19 The reliance on pathos and conflict is characteristic of traditional Aristotelean drama as well; it is not unique to talk shows, reality TV, or media narratives more generally.
20 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). See also Arlie Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Stephanie Shields, Speaking from the Heart: Gender and the Social Meaning of Emotion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
21 Hochschild, The Managed Heart. See also Shields, Speaking from the Heart.
22 For an insightful account of reality-TV casting, sec Vicki Mayer, "Guys Gone Wild? Soft-Core Video Professionalism and New Realities in Television Production," Cinema Journal 47, no. 2 (2008): 97-116.
23 Brian Moeran.Tricks of theTrade: The Performance and Interpretation of Authenticity," Journal of Management Studies 42, no. S (2005): 901-922
24 Hearn,"John, a 20-Year-Old Boston Native," 21
25 See Hill, Reality TV
26 Graeme Turner, "Celebrity, die Tabloid, and the Democratic Public Sphere," in The Celebrity Culture Reader, ed. P. David Marshall (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 495.
27 Sec xMurray and Ouellette, Reality TV.
28 Turner, "Celebrity, the Tabloid, and the Democratic Public Sphere," 499.
29 I am drawing here, of course, on James Carey's classic distinction. See James Carey, Communication as Culture (New York: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
30 For a broader discussion of this racialized phenomenon, see Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturahsm and the Media (New York and London: Routlege, 1994).
31 For a summary of these theories, see David Giles, "The Quest for Fame," in The Celebrity Culture Reader, ed. P. David Marshall (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 470-486.
32 Brenton and Cohen, Shooting People, 52,53.
33 Andrejevic, RealitvTV.
34 Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), 24.
35 Nick Couldry, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (London: Routledge, 2003).
36 Turner, "Celebrity, the Tabloid, and the Democratic Public Sphere."
Gender Below-the-Line
Defining Feminist Production Studies
Miranda J. Banks
For film and television practitioners in Hollywood, the gender gap becomes a question not only of who is hired, but what work they are asked to do. In order to engage with questions about gender equality (or inequality) in screen production, in my research, I explore theories of professional identity through the lens of labor studies and production economics. Quantitative assessments of the gender gap in film and television production often make broad claims based on overall percentages of women working within the industry.1 Gender disparity is a critical issue in Hollywood, but in order to understand the nature of the professional landscape, it is crucial to look not just at the overall numbers, but to examine the gendering of individual professions within the industry. In other words, my interest is not solely in the gender of workers (the biological sex of individuals within certain professions), but in the gendering c>fW3rjc(in terms^ofhow a particular rjrofession might be socially constructed though gender). Here, I highlight practitioners' own perceptions of their work while framing it within a cultural history of the economic and professional hierarchies inherent in screen production.
Production studies of media are predicated on the assumption that knowledge of the cultural and industrial modes of production will not just inform, but alter one's reading not only of the media text, but of the media. This theoretical tenet underlies die methodology, and therefore the organizing structure of production studies scholarship. Wlien these types of media scholarship are then folded into feminist production studies, projects become increasingly nuanced. This type of work provides an intervention to traditional feminist media analyses by incorporating a theorization of the material conditions of gendered labor within the context of a specific industry history. While a number of television production studies researchers take as their content female-oriented series or networks, their methodologies tend to privilege the work of creative auteurs and executives. In my own scholarship, I have found the voices of female practitioners working below the line have much to offer in their own theorizations of media production practices. Their experiential knowledge provided a corrective
88   Miranda J. Banks
testing of my own academic assessments. I see feminist production studies as works which define through example what is truly at stake not just in the process of production but in the study of production as well. Feminist production studies offer a method to interrogate power and cultural capital, femininity and feminism in production communities frequently overlooked in media industry research.
This kind of feminist production study has been done before, most notably in the work of Julie D'Acci and Elana Levine. Both scholars apply Richard Johnson's circuit of culture model, which examines the cross-flow of institutional hierarchies, production flow's, and audience analysis within a particular work.2 Yet the two scholars take the circuit of culture in two different feminist directions: D'Acci expands on the contested meanings of feminism while Levine offers a feminist methodology that encompasses the reflexivity of a researcher who is also a fan. Julie D'Acci's work on Honey West (1965—1966) and her book-length study Defining J> Women, which combine an archival-based industrial history with feminist textual S analysis, locate these television texts within the specific social history of the women's movement in order to better define the industrial struggles the creators and their networks faced, as well as the significance of the program's reception.3 D'Acci / uses a case study of this long-running series to explore how the show was a battleground for a negotiation of the terms of "feminism." In the representation of ^two powerful heroines, power hierarchies played themselves out behind the scenes ' while the creators, studio, and network tried to find, construct, and speak to the - female audience for a "women's program" that existed within the predominantly male genre of the police procedural.
Though D'Acci's book fills a significant gap in the history of media production labor, her analysis of the process of production focuses almost entirely on above-the-line professionals, especially the series' stars and their writer-producers Barbara Avedon and Barbara Corday. There is good reason for this—Cagney <&_ Lace/ (1981-1988) stands out as a series in the US not just because it was the first dramatic series with two female protagonists, but also because it broke ground with two female creators and executive producers at its helm. Focusing on the experiences of these above-the-line workers thus makes logical sense. While there have always been female practitioners in Hollywood, rarely has there been a production with so many women in these decision-making and -breaking positions.4
In "Toward a Paradigm for Media Production Research," Elana Levine applies Johnson's approach to the production of General Hospital (1963- ), a daytime soap opera. In her role as researcher, Levine tracks circulation of meanings within the production environment, arguing that television production is shaped equally by cultural notions of realism and economic determinants, such as time constraints. Unlike D'Acci, Levine spends some time talking about the work of a varietv of
Gender Below-the-Line 89
practitioners on the set—and how their labor is distinguished—and delineated—by gender hierarchies. Levine writes:
The limits of commercial culture are more complicated than simple profit motivation or the exploitation of workers. They can affect studio size and body size, the scope of the on-screen world and the scope of femininity. An understanding of such factors not only informs the interpretation of texts, but helps us to comprehend the priorities of capitalism, the imperatives of the television medium, and the reasons behind the products the medium offers. De-naturalizing the television world in these ways is the first step to not only knowing that world, but understanding the particular ways its power is shaped and its money and meanings are circulated.6
This field-based analysis of the lived experience of practitioners complicates the more text-based research of media scholars who have focused on the narrative worlds of media genres. This behind-the-scenes scholarship details how tensions behind the scenes are reflected—and even mirrored—in the finished, televised text. Both Levine and D'Acci use singular female-centered television series to track issues of the politics and economics of gender, both on and off the screen.
The distinction between "above-the-line" and "below-the-line" labor is crucial to understanding the nature of production, and in turn, to seeing different possibilities for intervention bv feminist production studies scholars. "Above-theTine" and"below-the-line" are industry terms that distinguish between creative and craft professions in production. The distinction is derived from a particular worker's position in relation to a bold horizontal line on a standard production budget sheet between creative and technical costs, establishing a hierarchy that stratifies levels of creative and craft labor. Above-the-line guilds include practitioners who are paid to create cultural products within a media industry. The kind of labor that they do is evaluated, both by the industry and by society, in terms of its imagination, artistry, and inventiveness. According to David Hesmondhalgh, those who work above the line are responsible for generating symbolic meanings, but this reification of "the symbolic," and of those in the foreground, speaks to larger hierarchies of cultural value explored in my own research.7 The work of writers, directors, producers, and celebrity actors is considered, and is compensated, above the line. In terms of payment, practitioners working above the line can negotiate with production studios for residuals, a cut of the distribution and syndication rights. As such, budgets for above-the-line workers vary dramatically. Below-the-line practitioners are considered—again, industrially and socially—as craftspeople or technicians, people who work with their hands. These practitioners hold distinct trade knowledge, much of which they have learned through apprenticesliigs_or on the job. This group would include cinematographers, editors, production designers, costume
90   Miranda J. Banks
designers, gaffers, camera loaders, body doubles, etc. Typically, below-the-line costs in production budgets are standardized by union contract wage scales.
While quantitative studies by scholars, unions, or activist organizations have fruitfully tracked the percentages of women working in above-the-line fields they fail to take into account that many below-the-line occupations have been dominated by women. In my own research, I have focused on particular professions within the industry where labor has been decidedly gendered, namely on stuntwomen (who work within a male-dominated profession) and costume designers (who arc, in vast majority, female). This was a twist on D'Acci's investigation of the groundbreaking women of the Cagney S^Lacey series. Whereas Avedon and Corday—and in turn, their characters Cagney and Lacey, had to negotiate terms like "woman, women, and femininity]® looking at gendered occupations, how would female workers articulate their labor and professional experience? Like Levine, I talked to practitioners about their daily lives. While Levine's research focused on a particular program, I was interested in examining a particular profession, exploring how women's work is defined, valued, and articulated within the industry. What T found in my research talking to female and male costume designers was that theirs is a gendered profession: within the context of production, costume design is devalued in relation to professions of, arguably, comparable import that are majority male. In my conversations with these professionals, I tried to listen to the language they used to describe their work and their lived experiences within the industry. What emerged was a heteroglossic history of practitioners, past and present, in which the meanings of women's work, of femininity, and sometimes even feminism, were ventriloquized through a number of people, including myself.
Here I explore costume design as gendered labor through the voices of film and television designers who talked to me about their role in creating characters, in supporting actors, and in distinguishing their work from related fields, namely that of costumer or fashion designer. In the US, this craft is not medium specific. Professionals increasingly criss-cross between media, just like studios and media corporations now do.9
The Work of Costume Design
In order to understand the nature of their work, I will point to a few of the issues that costume designers themselves see as daily pleasures and the difficulties they face: j building character through costume, working with actors—and their egos and .^rhstinguishing their work from that of fashion. The costume designer is the person responsible for designing, creating, and overseeing the wardrobe of all of the actors on a set. Sometimes these clothes arc created from scratch, other times they are purchased at retail stores and then modified to fit a character's needs.10 Jn order to create all of the costumes necessary for a production, designers will work with a
Gender Below-the-Line 91
1
team of employees, overseen by a costume supervisor. The day-to-day work of the costume designer requires skill, discipline, humility, creativity, attention to detail, and speed—all on a budget.
The central dilemma—and paradox—for costume designers.is_that their job is to visualize a character through" a costume that should go_unnoticed by the audience because it looks organic to the personality of the character. Thejnvisibility of costume designers' labor on the screen, however, frequently means that they are marginalized on the set and iq the press. For costume designers, it has not been a coincidence that their field, traditionally dominated by women, has also been underappreciated, undercompensated, and, with imprudent disregard, labeled as "women's work." Even the costume designer's tools—cloth and the needle— arc those traditionally ascribed to women's domestic labor. The gendering of the profession has defined the nature of the craft in other ways as well.
A costume designer's work is created for a two-dimensional world, in that it does not matter what a costume feels like or is made of, but rather about how the costume reads on the screen. Costume designer, and former Costume Designers Guild president, Deborah Nadoolman Landis describes the central goals of her trade as twofold: first, to support the narrative by creating memorable characters, and second to create costumes that balance the image within the frame.11 This is a team project. Costume designers work directly with the producer, director, and actor before cutting the first pattern. They design the "foreground" of the screen—namely the actors: they create clothing for every character that helps define the director's or producer's vision, and that supports the cinematographcr's composition by subtly guiding die audience's attention within the frame.12 If a costume is not right, and a viewer notices this, this extra-textual recognition pulls viewers out of the narrative, reminding them of the industrial production of the image. As Ngilá Dickson, costume designer of Lord of the Rings (2001—2003), explains, "You never want a jarring moment for the [audience]."13 This is precisely what is meant when costume designers discuss how their work should disappear within the image.
Costumes serve other functions as well, according to designers. They can focus a viewer's attention on a particular character, helping the viewer judge the character before he or she even speaks. Costumes can tell a story; character and personality are externalized in costumes.14 The use of particular types of clothing affects how an actor moves in space: his or her posture, balance, and gait. Television series productions require an entire wardrobe full of clothing, shoes, and accessories for each major character from which the designer can pull out single outfits over the course of each season.
A significant aspect of a costume designer's labor is understanding how to work with an actor's individual body, thereby finessing physical and emotional labor within the same work. The first people an actor sees every morning on a set are
92   Miranda J. Banks
Gender Below-the-Line 93
the hair, make-up, and costume crews, all of whom are in charge of manipulating an actor's body to transform him or her into a character. For this reason alone, the relationship between the actor and these, key craftspeople must be amicable, requiring a level of trust from the actor and skillfulness on the part of the costume designer. Television writer and producer, Mark Frost explains the significance of the relationship between actor and costume designer:
The costume designer has to be a kind of geisha to the actor. They have to make the actor feel safe and protected and enhanced by what they're wearing. They have to be able to deal with people who are making themselves very vulnerable for a living, and who have a lot of emotional needs and concerns.15
Being sensitive to an actor's particular physical strengths and weaknesses has always been essential to this emotional work. The designer often makes actors' bodies more proportional, taller, shorter, camouflages their physical flaws, or emphasizes their strengths in order to flatter their figures on screen.16 Costume designers use tricks of the trade to help minimize the weight that the camera will put on an actor, everything from sewing pockets together to removing belt loops to reinforcing a bodice to create slimmer curves and clean lines.17 Costume designers also introduce new looks slowly to apprehensive actors, building up the sense of trust that the designer truly knows the most flattering clothing for an actor. This is why costumes frequently improve over the course of a television series as actors and designers learn to trust each other,
Designers said that once that trust was established, many stars wanted to continue their relationships with them. During the studio era, many costume designers' names became attached to particular starlets, making themselves, and their costumes, famous, as well. In interviews, many costume designers describe their work as being part-designer, part-costume historian, and part-psychologist. Costume designer for films such as Taxi Driver (1976) and Annie Hall (1977), Ruth Morley understands that her job depends so much on her talks with actors that she laments not knowing more about human behavior. "I wish I'd studied psychology more— I had classical training. I do a lot of sketching, a lot of talking. I bring the actor in and really count on spending a lot of time with them. I try not to force color if someone really hates it. I try not to be unreasonable."18 Costume designer Nolan Miller, a long-time collaborator w"ith Aaron Spelling, has said many times that he sees his craft as 90 percent psychology and 10 percent creativity.19 Nicole Gorsuch, costume designer for television shows as varied as Jericho (2006—2008) and Home Improvement (1991-1999), explained that ultimately, no costume will look right if an actor feels uncomfortable in it:
It's never your full image, as a costume designer. It's a combination of what everybody wants. It's like you are a diplomat, trying to get what the producers
want, what the actors want, and what the director wants. You're just trying to make everyone happy and mesh it all together and fit it into the budget, and ultimately make the actors feel comfortable.20
This necessity for diplomacy that is central to their labor defines costume designers' work as both a manual craft and emotional labor. Their constant workaday negotiations mirror the above-the-line activities of producers and agents. And like that of above-the-line negotiations with talent, this relationship is not always easy or, for that matter, amicable. Oftentimes costume designers find that actors, especially those who have little experience on sets, fail to understand the art and craft of costume design and make extravagant requests.21 Costume designers say that this is only further complicated when young actors now arrive on sets with their personal stylists. While by definition, stylists' work entails managing, locating, and customizing a particular look for their client to wear (every day, for a photo shoot, for an event), most stylists know little to nothing about costume design or fabrication.22 Stylists are attuned to fashion, to fashion designers, and to their clients but, as many costume designers would argue, they do not understand the work of costume designers, nor do they have the experience, the history, or the knowledge of the craft of costuming to be helpful to their clients on the set. Stylists like Rachel Zoe have become part of the Hollywood A-list, as have the fashion designers whose clothes arc paraded on the pages of fashion and entertainment magazines as well as television shows like Entertainment Tonight (1981- ) and Access Hollywood (1996— ), but considering all the names that are dropped to the press and paparazzi, rare among them are those of the costume designers.
The Lure of Fashion Design
Costume designers, struggling to stay within budget, rarely have enough time or money to create costumes from scratch. More likely, costumes come from a variety of sources; some are bought, others are rented, and some are designed and crafted as original pieces. Designers say the demands on them to workfaster for less monev, while appeasing producers who are interested in using fashion designers' clothing, is far more prevalent than in their earlier years.23 As a result, costume designers often take advantage of fashion designers' offers for access to their collections to supplement an actor's wardrobe.24
There are clear advantages to the increased access costume designers have now to fashion designers' clothes. Fashion designers create and craft original clothing and accessories seasonally to be sold to individual clients or, more often, to consumers through specialty boutiques or department stores. Clothes that come to a production from a fashion designer are usually well made and assist the costume designer in portraying a character. Often uiese clothes are readily available to costume designers, and they are either free or sold to the production at drastically
94   Mirandal. Banks
cut prices.25 However, a fashion designer is usually only interested in dressing the main actors in a cast. Costume designer {or Will &_ Grace (1998—2006), Lori Eskowitz-Carter explained during the run of the series, "The bigger the show, the more free stuff you get—it's just the bottom line. The higher-end designers obviously want to dress my cast right now because it's a hit show with an attractive cast."26 This leads, though, to a gross misperception that costume designers are simply shoppers.2' Rather, the modern costume designers struggle everyday to maintain their artistic and creative goals within a commercial-run production. If a fashion designer's clothes are used as costumes, they are, without fail, the first to take credit for the costumes. This is yet another example of the erasure of
- the costume designer's labor: and the gross misunderstanding of the differences
< between costume and fashion.
The costume designers I have interviewed in my research argued that the common misunderstanding of the differences between fashion and costume is critical to their invisibility in the production process and in the press. Fashion and, through it, fashion designer court the attention of the press; whereas costume designers see their_role as serving_the character and the script, not^heir^own personas. While the work of the costume designer is veiled in the process of production, a fashion designer's intention is to highlight the uniqueness of his or her work, and bring attention to the label. At the most basic level, costume is about character and fashion
\ is about clothing. A costume is designed to be photographed, on display in a two-dimensional world, to look like something the character would wear. While it may be made from cloth, it is not simply clothing. It is used to facilitate the narrative and give shape and form to a character. In contrast, fashion is a consumable good. It is crafted to be noticed in its own right; fashion is designed for the three-dimensional world. In one case, clothing is used to define a character, in the other a character is used to define the clothing.
To say that costume and fashion are antithetical does not, in turn, imply that style has no role in the creation of a costume. Quite the opposite is true. Dress articulates character, and if the character is a young woman living in a city, attention to style and fashion would be a part of the character's persona. A costume is never intended to be fashionable or glamorous in its own right, unless, of course, this is the nature of a particularly fashionable character. But fashion and costume are not the same. Every piece of prefabricated clothing used in a film or television series must jgo through a process of transformation in order to become a costume. Inevitably (clothes are altered—dyed, customized, tailored, or aged—to fit the needs of a character and the scene.28 Thus, the work of the costume designer, even when using contemporary fashions, is regularly under-recognized for the larger purpose of selling a film or television series, the character, or the image of the'actor. But rarely does anyone take notice, especially off the set, of who was responsible for crafting the image in needle and cloth.
Gender Below-che-Line 95
Via costume, Hollywood has provided viewers with a way to understand characters. At different times, film costumes have inspired fashion trends, but it is not the costume designers' job to consider this in the production process. Instead, they must be true to the script, and their skills at developing the foreground of a character, in essence, erase their labor.
Looking toward Future Feminist Labors?
It is only when we pull apart at the seams of costume design that we, as scholars and viewers of media, can begin to see the intricacy of the artistry, and the hidden— and gendered—labor involved in its production. Misunderstandings about costume design—in particular its misinterpretations as shopping or fashion—are embedded in gendered readings of this skilled labor. When creative work"design" is described as everyday leisure "shopping," the professionalism and skill of these workers is undermined. Conflating the work of design with fashion seems to imply that clothes, whether in one's closet, on the runway, or on the set, have the same purpose and meaning. Again, fashion connotes dressing for ornamentation or style, and while a program like Project Runway (2005—2008) has given audiences a much better idea of the intensive labor involved in the production of fashion, fashion is seen as above costume design. On a number of occasions, the judges' harshest critiques come when they call a design "costumey." This privileging of fashion over costume makes a qualitative, hierarchical assessment—thereby denning "costume" as overwhelming, obvious, and tacky—decidedly not the work of skilled hands of a craftsman or artist.
Gender plays into the collaborative nature of film and media production— not just in what is produced but in how. In subtle ways, much of the work women do in Hollywood is—both through language and through economics—treated as "women's work." Through agencies and organizations, women within the industry are trying to redefine their work as artistry and crafts worthy of professional respect -and commensurate pay. There are a great number of women working in Hollywood today. Hollywood history shows that women have always played pivotal roles in production. A critical reappraisal of the data on gender breakdowns within industry professions tells a far more compelling talc about the economics of production. And without understanding, even just a bit, about the collaborative nature of production and the methods and traditions of compensation, wc would be lost in understanding the shifting nature of the text. The numbers game offers little understanding of the lived professional landscape.
Feminist production studies pull from varied disciplines in order to grapple with questions of gender within historical, industrial, institutional, and aesthetic frameworks. This type of scholarship demands an understanding of the intercon-nectedness of these different registers and their interrelations: grounding a reading
96   Miranda J. Banks
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of production within a distinct sociohistorical and economic context to examine a text, a profession, a character—even an individual—as a cultural and anthropological artifact. Exploring these disparate points of convergence in production at each of these registers provides a heuristic, integrated vision of media. In many ways, what D'Acci and Levine argue for is that for media scholars, the studies of \production, industry, and text'are always integrally intertwined. The scholar cannot truly understand one without at least a base knowledge of how hierarchies of power in production, distribution, and reception affect the process and the product.
A more nuanced assessment and analysis of the conditions and economics of gendered production labor provides a glimpse into the complex gender dynamics at play within this creative industry. These choices of who is working behind the scenes and how they are compensated for their work are essential to the production of the final product, translating to what we see on screen. Occasionally, these workers come out of the woodwork, such as when the Writers Guild of America hit the picket lines from November 2007 to February 2008. When the writers went on the streets, the gender and racial disparity within the profession of screen writing was laid bare on the picket line: the majority of picketers were male, and almost all were Caucasian. While this kind of underground history of gendered labor within Hollywood itself may not make a great script, it could be part of a larger, both scholarly and industrial, feminist project to bring awareness, and change, to the practices of making media.
While at first the notion of a feminist production study may seem only a viable method of analysis within the realm of production communities that have a majority of women, it is precisely the gender biases in production that need to be explored and uncovered. Embedded industrial theorizations of production culture must be harvested from practitioners and analyzed by scholars at every point in the production process. In this case study, I have focused on a profession dominated by women in order to explore why this production community has been defined as "women's work." But the gendering of professions in film and media production is visible throughout the industry. Elsewhere, I have explored the work of stuntwomen—and how they negotiate their careers—and their ideas about women's work—within a profession that has traditionally been deemed quite macho —or masculine. For women struggling to gain recognition within the industry, and for feminist scholars interested in gender and representation, studies that track the gendering of the production landscape offer insight and a nuanced interpretation of the lived media landscape.
We who study Hollywood often write from positions of cultural distance and privilege. We see the final product, and we may know a bit about the key players in the production. As work like D'Acci's and Levine's shows, there is a whole other drama being played out behind the scenes. And tensions often surround questions of such complicated and ever-changing terms as femininity and feminism, not only on
the set and screen, but also in the classroom. Just as production practices change, or notions of gender equality shift, so must scholars' methodologies for interpreting them change as well. With the extensions of film and television's boxes and screens, defining professional positions and establishing compensation rates across media platforms become central not only to how the industry conceives of itself and its future, but also how it hopes to make profits.
Notes
1 For example, Martha Lauzen's annual Celluloid Ceiling reports. See Martha Lauzen, The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind the Scenes Employment ofWomen in the Top 2S0 Films, Department of Communication, San Diego State University, CA, 2002—2007.
2 Richard Johnson,"What is Cultural Studies Anyway T'SocialTen 16 (1986-1987): 38-80.
3 Julie D'Acci, Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney &_Lacey (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Julie D'Acci, "Nobody's Woman? Honey West and the New Sexuality," in The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, eds. Lynn Spigcl and Michael Curtain (New York: Routledge, 1997), 72-93.
4 Even Sherry Lansing, who would later become the first woman to run a major motion picture studio, was involved with the development and green-lighting of the project. D'Acci, Defining Women, 19.
.5 Elana Levine,"Toward a Paradigm for Media Production Research: Behind the Scenes at General Hospital" Critical Studies in Media Communication 1 8 (2001): 66—82.
6 Ibid., 70,
7 David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002), 22,70-73; Miranda J. Banks,"Bodies ofWork: Rituals of Production and the Erasure of Film/TV Production Labor", PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2006.
8 D'Acci, Defining Women, 8. See Chapter 4,"Negotiating Feminism," 142—167,
9 Over the course of these two industries' histories, often the business models of one have been borrowed and adapted to the other. During its early formation, television was far more closely aligned with the radio industry than with the film industry. In fact, for the first thirty years, the major corporations in the television industry all had their start in radio. But now, with corporate conglomeration and the media mergers of the last twenty years in particular, the ties between radio, television, and film have been established within new paradigms.
10 Gina Mclntyre, "Style Factor: Designing Hollywood Is Divided over Just What Role High Fashion Should Play On-Screen,"Tfce Hollywood Reporter, May 7-13, 2002, 18.
11 Deborah Nadoolman Landis, interview with the author, May 24, 200S.
12 Ibid.
13 Shalini Dore,"DesigningWomen," Variety, February 19, 2002.
14 This can go back to the most basic representations of character. For example, think of the hero in the white hat and the villain in the black hat in early Westerns.
15 Todd Coleman, "But Can She Do 1949?: Who Gets the Work" The Hollywood Reporter, January 27, 1992, S-27.
16 "Screen Sorcery Gives the Girls Needed Curves: Many a Glamorous Figure Appears Above Criticism Through Designers' Art," New York Tribune, May 2S, 1941.
98   Miranda J. Banks
17 Leonora Langly, "The Man Who Shapes Stars: An Exclusive Interview with Couturier Nolan Miller °TAe Hollywood Reporter, November 1, 1985, S-9.
18 Mary Lisa Gavenas,"Cut from the Same Cloth: Five Designers Tali Shop," The Hollywood Reporter, December 9, 1988, S-24.
19 Nolan Miller, interview with the. author, March 28, 2003. Also, Langly,"The Man Who Shapes Stars."
20 Nicole Gorsuch, interview with the author, May 3, 2004.
21 Randee Dawn, "Hem and Haw: The Costume Designers Guild Wants Everyone to Know that It Does More than Just Women s Work'The Hollywood Reporter, February 18, 2005, 25-26; Simi Horwitz, "Stitches in Time: Welcome to the World of the Wardrobe Supervisor," Back Stage West, December 9, 2004.
22 Karla Stevens, interview with the author, October 30, 2005; Gorsuch, interview.
23 For example, Ngila Dickson was given a ten-day turnaround schedule to create up to a hundred costumes for each episode of Xena: Warrior Princess (1995—2001). Not only did she do this, but Dickson did such an outstanding job that she was given the Best Contribution to Design Award for New Zealand Television in both 1996 and 1997. She has since gone on to be nominated multiple times for and once awarded the Oscar for costume design in film. Mimi Avins, "The Battle of the Epics," The Los Angeles Times, February 29, 2004, El2.
24 Valli Herman-Cohen, "Masters of Anonymity," Los Angeles Times Magazine, August 19, 2001,42.
25 In order to create ease of access to fashions from their store in 2001, Barney's New York added a studio-services department that sells or rents their stock to studios. In Herman-Cohen, "Masters of Anonymity."
26 Mclntyre,"Style Factor."
27 Nadoolman Landis expresses her frustration about diis misperception: "Contemporary costume design, whether in film or in television, is a cinema art form continually undervalued and misunderstood. The notion that contemporary costumes are'shopped' by designers, reaching the screen unaltered, with fashion designers' labels intact, is an oft-repeated urban legend with no substance. We are often asked the innocent question, 'Where did you get it?' The answer is, we designed it." From Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Screencraft: Costume Design (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2003), 9.
28 Costume designer, Jeffrey Kurland says: "I can honestly tell you, though, that I have never bought a piece of dothing in a store that I have actually put on a persona and put directly on-screen. It's always recut, redone to that person for that character." In Jan Lindstrom, "Temperamental Mates: Despite Common Goals, Designers, Supervisors Often at Odds," Variety, November 21, 1997, 32.
Chapter 7
It's Not TV, It's Brand Management TV
The Collective Author(s) of the Lost Franchise
Den/'se Mann
The show is the mother ship, but I think with all the new emerging technology, what we've discovered is that the world of "Lost" is not ... circumscribed by the actual show itself ...1
Lost executive producer/sliowrunner Carlton Cuse
In the midst of a post-millennial era of crisis and change—technological, industrial, and cultural—the networks arc placing a new set of extraordinary demands on members of the TV production community. In particular, show creators and their writing teams are being expected to create high-concept, high-profile, multi-platform "TV blockbusters"— also known as "transmedia franchises"—that successfully mobilize a host of ancillary revenue streams, engender merchandising opportunities, and spawn a multitude of spin-offs, including digital content and promotions for the web. In this new, post-network TV workplace environment, Lost head writer-producers (aka showrunners) Carlton Cuse. and Damon Lmdelof see their expanded role as synonymous with that of the brand managers who oversee major, nonentertainment brands like Coca-Cola and Ford Motor.2 Adopting the methodology and focus of production studies, I argue in this chapter that the changed workplace environment and industrial circumstances associated with network television production in the age of the Internet have greatly altered the practices of collective "authorship" even though industry discourses publically adhere to obsolete paradigms namely, the designation of the singular voice of the "auteur"—when discussing the creation of so-called "quality" TV programs like Lost.3 Whereas media scholar and provocateur Henry Jenkins optimistically describes transmedia franchises in Convergence Culture as exciting and dynamic new creative frontiers and opportunities to engage in peer participation entertainment, this chapter considers the negative cultural impact on production culture of having heightened demands placed on television writer-producers who, albeit well paid for their efforts, have been handed greater responsibility for steering massive,