5.1: Introduction

Over the past twenty years, regional governments around the world and global film industry corporations have collaborated, if not colluded, to provide a steady stream of workers for film location shooting through legislated incentives. Seeking to reduce labor costs in relation to other fixed expenses, industry executives have successfully used incentives to reduce budgets. Meanwhile, regional policymakers have looked to film and television production as a panacea for anemic economic growth and declining employment indices.¹ Together, governments and industry have made labor into one of the primary fault lines in the political economy of film production.

For the former constituents, film employment may boost jobs numbers on annual reports but have not produced sustainable economic growth. As critics of film incentive policies point out, the vast majority of these film jobs have been transient, low-wage, or both.² At the upper end of the employment spectrum, the highest-skilled workers moved with productions. They have had the same economic impact as business elites, taking their earnings with them as they move from one fancy hotel to another. The larger proportion of film location workers, however, has not been so mobile. These workers—mostly in trades and services—have seen wages driven down. The adoption of right-to-work laws in the United States has put film unions in competition with antishop labor, especially in states that lack sufficient members to meet demand. Economic development offices frequently count service jobs, such as hotel, catering, and transportation staff, as multiplier results of the film economy, knowing that voters will not see the vast quantity of these low-wage, high-turnover jobs as quality careers. To mitigate the political fallout that film incentive policy has caused since the 2009 recession, local boosters typically promise that film jobs will attract other kinds of financial investors in the future, espousing a kind of optimism that has made the policy itself as precarious as the jobs it has generated.

For the film industry, the downward pressures for more abundant reserves of cheaper laborers have not abated. Producers have faced the stress of raising money and cutting costs. They have to weigh the money saved by producing outside Southern California or another major center against the investment in transporting resources, particularly the highest-skilled workers, to the location. Production budgets for labor are stratified, with decreasing studio investment distributed disproportionately to a few workers with star or brand name recognition. The move to reality television has marked an increasing reliance on talent that is either unpaid or underpaid. Volunteers, in the guise of endless levels of interns and assistants, have become part of the production apparatus. Producers have begun to face difficulties in stimulating a labor pool motivated to work for free. Workers have become jaded, even litigious; they now know that these exploited forms of labor rarely lead to stable career paths, particularly outside a global media and entertainment industry hub. In the face of a potential policy upheaval, the uncertainty of finding workers has to be strategized in new ways.

Figure 1: Filming of the HBO television drama Treme in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo credit: Derek Bridges, via Wikimedia Commons).

This chapter examines one strategy in the face of this emerging uncertainty in the current film labor regime. Specifically, it looks at the New Orleans–based production of the quality HBO television drama Treme (2010–2013) and its ability to create a moral economy for low-paying or unpaid film jobs. This strategy relied on a particular kind of call to work as a form of boosterism for the local economy and the culture that both sustains and emerges from it. The strategy succeeded because it fit well in the context of the current political economy as well as an imagined community of like-minded citizen-workers in the future. Based on conversations with series workers, primarily extras, this chapter provides a lesson about the labor strategy based on those workers who occupy the most precarious jobs in locational shooting.