Here’s another excerpt from Sherry B Ortner’s new book Not Hollywood, an ethnographic look at Independent Film since the late 80s. In this excerpt Sherry looks at social and economic background of producers in the independent sphere, finding that the majority come from upperclass background and educations.
The Sociology of Producers and the Neoliberal Economy of the 1990s
The independent producers who are part of this project are mostly within the age range of the filmmakers, Generation X, born between the early 1960s and the early 1980s. Some are a bit older, and most fall at the early end of the Gen X range, but on the whole there is not a major age/generation gap between the producers and the filmmakers. This is relevant in the sense that the producers and the filmmakers would share the worldview and the general aesthetic behind the independent films they make together. Beyond this, however, there are some interesting differences. First, gender: As we will see in the next chapter, women form a relatively small percent of directors and filmmakers. But it is a striking fact that women constitute almost half of the ranks of producers. In 1974, the Producers Guild of America (pga) recorded that 8 out of 3,068 members were female, or 0.3 percent (Abramowitz 2000: 65). According to Vance Van Petten, executive director of the pga, currently about 45 percent of its members are women (interview, December 13, 2007).
Next, class: It is an equally striking fact that independent producers tend to come from relatively high capital backgrounds and collectively are clearly part of the Professional Managerial Class or pmc. Many come from upper-middle-class families with significant amounts of money. Even if they are not all members of the pmc by virtue of money, they are almost uniformly so by virtue of higher education.
