A History of Hollywoods Outsourcing Debate: Runaway Production

(Hardback)

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A History of Hollywoods Outsourcing Debate: Runaway Production provides a critical history of runaway production from its origins in postwar Hollywood to its present uses in describing a global network of diverse television and film production communities. Through extensive archival research, Camille Johnson-Yale chronicles Hollywoods postwar push for investment in European production markets as a means for supporting the economy of Americas wartime allies while also opening industry access to lucrative trade relationships, exotic locations, and inexpensive skilled labor. For Hollywoods studio production labor, however, the story of runaway production documents the gradual loss of power over the means of television and motion picture production. Though the phrase has taken on several meanings over its expansive history, it is argued that runaway production has ultimately served as a powerful, metaphorical rallying cry for a labor community coming to terms with a globalizing Hollywood industry that increasingly functions as an exportable process and less as a defined, industrial place.

Reviews

The runaway production, as Johnson-Yale brilliantly describes, is a major Hollywood myth, as old as the Wizard of Oz. But never has the concept been used as creatively as in this book to tell the political, economic and cultural story of a massively important dream factory that has always been neither here nor there. -- Vincent Mosco, Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society, Queen's University
At a time when free trade, outsourcing, and economic globalization have once again become the focus of heated political disputes in the U.S. and around the world, Camille Johnson-Yales excellent new book provides readers with a guide to the ways the internationalization of the film industry since World War II has impacted Hollywood as well as a deft analysis of how the issue of runaway production has been variously conceptualized, framed, and debated by labor activists, industry executives, politicians, academics, and others over the years. Meticulously researched and lucidly written, Johnson-Yales study traces the discourse on runaway production from its beginnings in the 1940swhen industry executives framed overseas production of Hollywood films as means of countering the cultural influence of Communismthrough the controversy surrounding the outsourcing of animation in the 1970s up through contemporary debates over the role played by Canadian subsidies in luring Hollywood production to Vancouver and Toronto. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of Hollywood film labor, the emergence of the new global film industry and the rhetoric of trade policy debates. -- Steve Macek, North Central College
In A History of Hollywoods Outsourcing Debate: Runaway Production, Johnson-Yale traces a captivating and little-known history of the American film industry that is both timely and provocative. Drawing attention to Hollywoods increasingly globalized labor politics, this deeply researched book challenges us to rethink the history of film production in the US and abroad. -- Victor Pickard, University of Pennsylvania

Author Bio

Camille Johnson-Yale is assistant professor of communication at Lake Forest College.