Abstract
As the landscape of global film production continues to fragment with the advent of new Hollywood studio collaborations with partners in China, Korea, and India, it is valuable to return to the origins of some of these debates in the context of the labour movement in the West. Camille Johnson-Yale’s A History of Hollywood’s Outsourcing Debate offers a historically rich, detailed synthesis of the response of North American and European labour in the post-war period. Yet, the larger issues she examines, especially the question ‘Where and what is Hollywood?’, would benefit from a closer analysis of the role of labour not just in Europe and North America but around the world.
A History of Hollywood’s Outsourcing Debate is a detailed examination of the deterritorialization of production, with an emphasis on the perspective of the labour movement. The book focuses its attention on North American and European examples, namely, runaway productions in the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, and US in the post-war period. It draws heavily on archival materials to give a lucid history of the ways the labour movement pushed back against efforts by studio leaders to expand production outside the domain of production labour unions. Relying on English-language labour-based, government-based, and studio-based materials about Hollywood in relation to production outside Hollywood, the book delves into the constructedness of the idea of the industry.
Johnson-Yale rightly argues that the phenomenon of ‘runaway production’, despite its common usage, has suffered from a lack of detailed examination of its historical development and cultural implications. Billed in its introduction as a detailed examination of the runaway production debate, the book shines when giving a detailed history of labour in Hollywood. It draws on a wide range of archival, which comes through clearly in the historical accounts of the evolution of the phenomenon of runaway production. The book inserts highly detailed examinations of the role played by unions in pushing back against cost-cutting efforts to expand the global market for studios and to reduce the rates paid to below-the-line labour.
The book provides a helpful introduction for students to the history of the outsourcing debates that shape contemporary discussions of what constitutes ‘American’ or ‘Hollywood’ films. It can also serve as a useful history lesson for policymakers and lobbyists seeking to learn which strategies have been successful in working with foreign partners to advance the larger interests of the US film industry.
Missing from the book is an exploration of the usage of the term ‘runaway production’. While the book examines the phenomenon of filmmakers shooting outside Hollywood in the post-war period, the phenomenon of filmmakers shooting outside Hollywood existed well before this point, in China, the United Kingdom, Latin America, France, and other sites. A history of the term ‘runaway production’ would ensure greater specificity of the topics discussed in the book and would thus more carefully justify the text’s geographic scope. Similarly, the book uses the term ‘domestic runaway’ production as a way to describe production outside Southern California but does not make it clear whether people at the time used that term, or if it was a term introduced by the author. A detailed lineage of where the term evolved, who coined it, which institutions advanced it in which documents would have enriched the text. The inclusion of such a lineage would go a long way to distinguish between ‘runaway production’ as a post-war term and ‘runaway production’ as the phenomenon of films being shot outside Southern California in the contemporary period.
The book’s narrow geographic focus allows it to be specific in the cases it examines and the archival material it uses. However, at times it broadens its discussion to the global deterritorialization of Hollywood but does not provide cases outside of the West. The book’s conclusion, which focuses on the 1990s and 2000s, fails to include any mention of countries in Asia or Latin America. If the book were addressing only the immediate post-war period, these choices would make sense. When it claims to speak about the globalization of production labour more generally, however, this is a notable absence.
This text and its detailed history of Hollywood labour debates would be useful in advanced undergraduate or graduate classes in media industry studies or film history. Yet the text’s focus on issues of runaway production in North America and Europe would benefit from being paired with complementary texts that deal with pressing issues of labour globalization in India or China in order to present a fuller picture of the outsourcing of Hollywood. For Hollywood’s relationship with India, Nitin Govil’s excellent Orienting Hollywood and Aswin Punathambekar’s rich From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry offer important explorations of the subcontinent as a destination for Hollywood filmmaking. Books like Hollywood Made in China and Wendy Su’s China’s Encounter with Global Hollywood: Cultural Policy and the Film Industry, 1994-2013 detail the relationship between China and Hollywood that is missing from this history of Hollywood’s outsourcing debate. Despite nearly twenty years passing since the publication of Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell’s seminal book, Global Hollywood, there still needs to be more progress toward global inclusivity in media industries scholarship. That being said, A History of Hollywood’s Outsourcing Debate book provides a rich, detailed orientation to the labour debates surrounding runaway production with a commitment to telling the important stories of the US workers left behind in Hollywood’s mad rush to take advantage of global markets.