7.1: Introduction

Political economists and network theorists offer different assessments of the global relations of motion picture production. While spatially extended webs of productive labor are central to such approaches, neither explains specifically how these webs are constituted or how they operate in peripheral production ecologies. What is more, they do not consider the implications of the knowledge transfers and power hierarchies emerging from such transnational production contexts. By contrast, this chapter offers a concrete analysis of these issues in Prague’s postsocialist film and television industries. It focuses on the segregation of the local work world and on barriers inhibiting transsectoral knowledge transfers, which originate from a two-tier production system split between international and domestic production, and characterized by different business models, gatekeepers, career prospects, and precariousness.

The state-socialist past of the Czech Republic still affects its screen industries. In 1991, Prague’s once-monopolistic Barrandov Studios laid off most of its 2,700 staff, including all creative personnel. This step helped transform the Czech capital into a regional hub of international media production, attracting Hollywood on the prospect of a large, skilled, nonunion labor pool and, later on, a 20 percent rebate program. During the city’s peak year of 2003, international operations attracted $178 million in investment, roughly twenty times more than wholly indigenous productions, which comprised some fifteen to forty feature films annually. There are three main gravity centers in this labor market: international productions, television broadcasting (with the public-service broadcaster holding a privileged position), and wholly local film productions. These represent three semipermeable economies, work cultures, and instances of globalization. Furthermore, each is characterized by a distinctive structure and hosts distinct career patterns. Questions about their development crystallize around the extent to which they will sustain themselves, collaborate, transfer knowledge, offset risk, and increase their competitiveness in the region.

This chapter concentrates on international productions, especially “service production” in film and television. This is the strongest sector economically, yet the most vulnerable. It is also the sector about which scholars have said the least. This chapter considers how the globalization of media production might be understood from the perspectives of the transnational crews working on international productions. Despite being among the best-paid members of the labor market, Czech personnel are afforded less creative control, job security, and professional upward mobility than their colleagues in other sectors. Interviews with prominent members of this production culture,¹ along with ethnographic data gathered by student interns,² suggest that inequality in working conditions has contributed to the dynamics of this professional community. The chapter therefore focuses on multidirectional local and translocal processes of mediation taking place within the global production networks connecting major East-Central European cities to other parts of the world. In so doing, it reconsiders globalization in the sphere of film production in a manner that counters prevailing U.S.-centric perspectives.