Thoughts on Localising Hollywood
Courtney Brannon Donaghue’s book Localising Hollywood (BFI, 2017) is a treasure trove of media industries research focused on Hollywood’s global business structures through the lens of local markets. It begins with a straightforward overview of Hollywood’s relationship to global film distribution and production over two chapters, covering 1900-1970, and then the conglomerate era (as defined by Schatz) from the 1970s to the present. These brief capsule histories of Hollywood’s corporate finance structures relative to their ownership and focus on the market beyond North America are so good that I am planning on assigning them in future film history classes in lieu of the same sections in our university’s standard textbook, Thompson and Bordwell’s Film History. But these chapters are all rehashes of previously written history, buoyed not only by film historians, but a wide range of global media industries scholars writing since the mid-2000s about the impacts of globalization, convergence, and conglomeration on Hollywood’s business practices.
It is in the subsequent chapters where Donaghue’s work becomes transcendent, painting portraits of local production cultures which operate within, and alongside, Hollywood’s domestic operations. With chapters covering local-language production, international media hubs, and the MPA’s efforts to respond to the constantly-shifting circumstances of global media production. These chapters are built on existing scholarship (Havens, Lotz, Appadurai, Mosco, Wasko & Erickson, Miller, et. al) calling for examination of these exact parameters through innovative and local approaches. Donaghue’s methodology thus focuses on the intersection of the global and the local, and she uses a “mid-level” view of the media industries, studying mid-level operations, including personnel who must “navigate the interactions above and the dynamics below” their position in the corporate structure. (62)
Personally, I found the fourth and fifth chapters to be the most illuminating, focused as they are on local-language productions and Hollywood’s involvement in international media hubs. These two chapters reveal a lot about the studios’ global footprint that is new, exciting, and provides fertile ground for continued study on a number of levels, and would be useful for teaching global media in a number of different contexts, including in media theory and media industries courses. Likewise, they provided plenty of fodder for my own thinking through of the global film market relative to my own research, a nut I have yet to crack fully outside of global television format exchange (official and unofficial).
The rest of the book is quite good, but some of it feels like a rehash of material that has already been covered, if not quite in the same way. Thus, while the focus on mid-level involvement in the chapter on global franchising provides some insight to the unique qualities of putting these types of films together at an intersectional level, it feels akin to retelling a familiar story from the perspective of a side character in the narrative, something the rest of the book manages to avoid. That said, for undergraduates and new grad students, even that material is engaging and enlightening in some ways I haven’t seen before, and which they will no doubt find useful. I’ll begin incorporating this book into my classes next semester, and think it will provide a good foundation for working through the various dynamics at play in global media production, and be useful as a starting point for getting students to think about their methodological focus when conducting their own research, especially in upper-division media industries and film history classes.
