Stealing Shots: The Heroics and Helplessness of Media Labor

Abstract

There has been increasing scholarship in the anthropology of mass media, with particular attention to the production of film and television (Abu-Lughod 2005; Dornfeld 1998; Ganti 2012; Mandel 2002; Ortner 2013; Pandian 2015). Scholars in media and communication studies examine the precarious conditions of media workers, many of whom are “below-the-line”: craft and technical workers whose pay is generally not individually negotiated, and who may or may not be eligible for union membership (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011; Mayer and Goldman 2010). As globalization disperses production activities from historic place-based industries such as Hollywood and another famously commercial industry, the former “Hollywood of the East” that is Hong Kong, below-the-line media workers in both sites experience economic uncertainty. Los Angeles-based media workers struggle as studios move their filming operations out of California and to other states or out of the US for tax incentives and credits (Curtin and Sanson 2016; Mayer 2011; Miller et al 2005). In the case of Hong Kong, local below-the-line film workers become unemployed or under-employed as work moves across the border to China with cheaper pay and a different language spoken there (Szeto and Chen 2013). In this paper, I demonstrate that anthropology’s attention to work (e.g. Dumont 2015; David 2007) contributes to increasingly vocal discussions about the uncertainty of media labor in place-based industries, and, in turn, the insecure conditions of media workers in offshored and outsourced sites. Drawing upon multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Hollywood and Hong Kong including work as a nonunion “extra” and an unpaid intern at a Hollywood production company, I argue that the practice that is known among filmmakers in both sites as “stealing shots” (“tau paak” in Cantonese) – which means quick filming in outdoor locations without permission or a permit – operates not only as an expedient practice but also an ethos to be embraced in the pursuit of cinematic affect. Stealing shots, especially as practiced by above-the-line media professionals, figures as a behind-the-camera (mostly male) heroics over the physical environment and legal bureaucracy, yet it also, as I suggest, encompasses a potential theft from the vulnerable bodies of actors, stunt workers, technical crew members and craft workers in generally unregulated settings. I focus on specific instances of filming in the U.S. and Hong Kong where the perilous real-life production conditions can occasionally exceed the on-screen themes of danger and fragility due to demands from above-the-line media professionals, such as directors, in their ostensible pursuit of art amid commercial settings. While the on-screen results of such rule-breaking are often celebrated, the processes by which they are made, and their costs to media labor, are largely invisible.