Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television

Console-ing Passions: Television and Cultural Power

by John Thornton Caldwell

In Production Culture, John Thornton Caldwell investigates the cultural practices and belief systems of Los Angeles–based film and video production workers: not only those in prestigious positions such as producers and directors but also many “below-the-line” laborers, including gaffers, editors, and camera operators. Caldwell analyzes the narratives and rituals through which workers make sense of their labor and critique the film and TV industry as well as the culture writ large. As a self-reflexive industry, Hollywood constantly exposes itself and its production processes to the public; workers’ ideas about the industry are embedded in their daily practices and the media they create. Caldwell suggests ways that scholars might learn from the industry’s habitual self-scrutiny.Drawing on interviews, observations of sets and workplaces, and analyses of TV shows, industry documents, economic data, and promotional materials, Caldwell shows how film and video workers function in a transformed, post-network industry. He chronicles how workers have responded to changes including media convergence, labor outsourcing, increasingly unstable labor and business relations, new production technologies, corporate conglomeration, and the proliferation of user-generated content. He explores new struggles over “authorship” within collective creative endeavors, the way that branding and syndication have become central business strategies for networks, and the “viral” use of industrial self-reflexivity to motivate consumers through DVD bonus tracks, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and “making-ofs.” A significant, on-the-ground analysis of an industry in flux, Production Culture offers new ways of thinking about media production as a cultural activity.

Genres: Film

451 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Professor John Thornton Caldwell is Vice Chair of Undergraduate Studies at UCL School of Theater, Film and Television.

As a media studies scholar and filmmaker, John Caldwell teaches in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media. He has authored and edited several books, including Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (co-edited with Vicki Mayer and Miranda Banks, Routledge, 2009); Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Duke Univ. Press, 2008); New Media: Digitextual Theories and Practices (co-edited with Anna Everett, Routledge, 2003); Electronic Media and Technoculture (edited, Rutgers Univ. Press, 2000); and Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1995).

Caldwell’s critical and theoretical writings have been featured in the journals Television and New Media, Cinema Journal, Genre, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Emergences: Journal of Media and Composite Cultures, Medie Kultur, Film Quarterly and Aura: Journal of Film Studies, and have been published in numerous books, including The Media/Cultural Studies Reader (2009), The Media Industries Book (2009), Film and Television After the DVD (2008), The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies (2008), Television After TV (2004), Media/Space: Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age (2004), Issues in Contemporary Television (2004), The New Media Book (2002), Film Theory: An Anthology (2000), Television: The Critical View (1999), Living Color: Race, Feminism, and Media (1998) and American Television: History and Theory (1994).

His film and video productions have received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (1979, 1985), Regional Fellowships (AFI/NEA, 1985, 1988) and state arts councils (1984, 1985, 1989). His films have been screened in museums and festivals in Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Hawaii, Mexico City, New York City, Palm Springs, Park City, Paris, Taipei, Toulouse, San Francisco and Santa Cruz. They have been broadcast on SBS-TV Network/Australia, WTTW-Chicago, WGBH-Boston, WNED-Buffalo and WEIU-TV-Illinois.

Caldwell is the producer-director of the award-winning documentaries Freak Street to Goa: Immigrants on the Rajpath (1989), a film about the migratory pattern of “hippies” in India and Nepal, and Rancho California (Por Favor) (2002), a troubling look at migrant camps that house indigenous Mixteco workers within the arroyos of Southern California’s most affluent suburbs.

An M.F.A. graduate of California Institute of the Arts, Caldwell received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University.