5.2: The Treme Moral Economy

In 2013, Louisiana surpassed California as the primary location for the production of major Hollywood motion pictures.³ The state, one of the poorest in terms of the per capita poverty rate and median income, also outpaced Hollywood film shooting in other countries, including Canada and Ireland. This locational outsourcing, often derided as runaway production, has been a point of pride in Louisiana. There, media producers and policymakers alike have seized on film jobs as a cornerstone in the economic renewal of the entire Gulf Coast after a series of devastating environmental disasters, including two hurricanes and an oil spill, destabilized the political and economic infrastructure of the region. The city of New Orleans, which evacuated its entire population of nearly half a million people in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina and subsequently lost many longtime residents, has depended heavily on the growing film economy to bring new migrants and jobs. A 2012 Forbes article summarized the recent political economy: “Aggressive tax incentives have also been beneficial in luring new recruits, entrepreneurs, and large business to New Orleans. In 2002, a foundation for a new film industry had been established with a tax credit program for movies produced in the state. However, it wasn’t until after Katrina that more production crews committed to continuing their work with Louisiana, and quickly saw the benefits of working in the region. In addition, the productions were pumping millions of dollars into the city’s recovering economy, and providing jobs to those who wanted to get into the industry.”⁴ Ten years after the storm, the city still acknowledges the scars of Katrina—press articles still refer to the “post-K” era—while touting the power of the most generous film tax incentives in the United States to aid future recovery.

In this context, a television series that would focus on the city’s unique vernacular value and cultural resilience in the post-K era drew special attention. The auteur television producers David Simon and Eric Overmyer said they had wanted to create a program about New Orleans music long before the storm, but that the disaster brought a sudden moral imperative to make a general concept into a story. “Even ordinary scenes played out against a backdrop of this city three months after the storm take on an incredibly different dynamic. An ordinary scene . . . is about something much bigger,” said Simon, while waiting for the green light from the HBO network in 2009. Arguing for the symbolic importance of viewers witnessing a second-line parade in the months after the storm, Simon explained, “Just as a visual tableau, that’s an incredible statement of human endeavor. And you place it in the context of all the political (news) and all the problems and all of the dystopic things that have happened post-Katrina—if you can’t (make) a story of that, shame on you.”⁵ Within weeks, Fee Nah Nee, the local production company for Treme, would begin the process of certifying the applicable tax credits for producing the series.

For four years, Treme indexed the tight imbrication between the film economy and New Orleans through a program focused on ordinary life and an extraordinary local culture. Music, food, and public performance took center stage in the weekly narrative, which broadcast via the subscriber channel for three and a half seasons. Beyond this, the program’s producers were active in charity and volunteer efforts dedicated to local musicians and the musical cultures of the region. Production crews threw block parties in some of its affected shooting locations and helped host screening parties for residents who could not afford premium cable television service. Newspaper columns deciphered the careful cultural details and historical referents stitched into the story lines, and social media organized fans to participate in the interpretative community. From this base of avid viewers and admirers, Treme set out to hire local residents as part of its ethos. The hiring director, who had worked as a local on the Baltimore set of the earlier Simon/Overmyer collaboration, The Wire, told me he was always irked by film companies that shot in his hometown but hired outsiders. Treme would aim to hire residents, he explained, touting his efforts to support a local training clinic for film crew certification, because “it’s the right thing to do.”

It was also the most economical thing to do. Louisiana residents received an extra 5 percent in state tax credits, bringing their total discount to 35 percent of the budget. Locals do not have to be housed in hotels. They go home each day without a need for a per diem or transportation. On the set, the same director told me that the local hire brought added value to the decision-making process. They have “natural knowledge” that streamlines the production schedule. He said, “They know the Teamsters, and the bureaucrats, and also the residents. So they don’t mind as much when you invade their neighborhood.” In the battle to beat the budget, he said locals helped “win the hearts and minds” of the citizens.

This odd pairing of the ethically right and the instrumentally efficient was the labor strategy in Treme’s moral economy. Mark Banks sees moral economies as a counterweight to the alienating and individuating tendencies of marketplaces.⁶ In them, the basis of the exchange relation is founded in a social relationship that recognizes the worker as a unique individual rather than an object for exploitation. By offering to restore a measure of recognition to workers’ identities and experiences, these exchange economies seem to thrive in precarious settings that have already been ravaged by the worst excesses of neoliberal policies. In New Orleans, for example, privatization of recovery efforts shunted the responsibility for basic human services onto private corporations, which could then monetize relief and promote it as a form of corporate social responsibility.⁷ Media industries since 2005 were at the forefront of using Katrina storylines to generate both advertising revenues and corporate goodwill, often based on their ability to harness and channel the free labor or charity of others. This was particularly apparent in a spate of reality television and talk show programs that frequently promised to improve the well-being of the ordinary people brought into the production.⁸ These genres often claimed that their staff and crew were part of a family that left the local population better off. In the meantime, the programs were effective at cutting production costs by appropriating local settings and enrolling local residents, often in the form of volunteers. Although Treme followed this trajectory of corporate social responsibility, it also went beyond in imagining a more sustained investment in the lives of New Orleans’s creative workers than a single television episode or promotional event.

To their call to help New Orleans through media labor, extras responded in droves.