disregards (sometimes cynically) where the production labor for the system of exhibition/broadcast comes from. The craft world is about durable screen content; the brand world is about creating a regionalized, quasi-indigenized variant of a common IP experience. The brand world looks agnostic and open to all possible creative labor solutions, and this is why it is so threatening to organized creative, professional, production labor. The brand world does not just stand as an alternative to craft or technical expertise. It actively works—by deregulating scarcity—to change the relatively rigid conditions upon which production workers once maintained their value.

One of the dark accomplishments of nineteenth-century American agriculture was that the South shifted from slavery as a dominant mode of capitalist production to its shadow world, a profitable, more “user-friendly-looking” labor arrangement and replacement to achieve the same ends: sharecropping. If film and television’s craft world can be likened to a plantation system, where trained labor is kept on the farm but offered some level of protection, then the brand world can be likened to sharecropping, where employees give away protections in exchange for a small share of an unpredictable revenue stream and a life of permanent insecurity. Most creative labor in the transnational brand world today—including labor involved in reformatting—can be understood as profitable forms of sharecropping, arrangements that give film and television today a great deal of fluidity, insecurity, and impermanence. This follows from the fact that IP can travel quickly and replant itself in any country that wishes to partner in a format or high concept, while specialized craft labor is seen as inertial and leaden—a threat to quick profits.

3. Spec World. The third labor regime in the blended system is the spec world. From an agrarian design precedent, it can be understood not as an industrial plantation (like the craft world), or sharecropping (like the brand world), but as an agricultural process mimicking an early and late fall ritual that unfolds after the primary crops have been harvested: gleaning and scavenging. Some online practices today feel exactly like scavenging: the creation of incongruent mash-ups, filked music, and fan-vids in particular. The question arises, however, how this world of fans and free user-generated content can be viewed economically as a labor regime. Various scholars have noted how online users add value to corporations by inadvertently feeding rich marketing and demographic info to the proprietary corporations that give them “free” access; however, I am not focusing here on that form of “free” consumer labor. Rather, spec world refers to vast new cultural arenas in which professional participants and production aspirants alike are expected to produce creative works “on spec.” Screenwriters have known a fairly benign form of this term for decades. On spec in television meant writing and submitting entire screenplays as “calling cards” intended to win over executives or producers—even though spec scripts were never expected to generate near-term revenues.⁹ The real goal of the television spec script? To show producers and executives that writers seeking work have the chops and skills to write professionally—but on some show, series, film, or project of the studio or network other than the one listed in the title of the spec script. In television trade logic, spec scripts ideally open doors and get potential partners to start brainstorming imagined narratives, series, or relationships.

A diverse range of industrial habits now constitute the spec world. Consider the following examples:

• A vast underclass of low-paid “readers” writes up “script coverage” on every one of hundreds of screenplays submitted to the studio each month. This now obligatory narrative preanalysis essentially culls, preselects, and cognitively projects an idealized imagined narrative for quick comprehension in the minds of producers, agents, and network executives. Essentially the studio’s ultimate onscreen narratives and scenes are preimagined and thus preproduced by underlings (this ad hoc process of calculated imaginative projection makes features into collectively imagined narrative aggregates).
• A personal assistant to an overbooked executive habitually employs a cultural caste system to prioritize which agents or producers get development meetings, thus acting as an unintended, low-paid narrative element gatekeeper for the select stories eventually told in series episodes. As Erin Hill has recently shown, no one sees clerical staff gatekeepers as preemptive, de facto story editors, but industrially they function that way.¹⁰
• A filmmaker asks the crew on a low- or no-budget feature production to bring their own gear in exchange for “points” from distribution income. The newcomer-director implicitly “pays” his more experienced AC/recordist/gaffer with greater license to fill gaps and stylize scenes. The film gets a “festival release,” no crewmember gets distribution income, but the director leverages this quasi-improvisational first feature as calling card to raise real money for a second film.
• The star showrunner of a blockbuster TV series rarely sets foot in his “writers’ room,” where a dozen staffers and uncredited writers’ assistants all contribute story elements. Yet press and fans alike hail the narrative as the showrunner’s expression.
• Using the new Red digital camera and file-based recording, a director vastly overshoots each scene for his primetime episode. Unable to view all of his dailies due to this high shooting ratio, the director depends on his/her editor to pull the best takes, but there aren’t enough hours in the postproduction week to even view all of the footage. This forces the editor to defer to lowly assistant editors, minimum-wage loggers, and undermotivated production assistants to informally preselect (and thus preimagine) the eventual narrative world, just to meet deadlines.
• An American studio enjoins a cross-cultural negotiator to break down the proposed narrative of a planned feature film in China. This matchmaker/bureaucrat puts considerable effort into speculating, pretelling, and projecting the imagined story world to: 1) convince Chinese censors to imagine the scenes as benign; 2) convince Chinese governmental overseers that even the scenes with American actors are in some way authentically Chinese, thus justifying the claim that this should be “counted” not as an “American” coproduction but as a privileged “domestic” Chinese film (giving it huge advantages in theaters under the Chinese quota system); and 3) convince Chinese venture capitalists that the narrative will fill theater seats across China.¹¹ At the same time, other producers from the same studio make the opposite arguments elsewhere, speculating that the unmade narrative will resonate with American audiences as an American film. The result: contradictory spec work, out of both sides of a studio’s mouth.

These examples underscore how deep, systematic, and sometimes splintered acts of narrative imagination are to unglamorous industrial work. All of these practices make speculation or brainstorming central, core tasks in media. The final example—the fragmented “imaginative work” needed to get a Chinese–U.S. transnational feature going—even shows how delegated imaginative speculators can align neatly with uneasy capitalist bedfellows: “economic speculators.”

Unfortunately, as these examples suggest, “on spec” ceased being the exception—limited to screenwriters—awhile back, and now arguably orients the industry as a whole. Vast amounts of creative work in film and television (outside of screenwriting, that is) are produced and circulated as unpaid speculative demonstrations of artistic competence or as blueprints of imagined worlds. As I have documented elsewhere, spec work includes many self-financed “festival films” (which “pretest” the value of indie directors and concepts before studios have to risk their own capital); short films (“calling-card films”); excessive serial pitching protocols at work; ceremonial public pitchfests staged at television trade gatherings; film production competitions, company “brainstorming” sessions, conference panels, how-to sessions, and “how’d they do that” demos and web sites. Spec work once applied only to the desperate and unqualified trying to break into the business—since who would be stupid enough to give their professional craftwork or writing away for free?

Given the extent of these practices, spec work arguably defines media production both outside and inside professional film production and network television. In effect, even pros now increasingly “give it away for free,” in hopes of stiffing the considerable competition and winning new work—their own “guaranteed” Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Directors Guild of America (DGA) rates be damned! Professionals who give their work away for free typically defend this practice based on heightened barriers to entry. To succeed, that is, you can’t just verbally pitch a new show idea to an executive anymore. You have to present additional prototyping materials—tape or video of sample scenes or a beta-tested web series—to demonstrate, dramatize, or pre-enact your proposed production. And of course, these ancillary media forms must be self-financed by the spec-artist. Much of moving image production therefore actually takes place well before the director calls “action” on day one of any shoot.

The spread of spec work feels inevitable to many fatalistic indies trying to produce within deregulated media markets. Such media sectors discourage long-term affiliations and deal entitlements. Yet while indies learn ever more sophisticated ways to “give it away for free,” the emerging companies of the brand world have learned increasingly to move away from internal development of IP, in order to master what I would term external “spec-work harvesting.”

In this corporate IP harvesting system, a screenwriter increasingly cannot expect to get paid the guild rate to write a treatment without facing considerable pressure to write successive screenplay drafts—without pay or acknowledgment. In essence, such writers are implicitly blackmailed and expected (or have learned how) to “sweeten the deal” with executives by agreeing to write up and submit full (and sometimes multiple) drafts for free—or for some hoped-for downstream payoff. In some ways TV series pilots have always been speculative, performing as a brief test run that allows producers, networks, and audience to interactively speculate on whether the pilot will be successful as a series. Yet even the practice of producing series pilots has shifted increasingly to the financeless logic of spec world. These days, you can’t just independently produce your own pilot, as desperate as that might seem; you increasingly have to agree to fully self-finance the first half-dozen or dozen episodes of the proposed season to get a network deal for the whole package.

The genius of industry’s blended labor systems comes in the ways industry deploys quasi-cultural institutions to allow the brand world to interface, harvest, and monetize the labor of the spec world. Such spaces function like refereed “contact zones,” and include nonprofits, NGOs, and advocates (such as the IFP/Film Independent, the Sundance Institute) that keep the film/TV precariat on life support through enabling exercises involving group speculation. Such interface sites also function as cost-effective (sometimes bargain basement) IP markets. The slippage here between career and economics works because such zones promote themselves as therapeutic sites for spec-worker career development.

If filmmakers and producers once risked little by sharing creative ideas with a few key, well-placed individuals, they did so just to solicit lucrative long-term relationships. Now they have to keep their necks out and exposed for months, willing to eat the considerable losses that come from making professional media with no real or immediate promise of outside revenue. Studios and networks once provided upfront money to close a deal with a creator. Yet the many lesser networks and basic cable channels now increasingly appear to green-light deals without actually paying even seasoned producers for them. This alternative allows studios and networks to wait on the sidelines to pick up only the films, pilots, and series that have survived preliminary or initial runs—that is, series that have not already crashed and burned. Spec world is a pathetic and ugly world indeed, and not just for the hopeful users and unpaid prosumers gifting videos across the globe via YouTube and Vimeo, hoping against extremely long odds that they will be discovered.¹² In short, the spec world off-loads or, better, “preloads” more and more of the responsibility for actually producing and financing screen content onto the shoulders of the makers. Out of this process emerges an odd alignment: even film and TV professionals increasingly bear an uncanny resemblance to the younger, desperate aspirants who hope to take their jobs.