Does anyone know of good sources on the material production of US movies, both studio and independent? I’m particularly interested in the treatment of actors as workers. This became salient recently when a friend who is a union rep. with SAG told me about a multi-union wildcat strike on the set of a David O. Russell movie (which sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen). There are apparently complicated rules about pension funds and how much of a film’s financing has to be put in escrow to pay actors before filming can begin, and so on. This is an area I know next to nothing about, so if anyone can suggest a source for this kind of information, I’d be grateful.
I recall reading raves about Gerald Horne’s _Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950_. (On Amazon, that book led me to _Hollywood’s Other Blacklist_ about Union Struggles in Hollywood–Mike Nielsen.)
A couple years back, Edward Jay Epstein got a lot of press–and did a series of articles at Slate, which would probably still be available if you went and searched, about the the full economics of filmmaking — book’s called _The Big Picture_.
As to independents, John Sayles has a book _Thinking in Pictures_ that gets to many of the material mechanics of making a non-studio film (Matewan). Many of the books tied to Spike Lee’s films have such diaries/accounts; similarly, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust has some essays on the material problems of making that film. Richard Rodriguez has a book much touted by the whippersnappers.
I thought Mark Harris’ recent _Pictures at a Revolution_ was a pretty damn good read — an overview history of the best picture nominees of 1967, so it’s far less in depth, and it often ties to personalities and to aesthetics. But I really dug how it seemed to capture a much broader history of how films were made (and how the system was starting to shift).
Russell has major problems every time he steps behind the camera–is this a new pic, a recent turn of events?
Thanks, I’ll check these out. This is a new film (working title is ‘Nailed’) based on a bizarre screenplay written by Kristen Gore. I just read a story about this in the NYT: http://tinyurl.com/3ryfk6