The Lives of Kong: Labor and moviemaking in three acts

Investigating the globalization1 process called runaway production---Hollywood film studios moving film production to other countries and regions largely to avoid organized labor---is at the heart of The Lives of Kong: Labor and Moviemaking in Three Acts. It demonstrates that runaway production's devastating impact on the majority of unionized American film workers today emerges from an often bitterly contested history. Over three distinct periods, from the 1920s to 1971, from 1972 to 1998, and from 1999 to the present, domestic and foreign film studio management, workers and their unions, artists and craftspeople, and state, federal and other nations' government officials struggled over this issue in significantly different ways.;The re-historicizing of runaway production scholarship found in The Lives of Kong reclaims a much-needed scope for the discussion of its causes, consequences, and remedies. In addition, this study makes a unique contribution to labor history scholarshipby recovering aspects of the complex breadth of the history of entertainment labor unions. The project further contributes to the nascent study of globalization's impact on the middle and creative classes. In addition, this dissertation demonstrates how the links between film production processes and film content---a little-researched area---provide essential insight into the conditions under which runaway production emerges.;Using a multi-sited methodology appropriate to studying a globalization phenomenon, this study employs ethnographic methods, including oral history and participant-observation; along with analysis of 809 newspaper reports; and examination of production and film content analysis. The iconic 1933 film King Kong, famous for its depiction of a giant gorilla, simultaneously dramatizes an overseas American film production that goes terribly wrong. Each ensuing version, first by Dino De Laurentiis in 1976, and then by Peter Jackson in 2005, joins with the original to provide a time-specific springboard for the discussion of runaway production, including complicated portrayals of attitudes toward film work, film workers, and related explosive tensions involving race, gender and class. By re-connecting film process and product, while at the same time re-historicizing the runaway production debate, The Lives of Kong shows the efficacy of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of creative labor, leading to the potential for wide-ranging discussion of the relationships between image and power, which have public policy implications on both the national and international levels.;1 Social scientists usually use the term "globalization" to refer to the period initiated by the July 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire which helped plan financing for the post-World War II rebuilding of Europe. From the meeting came the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which was charged with the task of "preventing another global depression" by pressuring countries to apply fiscal policies that would stimulate economies (Stiglitz 2002). While the globalization literature makes a significant contribution to our understanding of postwar global forces, especially economic factors effecting third-world workers, for the purposes of an analysis involving Hollywood production, globalization begins earlier. For example, American motion picture involvement in the globalizing world had included the shift of motion picture productive power during World War I when the celluloid needed for European film production was used for the war effort, and so American film production could grow unimpeded by European competition (Cook 1996).