HUMA 2740

Lecture 11

- Still left other parts of industry unorganized

- Actor’s Equity Association – a theatre-based union failed to organize
film actors in 1919
- Fearing that Equity might be successful, MPPDA set up the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927, a company union
o Also the group that has an annual awards show to honour
achievements of people in industry
- Academy divided into five branches: producers, writers, directors,
actors, and technicians
- Was and still an association open to membership by invitation only
- Was and is elitist, bargaining power with management, as individuals,
was and is greater than that of their peers in the traditional crafts
- Strategy worked as people in the acting and writing professions were
initially content to let the Academy represent them
- All changed with Great Depression, during which a number of things
happened that changed the face of labour relations in America
- Erosion of living standards for most American workers changed
- Movie industry didn’t suffer as badly as other industry (people still
went to see movies to escape), the movie business did
- Studios reacted by cutting back wages – started a “temporary
measure” which reduced wages by up to 50% and was to last for only
two months but many studios made the reductions permanent and
the Academy was powerless to stop movie bosses
- A second thing that occurred was advent of President Roosevelt’s
New Deal Administration, an attempt to bring the US economy out of
 the Depression by pursuing a number of policies that went against
the grain of the conventional business wisdom of the time and that
encouraged cooperation between management and workers
- In order to placate workers, who helped get Roosevelt elected, the
program recognized their rights to organize and bargain collectively
Varieties of Televisual Experience

- May ignore TV, leaving it on, when doing other things

- Minimal level of attention and sufficient mastery of TV conventions
both recognize when program is worth watching and to make some
sense out of the snippet to which actually pay attention – indicates
sufficient competence in decoding TV texts and familiarity with
American commercial culture that we can drop-in and drop-out at will
- Tech change provided us with 2 other ways to watch TV: to channel
surfing and multiple screen viewing
- When we watch TV casually, we pay enough attention to make sense
of the program, identify with its characters and enjoy it
- Casual viewing means that we are not so engaged with the
characters and narratives that we resent the commercial interruptions
- When viewers like a program but dislike a particular character or
story, we may selectively ignore what we don’t like and attend to
those characters or segments that we do like – viewers essentially
rework a program to better suit themselves  focused viewing
- Program producers use ensemble casts and multiple story arcs to try
manage focused viewers within the commodity audience
- Engaged viewing – viewer is absorbed with a television series,
develops considerable expertise in series’ texts and intertexts and
may seek further info regarding series’ creator, actors and creative
personnel