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204 books match the query 'Direction & Production' and 5 start with b

cover of Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy

Below the Line

Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy

Vicki Mayer

Duke University Press, 2011

Below the Line illuminates the hidden labor of people who not only produce things that the television industry needs, such as a bit of content or a policy sound bite, but also produce themselves in the service of capital expansion. Vicki Mayer considers the work of television set assemblers, soft-core cameramen, reality-program casters, and public-access and cable commissioners in relation to the globalized economy of the television industry. She shows that these workers are increasingly engaged in professional and creative work, unsettling the industry’s mythological account of itself as a business driven by auteurs, manned by an executive class, and created by the talented few. As Mayer demonstrates, the new television economy casts a wide net to exploit those excluded from these hierarchies. Meanwhile, television set assemblers in Brazil devise creative solutions to the problems of material production. Soft-core videographers, who sell televised content, develop their own modes of professionalism. Everyday people become casters, who commodify suitable participants for reality programs, or volunteers, who administer local cable television policies. These sponsors and regulators boost media industries’ profits when they commodify and discipline their colleagues, their neighbors, and themselves. Mayer proposes that studies of production acknowledge the changing dynamics of labor to include production workers who identify themselves and their labor with the industry, even as their work remains undervalued or invisible.
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cover of Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production

Below the Stars

How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production

By Kate Fortmueller

University of Texas Press, 2021

Longlisted for the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, Moving Image Category

Despite their considerable presence in Hollywood, extras and working actors have received scant attention within film and media studies as significant contributors to the history of the industry. Looking not to the stars but to these supporting players in film, television, and, recently, streaming programming, Below the Stars highlights such actors as precarious laborers whose work as freelancers has critically shaped the entertainment industry throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By addressing ordinary actors as a labor force, Kate Fortmueller proposes a media industry history that positions underrepresented and quotidian experiences as the structural elements of the culture and business of Hollywood.

Resisting a top-down assessment, Fortmueller explores the wrangling of labor unions and guilds that advocated for collective action for everyday actors and helped shape professional norms. She pulls from archival research, in-person interviews, and firsthand observation to examine a history that cuts across industry boundaries and situates actors as a labor group at the center of industrial and technological upheavals, with lasting implications for race, gender, and labor relations in Hollywood.

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cover of Black Women Directors

Black Women Directors

Christina N. Baker

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Black women have long recognized the power of film for storytelling. For far too long, however, the cultural and historical narratives about film have not accounted for the contributions of Black women directors. This book remedies this omission by highlighting the trajectory of the culturally significant work of Black women directors in the United States, from the under-examined pioneers of the silent era, to the documentarians who sought to highlight the voices and struggles of Black women, and the contemporary Black women directors in Hollywood.  Applying a Black feminist perspective, this book examines the ways that Black women filmmakers have made a way for themselves and their work by resisting the dominant cultural expectations for Black women and for the medium of film, as a whole.
 

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cover of Bong Joon Ho

Bong Joon Ho

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon

University of Illinois Press, 2024

Successful cult films like The Host and Snowpiercer proved to be harbingers for Bong Joon Ho’s enormous breakthrough success with Parasite. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon provides a consideration of the director’s entire career and the themes, ambitions, techniques, and preoccupations that infuse his works. As Jeon shows, Bong’s sense of spatial and temporal dislocations creates a hall of mirrors that challenges us to answer the parallel questions Where are we? and When are we?. Jeon also traces Bong’s oeuvre from its early focus on Korea’s US-fueled modernization to examining the entanglements of globalization in Mother and his subsequent films. A complete filmography and in-depth interview with the director round out the book.

Insightful and engaging, Bong Joon Ho offers an up-to-date analysis of the genre-bending international director.

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cover of British Television Intellectuals: Unusual Kinds of Star

British Television Intellectuals

Unusual Kinds of Star

John Tulloch

Intellect Books, 2026

A passionate vision of British television intellectuals as distinctive professionals using media to translate knowledge and serve the public good.

Offering a pioneering exploration of one of Britain’s most significant yet often overlooked television phenomena, this book traces the rise and development of the TV intellectual as a distinct presence over the past sixty-five years. Situated within the framework of public intellectual theory, it explores several of Britain’s most notable and influential cultural figures, revealing how these unusual kinds of stars have combined creativity and intellect to engage wide international audiences.

At the heart of these intellectuals’ work lies a profound engagement with the concept of civilization—ranging from early concerns about its survival to critical reflections on colonialism and its legacies. The book shows how these influential figures, together with the television medium itself, have explored civilization in all its complexities, including thoughtful considerations of its future.

Blending historical analysis with cultural critique, this book will appeal to students and scholars in media and cultural studies, offering a compelling study of the intellectual and creative forces shaping British television across decades.

 
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