The Big Six

The Big Six Victor P. Corona Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko, editors. The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry. Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 326 pages; $34.95 paperback. Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko have assembled a timely and rich collection of essays on the dramatic reshaping of Hollywood film production since the end of the Second World War. Chapters describing the causes and consequences of these changes are grouped into three sections. The first part offers an overview of the history and structure of studio-dominated production and distribution. A section called “Industry Dynamics” discusses segments of Hollywood’s large and complex workforce, intellectual property rights, and the activities of the powerful Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The last part deals with Hollywood’s often contentious presence in ten foreign markets. Several core themes emerge throughout the volume, particularly the worldwide expansion of the industry and “ancillary markets” like video game sales, the rise and dominance of media conglomerates, and a relatively stable core of firms around which the industry is organized. The “stars” of this volume are inevitably the film studios themselves, especially the “Big Six:” Columbia TriStar, Disney, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros., along with their conglomerate parents (Sony, Walt Disney, Viacom, News Corp., General Electric, and Time Warner, respectively). To illustrate the kind of remarkable transformations occurring in studio ownership, the book begins with the case of Universal Studios. Between 1951 and 2004, control of the studio passed through the hands of the music label Decca, the talent agency-cum-television company MCA, the Japanese electronics giant Matsushita, the Canadian beverage company Seagram, the French media company Vivendi, and, finally, American conglomerate General Electric, which owns 80% of the company combining Universal and NBC (McDonald and Wasko, pp. 1–6). Furthermore, Tom Schatz’s thorough historical review notes that each of the four major television networks in the U.S. also became tied to a media conglomerate (p. 27). One result of this vast consolidation is that film and television productions now have unprecedented access to “multiple revenue streams” and “various consumption contexts” (McDonald and Wasko, p. 5). Other interesting chapters in this volume include discussions of marketing and distribution strategies and related enterprises tied to DVD sales, television, and music. With corporate concentration and growth as the organizational context, the “Industry Dynamics” section covers workforce composition and changes, intellectual property rights as the primary industry driver, and the MPAA’s lobbying efforts. This section’s relevance is highlighted by the fact that the volume was published just near the end of the strike by Writers Guilds East and West in January 2008. In describing the roles of agents, publicists, attorneys, and personal managers, McDonald incisively shows how the bases for the production of “stardom” changed dramatically in “a post [End Page 87] studio era as independent firms undertook the tasks necessary for cultivating, directing, and sustaining the images of leading performers” (p. 168). Susan Christopherson reviews turbulent labor markets in which even successful workers have “multiple employers during the course of the year, spells of intense work, and spells of unemployment” (p. 157). Other recent trends discussed by Christopherson include significant increases in available labor, the expansion of contract work, demand for cheaper labor costs in cable television programming, and a fierce push for cost reduction in productions (p. 162). The last section covers the massive extension of Hollywood’s reach into foreign markets. As an important premise of this discussion, John Trumpbour notes that as free trade was vigorously promoted in the postwar era, a “cultural exception” in trade agreements nonetheless allowed nations to nurture domestic production (p. 210). Discussion of the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, East Asia, India, Australia, and New Zealand reflect the complicated relationships in which Hollywood films vie with indigenous film industries but nonetheless dominate local markets. The products of these ties have included large investments like Australia’s Warner Roadshow Studios (David Newman, p. 301) or Mexico’s Fox Studios Baja (Tamara Falicov, p. 270). However, strong resistance has also emerged, as in Argentina’s establishment of “screen quota legislation to counter Hollywood’s hegemony” (Falicov, p. 273) or the distaste expressed in the Chinese term...

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