3.4: Self-Defeating Labor Tactics
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- John T. Caldwell
- University of California Press
I undertook this research partly because so many frustrated individuals that I talk to misperceive the labor regimes they operate within. Film school students think they are mastering the craft world (unaware that it is maintained by creative labor’s scarcity practices), even though the same film students’ file sharing, mash-ups, and online UGC gifting destroy the very scarcity-policed craft conditions under which they might once have made incomes in film and television. My nineteen-year-old film students usually get depressed when I point this out. By contrast, marginal producers glibly invoke their supposed Hollywood IDs, even while pitching and self-financing pilots according to the new ways of the brand world. The aggregate downward budget spiral this creates spurs runaway production—thus destroying the high-end craft world the same producers will desperately need if they ever hope to achieve industry “insider” or big-screen distinction. Alternately, below-the-line IATSE editors and above-the-line WGA members justify their “off-the-books,” nonunion spec work as a way to get more work. This wistful posture is likely reinforced and legitimized by social media sharing practices that they’ve learned and adopted from the spec world. Sadly, this freely given surplus work undercuts peers, taking work (and thus screen time) away from others, further increasing craft-world precarity.
Finally, earnest unemployed and outsider aspirants (adept at social media from the spec world but living far from physical production centers) send upfront money, entrance fees, registration fees, and retainers to agents who are not agents, managers and talent scouts who are not managers and talent scouts, film festivals that are not film festivals, “master classes” that do not master anything, student loan mills posing as film schools, “industry insiders” who are not insiders of anything, and “exclusive” online short film “showcases” that no one from the industry ever bothers to watch. In large measure, this collective aspirational surge—the aggregated resources and capital from ubiquitous film/TV aspirational cultures so vast that the sun never sets on their worldwide borders—is what feeds the paraindustrial beast and the industry it presumes to support. In these final cases, misrecognition of the spec-world labor regime by those within it alters both of the other two regimes but in very different ways: first, it destroys craft-world scarcity even as it feeds huge amounts of new ideas into the brand world, which large corporate conglomerates efficiently strip-mine.
With so much to lose and so much at stake for these three competing labor regimes, professional workers, aspirants, and scholars alike face complex alternatives in the dense para-industrial buffer. Navigating the buffer—which is now inseparable from the industry proper—requires considerable awareness and adroitness. This predicament means that the culture and spec work of production are now as obligatory to a worker’s skill set as the physical competencies of production craft once were.