Tinseltown on the Move.

• Author: Drake, Nora
• Position: SILVER SCREEN

PICTURE A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE SET. What do you see?--probably a soundstage with all the trimmings: giant klieg lights, expensive cameras, and hundreds of people--all the components of the perfect manufactured setting. Increasingly, though, it is becoming a myth. Take the superhero film "Logan" (2017), which features the Marvel Comics character Wolverine. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, with locations as diverse as Oklahoma and the Mexican border, the film actually was shot primarily in Louisiana, due in large part to the tax incentives offered by the state.

As moviemaking becomes a more global enterprise, sets today can be constructed anywhere (often more cheaply than in California). Moving a film's location to Atlanta, Toronto, or even China is a phenomenon known as "runaway production," and it is affecting the industry as a whole.

Michael Curtin, the Mellichamp Chair of Global Studies and a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, examines the effects of this practice and the increasingly global Hollywood labor market in Voices of Labor: Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood. Curtin, along with his coeditor Kevin Sanson (Queensland University of Technology), spent two years talking to Hollywood craftspeople about their concerns with the changing industry and the ways that globalization has affected their jobs. The book features more than 20 interviews with the creative masterminds behind the movie magic, including makeup artists, location managers, and visual effects supervisors.

Though it represents a broad range of job titles, a few common themes emerge in the book. One is that many in the industry feel anxiety about having to move themselves, and possibly their families, across the globe for a job. Even worse, they often push themselves to the point of exhaustion to try to make a smaller crew or budget feasible. "These are people who give quite a bit to their work," says Curtin. "The passion for craft is something that is a major theme of the book but, because they love what they do, they are willing to go the extra mile to prove that they can do more with less. This makes them especially susceptible to exploitation."

Curtin, who has worked as a producer in film and television, and is on the board of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, sees the issue as being inextricably linked to the global nature of modern production. Skilled craftspeople will move to where the jobs are...