Television Producers Go to the Movies: Transforming Professional Identities
TELEVISION PRODUCERS GO TO THE MOVIES
Transforming Professional Identities
In the age of streaming, the increased prestige of television has attracted major Hollywood talent—from A-listers to beloved character actors—to series production. On HBO, Big Little Lies (2017-) boasts an all-star cast including Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Laura Dern. Perhaps most famously (and ultimately, infamously), House of Cards (2013-2018) on Netflix turned on the participation of Kevin Spacey, whose films had already sustained viewer attention on the service. More recently, Netflix has turned instead to film stars including Emma Stone, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, and many more. By 2018, Amazon Prime Video had secured Julia Roberts—still one of the top-paid actresses in Hollywood by some metrics (K. Elkins 2019)—to headline its Homecoming (2019-) series. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the diminished prospects for film exhibition, even those A-listers who would refuse to work in television might soon find their work debuting on domestic streaming services rather than theatrically.
Despite these recent migrations of film talent to television, it is important to remember that television has long served as a stepping stone to the film industry. This is not to endorse the idea of film as some higher calling, but quite oppositely to recognize television as a training ground in which the craft of media making has been learned and a source of talent that can bring change and innovation to the film industry. Only the most obvious example is Steven Spielberg, who, despite his reputation as the master of cinematic spectacle, built his career on a foundation of television work. Spielberg directed episodes of series like Night Gallery (1970-1973), Marcus Welby MD (1969-1976), and Columba (1968-2003) before making made-for-TV films like Duel (1971), cutting his teeth on television. In that light, one could consider whether his success as a filmmaker depended significantly on his televisual literacy. Spielberg was, of course, not novel or unique in having arrived in the film industry through a career in television; in fact, film historians Michael Pye and Linda Myles (1979) characterize Spielberg as part of a new generation of so-called “movie brats” whose film school educations distinguished them from an earlier cadre of television-educated filmmakers who had already come up through the broadcast medium. Well before Spielberg, directors like Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, and Bob Rafelson had become “notable innovators” in film after early careers directing television in the 1950s (Petrie and Stoneman 2014, 61). Moreover, Spielberg is not alone in having become a household name synonymous with the cinema by way of television. Before his production company Bad Robot took the reins of major film franchises like Mission: Impossible, the Star Trek reboot trilogy, and the Star Wars sequel trilogy, contemporary Hollywood visionary JJ Abrams established himself as a driving force behind television series including Felicity (1998-2002), Alias (2001-2006), and Lost (2004-2010). The professional trajectories of some of the most notable US filmmakers have thus run through television for decades.
This is not to say that television has been an in-road to film for everyone. Of course, we could name many notable filmmakers who have never worked in the television medium. But more importantly, the pathway to film production that runs through television is harder for some to tread than others. The exemplars mentioned so far all share in common not just success in leveraging television work into film careers, but also professional and social privileges as white cisgendered men. To ask how they reveal a pathway from television to film is also to consider what barriers might exist to get on that pathway in the first place and what inequalities might present obstacles along the way. The question of how the television industry supports film professionals is also a question of whose career aspirations that relationship does and does not support. According to The Los Angeles Times, only a dozen of the top-100 grossing films of 2019 were directed by women, who represented only 10.6% of all directors working overall, with less than 1% of those opportunities going to women of color (Sakoui 2020). This means that no matter what role television may or may not play, the pathways open to women and people of color to filmmaker careers are fewer and farther in between. An exploration of the way in which the professional pathway into film from television is constructed and made meaningful might therefore allow a better understanding of how such inequalities are produced. From that understanding of the way television has served as a meaningful gateway to career opportunity, we might also identify an opportunity to imagine how change and greater equity can follow.
With that in mind, this chapter develops several instructive case studies that reveal how some television professionals have transitioned into filmmaking careers, how these transformations of professional identity have come to be understood in the entertainment press, and how these professional advancements have transformed the way Hollywood filmmaking is understood. In doing so, it will be possible to identify the professional pathway from television to film both as one in which white men have been privileged in the past and as one that offers a path to greater inclusion in the future.
To support this examination, the chapter puts considerable focus on the way in which Marvel Studios has repeatedly turned to former television professionals to guide their extremely lucrative filmmaking enterprise (with a combined box office earning of over $8.5 billion over 23 films since 2008 as of this writing) (Box Office Mojo n.d.). As the centerpieces and culminations of their everything-is-connected Marvel Cinematic Universe strategy, the Avengers films have been consistently produced in collaboration between studio head Kevin Feige and a director whose most recent and most prominent credits were located in the world of television. The first Avengers film, released in 2012, was directed by Joss Whedon, then a cult-favorite television auteur known for the genre series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Angel (1999-2004), Firefly (2002), and Dollhouse (2009-2010). While these shows attracted dedicated fan followings, none were mainstream hits, and Whedon’s sole feature film directing credit prior to The Avengers was the continuation of Firefly in the form of the 2005 box office failure Serenity—offering less than definitive proof of his ability to translate television success to blockbuster filmmaking. Nevertheless, Whedon’s The Avengers would deliver record box office returns, and he would carry on in this central creative role through the 2015 sequel Avengers: Age of Ultron (which meant not only directing the film, but consulting with directors assigned to Marvel’s other projects). Following creative differences over that sequel, however, Whedon stepped away and Marvel sought new filmmakers to help steward the franchise. Next up were brothers Anthony and Joe Russo who, like Whedon, had some prior filmmaking credentials (most notably the 2002 indie release Welcome to Collinwood and the 2006 romantic comedy Уоп, Me and Dupree), but hardly a track record proving their experience as stewards of a major action blockbuster. Yet like Whedon, the Russo brothers possessed a long list of television credentials, having directed the pilots for single-camera comedies, including Arrested Development (2003-2006, 2013-2019), for which they won an Emmy, and Community (2009-2015), for which they continued to serve as executive producers. After being hired by Marvel to direct the 2014 espionage thriller Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the Russo brothers directed the 2016 follow-up Captain America: Civil War and then stepped into the role vacated by Whedon to helm both Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), released back-to-back in 2018 and 2019. Marvel has thus demonstrated a consistent pattern of entrusting its most valuable anchors in their film franchise to creators who honed their skills in television.
As much, then, as the success of the studio is a story of convergence between comics and film, we might also reconsider it as an industrial and creative crossover between film and television, where the production of blockbuster cinema relies extensively on the professional identities and creative skillsets of another entertainment field.
To explore these intersections, this chapter examines an archive of industry discourse that constructs meaning, identity, and value for these professional figures while trying to make some kind of sense out of the practices and decision-making processes of studios and other employers. As media industry scholars, including John Caldwell, have argued, trade journals can serve as “deep texts” that enable the communication and circulation of knowledge within and across different communities of industry workers (2009, 202). As publications that attract a professional readership (although surely nonprofessionals can read them, too), trade journals help generate shared, commonsense perceptions about how industries work, producing what Timothy Havens has called the “industry lore” (2006, 123) that regulates and shapes the way practitioners engage in and understand their work. While they often parrot press releases and adopt celebratory perspectives toward the industries they cover, trade journals nevertheless represent only one site of critical and reflexive discourse through which industry cultures are constructed. To examine the culture of professional development that extends from television to film through Marvel Studios, this chapter extends from an extensive review of stories published primarily in Hollywood trade journals from 2010 to 2020 that work to make sense of the hiring of figures like Whedon and the Russos as well as their career trajectories following their filmmaking successes. Although many publications like Variety and Deadline contribute to this discourse, as well as popular venues like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many fan sites, the scope of this chapter limits what all could be examined, so emphasis has been placed on The Hollywood Reporter because of the greater resources it tends to devote to covering superhero films and other genre fare. Of course, the things that these directors and others say about their careers to The Hollywood Reporter are performative; but it is a specific kind of performance given in one of the preeminent venues in entertainment industry reporting, aimed at generating meaning and value from media work.
From this archive, the chapter first explores the advancement of the Russo brothers from their work in television, revealing the ways in which their television credits were positioned as commonsense, logical qualifications for Marvel’s film enterprise. In doing so, this analysis demonstrates both efforts to make sense of this remarkable career trajectory and the strategies used to construct and assign value to television work within filmmaking practice. From there, the chapter next traces similarities surrounding the hiring of Joss Whedon, but with a focus much more on the ways in which the television-creator-turned-filmmaker is narrativized as the subject of transformation. Both Whedon and the Russos emerge in trade reporting not as television-film hyphenates who maintain a position in both industries, but instead as figures who have transitioned into new roles and spaces exclusive to film with their television pasts behind them. Even when these directors did, in fact, continue working in television, this industry discourse often did the counterfactual work of suggesting they continued to work exclusively as film professionals. The resulting professional culture is not one in which the lines between television and film become blurred so much as one in which professionals accrue value by crossing from one side to the other. At the same time, however, this crossover potential carries the possibilities of transforming film itself, and thus the chapter reveals the ways in which these career trajectories destabilize perceptions of the cinema and invite new kinds of professional experiences and competencies. After examining the value that industry lore ascribes to the perspectives that figures like the Russos bring to television, the chapter ends by reflecting on the potential for this professional pathway to diversify film production. While the white men at the center of this industry lore evince the film industry’s continued refusal to look for value in a more diverse pool of contributors, this interest in the value of television creativity creates a parallel opportunity to imagine more inclusive forms of professional transformation. Women of color including Ava DuVernay have developed career narratives in which movement between television and film figures less as a step up between hierarchical fields and more as a fluid and non-hierarchical form of creative agency. While dominant industry narratives position professional movement from television to film work as a permanent upgrade for the worthy, these messier and more flexible arrangements reveal that these hierarchies need not remain intact.
