1999-2010

Monday, December 22, 2008

Scholar’s new book: “Tabloid Baby sketches out anxious, Darwinian, hard-drinking, sexually virile, homosocial workplace and interpersonal carnage!"


"The book Tabloid Baby, Burt Kearns’s ego-fixated first-person account of how he 'invented reality television,' sketches out an anxious Darwinian work world peopled by hard-drinking, sexually virile men driven to success in the homosocial workspace imported successfully by Rupert Murdoch via A Current Affair and Hard Copy in the late 1980s...

"One learns from this storytelling time a guiding moral— the sense that brutal career and labor volatilities bring with them acute lures and seductions. The narrative lesson is intended to serve well the hungry film/TV aspirants, interns and production assistants, who, like Kearns, have enough sexual and producing confidence to exploit in the interpersonal carnage that lies ahead..."

-- from Production Culture:
Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television
by John Thornton Caldwell (2008, Duke University Press)

As work winds down in 2008, we head into the year that will mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of the controversial, lauded memoir, Tabloid Baby. The book that Mike Wallace called “sad, funny, undeniably authentic," Maury Povich called “The Bible,” Seekbooks Update said “provides as much high-octane entertainment as any Hollywood expose," and The Australian called a "compellingly good read” resonates even stronger than it did upon its publication and subsequent blacklisting by the major news and entertainment conglomerates it skewered (Rupert Murdoch and Fox Television being a notable exception).

Tabloid Baby has also been referenced as an authoritative source in a number of books, including Marvin Kitman’s Bill O’Reilly bio, The Man Who Would Not Shut Up and Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and The News.


But a new book takes the cake! Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television is written by distinguished scholar John Thornton Caldwell, a professor at the UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television.

Professor Thornton's school bio notes he is “a media studies scholar and filmmaker” who’s "authored and edited several books… critical and theoretical writings... has been a keynote and plenary speaker at various institutions and international conferences”:

“He is the producer/director of the award-winning documentaries 'Freak Street to Goa: Immigrants on the Rajpath' (1989), a film about 'the migratory pattern of "hippies" in India and Nepal,' and 'Rancho California (por favor)' (2002), a troubling look at migrant camps that house indigenous Mixteco workers within the arroyos of Southern California's most affluent suburbs."

Professor Caldwell writes about Tabloid Baby in the context of his books overarching argument that one can learn a lot about the production of culture by looking at the cultures of production.


Tabloid Baby, he writes none too admiringly in the very first chapter of this landmark textbook, cuts to the heart of survival in the “unstable,” “unregulated” world of tabloid, syndicated and reality television.

Buckle up!

Here's an excerpt from Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television:

...Intermediaries in non-network television work worlds favor their own set of narrative stereotypes. One trade story—in the genre of “I drank and bullied my way to the top”—serves as a variant of the suffering, surviving, and seduction genre. The story arc cultivates the volatility and unruly quality of the work worlds within which nonmainstream TV is produced. The book Tabloid Baby, Burt Kearns’s ego-fixated first-person account of how he “invented reality television,” sketches out an anxious Darwinian work world peopled by hard-drinking, sexually virile men driven to success in the homosocial workspace imported successfully by Rupert Murdoch via A Current Affair and Hard Copy in the late 1980s. With satisfaction, Kearns takes credit for beating and breaking legitimate TV news with tabloid TV (which legitimate news finally came to copy) during this period. Typical of many career allegories and user guides for this unregulated cadre, Kearns writes with the same confrontational tabloid approach that he “mastered” in his series. Chapter titles like “Lesbians, Cripples, and Clowns” and “Rob Lowe’s Big Dick” provide contexts for female marginalization. Women are identified by the quality of their breasts, as in “Riva, who despite her tweetybird voice was a grand billowing bird, with even grander and more billowing breasts.” Women are demeaned... whereas men are rewarded for their masculine sexual capabilities. Kearns describes his collaborators as the “Wild Bunch” and the “wolfpack,” which essentially allegorizes Kearns’s entire production company as a gang of sexual-professional predators.

The effect of such an account presupposes that some industry players have a kind of bloodlust for savage competition and career advantage. One learns from this storytelling time a guiding moral— the sense that brutal career and labor volatilities bring with them acute lures and seductions. The narrative lesson is intended to serve well the hungry film/TV aspirants, interns and production assistants, who, like Kearns, have enough sexual and producing confidence to exploit in the interpersonal carnage that lies ahead.

Other industry work sectors are also still largely separated by gender. If Kearns and Schrader tell tales of sexual advantage and confrontation as masculinist skill sets, another subset of the surviving-and-seduction genre offers career guides outlining female sexual behavior and workplace voyeurism as vocational competencies…

Clearly a wide range of inclinations informs these narrative practices. The labor narratives of Kearns and Schrader map out a work world defined by interpersonal volatility, on the one hand, and predatory masculinist aggression as vocational competencies, on the other. By contrast, the labor narratives of Davis, Harris, and Hanssen and Gottlieb underscore the importance of unsubtle highly calculated forms of female sexual gamesmanship in the office. Both strategies—predation and seduction—are somewhat logical given the slippery and unstable nature of the nonunion, nonguild work worlds being explained for readers who want to work in them (tabloid television, D-work, networking, promotion and personal branding)…


Asked for comment, Tabloid Baby author Burt Kearns said, "I'm deeper than I thought."

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