This chapter will examine the systematic ways in which cultures of facilitation and “distributed creation” fuel Hollywood corporate, labor, and creative practices. The study brings together three substantial but largely invisible, ignored, or camouflaged sectors of Hollywood that are fundamentally important in the creation of film/TV screen content, yet have received scant attention from either scholars or critics: assistanting, marketing research rituals, and content development outsourcing. All three areas help constitute the industry's production infrastructure, which can be thought of, alternately, as interpersonal and inter-organizational networks through which the task of content creation is “distributed,” or as “catalytic” sites of mediation and negotiation that are subsequently erased by above-the-line creative executives: these habitually highjack credit for Hollywood's content creation on the basis of professional postures of managerial or personal exceptionalism.
Keywords:
collaborative production;
creative networks;
market research;
television assistants;
television development