Hollywood

Hollywood—shorthand for the mainstream U.S. film and television industry—has been at the center of globalization in three ways. First, export markets have been crucial to its reputation and economic vitality. Second, it has filmed movies overseas, often drawing on creative labor from other countries in search of economies of production. Third, its export success has led to concerns about cultural imperialism.

After World War I, the European film industries were in disarray. Before the war, the United States had been a net importer of both film stock and movies, but afterward, exporting became a viable option. The U.S. State and Commerce departments began a series of efforts to promote Hollywood exports. World War II delivered another severe blow to European industries, whereas Hollywood succeeded in having the Marshall Plan serve as a means to open up the markets of countries receiving reconstruction aid to U.S. cinema.

Since that time, a combination of the state exerting economic pressure, the ability to cover production costs domestically, and the use of a new international division of cultural labor (NICL) has kept Hollywood in its position of global dominance. Externally, the U.S. government and film industry set up new cartels to market films [Page 809]everywhere, with special agencies created for Anglophone and Francophone Africa. Hollywood's American Motion Picture Export Company of Africa, for example, dominated cinema sales to former British colonies from the 1960s, when as a whole the continent hosted the screening of approximately 350 films a year, perhaps half of them from the United States. These arrangements were facilitated by the U.S. government through close to 200 publicly funded domestic film commissions, Pentagon money and facilities, ambassadorial services, and through the allocation of state funds from other nations.

U.S. companies own between 40% and 90% of the movies shown in most parts of the world. Between 1977 and 1996, U.S. “copyright industries”—as the United States likes to call them, implying comprehensive governmentalization and commodification in this elision of the more common term cultural industries—grew three times as quickly as the overall U.S. economy. Between 1980 and 1998, annual world trade in “texts” from the cultural industries increased from US$95.3 billion to US$387.9 billion. The most popular 39 films across the world in 1998 came from Hollywood, while the domestic market share of other major filmmaking countries was declining: The percentage of the box office taken by indigenous films was down; in some cases, these declines were to record low levels. These figures represented a significant change from the earlier part of the decade when European audiences for domestic films had increased. In eastern Europe, the story is similar. An analysis of films on television finds that Hollywood pictures drew the highest audiences in 27 nations across all continents in 2009. Fox International made US$200 million in 2005 from overseas sales; five years later, it was US$1 billion. Eighty percent of programming for children outside the global South and China comes from the United States in the 21st century. Nickelodeon, for example, is available in more than 150 countries. In western Europe, the dominant TV drama series in 2007 were all American: CSI: Miami, Desperate Housewives, Lost, Without a Trace, and The Simpsons. In Asia, 25 million fans were watching the three CSI shows. Hollywood's NICL operates through a blend of comprehensive studio facilities and highly desirable roles in the labor process that rely on the disaggregation of production across space. The NICL is adapted from the idea of a new international division of labor: The targeting of developing markets for labor and sales, and the shift from the spatial sensitivities of electrics to the spatial insensitivities of electronics, pushed businesses beyond treating Third World countries as suppliers of raw materials to looking on them as shadow-setters of the price of work, competing among themselves and with the First World for employment. As production was split across continents, the prior division of the globe into a small number of wealthy countries and a majority of underdeveloped ones was compromised.

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