Supply Chain Cinema: Producing Global Film Workers [Paperback]

Why are big budget films typically made across an array of seemingly dissociated sites?

Supply Chain Cinemashows how the production journeys of such films exemplify the principles of the supply chain, whose core imperative is to nimbly and opportunistically manufacturing wherever is most amenable and efficient.

Through extensive on-site investigations and in-depth interviews with film professionals, Kay Dickinson delivers nuanced insight into working practices in the UK and the UAE. Among the sites she examines is Warner Bros' permanent base at Leavesden Studios near London. From tax breaks designed to attract foreign projects to infrastructures, logistical support and expertise offered, she considers why Hollywood giants elect to make more of their films in Britain than in the USA.

Dickinson goes on to show how the UK's ambitions to enlarge its creative economies has opened up a host of competitive advantages with British higher education increasingly fashioned to conform to the needs of border-hopping enterprise, thus generating a workforce keenly adapted to the demands of blockbuster moviemaking.

Supply Chain Cinemais a critical reconceptualization of blockbuster film production and a scathing indictment of the ways in which higher education and skills training schemes have become complicit in producing a workforce amendable to demands of global capital. This is essential reading and a cautionary tale that troubles how governments and universities are responding to the creative economy. Kevin Sanson, Queensland Univl.