Abstract
The entertainment industry fascinates. Sociologists, anthropologists, and economists have explored this glamorous field in almost every detail. Cinema in particular provides researchers with multiple benefits such as an abundance of data, especially today with the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and similar sources of information. In addition, cinema and television offer a wealth of research settings between the two extremes of high-culture (think Nouvelle Vague and Godard movies) and mass-market (think superhero franchises and reality TV). It is precisely this gap—which can be reframed as a gap between art and commerce—that Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby are trying to bridge by looking at how movies and shows are concretely made.
At the heart of their approach lies the idea that the commercial dimension of entertainment is never devoid of creativity and, conversely, that any artistic endeavor in film or television has a commercial dimension. They see erecting this bridge as a way to amend Pierre Bourdieu’s abstract view of fields as being fundamentally polarized. More precisely, all the chapters of this edited book deal more or less specifically with the concept of “brokerage,” understood primarily as a social network construct but also expanded and adapted to accommodate new findings from fieldwork. The comparative perspective between the United States and France helps to better apprehend the role played by institutions in how brokerage is used and unfolded; but it is not fully exploited because each chapter only explores one country or the other.
The book is composed of 12 chapters, most of them written by seasoned sociologists and management scholars who have a deep knowledge of the creative industries and entertainment, and the chapters use a variety of empirical approaches (with a strong qualitative component). It must be noted that readers will be rewarded with a rare treat: two of the chapters were authored by Hollywood luminaries Harry J. Ufland and Bill Mechanic. Ufland brings a unique perspective on “agenting” in Hollywood. He has built his career at talent agency WME andhas made his name by representing renowned actors and directors such as Robert DeNiro, Martin Scorsese, and Ridley Scott. Bill Mechanic, on the other hand, is famous for his production work at Disney, Fox Entertainment, and later as an independent (Pandemonium Films); the list of films he has supervised is stunning, from Minority Report to The Thin Red Line. Having both Ufland and Mechanic on board significantly increases the credibility and interest of the book for both casual and informed readers. Offering testimonies about the real life of Hollywood influencers on top of quality academic research is praiseworthy and should inspire other books in the field of creative industries.
The specific academic objective of the book is compelling and ambitious. It aims at contributing to the understanding of brokerage in creative industries. The creative industries—which range from fashion to music and include movies and TV—constitute a specific context where 1) uncertainty is pervasive, 2) drivers of value are debated, and 3) the cultural content of goods and services is very high. The creative process itself is loaded with anxieties and shrouded in mystery, but one key conclusion from research on the topic is that it is inherently collective. In other words, the act of creation is not an isolated act of genius; it is the outcome of various social interactions and structures. But the point is that not all participants in creativity play the exact same role.
In movies and TV shows, creativity is of a particular type. As we are told in most of the book’s chapters, it is the result of “short-term contract teams” or “single-project organizations.” It is difficult for individuals to navigate such careers, and this is where talent representatives come into play. They can take several shapes and be of varying importance. For example, while agents offering “packaged” projects to Hollywood producers (a whole team ready to shoot) such as Harry J. Ufland can be wildly influential, agents in U.S. reality TV are often not even credited or invited to production parties; and in the French pornographic industry there are no agents per se—their role is outsourced to actors who recommend each other. It must be noted that all these cases are extensively covered in the book, illustrating the breadth of its empirical reach in just 212 pages.
The reason why there is so much difference in power between seemingly similar talent brokers is to be found in their type and level of embeddedness. Whereas agents offering packaged projects are actively involved in the creative process, this is less the case with agents who have a more transactional approach. However, despite these power differences, a common function of all agents is to provide actors with much-needed socialization, this filtering out those who do not know the rules of the game and mentoring those who know them. In both the United States and France, we learn that talent agents are hierarchically ordered along a core-periphery structure where “fresh faces” start in the periphery and often join bigger and richer agencies when they become famous. Consequently, the key challenge for agents is to find a way to grow with their clients. In this sense, it is right to portray them not as rational actors “fixing” market failures by facilitating the transfer of information, but rather as stakeholders forming part of a wider social structure that would include producers, directors, actors, and so forth.
It is argued throughout the book that brokerage in creative industries must be seen as a tertius iungens type of action that binds rather than as a tertius gaudens one that keeps separate. Agents do not necessarily use theirposition to benefit from information exchange; instead they often try to create value by generating ties among otherwise unconnected actors. It appears clearly, for example, in the case of film offices that promote American states such as Utah. The role of actor Robert Redford in building ties between Utah producers and Hollywood professionals must be understood in this light, rather than in a more instrumental manner. The emergence of the Sundance festival in Utah was also a way to “congeal” existing ties in the form of a festival and routinize the emergence of new ties. A key conclusion of the book is thus that making sense of brokerage implies representing it in all its relational complexity.
Another big lesson to be drawn from this book is that despite having been extensively researched, entertainment can still generate fresh insights that can be used to explore creativity in greater detail. The specific role of talent intermediaries, and the way they participate in the emergence of creative output, is key to the creative industries. Beyond these industries, the role of brokers can be further questioned and reframed as relational entrepreneurship. From there, a more general theory of brokerage could be formalized. But this big theoretical contribution is still missing. This may a good thing, because it opens up a whole new avenue for research, not only in a comparative perspective across creative industries, but also in a more general, theoretical manner.