Do state funding, geographic location, and networks matter?

ABSTRACT

Using a uniquely constructed data set, we look at the ecologies of creative careers in film/TV-drama/theatre, using a detailed interview questionnaire case study of eighty-two prominent workers in the Irish film/TV-drama/theatre sectors. Three influences on career progression are given special attention: state patronage, geographic location and networks. There is strong evidence to show that those interviewed consider state patronage as very important to their career development, particularly in relation to “breakthrough” events. Even this group depends on outside work, particularly in advertising, to supplement incomes. Our findings confirm that prominent creative workers tend to be geographically concentrated and consider such proximity to other creative workers as important. A very large proportion of them also consider networks/personal connections as very important to career success, in terms of three main advantages: work/job contacts, the generation of new ideas and moral support/understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative careers
• theatre
• film/TV
• state funding
• networks
• geographic location

Notes on contributors

John O’Hagan is Professor Emeritus, Economics, Trinity College Dublin. He has published widely on cultural economics and cultural policy.

Denis Murphy lectures in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. His forthcoming monograph on the labour history of Irish film and TV drama production will be published by Liverpool University Press.

Ruth Barton is Head of the School of Creative Arts and Associate Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She has written widely on Irish cinema. Her latest monograph, Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2019 by Manchester University Press.

Notes

2 It is hoped that later work will compare the sample of prominent creative workers looked at here to an equally large sample of those who have not received awards

3 Many of the most renowned creative workers in the past, they point out, were almost penniless during their lifetime, but as always with many exceptions (Frey & Pommerehne, 1989). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was, for example, an extraordinarily prominent author from the economic point of view. William Shakespeare was also a very wealthy man for his time, with three main sources of income; a fixed salary as an actor, profits from part-ownership of the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, and further income for his work as a playwright. Georg Friedrich Handel lived like a wealthy gentleman and left a fortune in his will. Top opera singers, like top film stars today, were always paid exceedingly well and would have earned around €250,000 (in today’s money) each night at La Scala, for example. Star conductors and directors of opera were paid even more.

4 This is true in many countries, but not all, especially in Germany where many actors and directors still have permanent jobs.

5 See Abbing (2002) and Mangset et al (2018) for discussions of low incomes in the arts in different national contexts.

6 To this end, Ireland’s Section 481 tax credit is competitive with similar schemes all over the world. It can refund up to 32 percent of local production costs and is therefore the most lucrative subsidy available in Europe (Barton & Murphy, 2020). On an individual level, eligible creative writers, musicians, sculptors and painters can ‘shelter’ up to €50,000 per year from income tax under the so-called Artists Exemption scheme. In addition, donations to theatre companies are generally tax deductible, incentivising both personal and corporate patronage of the performing arts.

7 While none of the awards or nominations on which our sample is based includes a financial prize, some of the individuals in the sample have won considerable (usually literary) prizes such as the E.M. Forster Award or the Wyndham-Campbell Literature Prize.

8 Digital film production, for example, has seen the elimination or transformation of camera assistant roles such as clapper/loader, while creating new ones such as Digital Intermediate Supervisor. See also Caves (2002) for a more general discussion of the key features of the creative industries market. Bourdieu (1993) provides an even wider perspective covering the general theme of cultural production.

9 West (1988) notes how the literary agent arose in response to the power imbalance between authors and publishers, as the latter became increasingly professionalised in the early 20th century. In the film industry, talent agents arose in different circumstances. A series of events, most notably the decline of film audiences in response to competition from television and the forced divestment of the studios’ cinema exhibition divisions under antitrust legislation, saw the major Hollywood studios enter a long period of decline that ended the traditional practice of long-term direct employment of actors, writers, directors, film technicians and studio craft workers. See Lingo and Tepper (2013) for a good discussion of the complexities with which creative workers must cope in their employment.

10 Lincoln (2007) examined award winners in a different context, mainly in terms of the existence and causes of gendered age disparities.

11 Dublin and London could be described as a common labour market, but their proximity doesn’t necessarily mean that Irish creative workers must live in London.

12 How these awards are allocated is an issue looked at by Lincoln (2007). It is likely that there are biases in terms of race, gender and class in the allocation of these awards. The group is also not representative of all workers, just those who have received awards. We pondered how this might be overcome, but the problem came back to the same issue: what is the source for identifying the ‘population’ and hence for coming up with a random sample of prominent creative workers in Ireland? There is to our knowledge no such reliable source.

13 A recent survey of European audio-visual authors, for example, had a response rate of 25 percent overall, with a slightly lower rate among Irish respondents (Willekens et al., 2019).

14 We considered the possibility of self-administered questionnaires, as they are much less labour intensive, but given the nature of the information sought considered face-to-face interviews essential.

15 That is where the individual was a named recipient of the funding.

16 It may be that people are more open to new friendships at an early age as an explanation for this.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Creative Ireland.