Lexington Books
Pages: 220
•
Trim: 6½ x 9¼
978-0-7391-9313-6 • Hardback • April 2015 • $98.00 • (£65.00)
978-0-7391-9314-3 • eBook • April 2015 • $93.00 • (£65.00)
Violaine Roussel is professor of sociology at the University of Paris VIII.
Denise Bielby is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Chapter 1: Introduction: Cultural Brokerage in the American and French Film and Television Industries, Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby
Part I. Agents, Agenting, Agencies
Chapter 2: Twenty-Four Years of Agenting, Harry J. Ufland
Chapter 3: Talent Agencies and the Market for Screenwriters: From the Origins of Packaging to Today’s Transformations, Denise Bielby
Chapter 4: The Talent Agent’s Role in Producing Artists’ Symbolic and Commercial Value in France, Delphine Naudier
Chapter 5: The Market for Actresses: Gender, Reputation, and Intermediation in French Pornography, Mathieu Trachman
Chapter 6: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents, Tom Kemper
Chapter 7: “It’s Not the Network: It’s the Relationship”: The Relational Work of Hollywood Talent Agents, Violaine Roussel
Part II. Behind the Scenes of Production
Chapter 8: The Choice between a Good Job and a Good Life, Bill Mechanic
Chapter 9: The Importance of Being Ordinary: Brokering Talent in the New-TV Era, Laura Grindstaff and Vicki Mayer
Chapter 10: “This Is the Girl”: The Social Division of Recruitment in the French Film Industry, Vincent Cardon
Chapter 11: Film Offices as Brokers: Cultivating and Connecting Local Talent to Hollywood, Candace Jones and Pacey Foster
Chapter 12: Overlapping Temporalities in Project-Based Work: The Case of Independent Producers in the French Movie Industry, Laure de Verdalle
Movies are the heart of the entertainment business, a business that revolves around notoriously elusive notions of ‘talent.’ This fascinating collection of case studies peeks behind the screen to show us how talent is identified, valued, and mobilized by professionals who unobtrusively influence every element of the production process. Each chapter features richly detailed descriptions of how the business works and conceptually sophisticated arguments about the inscrutable relationship between art and commerce.
— Michael Curtin, University of California, Santa Barbara
In Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries, Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby have pulled back the normally unmovable curtain cloaking the true inner workings of day to day Hollywood to enable the layman to see the wizards at work, doing the good, the bad, and the ugly.
— Bob Bookman, Paradigm Agency
This is a book for anyone interested in the inner workings of the entertainment industry. It shows in stunning detail how the relationship, that somewhat ineffable realm of interpersonal dialogue and exchange, is and always has been at the very heart of the entertainment business.
— Michael Renov, University of Southern California