Emplacement and Emplotment: Media Production in Pandemic Times

Abstract

Places matter, despite the discursive hype of virtual making or remote locations, in showing the ways that production is a process nested within social worlds. In 2020, global Hollywood promoted a “COVID-friendly ideal” in order to return to work during widespread lockdowns and work stoppages. Yet by focusing comparatively on the stories that film and television workers told about production during COVID, we argue that crisis stories reveal much about the specificity of places in studying production cultures. To illustrate, we compare workers’ pandemic stories as evidence of emplacement in national hierarchies and emplotment in local power dynamics. Drawing on a corpus of seventy interviews conducted in Tel Aviv, Israel and New Orleans, USA in 2020 and 2021, we show that production cultures provide ample critique of normative tales that media industries promote about themselves and their workforces.

Filmed at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Scenes from a Marriage was an Israeli-US adaptation of the 1973 Swedish miniseries of the same name. It dramatizes the episodes in a single couple’s divorce. Told in an often-painfully slow pacing of two-shots and close-ups, the episodic diegeses are juxtaposed to a more frenetic orchestration.

In the first few minutes of Episode One, a vérité scene moves us through the studio set for Scenes. It is a play within a play. The camera, perched above lead actress Jessica Chastain’s upper body, follows closely behind as she hurries to her cue. Assistants walk alongside, taking her coat, her coffee, showing notes from a cell phone, and paying compliments without breaking Chastain’s stride. Everyone except Chastain is wearing a mask, which becomes obvious when she sits on a toilet seat for her final touch ups. Quick takes reveal a make-up artist, her fitted KN-95 and glasses seen as a reflection in the bathroom mirror, coming toward the actress and hands off screen that remove her earpieces and offer the central plot prop: a wedding band. The camera tightens up on Chastain’s fingers long enough to take a short breath before we see her in the medium shot, and when the director yells “Action!”

These bits of pandemic performance occur in each of the five episodes of Scenes, following the two principal actors off-set. In sharp contrast to the storyline of a marriage deconstructed, the openings and a closing of the series dramatize the construction of production during COVID-19. They display efficiency and flexible responses to the new conditions of creation. They show buzzing movement for a show that otherwise dwells on periods of Bergman-esque lulls and stasis. They socialize at-home audiences to the global Hollywood practices taken to keep production humming and crews safe.

“It’s a very COVID-friendly show in a way,” said the auteur producer Hagai Levi in an interview with Salon magazine (McFarland 2021). The phrase “COVID-friendly” was ubiquitous in the film and television industry for a time. It was used by production companies, especially those with a live audience, and by professional consulting groups, such as Safety Compliance Services. ¹ International studios and national guilds parroted the phrase “film-friendly” to reassure the public, and no doubt investors and funders, that they were open for business despite lockdowns across other creative industries (Mayer et al. 2024). ² For Levi, the conceit of including the backstage for COVID production was to remind us that “We shot it in one place, but of course it represents different places.”

This article focuses on the generalizability of places implied in this uniform “COVID-friendly” ideal that media industries proffered. Places still matter. We know this intuitively as denizens of places, both geographic and spatial. Yet media industries scholarship still toggles between transnational and national loci for understanding why place matters. Localities remain relatively insignificant, even in studies of production cultures, despite the common-sense associations between places and identity, status, and power. The lacunae may very well be ideological in two senses. First, there is the sense that media industries claim to represent everywhere, and thus are located nowhere in particular (Hozic 2001; Miller et al. 2001; Winseck and Jin 2011). Second, there is a sense that media labor is ubiquitous, spread evenly across all spaces, but no space in particular (Terranova 2000). In both cases, place is assumed as a common sense for both film and television production and media production cultures. It is perhaps only during a crisis during which media production seemed displaced or out-of-place, media professionals emplaced their industries through their everyday experiences of working during the pandemic, performing professionalism, and considering their own roles in their production cultures. Emplacement, and its manifestation through interview storylines, or emplotments, reveals how places mattered and diverged in preserving industrial power relations and social hierarchies, even as the times and spaces of production had been disrupted.

In theorizing place-based power relations in global Hollywood production, we focus comparatively on Tel Aviv, Israel and New Orleans, USA as two prominent nodes for global production hubs that also serve important functions in their national ecosystems. Selected as two mid-sized cities, one in the West and one in the East, these “crisis cities” (Gotham and Greenberg 2014) exemplify uneven development amplified by large-scale disasters, such as terror attacks in one and devastating hurricanes in the other, over the past twenty years. These cities engaged COVID-friendly policies early in the pandemic period, releasing rules for shooting, even before California enacted them. As such, film and television workers in these two places experienced the uncertainties and risks that seemed unfamiliar, even in an already uncertain and risky industry. Our 2020 to 2022 interviews with approximately seventy film and television workers in New Orleans and Tel Aviv thus reflect the urgencies of that moment in the contexts of an agglomerated destination for a variety of media industries, from the film majors, to broadcasters, to series production houses, to indies and news documentary production units.

What the interviews reveal is how, in all of these sectors, media professionals both emplaced and emplotted narratives for media industries that were localized in their own urban settings and lifestyles. In what follows, we present emplacement and emplotment as two methods for the comparative, interview-based study of production cultures, particularly at times of disruption and chaos. Then we turn to the interviews of professionals in New Orleans and Tel Aviv to illustrate comparatively how they made sense of chaotic moments through emplacement and emplotment. In each section, interviewees gave order to the changes that the pandemic evoked over their particular cities, their social groups, and their everyday practices. This analysis offers a way forward for studying how places matter in production studies.

Emplacement and Emplotment in Production Cultures

“Place” communicates a host of meanings for people, such as their location, territory, culture, status, identity, community, along with time and space. Emplacement and emplotment are means for communicating this slipperiness of place through stories. Stories are key to human development (Bruner 1986), and critical theorists have argued that emplacement and emplotment have functional value in human development as they articulate space into times and time into spaces (c.f. Ahmed 2006; Ahmed et al. 2003; Lefebvre 2004; Merleau-Ponty and Baldwin 2004; Ricoeur 1990). Respectively, emplacement refers to how humans construct cultural spaces for action, while emplotment refers to the temporal ordering of one’s own story in those spaces. Research interviews evidence how social actions occur in the context of emplacement. Social anthropologist Pink (2012, 24) usefully describes how field research into everyday life can “enable us to understand how people create their ‘sense of place’ and the role of practice in this.” She offers that people produce places through their actions. She writes, “[P]ractices, material agencies, skills, and ways of knowing don’t happen in places that their practitioners go to in order to perform them. Rather they are constituents of places” (Ibid., 28). Whereas Pink stresses the dynamism of emplacement as practices shift across spaces and times, emplotment implies a more ordered scripting for actions, or “creating a whole out of a succession of events” (Mattingly 1994). Emplotment focuses researchers’ attention on the plot elements of sense-making narratives, including characters whose actions work from conflict toward resolution. Stories establish the settings for characters, their motivations and actions in a coherent timeline. Emplotment limits free floating signifiers for places, instead tending to reproduce culturally available plotlines. Research interviews are dialogic, in this sense; they work toward affirming specific places as meaningful in order for actions to happen.

Emplacement is relevant to the study of media industries in drawing the shifting borders between and within cultures of production. Despite the seeming deterritorialization of media in global circuits of production, cultures of media producers – a subfield of media industry studies sometimes called “production studies” (Mayer et al. 2009; Mayer 2011; Banks et al. 2015)—territorialize by defining those who fit inside the culture, those who fit outside, and those who are invisible as unproductive in the universe of the producers under study. In recent years, researchers have deployed the concept of production cultures to refer to everyone from all people involved in Hollywood, to all special-effects workers, to all gay-identified media content creators, and so on. To this point, a comparative focus on emplacement would help show the convergences of global political economies and divergences of these production cultures. Geographer Doreen Massey lays out this dualism when she explains:

From jetsetters, to pensioners holed-up in lonely bed-sits, to Pacific Islanders whose air and sea links have been cut, to international migrants risking life and livelihood for the chance of a better life . . . all in some way or another are likely to be affected by the shifting relations of time-space, but in each case the effect is different; each is placed in a different way in relation to the shifting scene (Massey 1992[2018], 166).

For example, we might ask how the thick descriptions of ethnographic locations for production converge around the constitution of Hollywood (Caldwell 2008), Bollywood (Ganti 2012), Nollywood (Miller 2016) and Wellywood (Conor 2004); but diverge when considering the experiences of different kinds of social groups who come together in an international film festival (Iordanova and Ragan Amanda 2009), an e-sports arena (Taylor 2012) or a trade show (Caldwell 2023).

One challenge for studying media production is how media industries are emplaced from the inside of a production culture. Aside from problems involving access to media producers or barriers to witnessing production, or a simple lack of time for the sustained sensorial engagement that Pink advocates, there is the matter of telling stories. A singular interview about one producer’s experiences of work hardly describes a culture. Media producers, regardless of their occupational position, tend to speak from predictable scripts, owing to the professional demand to self-brand (Hearn 2008) and a constant churn of insider stories through popular, industry, and trade press (Caldwell 2008; Havens 2014). Mattingly (2008) a medical anthropologist, describes the difficulty of reading her research subjects’ individual motives and actions within a cultural framework as a form of “narrative mind reading,” because it lacks a basic storyline. “When life runs smoothly, mind reading (or ‘good enough’ mind reading) is nearly effortless” (Ibid., 138). It is only in a border situation when different cultures come into conflict over a series of events that allow speakers to formulate, rightly or wrongly, how the story unfolds and their role in the plotline. In traumatic situations, a research interview creates the conditions in which the interviewee will emplot themselves in the dramatic story, reorienting their character in each new setting. Mattingly explains what happens when a smoothly running life is suddenly disrupted:

We sometimes find ourselves in situations where it is not clear what is going on, or why people are doing what they are doing. It may not even be clear what people are doing when they are doing it in front of our very eyes. The stories we choose to tell, or feel compelled to tell, often concern precisely those situations where we were not, in fact, able to sort out what story we were in and came to grief because of it. Or, where someone else was inept at “reading the situation” and bungled things. This turns out to be of special salience in the cultivated space I attend to here (Ibid.).

Research interviews are cultivated spaces; and the pandemic demanded that interviewees tell new stories. It was in these less scripted scenarios, when interviewees told stories about their work, they were remapping the places that mattered to their own identity in that production culture.

The fact that we also lived in New Orleans and Tel Aviv, respectively, also gave us cultural insights into the ways residents articulated their unique places and plots in these cities before the most recent crisis. We knew what uneven development had done to the geographies of race and ethnicity, and we bore witness to the disaster as it unfolded from the first lockdown. We had already done extensive research on film and television production in our cities, which eased the access to interviewees, despite the difficult circumstances for any in-person contact. Nevertheless, our initial contacts with the people we knew had to be broadened to capture the diversity of social positions by gender, race/ethnicity, and class, as well as by occupational roles that locally defined people as “in the biz.” We hoped to balance our shared cultural locations with the interviewees against the real differences that we as white women in social and occupational roles of privilege would embody in these already fraught conversations.

Hollywood Hubs and Urban Production Cultures During COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic for film and television production was a “global problem” that was also geographically variable (Fortmueller 2021, 8). Shutdowns and release delays, union and government interventions, as well as varying return-to-work standards illustrated that production companies and networks were navigating similar challenges but in different ways. Streaming companies fled to locations with lower case counts – a strategic and political game of Risk. Meanwhile US territories quickly released their own guidelines for return to work and protections for workers, most publicly California’s governor who designated film and TV workers as “essential.” Fortmueller characterizes the COVID regulatory scene by late 2020 as patchy, as the usual bedfellows struck bargains with health authorities to keep working. In New Orleans and Tel Aviv, the rapid deployment of COVID media production conventions articulated the cities to the geopolitics of Hollywood and home. These contexts would be the settings for the emplacement and emplotment of workers’ pandemic experiences.

New Orleans

New Orleans as a place of production has a century-old tie to Hollywood. Yet the past twenty years accelerated an incentives race to lure major film and series shoots (Mayer 2017). No fewer than ten tropical storms in than time have threatened wind and rain that would inundate the city, the most famed one being Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Regular disruptions from crisis preparedness and evacuations have been features of urban everyday life (Gotham and Greenberg 2014), which highlights the utility of seeding an industry that is fleet-footed. Unlike the rootedness of oil and chemical production, Hollywood media production has moved in a hyper-mobile rhythm with an urban climate of carpe diem. The industry’s pursuit of flexible specialization made Southern California’s loss into Southeast Louisiana’s gain. After Katrina, the city doubled down on its attempts to support a relatively well-off creative class to offset the economic costs of infrastructural failures, both real and impending. The statewide incentives lobby (LFEA) launched a political action committee (PAC) to protect its stakes in the economic predictability of the unpredictable industry.

A result of these centrifugal and centripedal forces was a highly developed urban ecosystem for film and television. In the mid-2010s, the region outpaced every other geography for location-based Hollywood production, including Los Angeles, New York, Canada, and Ireland. Membership in the trade union local IATSE-478 ballooned from about 200 in 2002 to about 1,300 in 2015, and 1800 by 2023. ³ Regional chapters also represent production accountants, cinematographers, hair and makeup, and art directors, as well as members of the directors guild (DGA), the actors guild (SAG-AFTRA), and the Teamsters. Meanwhile the independent production has flourished as evidenced by the growth of the professional associations, such as the Film Society, Women in Film and Television, and the New Orleans Video Access Center, which has received state funding and national contracts to diversify the local workforce. In early 2021, the thirty-year-old film festival partnered with Sundance as a satellite city for COVID-safe independent exhibition. ⁴

Guidelines for COVID-safe productions in the city preceded those issued by most “film-friendly” cities. Film New Orleans issued guidelines in July 2020, which included approval of a safety plan that embraced weekly testing, sanitization, and the use of disposable equipment/masks, a medically licensed health and safety supervisor, and an extensive contact log for tracing. Further, any registered production would have to adhere to the phased reopening plan that the city launched the May prior. This restriction set the city apart from others in the region, which were embattled with polarized debates over public health and economic wealth. The industrial guidelines plus the city’s rules made film production in New Orleans feel unique to the place, and not quite like the surrounds or the nation.

Tel Aviv

In contrast, Tel Aviv’s film and television industry frequently stands as a synecdoche for the nation. Tel Aviv’s film and television industry is the largest in Israel and a bridge to the global entertainment industry through collaborations, co-productions, and film festivals. Created under the aegis of Zionism, film and television were rooted in internationalist diplomacy and domestic social control of Arab populations. Television broadcasting began after the 1967 war to explicitly address the occupied territories in Arabic. The medium’s domestic mission changed, reorienting to Jewish, Hebrew-speaking populations, but Zionism remained a goal for many Jewish industry leaders working abroad. Since the 1960s, “Hollywood has been one of the great cultural agents in the [U.S.-Israel] alliance, forging and magnifying pro-Israel sentiments in American society” (Shaw and Goodman 2022, 10). This special relationship, on the one hand, was reinforced with film funding, in particular the Rabinovich Foundation, but also was critiqued through diversification efforts in Israeli society, which promoted Arab creatives at home and abroad. ⁵ The local Tel Aviv film economy is positioned in the middle of this political economy, playing an outsized role in the industry’s symbolic capital and a national creative economy.

In recent years, the connections between Tel Aviv media industries and global media industries have deepened through licensing and co-productions. Agreements seem to follow particular series producers and talent, a trend called post-Zionist, post-TV production (Harlap 2017). Despite the post- nomenclature, the industry is still largely managed through an identitarian culture based on Jewish ties to European broadcasters and Hollywood. Both European-origin Ashkenazi and Middle-Eastern origin Mizrahi traveled as emissaries of foreign success. During the pandemic, the spike in streaming content benefited these elite producers, while putting the unions in the position of regulating the influx of Netflix and other streaming platforms (OTT) to include domestic production. ⁶ As an olive branch to global media industries, on the eve of a constitutional crisis in 2022, and after the pandemic’s worst impacts passed, the Israeli government passed a generous tax incentive policy to lure productions from abroad, thereby increasing the likelihood for below-the-line employment. ⁷

COVID regulations in Tel Aviv’s media industries were situated between the nation, which sought maximalist security through closed borders and rapid vaccine deployment, and a globalized production ecology focused on attracting new streaming productions. The Israeli government controlled the national COVID-response unilaterally for all territories. The first lockdown of all activities except “essential work during crises” came in March 2020, imposing stay-at-home orders for all workers, except those in medicine, police, pharmacies, and food markets. Soon after, the state deemed film and television workers “essential workers,” a legal vestige of a 1967 broadcasting law that media production was “essential” to maintaining soft power over Palestinians (Gotliffe 1981). The categorization favored media industry workers in Tel Aviv, as the city houses the majority of the country’s television production companies, studios, and networks. With their employment credentials, they continued working through three lockdowns in 2020, while others could not. While the state mandated physical distancing, temperature checks, masking, set hour schedules, and “purple pass” policies that identified essential businesses, the film and television industry imposed no additional rules regarding production during the pandemic.

Being Essential as Privilege Recognized, and Rejected

In the maelstrom, people in Tel Aviv and in New Orleans responded to national, international, and regional trends for COVID media production. Elite, above-the-line workers in both cities quickly adopted the moniker of being “essential,” affected as they were by the international conversation between Hollywood industries and their host countries. Similarities diverged among less elite workers in the two cities, where they found themselves even more precarious during the pandemic. Those workers were more skeptical overall of the lofty label of “essential,” seeing the logical gap between an essential hospital nurse and an essential grip. Among them, the rhetorical tropes for expressing one’s occupational status as essential had salience in showing your colleagues your place in Hollywood and in national hierarchies. To embrace your “essentialness” expressed whether you were working, and under what terms, as well your standpoint in relation to the categorization.

Tel Aviv

Early in our interviews, the term “essential” was commonly deployed among above-the-line workers as a term of duty. In a country in which the social is militarized (Ben-Eliezer 1998), coronavirus was posed as a threat to be fought with the hard power of public health policy and the soft power of media industries. The Tel Aviv interviewees emplaced themselves on this battlefield, repeating plots about their essential roles. “This is an industry that is defined as essential, so the second they removed the restrictions from the industry, productions started working non-stop,” said a worker who found himself called into action, adding:

This industry must provide content to the people, in the end, people are at home and want this content and you have to provide it to them. You can’t rely on rebroadcasts forever, so I guess that’s the reason they [the industry] decided that they must continue, as they do during war (below-the-line studio worker TL1). ⁸

Using this analogy that the Israeli media must go on during a war, this particular interviewee referenced the historical and national role that television has played in giving audiences what they need to endure wartime psychologically, including official messaging, morale boosting, and escapist entertaining.

Another interviewee who worked throughout the crisis expounded further on his media labor as wartime service:

Listen, we are essential workers, in a way, because even in a situation of war you have to entertain “the people,” because people who are sitting at home need to be entertained. Entertainment is a very important thing for raising morale. Even in war, we do that. So when people are sitting at home, they are frustrated with the whole corona situation. They can’t go anywhere; they need something to see on the screen that is not just news. The news is indeed essential and important, but it seems to me that it is less powerful than entertainment. For people during Covid, news constantly worried them and put them under pressure. You also have to entertain audiences with reality TV and TV series, to bring something else that will make them think about other things (below-the-line broadcast worker TL2).

Media in this passage are morale-boosting, anesthetizing, and complicit with the war effort. With the geographic centrality of Tel Aviv for producing television as a wartime weapon, television production personnel assumed their own centrality as “essential” to the coronavirus war effort. ⁹

The easy elision between a Tel Aviv identity with national media with “essential” wartime functions were most evident to those who found themselves producing outside of the city. When the pandemic closed the national gateways to cheaper production locations, workers who has remained relatively sheltered in Tel Aviv found themselves traveling within the country. One of the locations, Safed was used in a television series because the crew could not go to Eastern Europe, where production costs would be even cheaper. Instead, they found themselves traveling from their urban homebase to a relatively poor city in the North dominated by Ultra-Orthodox Jewish residents. Interviewees on location portrayed themselves as “jobs creators” in the periphery, but they also found they were not necessarily considered “essential workers” by the host city. Through an extended plotline, one above-the-line worker puzzled why a police officer stopped him at a checkpoint into Safed to question his work status:

I told him, “Listen, that [I am essential] is a philosophical question. I have a permit here. The producer gave me this permit; it’s the production company.” The officer told me, “Yes, your employer thinks you are essential, but do you think you’re essential? Do you think you are as essential as a doctor?” [. . .] I do not know. The questions are: What is essential in the face of Corona? What is essential in general? And who decides what is essential and what is not? I think there are people who, even in normal times, do not think that culture is an essential thing (above-the-line studio worker TL6).

In questioning his essential functionality, this speaker described feeling initially challenged to consider his own position in relation to either those on the frontlines of the crisis, or those less fortunate local populations he was rescuing with culture. The interpersonal dynamic he relayed ultimately reaffirmed his own righteousness as an essential culture worker, thus perpetuating a legacy of dependent relations between the Northern periphery and the Tel Aviv center.

New Orleans

Among the New Orleans’ interviewees, the word “essential” seemed clearly more suspect, aligned as it was with the agendas of California-based big studios and streaming services. Even workers in the red zone, those who were in the closest contact with unmasked talent, sneered that they were nothing like doctors, police, or “even someone in a grocery store” (above-the-line studio worker NO1). “It’s not like we’re saving lives or anything,” said one (below-the-line studio worker NO8). Instead, the term plotted the privilege of a hypermobile class of media makers. Another crew worker (NO2) saw “essential” as overtly political when discussing how vaccination was prioritized for essential workers from California:

Interviewer:

It’s not like you guys are considered essential workers like they are in California?

Studio Worker:

Exactly. I mean, we say we’re essential as a joke. I’m like “how are we essential?” We’re just movie people; but, as of right now, no one’s really discussed it [the vaccine]. I think we’re all just waiting to see if, once it comes out here, that we can get it. I guess people will start getting it; and, at that point, I don’t know if they’re [the studios are] going to say you have to have the vaccine or else you can’t get on the show. I don’t know how that’s going to work here, a right-to-work state. I don’t know how that works. Louisiana is its own little Southern monster when it comes to things like vaccines.

Place and privilege were intermingled in this exchange, designating who controls film workers’ health outcomes. While the interviewee was critical of the migratory Californian, she also positioned herself at the mercy of conservative officials in a rabidly anti-labor state. ¹⁰

In relation to other people in Louisiana and in the city, however, some of these same interviewees felt privileged as members of a local industry with relatively strong safety protocols. At a time when the most protective masks were in short supply in the city, one more crew member paused in a critique of her employer to reflect:

I have seven KN95 masks on my person. Actually, I have a pack in my kitchen cabinet and then I have another five in my car and then I have all my work one to say like 10. I’m like, ‘‘Holy shit I am blessed and highly privileged.’’ We feel like, ‘‘Oh well, we always have them; you can always get a fresh one” (below-the-line studio worker NO3).

From there she imagined a social project in which the industry would donate its masks to the city for public use, bringing the story to a happy ending. Whether or not film and television workers felt truly safe on the job, interviewees narrated stories that nevertheless recognized their occupational status. This recognition, illustrated in the quote, extended to the regular testing and masking that other businesses did not or could afford their employees.

Instead of being essential, production personnel tended to use the word essential in its adverbial form: essentially. New Orleans, a place of often existential musings about the endless disfunction and disaster of everything from sinkholes to deluges, gave residents much to ponder in terms of what was essentially happening. In each scenario, they were essentially unique in the plot, having to work and being lucky as an industry worker. Even one of the four studio heads in town considered the moniker with a bit of ambivalence and resolve. “It feels weird to be an ‘essential worker.’ But the reality is, our world is digital. And we’re not going back. So, we need to produce more,” he mused after we met with a reality series production team who were working at breakneck speed. In this moment, the place of New Orleans in the context of a Hollywood industry was simultaneously set in the everyday work in the studio.

The Power, or Not, to Choose Places

By 2021, coronavirus researchers could evidentiarily deny the notion that the disease was a “great leveler” in its impacts on societies already stratified by race and class (c.f. Wright et al. 2022). They point to the preexisting power relations that all but guaranteed that any institutional response would favor the most privileged peoples and add injuries to the most vulnerable. New Orleans was an early epicenter for outbreak after Mardi Gras 2020, resulting in a felling of the city’s cultural heritage bearers. Later The New York Times would use the tragedy as illustrative of the fact that “The conditions in the social and physical environment where people live, work, attend school, play and pray have an outsize influence on health outcomes”(Villarosa and Kasimu Harris 2020, emphasis ours). In Tel Aviv, the segregated nature of Israeli society drove a wedge between those who lived in the city and those covered under nationally strict corona policies, but without the ability to work remotely. ¹¹ Film and television production cultures reproduced these social hierarchies within and between places where public health, education, safety and services were already structured by segregation and identity differences.

The social divisions in urban production cultures reflected those in the cities in general terms. These contexts were implicit to the emplacement of production work and the emplotment of interviewees in the narratives of COVID. Places as cities and peripheries, as well as homes and workplaces, gave the settings for the experiences of race, class, and gender that stretched beyond a singular film and television production culture.

New Orleans

The early experiences in New Orleans with disease and ongoing struggles with public health policy enforcement hit production crew and independent creators hardest, though in divergent ways. The explosion of new content production put them on the job, but for longer hours and days to adhere to the new protocols. In contrast, independents struggled to find ways to achieve the new health and safety standards, which major studios estimated added between 5- to 20-percent to their budgets (Robb 2023). The result was feast or famine in the film industry. Interviewees commented on the accelerated pace of working among those who were employed, and the slow pace of those who were not.

Work acceleration was material and ideological in that interviewees talked about it as a widespread phenomenon in the industry, but also as a form of labor exploitation. Those who said they were most affected by acceleration of work tasks were also those in the lowest positions in the studio hierarchy in New Orleans. They were stuck in the workplace. Their stories took place in a set, on a film location, on a COVID testing line. As one below-the-line worker paused on the irony of essential work and power on the set:

I don’t want to down the industry in any way, but the upper echelon of the people who work in the industry sometimes, not always, treat people that work as “laborers.” They [the crew] do all the essential work, but they [managers] do treat them like crap. I’ve been treated like crap many times, and I thought I don’t have to do this. I can walk away right now. I don’t have to worry about this thing. I’m not there every single day from 9 to 5. . . If I want to walk-off of this and tell them kiss my butt, I can do that (below-the-line studio worker NO5).

This rebellious stance in the plotline later was tempered, as the same speaker put forth the adage that “you are only as good as your last job.” Walk off the set, and he said he would never work again in a reputation-driven field. Thinking about a pre-pandemic story in which the moral was to not speak up, he said, “The reputation really does matter. I know if I treated him [the director] like garbage or didn’t produce for him, it would have been the last time I ever worked with them [the studio]. He would have probably told 50 other people don’t work with that guy.” Non-unionized workers, including assistants and independent documentarists and videographers, were most likely to say they were exposed to the most punishing work conditions in the production structure, but they felt they had the least power to choose alternatives if they wanted to have a career.

The local urban context for the right to accept or refuse work was gendered and racialized. Not only did the disease impact African American and Latino communities more in the New Orleans, but it amplified the disparities in food, housing, and employment security. People of color who worked in film emplaced these systemic inequities at the intersection of their work and home communities. One independent filmmaker in particular identified these physical crossroads particularly poignantly:

[Film] people, they can’t go back to work right now but they will be okay. I’m not worried about them. They have unemployment. I’m worried about the musicians, who can’t get it. I’m worried about the culture bearers, lot of them who can’t get the unemployment. Those film guys. They’ll be all right. Now the independent filmmakers who were on sets like that. They have an issue. Because they can’t get it [unemployment] either. How are they going to survive? Right now, it’s not safe to go drive Uber. Or you can’t have a job as a waiter right now. I don’t know. I don’t have any answers for that. The best thing I can tell you is to take your stimulus money. The 1200 dollars. [. . .] I will say take that 1200 dollars and try to start a business. And that’s up to any young person, especially any young black person. Start your own business because this country ain’t here to help you. You got to do it for yourself. [. . .]

The DGA [Director’s Guild of America]. They’re taking care of the people. But you got to be a part of the DGA. You got to be a SAG [union] actor. Everybody’s not in the DGA. Everybody’s not a SAG actor. They keep taking care of their own. That’s the issue with taking care of filmmakers. You got to be a part of that crowd, that group (above-the-line indie worker NO3).

Statements about the racial and classed impacts of COVID on filmmakers pointed to the compounded structural inequities found in employment in the city more generally. ¹²

In our research conversations, stories varied by age as well. Older film workers said they were least likely to return to work. Young workers worried about breaking into the tightly closed networks that reproduce production cultures. A regional program manager for a work training program in the industry narrated the scenario of a perfect storm when the program to increase diversity in the film and television industry increased the numbers of young, people of color and women precisely when productions were hiring more workers into newly created health and safety positions.

I was like this is a very odd power dynamic. You have individuals who are coming into these positions that maybe have little- to no-production experience. And they’re the ones accountable of making sure that department heads producers are abiding COVID rules. You’re essentially having someone in an entry-level position telling a supervisor that they need to stand six feet apart, or they need to put on a mask, or all of it. [. . .]

In Louisiana I’ve seen how that has affected people. Even in my own job I get people hired on productions and then act as a buffer when they are trying to navigate those things. I’ve had young people going into shows in COVID compliance and feeling berated, beat down by their supervisors specifically.

The story finishes when the manager refuses to send more recruits to places where the pandemic revealed regional power dynamics between the most vulnerable non-white and female workers and their predominantly white and male bosses.

Conversely, independent workers in New Orleans identified how those with racial, gender, and class privilege seemingly thrived in the same period. Above-the-line and unionized veterans in their trades discussed their own power to choose work and leisure activities at home, such as working on writing projects, remodeling their home spaces, taking planning meetings on ZOOM, and volunteering for independent film projects in order to help workers who had less elastic health and safety budgets. In New Orleans, a longtime female freelancer compared her struggles to pay her sound collaborator railed against those producers who were seemingly “born with it,” or in her words: “the Dude-bro with money and contact privilege. They get to make their dream movies a lot faster than, for example, people of color who are not born into that privilege” (above-the-line indie worker NO4). This character sketch of the race, class, and gender of the unaffected film worker in COVID stories replicated those of the migratory and essential film class. Even on the periphery of the city, at a rural location-production site, an employee described a power geography centered in Hollywood “When you deal with people from LA or businesses, they don’t want to take the risk. Even though in the [local] area you’re allowed to go without a mask, on a set, they don’t want you on there without a mask” (above-the-line studio worker NO4). It is important to note that while the places that mattered to pandemic film and television production in New Orleans were relatively similar, individuals emplotted different personal challenges and advantages in relation to those places. An above-the-line worker and mother, who identified as white, found herself juggling home schooling with stay-at-home work. A producer/director, who identified as female and black, recognized that she could keep working on writing projects while teaching on ZOOM at a university, because of her occupational privilege and lack of children. However, both women spoke of the ways the local production culture in New Orleans favored creatives who were able to parlay their money, time, and other resources to keep working safely when others could not.

Tel Aviv

The gendered and classed experiences of working film and broadcast personnel reinforced other geographies of inequality between Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Palestinians in Tel Aviv’s media production culture. Amidst the public health crisis, the city had become the most expensive in the world, owing in part to a strong currency exchange. Inflated costs of living and evictions fueled gentrification and fractured ethnic neighborhoods in Tel Aviv. ¹³ Despite egalitarian policies that paid unemployed workers and covered health risks, those with money and status to stay near the center for media industries reaped both economic and symbolic benefits. One below-the-line crew worker situated Israel’s production culture in the place he identified with:

The industry mostly feels Tel Avivian. There are a lot of projects happening in Jerusalem, but you see that half of the team are Tel Avivians. [On the team that I worked with], there was a Jerusalem photographer, a Jerusalem producer, but the executive producer, and I, and the director all seem to live in Tel Aviv. Listen, Tel Aviv is also an attractive city [for global companies]. It’s liberal. Jerusalem is more complex, with the whole issue of religion, you know. Tel Aviv offers something younger, more liberal, more accepting. The place draws artists to it. (below-the-line studio and freelance worker TL2)

For those who saw themselves as part of this cosmopolitan, global, and liberal culture, place had an explanatory power for the normative power relations in the industry that also favored an elite class of Asknenazi Jews and a youthful, urban creative class. Being “Tel Avivian,” was a subject of conversation for those living inside and outside of the city, though with varying levels of self-awareness.

Inside of the city, production blurred the differences between public and private spaces. Everything that could be done “in house” became “in home,” as the first-class urban infrastructure permitted online meetings and e-work to proliferate. Interviewees emplaced the spatial constrictions of productions through three waves of severe lockdowns. A studio producer described her days as a “fusion of home and work” that physically presented itself “as if each room was a different ZOOM [meeting]. We were all careful not to get into each other’s frame” (above-the-line studio worker TL12). Class privilege further allowed for a division of the home and the workplace. Those who could outsource their child-rearing duties to a nearby relative or caregiver found life less stressful.

The best thing that happened to me is that my children’s nanny, who has been with us since the eldest was born, lives in our building. So what we did throughout “corona,” including the strictest closures, was that I went down to work at her place, and she came up to look after the children. It was a tremendous gift. Do I enjoy going to work at her place and invading her private life? I don’t enjoy it, but it was a big save (above-the-line studio worker TL15).

This anecdote of a clever solution to suboptimal work conditions was not feasible for those who lacked either a stable workplace or a stable homeplace, as was the case for those living on the city’s peripheries during a time of economic upheaval.

The broad generalities that describe the national labor force for film and television production were materialized in other material ways. During the pandemic, film location production concentrated in Tel Aviv and Hedera, a city about 50 km away. The same worker who described his precarious, entry-level job with long hours for an international studio production was also able to say he could just take a taxi home each night (below-the-line studio and freelance worker TL2). In contrast, a Palestinian production freelancer explained his precarity based on his distance from the city:

If there is an office that currently wants the production of a promotional video and I want to make a bid. I think for a moment “I need 2 cars to Tel Aviv. I will add NIS 500-600.” This is an unusual cost for a production. If I was based in Tel Aviv I could save on travel and the vehicle. [. . ..] I live in the periphery. It’s not the fault of the guy who lives close to the business owner who is looking for the service (below-the-line freelance worker TL1). ¹⁴

Geographic disparities during the pandemic magnified the challenges of Palestinian-Israeli film workers, many of whom had lived with struggles for equality and recognition in the sector (Lavie and Jamal 2019). Work was abundant during COVID, interviewees concurred, but they saw the uptick with ambivalence because the quality of the jobs could hardly compensate for their new costs of living and business. “I was lucky, because I had wanted to leave the wedding gigs for a long time. I wanted to establish myself more as a soundman. TV production continued during COVID, and we had work,” said one Palestinian professional who pivoted from events media production to film production during the lockdown (below-the-line studio and freelance worker TL3). While he said he appreciated being in such high demand, he realized quickly that the contract rate could not cover the increased costs of the technologies he now needed in his home studio in Nazareth. Moreover, he said he was expected to do far more roles in directing, photography, and sound, than if he made the same promo film in Tel Aviv. “Let’s just say if I lived in the Tel Aviv area, and I worked at Reshet (Channel 13), or the network, or the big studios. . . You go there. You have a salary. You get work. And everything is fine.” He said he survived financially, but only with government assistance.

The lifting of pandemic restrictions in 2022 seemed to reestablish the geographic power imbalances that existed prior to 2020, in the view of the Israeli film workers. What interviewees described as a surplus of jobs for all now fell back in the hands of a Jewish and Tel Aviv-based industry. As a coda to the pandemic, an above-the-line producer of Palestinian background said that when the restrictions were lifted, overt racism in the industry returned:

[Pre-pandemic,] I submitted applications to Israeli channels, the Hebrew productions, and I always got a message like this, ‘You are our second favorite choice. We will update you later’. [. . .] The coronavirus is over now. The public-service channel [Taagid] opened a few new calls for proposals. Suddenly I start receiving text messages from Jewish producers, saying, ‘′Hey, what’s up? We haven’t heard from you in a long time.’ They do this because they are applying to the same call. They need to know that they have [my] crew members, because they don’t speak Arabic, but they need Arabic speakers in the production. In the production that speaks Hebrew, my application is not accepted. Do you understand? It’s absurd. Coronavirus showed this dark side more sharply. And it hurts us financially (below-the-line studio and freelance worker TL1).

Placing and Plotting Pandemic Production Cultures

In interviews about Scenes from a Marriage, Levi gives liner notes for the beginning and ending vérité outtakes in his remake of the Bergman classic. Levi told Salon that he decided in the editing room to leave in the on-set production pieces as a way of showing the crew’s distress of making a series during COVID:

I think afterwards it said something about [main characters] Jessica and Oscar, because of the relationship they had before, what happened during the production and afterwards . . . I wanted to show them, in a way, to show something about themselves, as people, to say something about the relationship between them, and probably about the state of mind that they were in during the shooting. [. . .] I didn’t expect that to be so effective (in McFarland 2021).

This mental state of the crew is visibly represented in the final scene, which rolls after a director out of the frame yells “Cut!” The camera follows the actors walking off the set. With slow, romantic pacing and music, the actors wrap their arms around each other as they make it through the studio lot to their dressing rooms. After a warm embrace, they separate, revealing the official signs that remind the other crew to keep their face masks on.

The narrative of COVID-safe production communicated the sense of a monolithic global media industry poised to rescue the places where they sited. Yet the realities of the ways film and television workers experienced and talked about production in Tel Aviv and New Orleans were more fragmented in the first thirty-six months of the pandemic. The geopolitics of global Hollywood pitted some locations against each other to attract investment, particularly from streaming industries. Meanwhile, the domestic politics of the designation for media industry work as important relative to other industries could exacerbate internal divides between different kinds of creative professionals. Divisions of race, class, and gender in the distinctively urban settings for public health enforcement were replicated within transnational media industries that struggled to contain regionalisms under the banner of being essential. In this regard, media production cultures simply contained the fiction of placelessness.

In emplotting their own roles in these narratives of industrial survival or rejuvenation, media professionals reaffirmed their own perceived positions in the production cultures of their industries. These cultures were sheltered in many ways from the economic impacts of the pandemic, but speakers still cast their roles as champions in plotlines of countervailing events when work or costs accelerated, public and private spheres merged, and the costs of doing business had to be considered against the price of living through a pandemic. Media professionals in Tel Aviv framed their actions as important to a wider society that needed media contents, as if during war. In New Orleans, professionals framed their actions as worthy of emulation, for example in getting vaccinated and following work protocols. Unmoored from their regular routines, potentially removed from home spaces or workplaces, and disoriented away from clear pathways to career success, the interviewees in both cities wondered aloud whether the pandemic was an epic event after which everything would return to their proper places.

Production cultures are comprised of stories. Interviewees’ stories of their COVID experiences emplaced them in their cities relative to other production centers and peripheries. Whereas New Orleans media production cultures reaffirmed its differences from Los Angeles/Hollywood production cultures, Tel Aviv media production cultures embraced its national centrality as an Israeli industry. At the same time, by revealing their solidarities and senses of duty, as well as their blindspots and senses of entitlement, interviewees plotted themselves in the localized social dramas unfolding during the crisis. Who could work, and under what conditions, undermines a sense that media producers see themselves statically in a clearly identifiable production culture generalized beyond the everyday understanding of places where action happens. Through emplacement and emplotment together, interview-based studies of production cultures provide ample critique of normative tales that media industries promote about themselves and their workforces during a crisis (c.f. Mayer, Lavie, Banks eds. 2024). Stories about media production during the pandemic told as much how media workers positioned themselves in the material hierarchies of their local production cultures, as well as in relation to the centers and peripheries of media industry power. They challenge history as a series of “events,” using White’s (2014) phrasing, with participants’ sense of a practical past.

Production studies need not a pandemic to uncover the stories about why place matters in the everyday lives of media producers. The recurring cycles of boom and bust in the financialized political economy of global media, the impending pandemics, droughts, fires, and wars, and the catastrophic replacement of human media labor with artificially intelligent creators will ensure the need for future researchers to emplace in the face of displacement and emplot in the face of existential events. It is the job of researchers in these times to understand how place continues to matter to the study of culture and how. Otherwise, we risk repeating the narratives our film and television industry promote about themselves in crises.