Media and Globalisation

Global Hollywood: Exploding the Myths

Global Hollywood

• Miller, Govil, McMurria, & Maxwell

• Why is Hollywood more successful than other international film industries?– Should we look for the answer from neo-

classical arguments about supply and demand, free markets, etc.?

Why is Hollywood more successful?

• Myths– Superior managerial culture

– Hollywood is purely market-based and operates according to neo-classical economic principles

– Comparative advantage: huge domestic market and productions are in English which is global

– Freedom of entry for starters

– No state subsidies

– American audiences are resistant to foreign films

Exploding the myths

• Bottlenecks to entry– Limitations to foreign investment in radio and TV

• US market as insular• Government interest in influencing culture is

evident– Government subsidies and other forms of assistance– Government threats to resistant foreign markets such as

Indonesia– Hollywood military funding– America is multicultural, hence its not wholly true that

American audiences resist foreign films. It’s policy!

Exploding the myths …• Political economy approach

– Hollywood success premised on capital and state desire to maintain market and ideological dominance

• New International Division of labour– Exploitation of labour in the periphery– Role of the American government in prying

open resistant markets

Why the periphery are exploitable

• Deregulation of labour markets world-wide– flexible and disposable labour

• Smashing of unions in peripheral nations as condition for foreign investment– cheap and mobile labour (irony of trained/skilled

personnel migrating to the North - 20,000 African/yr

• Twice or more cheaper to export jobs to non-USA markets– Canada as major destination for runaway film and TV

productions– Asia: cartoons, the Simpsons done in S. Korea

Why peripheries are exploitable?

• Periphery nations compete in downgrading labour prices and elimination of regulations

• Co-productions? Predominantly American• Marked increase in runaway film and TV over the

years– Super-profits from cheap labour markets in Philippines,

China, etc– Disney exploiting workers in China: 16hrs a day, 7

days a week at between $0.1 and $0.3/hr

• Resistant markets don’t get investment: Zimbabwe requirement that support staff be local has been costly

Americanisation?

• “There are no Americans. America is full of foreigners” Alfred Hitchcock.

Some implications …

• Advances in technologies and the ability to simulate locations, flexibility to work from anywhere in the world