Unions and Rising
Production Budgets in the U.S. Film Industry: The Slaves Who Don't Picture
Themselves As Freemen.
Project
Statement
By
Jorge Villacorta
a. Description of the project.
This
will be a book that describes, providing historical examples, how the working
class, as a potentially self-conscious social class, has developed in the film
industry a strategy based on economics rather than class political objectives,
reproducing its own subordination to the bourgeoise political interest. While
petit bourgeois members of the film industry managed to move from petit
bougeois to bourgeois members of such industry through a variety of tactics
that reinforced their own role, the working class, through its unions, played
from a defensive position that limited its own political importance.
b.. Definitions: Objective and
methodology.
B1. Objective:
To
illustrate why the economic strategy of the working class in the film industry
was destined to lose the class struggle, while petit bourgeois members of the
film industry taking advantage of their cultural capital raised to bourgeois
positions.
B2. Methodology:
Critical
reading of the information provided by a variety of sources (thesis, papers,
books, interviews, documentaries, etc.) will allow me to conceptualize and describe
the strategies used by the unions and the petit bourgeois and bourgeois members
of the film industry, identifying the class ideologies behind concepts as “art”
and “artist.”
c. The project in the academic
context.
Books
on the sociology of art like Art worlds
by Howard S. Becker describe art production in the capital system while never
considering capitalism as a socio-economic system that generates and reproduces
its own conditions of existence, missing the historical foundations of social
structures and the concepts that describe them. On the other hand, a
sociologist of art like Pierre Bourdieu, considering the “classes” as “constructs
well founded in reality”, has described
the art world with logical consistency in books like Distinction: a social
critique of the judgment of taste, The rules of art, and The
love of art: European art museums and
their public. Scholars like Gregory Black in Hollywood Censored and Peter Decherney
in Hollywood and the culture elite: How
the movies became American have pointed out the bourgeois political
interests behind “self-regulation” and the recognition of the film industry
productions as an “art” by museums, government agencies, universities and other
cultural institutions. While these texts illustrate the facts from the
perspective of the successful bourgeois and petit bourgeois political
strategies, the self-defeating strategies of the working class through its
unions and a potentially conscious social class are missing. Other studies like
Drawing
the line: the untold story of animation unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson by Marc Sito and The New Zealand Hobbit crisis: how
Warner Bros. bent a government to its will and crushed an attempt to unionize
The Hobbit by Jonathan Handel and Pip Bulbeck that describe specific cases of class struggle in the film industry do not
consider them as a part of a general class strategy. This project would have a
wider political basis taking into account the analysis elaborated by Leon Trotsky,
Lenin, and other revolutionary theoreticians.
d. Subjects or ideas
underrepresented in the canon of film scholarship to date.
The
film industry, controlled by the bourgoise with the more o less reluctant
consent of the working class, is a capitalist film industry that reinforces the
political control of the capitalists. The unions in the film industry,
following a strategy based on economic demands in a capitalist society, have
forgotten the working class’s historical role as a potential ruling class. This
consideration is underrepresented in the canon of film scholarship, even though
the analysis intuitively move around this idea, a lack of political consciousness
impedes its clear-cut expression.
e. Significance in its field of study.
The
capitalist technological development has already achieved feats beyond the
necessities of the contemporary productive organization known as the film
industry. As a consequence, a change in the social organization is happening
slowly but irreversibly. Nick Bilton wrote on Vanity Fair in January 29, 2017, that
There are other, more dystopian theories, which
predict that film and video games will merge, and we will become actors in a
movie, reading lines or being told to “look out!” as an exploding car comes
hurtling in our direction, not too dissimilar from Mildred Montag’s evening
rituals in Fahrenheit
451. When we finally get there, you can be sure of two things. The
bad news is that many of the people on the set of a standard Hollywood
production won’t have a job anymore. The good news, however, is that we’ll
never be bored again.
If
what Bilton states “becomes true” (and is not already true), the working class
in the film industry would have lost the opportunity of guiding the
technological development in this branch of social production and it would be
useful to understand why this happened. Therefore, a study like this would have
a political impact in society and in the field of film studies.
f. How my professional experience is
relevant to the project.
Working
for free for Leonidas, the Anti-Communist Filmmaker, since 2008, as the
ghostwriter of his “Official Blog” (http://leonidaszegarra.blogspot.com), as his media adviser, as his
personal film critic and as the manager of his IMDb.Pro account https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7039401/ (that I financed) and in 2010 during
the shooting, editing, promotion and exhibition of María
y los niños pobres
(2010) as his assistant director, co-editor, crew in the direct sound
department, promoter, sponsor, and security guard at the rented movie theater
where the film was exhibited, I have accumulated experience in different áreas
of the film production that shows me the artificiality of the work division and
the specialization that rules the film industry. This work division that
conditions the participation of the working force allows the production of
industrial products undermining the class consciousness of the workers, who
must pay attention to obtaining more work under these (capitalist) conditions,
as jobs, instead of understanding that the whole society is organized with the
same capitalist model and recreates the same problems faced by the working
force again and again. My experience, generated by a petit bourgeois mode of
film production is very useful at the time of analyzing the political
strategies of the bourgeoise film industry, that takes advantage of the little
amount of economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital owned by the working
class and even the petit bourgeosie. Only certain members of the petit bourgeioise
take advantage of their power as owners of cultural capital, becoming members
of the bourgeoise film industry after creating their companies in a variety of
áreas such as production, special and visual effects, public relations, etc. As
a teacher of the course “Directing Actors Workshop” at the University of San
Marcos (Lima – Peru), for one semester (2017-II), after inviting Leonidas
Zegarra to my classroom, I observed the reactions and interaction between the
filmmaker and the students, which provided me with deeper insight into the
petit bourgeois mind that is under the influence of the bourgeois film mode of
production. As the appointed curator of the Leonidas
Zegarra (Film) Museum [Casa Museo
Leonidas Zegarra, in Spanish], which is a project in development initiated
in 2010, I have had to study Mr. Zegarra’s film career and accompany him at a
variety of artistic events, retrospectives, and homages developed along the
streets, in cultural centers, art galleries and museums, as well as to hear
negatives to exhibit his autobiographical movie at multiplexes located in Lima,
Peru. This experience allowed me to see how the reputation of the “artist” as
well as the reputation of the film as “art” are created, recognizing its dependency
on basic material interests. Having a Master’s degree in Social Communication
and having undergone a doctoral program in the History of Art (2012-2013), I
have the cultural capital required to develop my project successfully.
g. The project’s significance to my
own professional development.
Working
for Leonidas Zegarra, the Anti-Communist Filmmaker, demands detailed knowledge
of the Communist and Socialist ideas on the film industry and the art world in
order to defend Mr. Zegarra’s position. Developing this project will give more
ideological ammunition to protect and promote Mr. Zegarra’s career, which has
been attacked in the past for self-proclaimed “pro-socialist intellectuals” who
don’t understand their own class extraction and in fact, have politically
conservative positions. As an aspiring artist who is interested in creating his
own audiovisual production company, the knowledge acquired through this study
would help me to keep clear anti-unionist policies.
h. Timetable for completing the
project.
2020:
Reception of funds.
January – July
2021. Analysis of the information available.
August – November
2021. Elaboration of the text.
December
2021: Final draft.
January 2022:
Publication.
i. Additional resources and how I
intend to use the grant.
I
don’t have additional resources and I intend to use the grant wisely. The core
of the project is conceptual, which demands books and time to read and/or
interview key sources if necessary. The grant will be used to cover these costs
and to pay for the cost of publishing the book.
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Unions and Rising
Production Budgets in the U.S. Film Industry: The Slaves Who Don't Picture
Themselves As Freemen.
Select
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By
Jorge Villacorta
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