11.4: Precarity, Repeat Collaboration, and Industry Entry
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- Jade Miller
- University of California Press
Creative work and precarity in labor tend to go hand-in-hand, as the individual case studies in this volume collectively illustrate. In creative industries worldwide, creative workers tend to form new teams for each project. 24 This can range from the culturally temporary work structure in the technology sector, in which workers expect to work at companies for only a few years before shifting job title and project, 25 to the extremes of per-project team reformation in the creation of movies, television shows, and songs. On this end of the creative industries, workers are largely freelance and must constantly find new work as they coalesce for the completion of a single project.
In movie industries based on theatrical release logic, being hired on a film may mean several months of work on a single project—perhaps even a year or more— depending on one’s role in the process. Nollywood instead operates on an industrial logic favoring rapid, inexpensive production. Instead of pouring money into a single title and laboring over an extended time frame, most Nollywood production moves at a brisk pace, as can be seen in other straight-to-video industries worldwide. 26 This is an extreme form of precarity, as a living is forged in Nollywood from working every week or every day, going from production to production. As informality in distribution entrenches power in the hands of the marketers, it also heightens precarity for Nollywood’s nonmarketer labor force, as they lack recourse to legal protections and collective bargaining.
Nollywood production is marked by velocity. It is not unusual to shoot ten scenes in one day, with two to three weeks of shooting per movie a common scenario. 27 With one week of preproduction and one week of editing and packaging, a video film can go from inception to sale in four weeks, though three months is a much more common scenario, and New Nollywood titles take even longer. An indemand worker can easily shoot two movies in one month. With modest pay from any individual movie, workers make a living mainly through quantity, and some can be found working nearly every day, ending one movie project to begin another.
Movie industries worldwide are mostly marked by freelance labor agreements, with crews coming together in new and different formations for project after project. Researchers from Caves 28 to Currid 29 have noted the weight this gives to informal relationships that may bridge friendship and business: if you must rely on your reputation to secure employment in a business marked by whom you know, social relationships are a core motor of your career and professional development. Despite the prominence of guilds in Nollywood, people usually hear about jobs from either someone they have worked with before or the recommendation of a friend. While this is not unusual in other movie industries, the lack of formal recourse to government labor regulation, talent agents, or managers marks Nollywood as particularly informal. Furthermore, the sheer number of projects that Nollywood workers must pick up to support themselves—many more than in movie industries marked by theatrical release of higher-budget projects—means that the informal is even more important to workers as a means through which to ensure their continued financial stability. Because of this quantity-based logic in production and labor, repeat collaborations are particularly common, and maintaining trust among individuals in those working groups is an essential survival tactic.
This trust is not easy to come by: breaking into the industry can be challenging. Entry into Nollywood is often based on family, ethnic, or other preexisting ties. There is little formal training in the industry, and many workers learn along the way. Some efforts to institute training programs via moviemaking schools have begun, but these have not become a reliable mechanism for feeding talent into the industry. Gathering places, like O’Jez’s, the bar and restaurant in the National Stadium, can provide another opportunity to network one’s way to the top. Industry events such as premieres, awards ceremonies, and elaborate birthday banquets are the type of invitation-only places where major business deals are negotiated. A bar like O’Jez’s, which is open to the public, is less likely to yield dramatic results. It does, however, provide the chance to see and be seen, and people make an effort to hold personal meetings there, in order to be observed by others in the industry. In such instances, industry aspirants may find themselves only a few degrees removed from a critical phone number; personal introductions are common occurrences in these locations, helping novices connect with senior players in the industry.
Apprenticeships are often a low-cost entry point into the industry, especially for producers and technical crew. It is commonplace across Nigerian industries for a “big man” to train a number of “boys” to work under his mentorship, 30 and it is no different in Nollywood. This tradition is thought to ensure personal loyalty. One midlevel producer I spoke with, for instance, runs a production company whose in-house editor is the producer’s former barber, someone the producer trained for the position. This way, the producer says, “I know he will always be loyal to me.” Other industry workers teach themselves. One postproduction special effects artist I interviewed, for instance, learned his craft from free online tutorials on special effects software, such as Video Co-Pilot, Cinema 4D, and After-Effects. His training was a side pursuit based on personal interest while he was enrolled in another field of study at university. University education is common among the creative arms of the industry (producers, directors, editors, and so on) though not a requirement. Marketers are usually not university educated, as they often work in the marketplaces from a very young age and gain their knowledge from those experiences. Some of the rancor and distrust between marketers and directors is based on that point alone.
Guilds structure the industry. While crew and big-name stars are hired through personal connections, nonstar actors are usually enlisted through auditions. Auditions tend to be formal, well-attended affairs, with members of the leadership of each guild expected to attend and make sure everything is operating in a respectable fashion. For guilds with many members and limited work—for instance, the Actor’s Guild—guild membership also forms the framework through which creative workers look for and find work. The power of the guild, regardless of who is in charge, stands in for a legal system in industry disputes, and it can also serve as a mechanism for resisting external interference in the industry status quo, be it from governmental or foreign interlopers. And it is the marketers’ guild, FVPMAN, where industry power is concentrated, in an opaque and cohesive collective of small- to medium-size distributors. The core of government efforts to control Nollywood has been aimed at interrupting this bloc and promoting the emergence of a few corporatesque national distributors that could be more easily controlled. This governmental strategy of control (actively promoting the emergence of a few corporate giants as opposed to a diversity of dispersed small distributors), implemented in many government bids for control over media industries worldwide (perhaps most notably in early U.S. radio development), has thus far failed in Nollywood, as the cohesiveness and collective opacity of the marketers, schooled by years of actively avoiding government notice, has made them challenging consolidation targets.
We can thus see informal, undocumented transactions as the building blocks of the industry, structuring its organization and labor processes. And we can see extreme precarity as characteristic of Nollywood labor. While informal connections and trust also form the basis of the working relationships of most other contract-based creative industries, including most of those highlighted in this volume, what is distinctive about Nollywood is that this is the only currency. There is no recourse to formal political or legal systems or institutions, like talent agencies, to help structure industry operations. At once a source of immense strength for those who control the distributive mechanisms, the southern Nigerian film industry’s self-governed informality remains an ever-present challenge for workers who lack equal footing and for those looking to codify it with standards based on structured global networks, from which the industry remains disconnected. Such tensions have and will continue to shape Nollywood.