7.3: Globalizing a Postsocialist Production World – Producers and Production Management as Cultural Interface
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- Petr Szczepanik
- University of California Press
Providing services to overseas companies is nothing new for Prague’s Barrandov Studios. The studio first engaged in this practice in the 1930s, and continued doing so during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and state-socialist rule. Under state socialism, Barrandov participated in myriad coproductions with, and provided production services to, partners from socialist and Western nations. Unlike coproductions, its services to Western producers were valued in economic, rather than ideological, terms, because they were lucrative ventures bringing muchneeded hard currency into the country. After the studio privatized following the fall of state socialism in 1989, international production was still dominated by former executives of communist-era Barrandov’s Foreign Commissions Department. At this time, Prague was underdeveloped, with most overseas producers using their own crews and sending rushes to cities like London. Moreover, overseas producers required local intermediaries to help deal with local accounting and legal systems, as well as providing access to essential resources like labor, sets, and locations. The state-socialist-era production managers who pursued these roles encountered significant difficulties in adapting to the new flexible regime. Many spoke little English, and their working habits and organizational culture were different from those of their new American partners. As former secret police agents, some struggled to come to terms with transparent negotiations and business practices. 9
By the late 1990s, this older cohort who had focused on West European productions was being replaced by younger players. Some of this new generation came from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, with Briton Matthew Stillman’s company Stillking the most successful of the new setups. The thirty-year-old Californian David Minkowski came to Prague in 1995 to work on low-budget international productions. He teamed with Stillman, marking the start of a twenty-year process that made him the most influential figure in the Czech production services industry. Minkowski’s career advanced at a rate impossible in Los Angeles, a city in which, by his own admission, he would have been unable to secure high-ranking executive positions on prominent projects like Casino Royale (2006). 10
Prague’s foreign services boom started in 1998. Foreign commissions required flexible, English-speaking workers. This development coincided with an estimated thirty thousand young Americans relocating to Prague. Having formed social networks, some of these “YAPS”—Young Americans in Prague—were hired by production service companies as managers to work alongside Czechs, most of whom had been employed by Barrandov during the communist period. The latter were reluctant to work the long hours common for Hollywood productions, and so Minkowski sourced bright, eager youngsters working in the city’s hotels and restaurants. According to one account, “He would strike up conversations to test their English, and if they seemed smart enough to quickly learn a new, demanding job, he would ask if they wanted to work at Stillking. ‘They always said, yes,’ recalls Minkowski. ‘I mean who would choose to be a waiter or receptionist instead of doing movies?’” Ten years later, most Stillking employees were under forty, and the Barrandov generation was gone. 11
In 1998, Stillking expanded into big-budget productions, acting as a regional mediator for Hollywood studios wanting to shoot in countries like Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. In a marketing campaign dubbed “Shoot Europe,” Stillking invited foreign studios to “show us the scripts, we’ll budget them for you, find the right locations and crew—and if you work with us you’ll save between 30% and 50% compared to equivalent costs in the US.” 12 By the late 1990s, Prague was earning a reputation for quality and not just inexpensive film production services. Bigger projects were drawn to the city by experienced crews, Barrandov’s fourteen soundstages, and locations that could stand in for any European city or historical period. Consequently, a disproportionally large filmmaking community of five thousand professionals developed. 13
This boom period ended in 2004, when governments in countries like Hungary started to implement new initiatives to bring overseas producers to their cities. Poised to soar in Hungary, foreign film investment fell 70 percent in Prague. 14 A second slump saw foreign spending drop another 66 percent in 2008. For the first time since 1992, income from international productions was less than from domestic productions. 15 In the city’s postboom years, production service professionals suggested that the domestic film industry was dying. They insisted crews and the surrounding infrastructure could not survive in a small country like the Czech Republic without the support of overseas producers.
To bring the country into line with its competitors, the Czech government belatedly implemented a 20 percent cost rebate program in 2010. This step fueled a new wave of international productions, as income rose to $140 million by 2013. Yet the program was still characterized by short-term thinking, such as attracting international projects individually, rather than a long-term strategy designed to complement and develop local skills. 16 Since then, a relatively low rebate cap of $25 million has threatened such investments. Combined with the proportional allotment principle, this cap has caused the rebate to drop from 20 percent to 6–8 percent. 17 By contrast, Budapest has enjoyed considerable prosperity since introducing a cap-free rebate program. 18 In 2014, the Czech cap was finally raised by $14 million; Hungary responded by raising its limit from 20 percent to 30 percent, pushing competition to a new level. 19
Since 1990, around 140 foreign feature films and TV series have been shot at Barrandov. 20 Of these, 60 were Hollywood productions, including Mission: Impossible (1996), Van Helsing (2004), and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008). A typical international production involves numerous crews shooting both at local studios and on location. Below-the-line personnel are mostly Czech, heads of departments American or British, and above-the-line talent from the United States. For several months, talent and support personnel work for twelve hours plus, six days a week. Their face-to-face interaction can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts but permits them to observe others, imitate their practices, and learn by doing.
As studios and producers operate on an increasingly global scale, they must collaborate with personnel in a variety of locations. The key players in a Hollywood runaway production are typically the head of physical production (or vice president of production) at the studio, the producer, the line producer, the local production manager, the local studio manager, the production designer, the location scout, and the director. During shooting, the line producer is the studio’s principal representative: s/he oversees the production on location. Line producers may hold little decision-making power, but American producers see them as specialists on locations and local crews, whose opinions influence whether to shoot at a particular overseas site. Local production service companies and production managers are the main partners of incoming line producers. Together they form a cultural interface between the United States and local production centers, as they pursue maximum efficiency by engineering Hollywood-style working conditions. 21 Incoming line producers and local production managers are therefore key channels of knowledge transfer, enabling both parties to learn from each other. However, by achieving this mutually beneficial symbiosis and assigning other agents distinct positions within the structure of the transnational team, they obstruct local personnel’s access to higher-level positions.
As a profession, the film producer did not exist in Eastern Europe under state socialism, which instead used centralized production systems. 22 In the early 1990s, the role of the producer needed to be created from scratch. The old-style production managers previously employed by state-owned studios attempted to upgrade their skills and reinvent themselves either as independent producers or as production service companies catering to overseas clients. Adapting to Western production cultures and learning from foreign partners were particularly important skills for the owners of production service companies. Foreign producers became conduits of tacit, embedded organizational knowledge, which local players attempted to internalize through direct observation and imitation.
Later in the decade, the labor market hosted the first generation of postsocialist producers, consisting primarily of students from the relaunched production program at Prague’s FAMU film school. These newcomers distinguished themselves from the older managers-turned-producers, embracing European norms of competing at international film festivals and coproducing films with Western partners. 23
My interviews suggest that overseas producers and Czech personnel mainly transferred organizational knowledge relating to the division of labor, pacing, problem solving, work ethics, and communication. Even below-the-line talent contended they learned more managerial than technical skills. If technical knowledge was in fact mentioned, it did not concern filmmaking or technology but rather budgeting and accounting. This type of embedded organizational knowledge can be externalized during on-set interaction and internalized by local suppliers through observation and imitation. Production managers serve as cultural mediators during this kind of transfer. Minkowski identified the need to train new production managers as the greatest challenge to the current system, estimating that financial and organizational services represent 80 percent of Stillking’s operations. Rather than reeducating veteran professionals, he picked young, English-speaking outsiders: “In the areas of accounting, production management, coordination, assistant directors, . . . locations, you can train people who don’t have any experience and you can put them in positions of authority, and if they are the right personality and have the right internal skills, they can learn it quickly.” 24 By the late 2000s, Czech production managers were self-sufficient, with Hollywood-style organizational skills firmly integrated into their daily routines.
Minkowski could not simply throw young English speakers into skilled technical fields like camera operation and lighting. Yet even in these areas, technical expertise was an important but inessential aspect of recruitment, as newcomers were assigned mentors from the older generation. He recalled the case of a gaffer who, although talented, “drank a lot [and] didn’t work more than twelve hours, even if he was getting paid overtime.” Although this gaffer’s work ethic did not meet American standards, Minkowski felt apprentices might learn much from him: “They didn’t have his cultural history, so they weren’t running into the same problems,” he explained. 25 Today, Minkowski added, these apprentices are the top technicians in Prague.
Rather than simply involving Czechs picking up Hollywood methods, these learning processes are bilateral. The importance of locational knowledge and mutual learning is spelled out by Tom Karnowski, a prominent line producer involved in international productions such as Shanghai Knights (2003) and Everything Is Illuminated (2005). He explained that before deciding to travel to a foreign location, Los Angeles producers look at who has completed projects of similar size or type in the location in question. They also take local production practices into account. Karnowski recalled that while working on Everything Is Illuminated with an American director and cast, he became convinced that they should utilize the skills of as much local personnel as possible and “make it like you would have a Czech film, . . . especially if we have a very low budget to work with.” 26 He therefore posited Czech production culture as well suited to the improvisational techniques often used when shooting low-budget American films on location.