11.1: Introduction

Just as Hollywood production frequently departs the greater Los Angeles area for less expensive shooting locations worldwide, Hollywood studios have also expanded their interests globally, investing in everything from Bollywood studios to telenovela-producing corporations.¹ In this sense, the Los Angeles-based film and television industry is indeed a multilevel “global Hollywood,” as Miller and his colleagues convincingly illustrate in their so-titled book.² Accordingly, the individuals who make up global Hollywood’s workforce are both geographically diverse (in “runaway production” locations from New Orleans to Prague) and industrially diverse, working on domestic film and television productions as well as major international projects, all of which increasingly rely on Hollywood capital. Global Hollywood’s workforce, then, may include the labor on a Universal Studios movie shooting in Prague, labor on a Bollywood movie that is partly funded by a subsidiary of Sony Pictures, and labor on a telenovela produced by a company with ownership links to NBC. While the dynamics of employment differ among locations, as other chapters in this book illuminate, interest and investment from Hollywood require significant transparency in distribution and management at the very least. This generally means a corporate structure with a few behemoth companies dominating production and neoliberal governance: local and national policymakers and large private companies working in tandem to establish the sort of regulations, policies, and practices, including reliable copyright and contract enforcement, that are attractive to foreign direct investment (FDI) and formal domestic bank investment.

Entertainment production worldwide also exists outside Global Hollywood’s networks. In this chapter, I critically examine the relationships among labor, distribution, informality, and power in one such industry: the massively popular southern Nigerian movie industry known as Nollywood.³ Its productions dominate screens and mediascapes across sub-Saharan Africa and throughout the global African diaspora, though exact numbers about its production output and income are challenging to discern.⁴ Counting and demonstrating sales are not just relevant to demonstrating an industry’s importance for academic study or popular journalistic pieces. Rather, opacity (and the accompanying general inability to codify formal sales figures) is a defining part of Nollywood’s structure and strength,⁵ shaping nearly every part of the industry’s day-to-day operations and practices. In particular, this opacity reinforces the power of the film distributors known as “marketers,” who leverage their gray-market knowledge to control the Nollywood marketplace. While an industry predicated on personal relationships may appear to risk breeding disorder, Nollywood is in fact quite organized, a result of the marketers’ self-governing practices and the industry’s guild-based infrastructure. Consequently, Nollywood remains largely disconnected from formal global networks of labor organization, financing, and distribution,⁶ but is nevertheless a nexus point for its own set of global flows and linkages.

Using a series of onsite observations and interviews with practitioners in the Lagos-based industry, my analysis reveals how global concerns about the precarious nature of local labor are shaped in this context by the particular brand of informality that characterizes Nollywood. If we take precarity and informality to be linked, we can see Nollywood as a particularly informal industry with a particularly precarious workforce, marked by limited recourse for labor grievances. I assess Nollywood’s informality as a phenomenon forged out of a very specific place: Lagos, a rapidly growing, often overflowing megacity and an alternative media capital, a hub for global flows and connections that utilizes few of the formal dominant networks that mark Global Hollywood.⁷ In this way, this chapter grounds the reality of local media labor in the specificities of the actual places where that labor works. In short, the structure of Nollywood reflects the specific architecture and shape of Lagos.

I would also like to be specific about what I mean when I discuss industrial informality in Nollywood. Film industries from Hollywood to Bollywood can be said to feature informal elements at many levels of production, especially in relation to labor practices like recruitment. And Nollywood features some formal elements in its production inputs and distribution outlets.⁸ The distinction between formality and informality, then, is not a dichotomy. Rather, it is a continuum with no industry falling fully at either extreme. Additionally, the question of what exactly informality is and whether it should be celebrated has been subject to much scholarly debate, particularly in the context of media distribution studies, and Nollywood has been at the core of many of these arguments.⁹ There has been concern over the potential to exoticize and “Orientalize” Nollywood via an overabundance of focus on the informality in the industry.¹⁰

Accordingly, to demystify the discussion of Nollywood’s informality, I wish to be very clear about what exactly I mean by informality in Nollywood, and the ways in which it is a conscious choice in a global power play. This study understands the basic intersecting constituents of Nollywood’s industrial informality to be 1) not documenting sales or most other distribution figures in any publicly accessible/scrutinizable fashion, 2) not utilizing legal contracts for employment or other business relationships, 3) not using agents or other formal inputs such as accredited schools for talent recruitment, 4) not pursuing copyright violations via legal frameworks, and 5) privileging undocumented financing and distribution networks and spurning alternatives. It may be noted that four of these five elements begin with the word not. This is because our understanding of informality as an industrial feature worthy of mention exists only because of the existence of formality in these areas in other industries. While there may be some level of informality in other global movie or television industries, the dominance and intersection of these elements in Nollywood’s day-to-day functioning render the industry predominantly informal as opposed to the fragmented informality that characterizes the global media industries that compete for Hollywood’s production, coproductions, partnerships, or investments on the international stage. And point 5 underlines the conscious and active choice by Nollywood’s marketers to utilize informality as a means to maintain power and thwart challengers.