Review: Locating Migrating Media, Ch. 6, “If You Build It . . . Film Studios and the Transformative Effects of Migrating Media Production”, by Ben Goldsmith.

Review: Locating Migrating Media, Ch. 6,  
“If You Build It . . . Film Studios and the Transformative Effects of Migrating Media Production”
by Ben Goldsmith.

Dr. Ben Goldsmith's article reveals some "do's and don'ts" for anyone planning to construct a film studio; Dr. Mark Woods reviews Goldsmith's article in this post. 

Review by Mark Leslie Woods, B.A., L.L.M., Ph.D.

[Pictured above: Dr. Mark Woods at Kratky Film, Prague, part of the larger Barrandov Studio complex, one of the largest studios in Europe,  located in the Czech Republic, and home to many so-called 'run-away' film productions during the 1990s. Photography by Paul J. Natter.]

About Dr. Mark Woods: Dr. Mark Woods is a former lecturer (part-time) on the UK Skillset / Screen Academy Wales, located at the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries (CCI) at the University of Glamorgan (which recently merged with the University of Wales, Newport, home to the famous Newport International Film School) to become the University of South Wales, UK). Dr. Woods holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies and is a Master of Laws (L.L.M.) in Intellectual and Industrial Property Law.  His research interests include Film Policy, National Identity, and both the Aesthetic and Industrial ‘fields of production’ for the worldwide audiovisual industries, including the ‘digital economies’.  He has previously worked in film and television exhibition, sales and film festival promotions at local and regional levels, and as an international sales agent.  Since 1999, Dr. Woods has visited and studied the operation of film studio complexes and their related support industries in Europe and North America.

 

About Ben Goldsmith: 

“Ben Goldsmith is Senior Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), at Queensland University of Technology. His recent work focuses on media policy and the Convergence Review, and he has written three submissions to the Review on behalf of the CCI. His research interests include Australian cinema and television, media production and globalisation, and media and cultural policy. He has previously worked at the University of Queensland, the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and Griffith University. He has written several books including Rating the Audience (with Mark Balnaves and Tom O'Regan) The Film Studio (with Tom O’Regan), and Local Hollywood (with Susan Ward and Tom O’Regan). He is the co-editor (with Geoff Lealand) of the Intellect Directory of Australian and New Zealand Cinema, published in 2010.” Ben Goldsmith’s Experience includes:

• Senior Research Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology 2012–present
• Senior Research Fellow, Swinburne Institute, Swinburne University of Technology 2011–2012
• Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland 2010–2010
• Lecturer and Researcher, Australian Film, Television and Radio School 2004–2010

Education

• University of Queensland, PhD, English, 1997
• University of London, MA (Hons), Area Studies (Australia), 1991
•  

Research Areas

• Screen And Media Culture
• Media Studies

[Click here to see profile of Dr. Ben Goldsmith, which can be found at the linked site.]

Review: Locating Migrating Media, Ch. 6,  
“If You Build It . . . Film Studios and the Transformative Effects of Migrating Media Production”, by Ben Goldsmith.

Book/Article Review by Dr. Mark Woods:

This is an article from a recently published book, which looks at the nature of the film, television and audiovisual industries, in the context of government policy and media industry relations.  It charts out the state of things today, regarding the trend of local and state governments, to construct new film studios.

In most cases, these new studios are supposed to either launch a new film industry sector, as part of the local economy, or to shore up and expand an existing industry.  Ben Goldsmith looks at this topic, and introduces it to readers with a cinematic allusion to Phil Alden Robinson’s smash 1980 film, Field of Dreams (1989).

Goldsmith reminds us of how in the film, an Iowa cornfield is transformed into a baseball field, and about the adventure the film’s protagonist has on this path of discovery, leading to the seemingly miraculous conclusion of the field being built in the ‘middle of no where’.

Goldsmith likens the construction of the baseball field to the popular trend, of local communities around the globe seeking to attract a ‘creative industries’ sector to their community, by building a studio complex, complete with soundstages, back lots, editing suites, and all the things we normally and historically associate with Classical Hollywood Film Production, in the former physical location of Southern California. 

[This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons.]

In the film, Field of Dreams, a proverb sets the theme, “If you build it, they will come”, and Goldsmith tells us how many aspiring communities toss large amounts of taxpayer and private money at studio projects, in hopes of having a similar, miraculous occurrence of a baseball field appearing in a remote Midwestern farm village, but in the case of these government policy makers, they are hoping to build capacity and create jobs.

Goldsmith shows the wisdom and folly of this idea. He lays out the current status of the industry, which as the book title and article title tell us, are ‘migrating’. By this Goldsmith refers to a phenomenon that date back to the early 1970s when what was merely a trickle of film productions seeking lower costs and more ‘authentic’ locations left the confines of Los Angeles and Southern California, and began making what came to be known in the industry as ‘run-away productions’.

The label ‘run-away productions’ was probably invented by the collective of Hollywood studio executives and “above-the-line” and “below-the-line” film talent and craftsmen, who in a rather imperial way saw their monopoly on worldwide film production as a natural and inevitable historical and future constant, and who were shocked and threatened when film companies began to seek cheaper and more diverse shooting locations, outside LA.

 
Some of the most famous ‘run-away productions’ locations in the 1980s and 1990s were Canada, New York, Florida, and remote places like Barrandov Studios in Prague, Czech Republic and London and Rome. 

This trend accelerated and expanded, as entire states and countries began to see the economic benefits of attracting and hosting this ‘migrating’ industry (of what were becoming more and more itinerant) film and television production companies, with all their core talent and support vendors and suppliers.

About this same time in the early 1990s, film festivals and related markets and industry events began to get organized, and grew to number in the 1000s in the US and 10s of 1000s across the globe. 

Prior to this and up through the new millennium, organizations including “Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique” or in English, the “International Federation of Film Critics” otherwise known as “FIPRESCI” began rating and offering certified qualifications to film festivals around the world, and began bringing a professional level of film judging standards and jury procedures to the entire industry. 

[Newly constructed BBC Studios and Dr Who Museum at Porth Teigr in Cardiff Bay, Wales, UK.]

 (All photography unless otherwise noted are by Dr. Mark Woods.)

FIPRESCI traces its history all the back to pre-WWII Paris in 1925, where “some film journalists from Paris and Brussels founded a Professional Association of the Film Press.”

Article I of their ‘Statutes’ states:

Article 1:

“The organizations of professional film critics and film journalists, established in different countries for the promotion and development of film culture and for the safeguarding of professional interests, constitute the International Federation of the Cinematographic Press (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique — FIPRESCI) — an institution founded on the 6th of June 1930.” Please read more at: http://www.fipresci.org/about/statutes.htm

To summarize their long and noble history in the development of the audiovisual industries, FIPRESCI along with the Hollywood Academy and other professional groups, began to bring a professional set of regulations and standards to the media production and distribution/exhibition machinery, that formerly were associated with the professions of law, medicine, etc.

FIPRESCI helped to create a list of key ‘must-attend’ film festivals around the world, known as ‘A-list’ events, and then there was a grading of other cities’ events as ‘B-list’ etc.  The effect of this structural organizing was to help compel film makers to regularly leave Hollywood and other concentrated pockets of production, and visit other locations around the world. 

While these filmmakers travelled to these film events to screen and market their films, they were also wined and dined by local tourism boards and taken on "FAM" tours to fam-iliarize them with each city's best shooting locations. 

This no doubt helped to lure filmmakers back to these and other cities, and Hollywood began to panic. Film incentives in the form of tax rebates and other discounts and grants were subsidized by competing cities and states, and in order to maintain their competitive appeal, these locations began equipping their cities with amenities targeting the industry's technical needs, including the construction of purpose built, renovated and re-purposed studios.

Governments and private film societies around the world caught on, and began to realize that, in order to become a so-called “World-Class City” they would have to have all the required elements, which came to include (for purposes of prestige and media exposure, as much as the income it brought) hosting a prominent film festival and having the social and economic infrastructure to support a film and television production industry. 

This trend has been increasing for the last 10 years, and more new studios are in the construction and public policy planning 'pipeline'. 

[Photo of BBC Studio, opened 2010-2011, Porth Teigr, Cardiff, UK by Dr. Mark Woods.]

Goldsmith’s article is written for a learned group of film and media studies scholars, who at the level of peer-review research could be assumed to have an extensive film policy and film history background, for points of reference. Goldsmith’s article will be useful for this group of readers, but is also written in an easy-to read and understand format, that will also be helpful to casual readers, including those without an academic background.

Goldsmith doesn’t directly reference the parallel development of film industry capacity building activities to include FIPRESCI and the A-list festivals that became the historic markers for globally competing cities attaining to the highest level of “World-Class City” or some relative placement in tiers below that pecking order.

I’m adding that to give a broader historical context to Goldsmith’s article. The reason this expansion on his article is important, is because those relatively unsophisticated government policy makers, i.e., “those without an academic background” mentioned above, might be asking as they read this article, something like, “We already have been setting aside funds to underwrite our local film festival, do we now have to ALSO set aside funds to construct a film studio?”

The short version of Goldsmith's response is this: Yes and No. Yes, you should consider whether building a studio is feasible and sustainable and desirable, and no you shouldn't get involved unless you are ready and willing to go beyond mere construction 

- i.e., construction is not enough, you need to also invent and form a new or re-invigorated LOCAL film production community, or the project will not be sustainable 

- and only this, you also need to do what it takes to convince your LOCAL film production community to support the studio project - which involves a clever understanding of how the industry works, who needs to be involved and how do to it.

For example, if you are planning to build a studio, but there is no one in your organization who has ever encountered a film event adjudicated by a FIPRESCI-standard jury, then you need to more homework before you begin this project - you might be spending money on construction expertise, something many planners know well, while neglecting the expertise needed to engage the built environment with the social and economic 

- in other words, what are you hoping to do on opening day, when the lights come on, but nobody in the film industry knows you or wants to use your studio?

You should have an expert on board your team with a combination of local networks, and international connections and knowledge, who can answer related questions, and more importantly, someone who has the energy and courage to create this support community for your new studio project.

These and similar questions would make sense for policy makers, especially in this so-called ‘Age of Austerity’ that the world is currently suffering under, along with the limits and cuts to public funds, that goes with it.

Those policy makers asking such a question are raising a logical question that Goldsmith succeeds in answering in his article.

He does this by showing how many policy makers rely upon the proverb of the film Field of Dreams, hoping that if they just build a film studio, somehow that will be enough to result in ‘They will come’ meaning the decision makers of major feature film and TV productions will magically show up and begin queuing at the studio leasing office door, resulting in income for one and all.

Goldsmith shows how this is well intended on the part of government policy makers, but often a naïve and costly decision, which in some cases has resulted in some enormous losses and spectacular flops. 

What is most helpful about Goldsmith’s article is how he creates an easily understood premise, and then briefly in less than 30 pages outlines and discusses the key mistakes that many policy makers slip into, allured by the ‘get rich quick’ schemes of building a film studio, but without understanding how the industry works, and then either learning hard lessons as their completed studios underperform or worse still, become a drain on, rather than an contributor to the public purse and the local economy.

Goldsmith also describes some of the social impact of the policy decision to locate in one’s community a film studio, along with some of the usual and unexpected consequences of that decision.

Goldsmith’s article goes further, as it explains the increasing competition between the multitudes of communities trying to cash in on this construction trend, and cites where many go wrong. Goldsmith says,

“As more and more places around the world are equipped to host film and television production and are able to provide sufficiently diverse yet generic locations as well as financial incentives, labor and other resources to meet the needs of migrating production, producers have more choice, and competing agents of the location interest have constantly to find ways to sell a location’s capacity for imposture.” (Goldsmith, 2010: pg. 104-105)

Goldsmith is referring to a concept he introduces as ‘location interest’ which basically means the motivation and benefits which makes the construction and support and maintenance of a local film studio complex an ‘interest’ for all local ‘stakeholders’ --

 -- so that these local participants in the film industry see themselves as having a ‘win-win’ relationship with the studio’s existence, and then begin self-perpetuating the initial promotion of the studio with their sustained, individual promotion of it. 

[Italian postage stamp commemorating 70th Anniversary of Cinecittà, Europe's largest film studio.]

Not understanding and properly developing this essential group of local supporters with what Goldsmith terms ‘location interest’ is the point where many studio construction project go wrong, and which can lead to a fatal collapse or abandonment of the project, with the related fallout of loss of funds and loss of reputation.

Goldsmith says this is especially true of ‘smaller production locations’ with stars in their eyes, i.e., having been dazzled by the glamour of the industry, have not done their preliminary homework about what is really requires to LAUNCH and SUSTAIN such project for both the short- and long-term:

“Smaller production locations that sell themselves as low-cost options and which do not have sufficient depth and range of finance, infrastructure, services and people to be self-sustaining in times of inevitable downturn are especially vulnerable unless synergies can be found with other businesses or sectors of the economy.

"And yet every year more places hear the call to build and refine regulations in a bid to attract migrating media production.” (Goldsmith, 2010: pg. 105)

So, we can heartily recommend this article to anyone in a policy-making role, who is contemplating ‘jumping on’ the studio construction ‘bandwagon’.  The central theme of Goldsmith’s thorough study of this question is ‘do your homework’ BEFORE you commit to the short- and long-term expenditures. 

 [Dr. Mark Woods in Rome, Italy on visit to Cinecittà Studios. Photography by Mauro Philip Conti.]

Again, Goldsmith references the film Field of Dreams:

“If you build it, they will come” . . . “the phrase is full of optimism and potential. It seeks to instill confidence that the construction of production infrastructure like studios and the nourishment of conditions for local service providers will drive the (economic) locomotive and open the (celebrity) stargate. Unfortunately sometimes, it is just a crazy dream.” (Goldsmith, 2010: pg. 105)

Goldsmith’s article is a good starting point if you are one of those policy makers ‘doing your homework’ before you allow your budget or department to get carried away with the excitement of building a studio in your locale.

The entire book that houses this article provides a broader and more complicated contextual setting for Goldsmith’s article for the serious scholar at the level of higher education and top-level government decision-making consultants or hired experts.

The book is available from Amazon by clicking one of the links posted below. 

All quotes are used under US Fair Use and UK Fair Dealing legal regimes and protocols, as an ‘educational’ and/or journalistic exception, i.e., for ‘purposes of criticism or review or instruction’, to what might otherwise constitute copyright infringement of the authors’ quoted works.

Please respect the rights of the authors of this review and all published sources mentioned in this website. Thank you for your consideration.  © 2013 Dr Mark Leslie Woods, Cromlech Media Consultants, Ltd.

Goldsmith, Ben. “If You Build It . . . Film Studios and the Transformative Effects of Migrating Media Production”, Ch. 6 (Pg. 103-130). “Locating Migrating Media”, edited by Greg Elmer (2010), Lexington Books, Lanham, MD/US. Edited by Greg Elmer, Edited by Charles H. Davis, Edited by Janine Marchessault, Edited by John McCullough, Contributions by Tamara L. Falicov, Contributions by Ben Goldsmith, Contributions by Janice Kaye, Contributions by Barry King, Contributions by Albert Moran.

“Locating Migrating Media details the extent to which media productions, both televisual and cinematic, have sought out new and cheaper shot locations, creative staff, and financing around the world.”

“The book contributes to debates about media globalization, focusing on the local impact of new sites of media production. The book's chapters also question the role that film and television industries and local and regional governments play in broader economic develop and tax incentive schemes.”

“While metaphors of transportation, mobility, fluidity and change continue to serve as key concepts and frames for understanding contemporary media industries, products and processes, the essays in this book look to local spaces, neighborhoods, cultural workers and stories to ground the global-that is, to interrogate the effect of media globalization before, during and after film and television shooting and onsite production.”

“By locating migrating media, these chapters seek to determine the political, economic and cultural conditions that produce contemporary forms of televisual and cinematic storytelling, and how these processes affect the inhabitants, the "look" and the very geopolitical future of local communities, neighborhoods, cities and regions.”

“The focus on relocated screen production highlights the act of film- and television-making, both aesthetically and economically. To locate migrating media is therefore to determine the political and cultural economies of globalized sets and stages, be they in new studios or on city streets or, perhaps most importantly, in our imaginations.”

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 30 August 2010

Format: Hardback 196 pages

See: Full bibliographic data

Categories: Films, Cinema, Television, Media Studies, Central Government Policies, Industrial Relations

ISBN 13: 9780739142417 ISBN 10: 0739142410