Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors' Labor

167 Pages·1995·10.22 MB·English

by  Danae Clark

Negotiating Hollywood
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Negotiating Hollywood
The Cultural Politics of Actors' Labor
Danae Clark
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright 1995 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
A different version of chapter 5 appeared as "Acting in Hollywood's Best Interest," Journal of
Film and Video 42.2 (1990): 3-19. Used by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Danae.
Negotiating Hollywood : the cultural politics of actors' labor /
Danae Clark,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-2544-1
ISBN 0-8166-2545-X (pbk.)
1. Motion picture industry—Economic aspects—United States.
2. Trade unions—Motion picture industry—United States—History.
3. Industrial relations—United States. 4. Motion picture industry
in motion pictures. I. Title.
PN1993.5.U6C54 1995
384'.83'0973—dc20 94-46538
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
In memory of my father
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
\ / The Actor's (Absent) Role in Film Studies 1
2 / The Subject of Acting 18
3 / The Politics of (Self-) Representation 3 7
4 / Discourses of Entertainment 63
5 / Labor and Film Narrative 82
6 / The Terrain of Actors' Labor 118
Notes 129
Selected Bibliography 143
Index 147
vii
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Preface
This book is not about stars. Nor is it a book that could easily be categorized
as belonging to that area of film scholarship typically called star studies. It is
rather a book that seeks to destabilize the concept of "star" and to interrogate
the very premises upon which "star studies" traditionally rests.
Having initially set out to write a book about stardom in the U.S. film
industry, I was somewhat surprised by this position of disavowal. But, in ret-
rospect, this position is a logical—or, at least, not too surprising—outcome
of my attempts to confront and rearticulate the shifting relations of theoreti-
cal practice within film studies.
In the mid-1980s, when my ideas for this project were just beginning to
take form, the field of film studies was in a peculiarly intense period of flux.
Screen theory, which had played such a dominant role in film studies over the
previous decade, was losing its theoretical potency. Cultural studies, in its im-
ported form from Britain, was meanwhile gaining theoretical and political
ground. These two approaches to the study of film (or popular media more
generally) seemed to lock heads.1 The former was overtly textual and psy-
choanalytic, taking into account our subjective and unconscious relations to
film and filmic (dis)pleasure. The latter was more contextual, theoretically
and materially rooted in the lived practices of cultural struggle. Where did
star studies fit within this tension?
Star studies, by this time, was an accepted and established subgenre
within film studies. In the wake of Richard Dyer's influential book Stars
(1979), analyses of stars or star images combined semiotic and poststructur-
alist theory with subcultural and sociological approaches in ways that were
beginning to challenge the text-based criticism of Screen theory and to in-
corporate aspects of cultural studies. It was in part this refashioning of the
field and the hybrid approach to the study of stars that drew my intellectual
interest. But by the late 1980s it appeared that the field of star studies was
spinning its wheels. Most articles about stars followed a standard formula:
choose a well-known star, establish his or her star image by analyzing his or
her roles in various films or the "persona" established for the star through
ix