John T Caldwell
Biographic Data
| ID | 94610 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John T Caldwell |
| GIVEN NAMES | John T |
| FAMILY NAME | Caldwell |
| SIGNATURE | CALDWELL J T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0259-3589 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
St Century Televisuality? Golden Ages and Collateral Damage in Industry Stress Research
This article examines how the innovations of, and fallout from, the post-1980s US multichannel cable era both prefigured and were transformed by the 21st-century online platform streaming era. Intense corporate competition, in which traditional networks and studios collided with disruptive new firms, triggered producers to innovate new ways of financing, making, and conceptualizing media content. Both disruptions spurred mergers, bankruptcies, ho…
Three Films of Yehuda Sharim
Within our current moment of scripted immigration crisis it is difficult to grasp fully how the delegated punditry of 24/7 news media reportage in the United States has effectively muzzled the actual voices of immigrants and refugees. This is certainly true until one screens three recent films by media artist and filmmaker Yehuda Sharim. I thought a great deal about the art of media silencing while watching Sharim’s films We Are In It (2016), See…
Production Culture
In Production Culture, John Thornton Caldwell investigates the cultural practices and belief systems of Los Angeles-based film and video production workers: not only those in prestigious positions such as producers and directors but also many "below-the-line" laborers, including gaffers, editors, and camera operators. Caldwell analyzes the narratives and rituals through which workers make sense of their labor and critique the film and TV industry…
Wired TV
This collection looks at the post–network television industry’s heady experiments with new forms of interactive storytelling—or wired TV—that took place from 2005 to 2010 as the networks responded to the introduction of broadband into the majority of homes and the proliferation of popular, participatory Web 2.0 companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Contributors address a wide range of issues, from the networks’ sporadic efforts to engage…
Para-Industry, Shadow Academy
What does it mean to critically theorize a media industry that critically theorizes itself? How should scholars engage, describe and research media industries in which reflexive forms of self-scrutiny, posed transparency and meta-reflection have become dominant and widely circulated forms of commercial screen content and entertainment? In this chapter, Caldwell maps the outlines not of ‘paratexts’ but of what he terms ‘para-industry’. This refers…
Stress Aesthetics and Deprivation Payroll Systems
The working conditions and production cultures of Hollywood are tightly and interactively woven together with film and television working conditions in many other parts of the world. In Production Culture, I argued that the de facto mission of Hollywood production's "race to the bottom" in the new millennium and the age of user-generated content has been "to acquire content for little or nothing and to get everyone to work for free."1 Consider ho…
Distributed Creativity in Film and Television
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 researc…
Worker Blowback
Breaking Ranks
The recession has accelerated production labor's alarming but seemingly inevitable “race to the bottom.” The corporate goals fueling labor's steep dive are familiar: to achieve greater corporate fl
Hive-Sourcing Is the New Out-Sourcing
Hive-Sourcing Is the New Out-Sourcing:Studying Old (Industrial) Labor Habits in New (Consumer) Labor Clothes John T. Caldwell (bio) When the tools of production are available to everyone, everyone becomes a producer.1 Chris Anderson, The Long Tail Brecht, meet Wired. We stumble all over ourselves to engage new media, digital platforms, and online fan activities—YouTube, MySpace, critical fan sites, social networks—as a next important stage in cin…
Production Studies
Introduction: Production Studies: Roots and Routes, Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell. Part One: Histories of Media Production Studies. 1. Bringing the Social Back In: Studies of Production Cultures and Social Theory, Vicki Mayer. 2. Industry-Level Studies and the Contributions of Gitlin's Inside Prime Time, Amanda Lotz 3. Leo C. Rosten's Hollywood: Power, Status, and the Primacy of Economic and Social Networks in Cultural Pr…
Screen studies and industrial 'theorizing
Journal Article Screen studies and industrial 'theorizing' Get access John T. Caldwell John T. Caldwell [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 50, Issue 1, Spring 2009, Pages 167–179, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjn074 Published: 01 March 2009
Critical Industrial Practice
This article examines the integral, reflexive, and critical functions that industrial texts play in contemporary corporate repurposing, cross-collateralization, and branding. More than simply practitioner discourses, the article takes as its object what it terms the “low theoretical” tendencies found in “deep” industrial texts to better understand the critical-theoretical competencies and marketing imperatives behind the textual practices of the …
Convergence Television
New Media
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTEREverett & Caldwell SECTION 1: DIGITEXTUAL DECONSTRUCTIONS 1. Digitextuality and Click Theory: Theses on Convergence Media and Digital Reproduction, Anna Everett 2. Media in the Digital Age 3.The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication, Bertolt Brecht 4. Invisible Media, Laura Marks 5. Exit Meat: Digital Bodies in a Virtual World, Mischa Peters SECTION 2: DIGITEXTUALITY AESTHETICS 7. Space Invaders: Thoughts on Technology and th…
Alternative Media in Suburban Plantation Culture
This article reconsiders the concept of `alternative media', and describes a set of alternative media projects produced over six years in and around migrant farm worker camps in southern California. The media projects described here (small-format videos within marginalized labor communities), challenge assumptions about `alternative media' on three levels - as a theoretical concept, as media practice and as a political project. The article argues…
Representation and Complicity in the Suburban Campo
Research Article| November 01 2003 Representation and Complicity in the Suburban Campo: Reflections of a Documentary Filmmaker John T. Caldwell John T. Caldwell John Caldwell, associate professor in the UCLA Department of Film, Television and Digital Media, produced and directed the films Freak Street to Goa (1989) and Rancho California (2002). He is the author of Televisuality (1999, the editor of Electronic Media and Technoculture (2000), and t…
Statement by John T. Caldwell, California State University, Long Beach
Televisuality as a Semiotic Machine
Citing a trend, preparing for it, and riding its popularity can spell success for the agency and its client. Surfers talk about a swell, [Jeff Weiss] says. When you're sitting out past the waves you see a swell in the horizon and three waves later you know that'll be the big one. We're like that. -Diane Struzzi, Scandals, Rumors, and Rock 'n' Roll: On the Edge with Margeotes, Fertitta, and Weiss, Millimeter, October 1989, 126
Critical Industrial Practice
This article examines the integral, reflexive, and critical functions that industrial texts play in contemporary corporate repurposing, cross-collateralization, and branding. More than simply practitioner discourses, the article takes as its object what it terms the “low theoretical” tendencies found in “deep” industrial texts to better understand the critical-theoretical competencies and marketing imperatives behind the textual practices of the …
Production Culture
In Production Culture, John Thornton Caldwell investigates the cultural practices and belief systems of Los Angeles-based film and video production workers: not only those in prestigious positions such as producers and directors but also many "below-the-line" laborers, including gaffers, editors, and camera operators. Caldwell analyzes the narratives and rituals through which workers make sense of their labor and critique the film and TV industry…
Screen studies and industrial 'theorizing
Journal Article Screen studies and industrial 'theorizing' Get access John T. Caldwell John T. Caldwell [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 50, Issue 1, Spring 2009, Pages 167–179, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjn074 Published: 01 March 2009
Breaking Ranks
The recession has accelerated production labor's alarming but seemingly inevitable “race to the bottom.” The corporate goals fueling labor's steep dive are familiar: to achieve greater corporate fl
Alternative Media in Suburban Plantation Culture
This article reconsiders the concept of `alternative media', and describes a set of alternative media projects produced over six years in and around migrant farm worker camps in southern California. The media projects described here (small-format videos within marginalized labor communities), challenge assumptions about `alternative media' on three levels - as a theoretical concept, as media practice and as a political project. The article argues…
Televisuality as a Semiotic Machine
Citing a trend, preparing for it, and riding its popularity can spell success for the agency and its client. Surfers talk about a swell, [Jeff Weiss] says. When you're sitting out past the waves you see a swell in the horizon and three waves later you know that'll be the big one. We're like that. -Diane Struzzi, Scandals, Rumors, and Rock 'n' Roll: On the Edge with Margeotes, Fertitta, and Weiss, Millimeter, October 1989, 126
Statement by John T. Caldwell, California State University, Long Beach
New Media
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTEREverett & Caldwell SECTION 1: DIGITEXTUAL DECONSTRUCTIONS 1. Digitextuality and Click Theory: Theses on Convergence Media and Digital Reproduction, Anna Everett 2. Media in the Digital Age 3.The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication, Bertolt Brecht 4. Invisible Media, Laura Marks 5. Exit Meat: Digital Bodies in a Virtual World, Mischa Peters SECTION 2: DIGITEXTUALITY AESTHETICS 7. Space Invaders: Thoughts on Technology and th…
Alternative Media in Suburban Plantation Culture
This article reconsiders the concept of `alternative media', and describes a set of alternative media projects produced over six years in and around migrant farm worker camps in southern California. The media projects described here (small-format videos within marginalized labor communities), challenge assumptions about `alternative media' on three levels - as a theoretical concept, as media practice and as a political project. The article argues…
Representation and Complicity in the Suburban Campo
Research Article| November 01 2003 Representation and Complicity in the Suburban Campo: Reflections of a Documentary Filmmaker John T. Caldwell John T. Caldwell John Caldwell, associate professor in the UCLA Department of Film, Television and Digital Media, produced and directed the films Freak Street to Goa (1989) and Rancho California (2002). He is the author of Televisuality (1999, the editor of Electronic Media and Technoculture (2000), and t…
Convergence Television
Critical Industrial Practice
This article examines the integral, reflexive, and critical functions that industrial texts play in contemporary corporate repurposing, cross-collateralization, and branding. More than simply practitioner discourses, the article takes as its object what it terms the “low theoretical” tendencies found in “deep” industrial texts to better understand the critical-theoretical competencies and marketing imperatives behind the textual practices of the …
Hive-Sourcing Is the New Out-Sourcing
Hive-Sourcing Is the New Out-Sourcing:Studying Old (Industrial) Labor Habits in New (Consumer) Labor Clothes John T. Caldwell (bio) When the tools of production are available to everyone, everyone becomes a producer.1 Chris Anderson, The Long Tail Brecht, meet Wired. We stumble all over ourselves to engage new media, digital platforms, and online fan activities—YouTube, MySpace, critical fan sites, social networks—as a next important stage in cin…
Production Studies
Introduction: Production Studies: Roots and Routes, Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell. Part One: Histories of Media Production Studies. 1. Bringing the Social Back In: Studies of Production Cultures and Social Theory, Vicki Mayer. 2. Industry-Level Studies and the Contributions of Gitlin's Inside Prime Time, Amanda Lotz 3. Leo C. Rosten's Hollywood: Power, Status, and the Primacy of Economic and Social Networks in Cultural Pr…
Screen studies and industrial 'theorizing
Journal Article Screen studies and industrial 'theorizing' Get access John T. Caldwell John T. Caldwell [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 50, Issue 1, Spring 2009, Pages 167–179, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjn074 Published: 01 March 2009
Breaking Ranks
The recession has accelerated production labor's alarming but seemingly inevitable “race to the bottom.” The corporate goals fueling labor's steep dive are familiar: to achieve greater corporate fl
Worker Blowback
Distributed Creativity in Film and Television
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 researc…
Stress Aesthetics and Deprivation Payroll Systems
The working conditions and production cultures of Hollywood are tightly and interactively woven together with film and television working conditions in many other parts of the world. In Production Culture, I argued that the de facto mission of Hollywood production's "race to the bottom" in the new millennium and the age of user-generated content has been "to acquire content for little or nothing and to get everyone to work for free."1 Consider ho…
Para-Industry, Shadow Academy
What does it mean to critically theorize a media industry that critically theorizes itself? How should scholars engage, describe and research media industries in which reflexive forms of self-scrutiny, posed transparency and meta-reflection have become dominant and widely circulated forms of commercial screen content and entertainment? In this chapter, Caldwell maps the outlines not of ‘paratexts’ but of what he terms ‘para-industry’. This refers…
Wired TV
This collection looks at the post–network television industry’s heady experiments with new forms of interactive storytelling—or wired TV—that took place from 2005 to 2010 as the networks responded to the introduction of broadband into the majority of homes and the proliferation of popular, participatory Web 2.0 companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Contributors address a wide range of issues, from the networks’ sporadic efforts to engage…
Production Culture
In Production Culture, John Thornton Caldwell investigates the cultural practices and belief systems of Los Angeles-based film and video production workers: not only those in prestigious positions such as producers and directors but also many "below-the-line" laborers, including gaffers, editors, and camera operators. Caldwell analyzes the narratives and rituals through which workers make sense of their labor and critique the film and TV industry…
Three Films of Yehuda Sharim
Within our current moment of scripted immigration crisis it is difficult to grasp fully how the delegated punditry of 24/7 news media reportage in the United States has effectively muzzled the actual voices of immigrants and refugees. This is certainly true until one screens three recent films by media artist and filmmaker Yehuda Sharim. I thought a great deal about the art of media silencing while watching Sharim’s films We Are In It (2016), See…
St Century Televisuality? Golden Ages and Collateral Damage in Industry Stress Research
This article examines how the innovations of, and fallout from, the post-1980s US multichannel cable era both prefigured and were transformed by the 21st-century online platform streaming era. Intense corporate competition, in which traditional networks and studios collided with disruptive new firms, triggered producers to innovate new ways of financing, making, and conceptualizing media content. Both disruptions spurred mergers, bankruptcies, ho…
Sociology (13 works) · Art (11 works) · Media studies (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (7 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (6 works) · Visual arts (6 works) · Art history (5 works)