Contract and Control in the Entertainment Industry

Greenfield, Steve; Osborn, Guy

doi:10.4324/9781315259376

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Greenfield and Osborn explore limits to contractual subordination in the neoclassical model; in some British cases disputing recording artists’ contracts: Whilst the classical approach should hold that the contract is immune from challenge beyond very narrow exceptions [… c]ourts have shown themselves willing to look at […] agreements and consider if these are reasonable by reference to the interests of the parties and a broader public policy consideration. (2007: 13; see also 1998)…”

Section: Classical and Neoclassical Modelsmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…Conversely, if no simple unfreedom lies within commercial industries, no simple freedom lies outside of them. In metaphors of artists’ ‘entrance’ into industries where their value is contractually ‘coloniz[ed]’, Greenfield and Osborn risk reifying the romantic-individualist persona of an artist fully formed outside any market (1998: 180–1; in sharpest contrast, for Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them’; 1972: 122). They might have good reasons for wanting to protect ‘artistic integrity and creativity’ from industrialization (Greenfield and Osborn, 1994: 126), but rather than any self-present good, the authority of such values reflects an institutional achievement, in negotiating and legitimating particular roles for particular workers.…”

Section: Organizational Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Negotiating contract: The commerce and artifice of dealing for creative work

Heuman¹

2015

International Journal of Cultural Studies

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Following growing bodies of scholarship concerned with the social and cultural lives of economic forms, this article tries to recover some of the complexity of contracts in creative work. While contracts might seem to reflect narrowly economic determinations, as mere instruments of commerce, sociological models emphasize their contingency and artifice. Moving toward and forward from such models, this article synthesizes a more socio cultural model, approaching contract as a scene of contestation, communication and constitution. It develops these themes in a series of engagements with predominant legal, economic and sociological models of contract; across these engagements, it draws upon and draws together cases of recording artists and film stars, while also drawing broader comparisons with other creative workers.

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Section: Classical and Neoclassical Modelsmentioning

confidence: 83%

Section: Organizational Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negotiating contract: The commerce and artifice of dealing for creative work

Heuman¹

2015

International Journal of Cultural Studies

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“…Yet the vulnerability of aspiring pop acts (and established pop stars) also has a legal basis: the contract by which the company can insist that the act must do this or must not do that, where the punishment for failure to comply can include indefinite professional isolation, not just being dropped by the company. As Greenfield and Osborn (1998) show, the standard recording contract gives the company the power to keep the act under obligation, without legal access to a market for their labour, indefinitely. It was exactly this professional detention that awaited Kesha in 2014 when she sought to end her contractual relationship with producer Dr. Luke, and in which she spent several years unable to offer her services to anyone else 2…”

Section: Commodification Gender and A ‘Long Fetch’ Of Music Profiteeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In popular music studies, the analysis of individual contracts for the sale of singers’ labour power (e.g. performance and recording contracts) is not as developed as are studies of music and law that focus on copyright, censorship, cultural policy or collective bargaining (but see Stahl 2010, 2013; Greenfield and Osborn, 1998). This paper aims to contribute to that development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are workers musicians? Kesha Sebert, Johanna Wagner and the gendered commodification of star singers, 1853–2014

Stahl

2021

Pop. Mus.

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The legal history of pop singer-songwriter Kesha Sebert has brought to light serious problems of gender and power in the US recording industry: it remains male dominated to its core. These contemporary problems have specific historical origins. Contextualising the 2008–2014 lawsuit between two rival producers over the exclusive right to Kesha's labour power suggests that elements of Victorian gender relations and class war were baked into the doctrine on which that 21st century case turned. Drawing empirically on court documents, and analytically on perspectives from history and sociology as well as feminist legal scholarship, this paper explains the persistent vitality of a ‘gendered erotic triangle’ in music production. By contextualising Kesha's gendered legal triangulation, and analysing a seemingly technical quibble about the interpretation of a statute of (temporal) limitation, this paper frames the commodification of singers’ labour power as central to a gendered project of class domination.

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“…But Davis' forceful language also mirrors the political-legal force available to companies holding such contracts (Greenfield and Osborn, 1998). The well-known contracts of Davis and De Havilland are among the many that evince this politics of long-term capture and control; their characteristic suspension clauses will play a central role in this analysis.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Employee in a Cage? Olivia De Havilland, Warner Bros. Pictures, and the ‘Limit Case’ of Star Employment

Stahl

2016

Entertainment and Sports Law Journal

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In 1944, two California courts agreed with actor Olivia De Havilland's claim that the state's seven year limit on the enforceability of employment contracts applied to her 1936 contract with Warner Bros. Pictures, and refused to enforce the contract beyond its seventh anniversary. This article revisits the well-known De Haviland v. Warner Bros. Pictures (1944) Appellate Court decision, and its lesser-known, lower court antecedent, in order to explore the decisions' related but distinct assumptions about employment, employers, and employees. Both courts agreed (1) that employees need protection from excesses of employee power, (2) that employment is a public, social phenomenon, and (3) that protection may (and must) be afforded by the police powers of the state; this article analyses illuminating differences in the courts' rationales. Examining the politics of star employment is worthwhile for more than just historical reasons: star employment constitutes a "limit case" of employment, illuminating in its extremes features that are central to but generally obscure in the run of daily working life. The limit case, in this instance, re-injects controversy into what appears to be a settled institution of modern life. Revisiting episodes of struggle over the terms of star employment makes available a set of critical concepts useful in contesting (neo)liberal common sense about employment as a strictly private affair. De Havilland's two cases and decisions-fascinating and compelling in what they contribute to our knowledge of Hollywood's labour history-bequeath intellectual tools useful in the dissection of the politics of employment today.

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Contract and Control in the Entertainment Industry

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Negotiating contract: The commerce and artifice of dealing for creative work

Negotiating contract: The commerce and artifice of dealing for creative work

Are workers musicians? Kesha Sebert, Johanna Wagner and the gendered commodification of star singers, 1853–2014

Employee in a Cage? Olivia De Havilland, Warner Bros. Pictures, and the ‘Limit Case’ of Star Employment

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