11.3: Implications of Opaque Distribution
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- Jade Miller
- University of California Press
While Nollywood produces movies, it is not technically a “film” industry. Movies are not shot on celluloid nor are they usually intended for big-screen projection in cinema houses. Instead, Nollywood movies are shot on video and largely viewed in private or in small public screenings. Though there are constant televised screenings of Nollywood movies, some informal public screenings in video parlors, 17 and a growing trend of some higher-end titles utilizing a splashy initial release and short run at expensive cinema houses, 18 the vast majority of profits in Nollywood come from physical direct-to-consumer sales. Most Nollywood movies are financed and distributed by one group of people, known as “marketers.” Despite the name, they serve multiple roles for each movie: executive producers, marketers, and distributors. Essentially small-scale entrepreneurs with experience in the gray- and black-market electronics trade, marketers leverage their knowledge of Nigeria’s informal, undocumented marketplaces and open-air bazaars to structure their business dealings in the movie business. While many creative workers in the industry bemoan the lack of everyday cinema houses, affordable to the poor and lower middle class and contributing to a local cinema-going culture, 19 the marketers flourish in an environment that leaves them in control of most authorized distribution.
Once finished movies have been pressed at the disc replication plant, the marketers package them with the appropriate graphics and release them to the markets on the next Monday. These movies flow through distribution hubs and subhubs, usually first focused on places like Alaba (the Lagos market) and Onitsha (the city in the Igbo-dominated southeast that is home base for a large number of production companies). Copies are then sent to nearby cities for sale at their markets, and they fan out to smaller hamlets from there, much the way electronics fan out from Alaba across the nation. These distribution networks are held together through trust, personal connections, and informal exchange as opposed to legally binding contracts, a prominent feature in any informal economy.
“Piracy” is part of both the heritage and the current functioning of the video distribution system, 20 although I will refer to it here as unauthorized distribution in order to remain value neutral. Despite the marketers’ public proclamations that unauthorized distribution is decimating the industry, they themselves are not fully operating on the legal side of copyright law in all of their business dealings. Instead, one might say that they operate in a gray area, obtaining certain rights for movies and then overstepping them and hiding profits. The core professional experience of the marketers comes from a background in electronics trading, including unauthorized distribution of foreign movies. As Brian Larkin has illustrated, 21 their success in distributing the movies they produce comes in no small part from using the same distribution networks they forged years before to distribute unauthorized copies of Hollywood, Bollywood, and Asian action movies, and is augmented by their ability to operate behind closed doors and out of the sight of any potential regulators.
The current process of financing an average Nollywood movie is inextricable from the informality of its distribution. Again, while movie industries worldwide seek diverse funding sources (of varying degrees of legitimacy and reliability), the avoidance of transparent distribution in Nollywood delimits the potential to attract bank loans or other formal investors, as investors tend to require confirmed sales figures and reliable sales projections. The marketers’ often antagonistic relationships with the government over taxes and other documentation issues mean that loans and grants upon which other film industries can rely are not part of the landscape for most moviemakers in Lagos. Instead, individual marketers tend to finance their own productions. Those in charge of distribution—the marketers— are the only ones who can make financial decisions and calculate risk, a confidence that comes from their exclusive control over (informal) distribution networks and associated knowledge of the (opaque) marketplace. This oversight establishes a level of collective power among the marketers that is intentionally difficult to usurp and that repels investment attempts by outsiders. 22
Moreover, these marketers zealously guard their power by policing the informal relationships that enshrine their authority, which is particularly important as we analyze the structure of the industry. The strength of their informal networks trumps most attempts at formal takeover, and this strength is derived from informality: opacity in sales figures and distribution networks, and informality in industrial organization. Informality, however, is not the same as describing the industry as a disorganized, chaotic collective. In the absence of governance by legal institutions or the centralized formal power of major corporate studios, control is enforced by a mass of small enterprises whose internal organization helps preserve their collective interests, best represented in the marketers’ guild (FVPMAN).
FVPMAN is just one of the many guilds constituting Nollywood’s internal infrastructure. 23 Guilds, each boasting an elected national leadership, represent almost every aspect of the industry from marketers to makeup artists. Guilds provide, in essence, internal governance for the industry, standing in for legal contracts and labor regulations. While they appear centralized and visible, akin to unions, guilds are neither transparent nor formal, neither registered with nor regulated by the government, and subject to no external oversight. For instance, in the absence of legal contracts, guilds are meant to solve disputes. In theory, a grieved party takes his or her grievance to the guild’s leadership, who work to solve the dispute with the offending party’s guild. In practice, however, a dispute between an elite and an underling will rarely result in a disruption of the status quo, and there is no recourse to formal legal litigation as a corrective. Nollywood sets are full of empty complaints about labor practices, from unpaid labor to unsatisfactory working conditions.
While most guilds deal primarily with internal labor issues, the collective power of the marketers’ guild, FVPMAN, is immense. In the past the guild has made attempts to space out movie releases to counteract periodic “gluts” in movie releases. FVPMAN also has cut down on production at times to address the same issue. Attempts to dethrone the marketers have consistently ended in failure, whether the attempts come from blocs of creative workers or government authorities, both wishing more control over the industry. For instance, Nollywood stars are a central mechanism through which movies are branded and sold to the public. Marketers rely on their images to help secure financial success. Nollywood stars are thus widely recognizable and glamorous, though fame secures most of them only a modest fortune. To make a consistent living, most stars must work frequently, and those demanding extravagant fees can fall out of favor with the marketers. FVPMAN acts quickly to shut down productions or blacklist actors if the organization feels the marketers’ power is being chipped away by an overentitled celebrity. Heightened budgets and salaries in a bigger-budget nonmarketer branch of Nollywood, now known as “New Nollywood,” have yet to evoke industrial change: workers must work so frequently that New Nollywood’s limited slate won’t sustain them, and the marketers still set the terms for the bulk of the industry.
For such a young industry, Nollywood is subject to constant speculation on the shape of its future. Various plans to shift that future in one direction or another come from both within and outside the industry. New plans to “formalize” in one way or another are near constant, including cinema construction schemes and various licensing initiatives put forth by the government and guilds. Some of these new ideas die before they are born, while others persist but only affect a small subset of the industry during their tenure. As with most cultural industries, the real power of the industry is centralized with those who control distribution. In Nollywood, this still means the marketers. Locating power in creative industries is key to understanding their functioning, and understanding the marketers as the nexus of power here is key to understanding Nollywood’s persistent informal infrastructure. This informality can be a source of industrial strength to reinforce dominant power structures, and thus integration into formal global networks is unlikely to serve the best interests of those in authority (here, the marketers). This informality also marks the experience of labor and the nature of production and distribution in Nollywood in a manner that exceeds anything seen in industries that rely on theatrical release, official legal contract enforcement, and relative transparency in distribution statistics.