Don’t Do That – Taboos in Hollywood, Part II

30 05 2012

In 1949, Hortense Powdermaker wrote that “every part of a movie production is circumscribed by a very specific code of taboos.  We know all societies, from primitive ones to modern Hollywood, have their ‘thou-shalt-nots’.”  This is the second in a two-part entry on taboos in the entertainment industry.  The first part covered taboos about what could be shown onscreen; this writing covers taboos in the industry itself.

As mentioned in the first entry, most taboos serve one of two purposes: to insure luck and success in an endeavor or to maintain a social status quo.  The onscreen taboos against what can and can’t be shown generally serve the first purpose; the taboos discussed today serve the second.

Anthropology of Hollywood

“Mondo” movies like as this one confronted so many social taboos that they had to be produced outside of Hollywood (mostly in Italy)

Because the entertainment industry is a community that is, in a sense, a professional one (you usually join by working within it), taboos in Hollywood often govern working relationships.  For example, a complicated set of status quo taboos dedicated to maintaining departmental boundaries govern below-the-line workers on a set.  “Keep it in your department” is the law of the land; don’t go outside your department with complaints, or to air dirty laundry; never touch equipment belonging to another department.  And make sure your loyalty to your own department is paramount: be on time, never leave early, and if your department head quits, you need to at least consider doing the same.

Actors have a number of taboos for the auditioning process; once again, these are mostly professional taboos, dedicated to making sure everyone acts in a proper way: don’t shake the casting director’s hand.  Don’t make small talk around your audition with the casting staff.  And most of all, once you go on, don’t tell the casting director that you need to “take a moment” to get into character.

This is hardly an exhaustive list, but you get the idea; other taboos govern nearly every occupation or type of work in the Industry, and can be seen across the professions involved in movie and TV production: if you’re in a guild, for example, it’s considered a serious transgression to work a non-union show (at least by your union).  There seems to be a taboo against stealing each other clients among agents and managers, but from the limited amount I’ve spoken with people about it, this seems less of a true taboo, and more like etiquette.

Taboos also cover the attribution of credit on a production: it’s considered pretty bad to try and take credit where credit is not due, or to screw people out of it when it is due: just ask the plaintiffs in the many lawsuits over credits that have been filed over the years; the long-running one over the movie Crash was an example of this.  Suits over credit- and idea-theft have entangled movies including Titanic, The Matrix, The Expendables, and Kung Fu Panda.  And just last November, a nun sued the studios that produced Sister Act almost twenty years earlier, saying they stole her life story – apparently some taboos even the Lord’s people will not forgive.

Anthropology of Hollywood

Is this the original Kung Fu Panda, and the Dreamworks creation just a knockoff? His creator hopes a court thinks so.

Note that in these cases, there isn’t much of a taboo against actually doing it – people try and screw other people out of credit all the time – but there’s a solid taboo once you get caught.  Taboos can be like alcohol: if they begin to be transgressed often enough, society eventually develop a tolerance, and once-forbidden behavior can find its way into the mainstream.  This isn’t to say that one day it’ll be okay for a gaffer to make off with the costumes on set, or people won’t care if you steal their clients – but social rules do change, and it’ll be interesting to see which taboos hold sway over Hollywood in the next fifty years.

                                                                                                                       — Scott Frank

  • The departments on a set can include: Camera; Grip; Electrical; Sound; Art Department; Hair/Makeup/Wardrobe.
  • There are many excellent anthropological works about taboos; some of the more interesting are Mary Douglas’ work on food taboos, and George Gmelch’s writings about taboo and superstition in baseball.

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See No Evil, Hear No Evil: Taboos in Hollywood, Part I

23 05 2012

Anthropologists love to talk about taboos.  By talking about what is forbidden, you can discover the hot-button social issues in a society.   Roughly speaking, a taboo is any sort of behavior that is significantly frowned upon by society at large; how big that frown is (are you killed for transgressing? Exiled? Sued?) depends on the society, the nature of the taboo being broken, and the purpose of the taboo.  Some taboos are in place to insure luck or success in an endeavor – like the groom shouldn’t see the bride before the wedding.  Some taboos exist to maintain a social status quo – such as those governing which races, religions, and sexual orientations are allowed to marry.  Taboos of sex, religion, and violence are common in societies around the world, including our own.

Taboos are a big subject, and so this will be a two-part entry on taboos in Hollywood.  This week we’ll cover taboos against what is shown onscreen, and next week taboos on people actually working in the industry: what you are and aren’t you allowed to do if you’re a gaffer, actor, agent, etc.

Onscreen taboos – what you can show or say and what you can’t – have been a part of Hollywood since the beginning.  Concerns over the content of sex, violence, and drugs have been part of the dialogue about movies since they were just starting to be made: in 1934, to head off possible government intervention, the MPAA created the Production Code, overseen by the mighty Hayes Office.  The Code was a very explicit expression of the social mores of America at the time; or at least a segment of them.

The Code had very strict rules for what you were allowed to show onscreen: all crime had to be explicitly punished by the end of the movie, for example.  No profanity was allowed, and of course interracial mixing was strictly forbidden (also, by the way, you weren’t allowed to show childbirth).  The censors of the Hayes office reviewed every film, and if you didn’t pass you got fined $25,000 and couldn’t show your movie in member theatres; as well as facing boycotts by powerful social organizations like the League of Decency.

anthropology of Hollywood

An image that shows ten of the things forbidden by the production code (taken by A.L. Shafer, at that time the head of photography at Columbia Pictures)

Hortense Powdermaker, writing in the late 1940s, suggested that while the Production Code appeared to be enforcing taboos to maintain the status quo, its real existence was to enforce the kind of taboos that ensure luck and success: if a moviemaker followed the dictates of the Code, then their movie could be released, and make lots of money.  In this view, making a movie that followed the rules and abided by the Code was a ritual that enabled the filmmaker to avoid the bad luck of boycotts and fines, in favor of official approval and a successful release.  We see a similar pattern with the way films are made today.

The eventual successors to the Production Code, of course, are the MPAA ratings that everyone is familiar with: G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17.  What the Ratings Board allows and doesn’t once again tells us things about society; the primary criterion on which a movie’s rating is based include sexuality, violence, and profanity.  But of course, those aren’t given equal weight: a PG-13 movie can have plenty of violence (as long as it isn’t “realistic and extreme“), but the moment two naked people have sex, it’s a R rating (naked people not having sex can be PG-13.  So look, but don’t touch, people).  Also considered worse than violence are drugs and swearing – any drug use automatically means a minimum PG-13 rating, and if you swear more than once, you’re rated R.  So are we, as a society, less worried about violence than about sex?  Or is it just that the ratings board thinks we are?

In the final analysis, what’s interesting is that these taboos also fall into the category of ones in place to insure success or luck: the people who write and produce these movies and TV shows usually don’t believe in the taboos they are required to enforce, but they have to pretend as if they do in order to insure that the TV show will be allowed to air, or the movie will get a good rating from the MPAA and thus get a shot at a successful box office take.

anthropology of Hollywood

Why does that one couple have the same creepy smile on their faces when they view G-rated content, as when they’re watching an NC-17 movie?

Critiques and controversies arise in these taboo-regulation systems when the censors start to march out of step with society as a whole.  This happened at the end of the Production Code era (it collapsed in the late 60s), and you can see it today in controversies and challenges to the MPAA system by the distributors of Bully, Darren Aronofsky (for Blue Valentine), Kevin Smith (for Zack and Miri Make a Porno) and of course the so-ironic-it’s-almost-too-good-be-true battle over the rating for This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a film about the rating system itself.   From all this, we see that taboos tell us about the values a society holds both when they are enforced, and when they are broken.

— Scott Frank

    • The standards for what can and can’t be shown on television also merit a solid discussion.  There wasn’t space for that here, perhaps in a future entry. The cultural reasons for those standards, however, are very similar to the ones outlines here for films.
    • The criteria for MPAA ratings are a fascinating read, and can be found at http://mpaa.org/ratings/what-each-rating-means
    • You can still read the Hayes Office censorship reports upon request at the Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.  They’re a fascinating read.
    • My favorite lines from Hayes Office reports: “There must be no excessive gruesomeness in the shot where Lorenz lets the dead, limp body of the hag slump to the floor.”  And “Delete shot of Doctor smothering Pygmy’s face with cotton wool while Pygmy is in his hand.”

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

25 04 2012

Congratulations! If you work in the entertainment industry, you are statistically more likely to make it big than in a regular field.  Of course, you’re also more likely to completely fail.  Welcome to the magic of living and working in a kurtotic system.

This news comes courtesy of the absolutely-fascinating-every-single-one-of-you-should-read-it book Hollywood Economics, by Arthur De Vany.  I’m not a statistician (as you’ll obviously see), but De Vany is, and the book is full of brute force statistic analysis of different aspects of the entertainment industry, including “does having a star in your movie guarantee box office?”  “is the blockbuster strategy successful?”  and “does luck or talent predict a strong career in the industry?”  (that last one should be of interest to pretty much everybody).  Now, as an anthropologist, I am loathe to rely on strictly statistical analysis of what are clearly strongly culturally-determined effects, but DeVany’s data is compelling.  Statistics can’t give you an idea of the cultural reasons behind the effects they’re showing, but they are good for measuring those effects.

One of the most interesting overall conclusions De Vany makes is that analyses of almost all Hollywood functions reveal that the entertainment industry is, statistically speaking, highly kurtotic (as opposed to having a standard, bell-curve-like distribution).  That means that the industry is characterized by a non-standard distribution curve of resources, and is highly sensitive to nonlinear event cascades: so exceptional statistical values, both high and low, occur more frequently than in normally structured systems.

anthropology of Hollywood

Different statistical curves – note that high kurtosis (technically called “leptokurtic” here) has an unusually high peak, but also that the downslopes of the peak are lower than in a standard distribution. I know, statistics make my head hurt, too.

In other words, there is an unusually large proportion of people at the bottom, and that people at the top are really at the top.  And as a side benefit, seemingly small events can snowball into large outcomes more frequently than in a standard system (for example, you write a small screenplay for a webisode, someone likes it, they offer you to write an episode of a TV show, you get bigger and bigger screenwriting jobs, and eventually you’re a well-known, powerhouse screenwriter (?), being yelled at by Mel Gibson – all originating from a single, small event).  Now, things like this can certainly happen in a regular system, but in a kurtotic one, they’re more likely to happen.

That’s right, in a system of high kurtosis, extreme values occur more often than in a regular system.  As De Vany notes, the Hollywood system is “dominated by a handful of extraordinary movies and artists that account for nearly all of the industry impact and revenue.  The kurtocrats are Hollywood’s elite, the actors, directors, writers, and producers who are associated with the major movies.”

Figures do indeed bear this out.  According to the MPAA, in 2010 the entertainment industry was responsible for $16 billion in wages in the state of California.  The top ten earning actors that year made $349 million of the total $16 billion in wages – meaning 2% of the total wages were earned by roughly .0038% of the workforce.  But we shouldn’t forget that there are 121,990 more actors out there; DeVany is correct about the kurtotic nature of the industry, but his analysis creates an unreasonable focus on the super-elites in the system, while ignoring the vast number of middle-class, working stiffs.

anthropology of Hollywood

One of De Vany’s graphs, showing the effect of having big-name stars in a movie. From the names, you can tell this article was written in 1999. (full citation below)

A system of high kurtosis means a lot of high values, but a lot of extremely low ones as well – all the people you know or have met that are trying to make it for many years, or exist on the fringes of the industry.  But hey, look at the bright side: a nonlinear event cascade could mean that any one of those people could (relatively) suddenly be unbelievably successful.  In fact, the rise of the original studio heads is an excellent example of this; and it’s arguably part of the dream that has kept people coming to L.A. since the biz began.

— Scott Frank

  • Table from “Uncertainty in the Movie Industry: Does Star Power Reduce the Terror of the Box Office?”  by Arthur De Vany and W. David Walls, Journal of Cultural Economics, 23: 284-318, 1999.
  • By the way, as an anthropologist and not a statistician, my grasp of these concepts is admittedly weak.  I’m going mostly by my reading of what De Vany writes, and will welcome corrections from people with a deeper understanding of statistics than myself.

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A Boffo B-Roll – Linguistics in Hollywood

19 04 2012

An Abby Singer. Points. Upfronts. Residuals.  Chances are, if you’re reading this you know what these words mean; if you don’t – well, that’s sort of the point.  When people ask what makes the people who work in the entertainment industry a culture (in the anthropological sense), I point out that they have their own language.  Or rather, in a technical sense, not their own language, but their own dialect.  A dialect is a specific subset of a language, used by people in a “discourse community.” This is an (admittedly imprecise) term that means, basically, people who use the same dialect.  Speech communities can be based on geographic region, socio-economic class, ethnicity – or in this case, profession.

There’s a lot to write about language in the industry (including what we mean by “the industry”); and this entry is just the beginning of a discussion on linguistic aspects of Hollywood culture.  But when we speak about language, one of the primary markers of a local dialect is the presumption that other locals know.  For example, check out the billboard pictured below:

anthropology of Hollywood

Do you know what an upfront is? The person who paid for this billboard is betting that you do.

“WE LOOK GOOD IN AN UPFRONT – even if you don’t know what an upfront is.”  Now, whoever paid a lot of money to put that billboard up on Wilshire blvd is aiming it at people who clearly do know what an upfront is – otherwise, why advertise to them?  But by adding the tagline “even if you don’t know…” they imply to those viewers that they are part of a privileged in-group, people in the know who understand the specialized dialect of the industry.  They’re saying that if you know local dialect, like the difference between Above-the-Line and Below-the-Line (and on which side of the line you stand) – then congratulations, you’re one of the cool kids.

But defining group identity is just one of the effect of language; specialized language – or jargon, if you prefer – is actually handy to people doing their jobs.  One of the most common forms of local language is in the specialized professions of production.  Each of the professions involved in production has their own set of terms; a professional language, technically called a “cant.”  Sometimes when I talk to a friend who works cameras, for example, I can barely understand him.  In Hollywood, even the names for the jobs themselves have meaning only to those who already live and work here: gaffers, grips, and show runners, for example. And how many people in Poughkeepsie know what a production designer does?

Finally, the trades (another local term) are also famous for their use of specialized language.  The best-known example may be the famous Variety headline “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” – that is, people in rural areas aren’t going to see movies about rural life.  Variety also routinely uses terms like boffo, payola, and skein, and provides a dictionary of self-titled “slanguage” online.  Similarly, in its’ official history, The Hollywood Reporter proudly trumpets its use of localized language back in the day  (“Studios were referred to as ‘the plant.’ Directors would sign on to ‘megaphone’ a picture.”)

anthropology of Hollywood

The famous headline (in 1935, Variety cost 15 cents – and was published in New York)

Linguists believe that the way we speak influences the way we think.  I’m not sure what that means for the speech community using the local dialect we’re talking about here (that they want everything to be boffo?  That they see an actual line dividing workers in different parts of a production?); maybe it means that Southern Californians should have twenty different words to mean “70 degrees and sunny weather.”

(by the way – it’s not true that Eskimos have twenty words for snow)

— Scott Frank

  • Two exhaustive collections of the dialect of the entertainment industry can been found in Movie Speak: How to Talk Like You Belong on a Movie Set by Tony Bill (a producer) and Strike the Baby and Kill the Blonde: And Insider’s Guide to Film Slang by Dave Knox (a camera operator).  Actually, it’d be interesting to compare the two in-depth, to see the differences in dialect from people with different jobs in the industry.
  • For a more academic look at the language of different professions, you can look for the work of linguist Roger Shuy (he’s written about the language employed by lawyers, doctors, and other professionals).
  • People keep asking what an upfront is, so: upfronts are presentations that networks hold for advertisers, in order to convince them to purchase air time for ads.  They have also become the de-facto place for major networks to unveil their lineup of programs; so often it’s the first place where a shows’ future (renewal or cancellation) is confirmed.

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Housewives and Death – Ritual Violence onscreen

5 04 2012

The L.A. Times recently ran an article on the lawsuit former cast member Nicollete Sheridan is bringing against the producers of Desperate Housewives.  There’s lots to culturally unpack about that whole situation, but what struck me was that the article noted that in course of the show’s eight seasons, 49 characters have been killed off.  Forty-nine! This isn’t a police procedural, or a show that takes place in a combat zone or a deadly meat-packing plant; in fact, it’s supposed to be a white, upper-middle class neighborhood.  Housewives takes place in a tough neighborhood – according to LAPD statistics, there have been just eleven actual homicides in the past six years in all of West L.A. (the 405 to the ocean, and the 10 north to Sunset blvd).  Can you imagine if a similar upper middle-class neighborhood in L.A. to the one depicted on the show actually had that crime rate?  It’d be in the news every day (and then, imagine if a predominantly poor or ethnic neighborhood had the same rate; would the coverage be as extensive?)

anthropology of Hollywood

Map showing locations of L.A. county homicides (bigger circles indicate more murders per area)

Not that anyone expects TV to depict reality; certainly not with an explicitly escapist show like Desperate Housewives.  Violence, especially ritualized violence, is a common subject for anthropologists to focus on.  “Rituals” to anthropologists are almost any behavior that occurs over and over, according to certain social rules (sometimes written, but often oral or even unspoken).  So yes, your Quinceanera or Bar Mitzvah were rituals, but so are the dance of studio contract negotiations, or the Academy Awards.  “Ritualized violence” is violence enacted in a specific, rule-driven way.  Examples could be a blood vendetta in which both sides are trapped by social rules that keep the an endless cycle of violence going; or the “jumping in” ritual for a gang, where current members beat on prospective ones.

In a sense, most of the violence we see on TV, and to some degree in movies, appears in a ritualized way.  Almost all police procedurals are like this, in which the pursuit of the crime unfolds the same way every week.  On a show like Castle, the ritual is followed with almost robotic devotion: each episode opens with a murder, the cops bring in exactly one wrong suspect, then after a flash of intuition bring in the right one.  This isn’t a critique; I enjoy and appreciate genre conventions, and the writers there do an excellent job of following them.

anthropology of Hollywood

Duels are an extremely ritualized form of violence (this one is illustrating a scene in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin)

Violence-wise, even individual fights in movies and on TV to some sense follow a cultural script: in a well-choreographed fight scene, certain things will occur every time – a flurry of blows, a moment where the adversary gets the upper hand and things look grim for Our Hero, and then a final bold/desperate/lucky move that results in triumph.  This script has been followed from the days when Errol Flynn dueled sword-to-sword with Basil Rathbone to modern times, when Matt Damon throws everything he has (literally) at his opponents in the Bourne movies.  You can trust me on this one not because I’m not just an anthropologist, but a fight choreographer, too – well, that’s my single IMDB credit, anyway.

One final note about onscreen violence: a 2008 study by economists Gordon B. Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna  (“Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?”) showed that on weekends when violent action movies get released, violent crime actually decreases.  They propose a number of reasons for this: the primary one is that people who are likely to commit violent acts like to go see violent movies.  Since those people are in movie theatres, they’re a)not out and about, committing crimes, and b)not drinking, which is positively correlated with increased violence.  In fact, Dahl and DellaVigna speculate that the release of a big, violence-oriented action movie results in 1,000 fewer assaults on opening weekend.  And people say movies aren’t good for you…

— Scott Frank


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Welcome to Hollywood Sapien – the Anthropology of Hollywood!

7 03 2012

Hello; my name is Scott; I’m an anthropologist (that is, I have a Ph.D. in it), and I’ve been studying the entertainment industry for over ten years. 

What can an anthropologist tell you about the entertainment industry?  When most people think of anthropologists – if they think of us at all – it’s in terms of studying remote tribes: in Papua New Guinea, perhaps, or among the !Kung bushmen.  Occasionally you get an image of Indiana Jones, or for the people who remember their anthropology course back in freshman year, Margaret Mead.  When people at a party ask what I do and hear “I’m an anthropologist,” they say “oh, you dig up dinosaur bones?”  The correct answer is to say “yes,” then slowly edge your way over to the punch bowl.

Anthropology is the study of human beings, in any place and any time; modern anthropologists use their skills for understanding human behavior everywhere, from remote villages in the Amazon or Himalayas to the bustling urban streets of Shanghai or Paris.  At Hollywood Sapien, the goal is to look with an anthropologist’s eye towards the “tribe” of the entertainment industry.  Those who work in the business know: people in Hollywood are like their own remote tribe – with specialized language, complex social networks, and strange behaviors that seem bizarre to outsiders.  Over the years I’ve presented scholarly articles and papers on casting professionals, actors, scientific and technical consultants, headshots, and production design.  And with an estimated (by the MPAA) 193,200 people working in the entertainment industry, there’s plenty more to write about.  By the way, that number is low – there are about 192,000 people just working in the local Hollywood unions; if you include all the related jobs, the figure is much, much higher.

A New Yorker cover featuring Oscar "worshipers"

The anthropology of Hollywood: the entertainment industry tribe “worshiping” their Oscar idol

In 1949, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker first wrote about Hollywood from an anthro perspective.  She wanted to see how understanding the people who make movies [no significant TV then] helps to understand the final product  (in her words, “how the social system underlying the production of movies influences them”).  That was 63 years ago, and although in many ways the Hollywood of today is not the one she studied, the culture she described is familiar to any denizen of modern Los Angeles and the entertainment industry: the competition, the belief that everybody is just one “break” away from success or failure, the jealously-guarded profit figures, and the phenomenon whereby “schoolteachers, doctors, white-collar workers, and many others…spend their spare time writing movie scripts.”  That’s right, apparently that was true in 1949 as well as today.  So the fact that the guy who does your hair says he’s also writing a script is part of a long and noble tradition.

There are so many amazing, fascinating, crazy, and occasionally unbelievable things about the Industry; in the coming weeks and months (years?), there will be no shortage of subjects to write about.  I welcome discussions, responses, and suggestions for topics; this should be a conversation we all have, no a lecture.  Look forward to next time!

                                                                                 — Scott Frank

  • I shouldn’t be confused with the screenwriter Scott Frank (whose real name is Alan Scott Frank).  Pseudonyms, screen names, and naming conventions and will be covered in a future post.  For now let’s just note that nicknames and alternate names are common in cultures around the world.
  • People interested in a historical perspective on the Industry might enjoy Powdermaker’s original 1949 anthropology of Hollywood book, titled Hollywood, The Dream Factory.  Out of print for a number of years, you can find it on abebooks and Amazon.

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