A History of Hollywood’s Outsourcing Debate

This book provides a critical history of runaway production, a phrase used by Hollywood production labor to describe the outsourcing of film work to foreign locations. Beginning with its inception in the 1940s, Camille Johnson-Yale argues that runaway production represents Hollywood’s historical evolution from a place to a global commodity.

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A History of Hollywood’s Outsourcing Debate: Runaway Production provides a critical history of runaway production from its origins in postwar Hollywood to its present uses in describing a global network of diverse television and film production communities. Through extensive archival research, Camille Johnson-Yale chronicles Hollywood’s postwar push for investment in European production markets as a means for supporting the economy of America’s wartime allies while also opening industry access to lucrative trade relationships, exotic locations, and inexpensive skilled labor. For Hollywood’s studio production labor, however, the story of runaway production documents the gradual loss of power over the means of television and motion picture production. Though the phrase has taken on several meanings over its expansive history, it is argued that runaway production has ultimately served as a powerful, metaphorical rallying cry for a labor community coming to terms with a globalizing Hollywood industry that increasingly functions as an exportable process and less as a defined, industrial place.