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Page 1: שיעור 12 - Making the Most out of 15 Minutes. Colins

http://tvn.sagepub.com/Television & New Media

http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/9/2/87The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/1527476407313814 2008 9: 87 originally published online 16 January 2008Television New Media

Sue CollinsMaking the Most out of 15 Minutes : Reality TV's Dispensable Celebrity

  

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87

Television & New MediaVolume 9 Number 2March 2008 87-110

© 2008 Sage Publications10.1177/1527476407313814

http://tvnm.sagepub.comhosted at

http://online.sagepub.com

Making the Most outof 15 MinutesReality TV’s Dispensable CelebritySue CollinsNew York University

Reality TV invites new considerations for theorizing celebrity as a cultural commoditywhose economic value is based on potential exchange. In this article, I argue that realityTV’s construction of a new stratum of celebrity value—ordinary people performing“the real”—supports claims that the industry is moving toward a “flexible” model ofeconomic organization. The production of reality TV expands the labor stock to includenonunionized, nonpaid or low-paid contestants playing themselves, while also displacingunionized actors from production opportunities. Moreover, reality TV’s D-level celebritygenerates novelty out of audience self-reflexivity with minimal risk and temporal flex-ibility. Celebrity value, as a mechanism to gather audiences, undergoes a new form ofdispensable synergy that shelters the larger system of celebrity valorization from thedual problems of scarcity and clutter.

Keywords: reality TV; celebrity; political economy; cultural labor

In February 2004, Bunim/Murray Productions bestowed on Philadelphia’s civictourism and marketing officials the kind of “cool” publicity that can’t be bought:

they decided to shoot the fifteenth season of the MTV reality series The Real Worldin Philly’s Old City neighborhood. In their efforts to remodel the former Seamen’sChurch Institute, the show’s producers hired nonunion labor, a practice they hadbeen following in thirteen Real World cities since 1992. But this time, the producersencountered the unbridled wrath of a union town’s organized labor, which after twoweeks of picketing effectively prompted producers to pull out with 70 percent ofconstruction complete and three weeks left before taping was scheduled to begin(Klein 2004b). It took a fan-based, tech-savvy grassroots movement, civic syco-phancy, and a secret unprecedented agreement to include union workers along withnonunion at the job site to get MTV back (Anderson 2004; Klein 2004a, 2004b;Tkacik 2004). In this case, however, Philly’s trade unions claimed the job site astheir turf, and not as a television “set” that would normally employ the InternationalAlliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (I.A.T.S.E.; Klein 2004b).

Reality TV’s production principles have triggered widespread displacement forHollywood’s unionized labor. Challenges to the genre’s encroaching colonizationof prime time have been mildly successful, as in the case of I.A.T.S.E. winning

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88 Television & New Media

unionization for Big Brother1 and the Writers Guild of America2 securing unionwork for some host introductions and voice-over scripts (Rendon 2004). Because ofthe enormous popularity of network reality shows such as Survivor, American Idol,Joe Millionaire, and The Apprentice, among others, reality TV has precipitated a“radical restructuring of the network business” (Carter 2003), which calls attentionto the new industry practice of bypassing costly unionized actors. The AmericanFederation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and the Screen Actors Guild(SAG) have been unable to contest the hiring of ordinary people, the staple ofunscripted reality formats, because these shows, in general, do not fall outside ofpreexisting rules of AFTRA coverage. The fact that reality formats are popular withproducers and audiences alike, however, is reducing the opportunities for scriptedwork on broadcast space across union membership. With employment dropping 1.6percent in 2003, 6.5 percent in 2002, 9.3 percent in 20013 and 15 percent from thehighpoint of employment in 1998, SAG claims to be taking a hit for the popularityof reality shows too, over which it has no jurisdiction, alongside the ever-presentthreat of American productions shot on foreign soil without SAG contracts(Brodesser 2004; Kiefer 2002; McNary 2002; Screen Actors Guild 2005a). Withsome forty reality shows occupying broadcast and cable space in the spring of 2003(Groves 2003), and 20.5 primetime hours allotted to reality programming in Fall2004, SAG and AFTRA projected a loss of over nine thousand union jobs betweenSpring 2004 and 2005 (Screen Actors Guild 2005b).4

Although the industry’s trades warn of continuing unrest and the unions conferwith each on how to combat the displacement of actors, this is not to say thatcelebrity as a cultural commodity will suffer under the new economic logic of realityprogramming. On the contrary, reality TV invites new considerations for theorizingproduction strategies of celebrity, particularly with respect to formats that do not dealin “talent” per se, but with the “performance of the everyday” (Roscoe 2001). Recentscholarship has engaged theoretically with reality TV’s promise to democratizecelebrity as a way to explain the genre’s widespread appeal, but the question of howreality TV alters celebrity production within the cultural industries warrants moreexploration. In particular, I ask: What happens when an influx of reality TV’s castmembers try to enter the celebrity field? To what extent are they absorbed and howdoes this affect the larger system of celebrity valorization?

The Real World cast members left the first season in 1992 to be greeted by the“immediate buzz” of the celebrity infrastructure: talk show guest appearances, pro-file articles, commercial endorsements, mall openings appearances, lectures, and thelike. After the first Survivor finale, which attracted 51.7 million viewers, reality TVveterans were “showered with interview requests, sitcom cameos, and managers andagents pleading to represent them” (Wolk 2002, 33). While some go on to bigger andbetter celebrity valorization, such as original Survivor contestant Colleen Haskell,who managed to land a part in Rob Schneider’s film The Animal and an appearanceon That ’70s Show, others such as George Boswell, a 43-year-old commercial roofer

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who was voted out of the Big Brother house, give up their day job believing they aredestined for show business. Most of these reality TV vets find that in the sixteenthminute, they are not absorbed into the celebrity system; rather, their celebrity currencyruns out and they are channeled back into obscurity. Yet, this D-level reality TVcelebrity has very real benefits for cultural producers,5 broadcasters, advertisers, anda host of related cottage industries borne out of reality TV’s system of production.

The making of celebrity, as with most cultural products, is configured aroundwhat has worked before. Reality TV’s recombinant nature proves the point that newcultural products are structured to standardize them, and the genre’s production ofcelebrity is no exception. With this in mind, Mark Andrejevic’s (2003) claim that“reality programming has, paradoxically, undermined the uniqueness of celebrity,”and rendered star quality “fungible” (11), needs to be modified to account for thesystem of stratified production in which the economic value of celebrity is a functionof potential exchange.6 In other words, what needs to be emphasized in an under-standing of the production of celebrity is the degree to which celebrity’s intertextualproperty, as a function of symbolic valorization through which audiences derivemeaning, pleasure, or distaste, determines its economic value. Although celebritysuccess is located in its distribution, that is, in the creation of sustained audiences forits consumption, what is new with reality TV is the construction of a new categoryof celebrity—what I am calling dispensable celebrity—that generates novelty out ofaudience self-reflexivity with minimal risk and temporal flexibility. This lower stratumof celebrity value affords both surplus for cultural industries and the maintenance ofthe larger system of celebrity valorization, which, as with other commodities, is basedon scarcity.

Ostensibly, reality shows featuring ordinary, real people demonstrate that thegenesis of celebrity as a top-down production of the cultural industries is being chal-lenged by the audience’s attention to itself. The talent shows such as American Idoland Last Comic Standing, recombinant forms from old pop talent show formats suchas Star Search, openly mine celebrity from talented contestants. In this format, audi-ences are “interpellated” into “a discourse of care” as they engage in the “fantasy ofparticipatory democracy” by casting their vote for their new idol or star (Cowell2003), and at the same time, virtually guaranteeing producers surplus, for example inrecord sales, when they contract both winners and losers. Through the use of personal“backstage” narrative constructed by a visual aesthetic characteristic of reality TV,the pop shows also promise to reveal “the internal workings of the music industry,and crucially, its manufacture of fame and stardom” (Holmes 2004, 148). Many ofthe high ratings reality TV shows, however, while competition based, do not placethe cultivation of celebrity at their center.7 Rather, shows such as the “gamedoc”(Survivor, Big Brother, The Apprentice, etc.), purport to represent ordinary, real indi-viduals in competitive situations that require astute manipulation and resiliency,while the “docusoap” (Real World, High School Reunion, My Life as a Sitcom, etc.)places them in “natural” settings, and uses documentary style production values to

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focus on their everyday lives but with the intervention of soap opera structuringtechniques (Murray 2004). As Murray and Ouellette (2004) put it, the reality showworks by promising viewers “revelatory insight into the lives of others as it withholdsand subverts full access to it” (6).

The reality gamedoc and docusoap formats, in particular, highlight the utility ofcelebrity stratification for cultural producers. Within the production of reality TV,celebrity operates out of an expanded field of labor stock to include nonunion low-costworkers, the risk of celebrity production is minimized, the temporal boundaries forcelebrity’s success are flexible, and celebrity itself undergoes a new form of dis-pensable synergy that shelters the larger system of celebrity valorization from thedual problems of scarcity and clutter.

Celebrity Is a Commodity

To understand the system of reality TV celebrity production and how its opera-tions compliment the organizational restructuring of the television industry currentlyunderway, celebrity needs to be situated as a commodity form meaningful to mediatheory. Celebrity, understood in modern terms, is a product of the nineteenth century“graphic revolution,” in which image reproduction facilitated by advances in printtechnology enabled the “manufacture” of fame (Boorstin 1987) and subsequenthuman interest journalism (Ponce de Leon 2002; Schickel 1985). But a celebrity’sreproduction, while a necessary condition, is not a sufficient one.8 Celebrity shouldalso be conceptually differentiated from fame, a precapitalist conception of visibil-ity, which while having carried over to modernity had been restricted by precapital-ist technology, time and space contingencies, and the designations of the heroic bythe ruling class to the “great men” of royalty, aristocracy, nobility, and the church.Only after the invention of the printing press and the rise of early forms of capitalistproduction did an economics of publicity emerge to augment the visibility of self-proclaimed and celebrated authors as well as to protect the ownership of their work(Braudy 1986; Eisenstein 1979; Ong 1982). Celebrity is distinctly a capitalist phe-nomenon coinciding with changes in communication technology that enabled newsforms of social mobility, the democratization of the consumption of cultural goods,and the production of secular notions of popular culture (Benjamin 1969; Ewen1988; Gabler 1998). Celebrity is the democratization of fame, but more importantly,it is fame commodified. That is, it is a symbolic form whose transmission and recep-tion within a commercial media system renders it a cultural commodity.9 Celebrityis established by its visibility as a function of its reproducibility, or by its exposureto audiences, who subjectively participate in the discursive construction and mainte-nance of celebrity through their reception. Graeme Turner (2004) argues that celebrityis not produced uniformly within the cultural industries nor without (for example, inbusiness, politics, journalism, etc). It exists as “a genre of representation and a discursive

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effect,” but also as a commodity produced and distributed by the promotions, publicity,and media industries, and it is a “cultural formation” whose social functions involvesforms of pleasure and constructions of identity (9). These generic and intertextualproperties, together with the fluctuations in the marketplace for celebrity consumption,enable entertainment celebrity to act as an audience-gathering mechanism whoseproperties as labor power and capital represent stratified value to cultural producers.10

The Political Economy of Entertainment Celebrity

Similar to other cultural goods, celebrity is the outcome of complex interplay amongprocesses of production, mediation, and reception. Foremost, it is dependent onstrategies of capitalist production that try to predict the capriciousness of audiences’preferences and tastes. But celebrity is complicated as a cultural commodity becauseit is both part of a cultural product, such as a film or TV show, and a commodityitself. Richard Dyer (1986), whose work has been predominately concerned with theproduction of film stars and the “star image,” points out the complex market functionof stars. They are a category of property in the form of brand name and image that canbe used to raise capital for a film; they are part of how films get sold to audienceswho expect certain meanings from the star’s presence in the film; they are an assetto the star him or herself and to the studio and professionals involved in their pro-motion; they are a major expense in the production of a film; and they are a part ofthe labor that goes into the film as a commodity. In short, stars are “both labor and thething that labor produces” (Dyer 1986, 5). Once the “raw material” of the person hasbeen fashioned into the star by a host of professionals who perform labor onto thestar (hairdressers, coaches, dieticians, make-up artists, etc.) and by the professionalsinvolved in the making of the film as well as the performances of the star , the “star image”can be seen as “congealed labor,” that is, “something that is used with further labor(scripting, acting, directing, managing, filming, editing) to produce another commodity,the film” (6).

Since the beginning of the film star system in the second decade of the twentiethcentury, star value has been managed as a form of product differentiation to satisfyaudience demand (Kindem 1985; Klaprat 1985), but also as meaning that could bedistributed throughout extrafilmic texts such as popular, trade, and fan magazines(deCordova 1990).11 “Cultural producers” of stars were limited to film studio headsand their producers and directors. In the poststudio era, star management andcontrol over access to stars was taken up by a new set of “players” such as talentagents and personal managers (Litwak 1986; Wasko 2003). More recently, celebrityproduction is thought about in broader terms such as a “promotional culture,” whichinvolves media professionals who make decisions about hiring talent, agents andmanagers who negotiate with these producers on behalf of their clients, and otherintermediaries such as publicists who work between producers and agents on the oneside, and various media outlets on the other (Turner, Bonner, and Marshall 2000).

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In contemporary terms, celebrity autonomy has enhanced the potential value acelebrity can claim, or perhaps more accurately, what agents or managers can negotiate,but it has also increased the risk for unstable meaning when celebrity moves amongother spheres of activity besides entertainment. For example, an increase in symbolicvalue (more visibility and therefore more meaning) may not increase economicvalue, such as in the case of celebrity personal scandal or high involvement withcontroversial sociopolitical issues. On the other hand, as Thompson (1990) argues,“the symbolic value of a good may be inversely related to its economic value, in thesense that, the less ‘commercial’ it is, the more worthy it is seen to be” (156), which,of course, does not negate real commercial value.12 In any case, strategies of produc-tion surely take into account and monitor celebrity’s dynamic symbolic meanings asa direct function of its profitability. In this sense, celebrity should be seen as a kindof intertextually fluid “capital” that gets “deployed with the intention of gainingadvantage in the entertainment market and making profits” for cultural producersand the celebrity him or herself (McDonald 2000, 5).

Given the unstable and unpredictable nature of celebrity value, key objectives forthe production of celebrity are to manage the problem of novelty and the problem ofscarcity vis-à-vis media reproduction. Aside from marketing studies on the value ofcelebrity endorsements and economic analyses that try to account for market valuesof film stars or predict their box office appeal or marketing cachet, there are fewstudies in cultural studies or the political economy of the cultural industries thatmake the production of celebrity as a commodity their focal point. A few scholars,however, have done important work on the “cultural industries” in general that isuseful for thinking about dispensable celebrity.13

In his analysis of cultural production, Bernard Miège (1989) argues that producersmust concern themselves with the risks and uncertainty that characterizes culturalproducts and so they become an intervening factor in the production of the text.14 Tospread the risks associated with uniqueness and to militate against the demands ofcultural labor, the producer intervenes to ensure the product is “marked by the stampof the unique, of genius, in order to be standardized” (Miège 1989, 29). In otherwords, reproducibility both standardizes types (e.g., “rat pack,” “brat pack,” etc.) andfacilitates the potential for intertextual meanings that potentially increase symbolicvalue. However, these constructions are no easy matter to predict, evident by the factthat both large and small production companies meet with success and failure.15

Miège explains that because producers need to spread the risks, they construct“catalogues,” operating by a policy that “requires direct access to cultural workersand implies their rapid renewal and rotation according to the swings of fashion”(30).16 Thus, celebrity needs to be seen as a cultural product that is born out of a vast“reservoir” of cultural workers who are ready to work without wage retainers in whichvery few “make it” and whose success is not predictable nor necessarily sustainable.The entertainment industry, in fact, is characterized by a massive earnings disparityand high unemployment for up to 90 percent of its union membership on any given

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day (Gray and Seeber 1996). Only about three-quarters of SAG members earn the$9,000 yearly minimum to qualify for health and pension benefits, while 8 to 10percent earn a middle class standing and only 2 percent enjoy superstar earnings(Bloom 2002).17 While a few of these stars use their capital to enhance their poweras directors or producers themselves, most actors are in constant competition forwork in a field with excess supply, and they experience little autonomy or creativefreedom in their work (Peters and Cantor 1982). Indeed, David Hesmondhalgh(2002) observes, “The poor working conditions and rewards for creative cultural workhave been obscured by the fact that, in a complex professional era, very generousrewards are available for symbol creators who achieve name recognition in theminds of audience members” (58). The star system, which gives the highest market-ing priority to “star symbol creators,” in Hesmondhalgh’s terms, is employed byproducers as a type of “formatting” that links stars with privileged texts (hits) to offsetmisses. Additionally, stars can be seen as brands that act as guarantors of meaningacross a variety of texts with which audiences can identify, including the capture ofa star’s image as a type-set for the purposes of endorsing goods and services outsideof the entertainment industry.

Nicholas Garnham (1990) also underscores the importance of what he calls the“editorial” function: that is, the commensurate matching of the “cultural repertoire”and its production costs with audience taste and spending power. Because demand forcultural products is unpredictable, the cultural industries offer audiences a culturalrepertoire of goods to spread the risks. Increased productivity in this context takes theform of expanding the audience for the product by offering symbolic values in theform of novelty or difference. There is a “constant need to create new products whichare all in a sense prototypes” while, at the same time, commodities produced are “notdestroyed in the process of consumption” (160). Scarcity, on which price or value isbased for most commodities, must be artificially created by using strategies of verticalintegration such as monopoly control over distribution to limit access to the reproductionof cultural products. These factors lead Garnham (1990) to argue that it is “cultural dis-tribution, not cultural production, that is the key locus of power and profit” (162).

Borrowing from Miège (1989), Garnham (1990), Ryan (1992), and Hesmondhalgh(2002) outlines four “stages” of cultural production: creation, reproduction, circulation,and retailing/exhibition/ broadcast.18 In response to the unique problems facing thecultural production (high risk and unpredictability, high “first copy costs” and lowreproduction costs, and the need to create artificial scarcity), the cultural industriesorganize with respect to a number of practices: misses offsetting hits, concentrationand integration, creation of artificial scarcity, and formatting strategies using stars,genres, and serials. Given these dynamic conditions, Hesmondhalgh concludes that theprincipal organizing response of the cultural industries since the 1980s and 1990s19

to their distinctive problems has been to oversee creative input of cultural productswith loose control while tightening control over reproduction and distribution—twodistinct stages, the latter of which he refers to as “circulation” (55–56). Circulation

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signifies a more comprehensive process than distribution and wholesaling; it alsoincludes marketing and promotions, which are critical processes for the reproducingof celebrity as a commodity in and of itself (56).

More specifically, there are two key ways these analyses inform celebrity. First, itis clear that celebrity’s symbolic value is a function of its novelty or difference withinits class as a cultural product (both part of a product and a product itself), yet itsproduction as a commodity is generally similar for any single celebrity. Efforts tomarket, publicize, and cross-promote a new celebrity or to sustain a celebrity’s audiencebase are undertaken in ways that are commensurate with a celebrity’s potential orprojected value. For example, arrangements for celebrities to appear in various mediaformats and at PR events are often written directly into the celebrity contract.20 However,an analysis of celebrity’s reproduction is problematic because unlike the materialproduction process (in which the cost of materials and scale wage, or below-the-linecultural labor, is generally fixed), or cultural production in which celebrity is an inputof fixed creative cost, celebrity’s reproduction cost is complicated when by reproduc-tion we now mean reproducing a single celebrity in subsequent cultural products.Celebrity value from a political economic perspective, as I have been arguing, is bestunderstood as a function of visibility based on potential reproducibility and the subse-quent sustaining of an audience base. Its economic valorization, then, is constantlyshifting as celebrity intertextuality accumulates as a function of exposure within textsand around them (i.e., marketing, publicity, and cross-promotion in relation to specifictexts, celebrity self-promotion, and celebrity exposure outside of the entertainmentsphere). Stable intertextual meanings from the perspective of cultural producers mayconstitute surplus value or loss in the case of overexposure until celebrity renegotiatesits value in relation to the production of some text, but novelty implies some shift incelebrity meaning, or the introduction of new celebrity.

Second, when Garnham argues that distribution is the key factor of power andprofit, we can infer that celebrity’s success is located in the creation of audiences forits consumption. Distribution in this sense for celebrity means the degree to whichcelebrity’s intertextual property (a function of its symbolic value for audiences)determines its economic value, in terms of box office draw for a particular text andin terms of gathering audiences for advertisers.21 As Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944]1997) noted, the logic of cultural production, while an interdependent process, ismuch less about the differentiation of content of cultural products, than it is abouthow consumers are classified, organized, and labeled to receive cultural commodi-ties. In more contemporary terms, Magder (2004) argues that the logic of commer-cial broadcasting is not to give audiences what they need or say they want to watchbut to “give people what they are willing to watch, or at the very least, programmingfrom which they will not turn away” (143). To amass a public that can be sold some-what reliably to advertisers, cultural producers try to reduce uncertainty by offeringa range of mass-produced products that vary in quality, while “triangulating”between “the wants and needs of advertisers and the wants and needs of viewers”

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(142). With respect to celebrity production, the cultural industries recruit talent,manage and control the construction and reproduction of their personae, and executediffusion processes as strategies dictate what will secure a reliable audience base.How celebrity gets reproduced across various texts depends on the processes ofcirculation that work to distribute celebrity beyond broadcasting and film distribution.Marketing and publicity are key to celebrity’s accumulation of symbolic value that,in turn, determines its reproducibility. In this way, the “producers” of celebrity,which is a form of congealed labor, include not only the owners and executives whoexhibit loose control over creative decisions, but also the “creative managers”22 whointervene in the ways Miège (1989) and Garnham (1990) suggest, as well as the hostof people involved in the promotions business who distribute celebrity among thetexts that feature celebrity as a commodity itself.

But the processes of celebrity reproduction and circulation are largely predictionsmade by cultural producers, and at the same time, they are vulnerable to the problemof clutter. In conventional economic theory, more celebrity (as a class of culturalproducts) would suggest the value of each member would diminish. However, thesystem of celebrity valorization seems to defy this law. A “unit” of celebrity canincrease in value (both symbolic and economic) with the increase in its reproductionand its access by audiences. The celebrity system as a whole has not suffered fromdiminishing returns, if the burgeoning celebrity journalism industry is any indication.The system of stratification seems to profit from the traversing play of celebrity asabstract value among the strata. Celebrity value at lower levels of stratification valorizesthe star system because it serves as points of lesser comparison with A-list celebrities,while the existence of a star system stimulates the continuing production of aspiringcelebrity. The celebrity system as stratified value transcends the laws of the marketeconomy in that its reproduction at some point within the strata assures its largerreception as a system. Moreover, as distinct living human beings, celebrities bringidiosyncrasies to the equation that are not fully controllable, or even explainable forthat matter, and it is this potential instability in celebrity meaning combined withshifting audience tastes that makes celebrity value particularly difficult to pin down.Still, reproduction and circulation processes work to “create” celebrity scarcity. Forthe production of television celebrity, this implies variously limiting access to highervalues of celebrity while also maintaining some optimal degree of celebrity circula-tion as an audience-gathering mechanism for advertisers.

Herein lies the economic beauty of reality TV for cultural producers: a new levelof celebrity stratification produces novelty that is easily and cheaply produced, whilecirculation, the key to creating scarcity as a measure of value, intrinsically limitsaccess to higher values of celebrity because ordinary people in reality television,ironically, are not “real” actors with accumulated intertextual capital. They do nothave access to wider circulation by which to accrue sustained symbolic and eco-nomic value. They do earn value, however, as a form of dispensable celebrity thatpleases audiences for its novelty and self-reflexivity, and producers for its financial

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and temporal expediency. Let us look more closely at how reality TV has developedas a production logic and why dispensability is the defining feature of this new modeof celebrity.

The “Real”-ization of Dispensable Celebrity

The success of reality television, particularly its “second wave,”23 has spawned agreat deal of scholarly research that attends to close readings of specific texts, indus-try perspectives, and audience reception to explain its widespread popularity andcultural significance. Chad Raphael (2004) analyses the political economy of “reali-TV,”24 arguing that this mode of television production emerged in the late 1980s asa cost-cutting “fiscal strategy” in response to a new Hollywood economic environ-ment characterized by the rising costs of network program production, competitionfor advertising revenue among more distributors, greater debt incurred by the net-works, media industry deregulation, and new audience measuring techniquesdesigned to measure segmented markets. In addition, reality programming offeredproducers a way to prepare for potential strikes because these shows did not rely onscripts or acting talent, which also meant bypassing Hollywood agents’ commissionfees, and because they could be produced more quickly than fictional shows.25

Reality shows “gained currency in this environment of relative financial scarcity andlabor unrest,” Raphael suggests, largely doing away with “higher-priced stars andunion talent” (124). Moreover, low-end production values were embraced as a cost-cutting strategy, while also operating to make rhetorical claims on representing “thereal” (see, for example, Dovey 2000).

Raphael points out that in the early 1990s, reality television was the only categoryof prime-time programming in most cases not to operate on deficit financing. Today,the average scripted show can cost $1 to $2 million for a prime-time hour, while anhour of reality programming costs about $700,000 to produce (Rendon 2004). Thehigher the prime-time climb up the celebrity ladder, the higher the price tag. Magder(2004) shows that in the 2001-to-2002 season, for example, NBC’s hit drama ERcost the network some $13 million, while Friends had a production cost of $7 mil-lion per episode. CBS’s Survivor, one of the few gamedocs that still captures thecoveted 18- to 35–year-old demographic, was the most expensive reality show, cost-ing the network $1.4 million per episode. In this case, savings from above-the-linelabor can be used to cross-subsidize higher budgets to pay for insurance premiumsthat cover increasingly daring stunts as well as the infrastructures to build sets andmaintain contestants and crew in exotic places. In fact, Magder argues, the Survivorbusiness model represents a larger shift in network programming currently under-way. This new business model operates off of preproduction sponsorship to offsetthe cost of having the show made (which the network would normally pay viaa licensing fee and then hope for advertisers’ interest), using product placement,

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merchandizing tie-ins, and subscription web site interactivity. Despite the fact thatreality programming doesn’t lend itself to syndication, it has proven profitable, atleast so far, because its reliance on preestablished, successful formats “greatlyreduces the risks associated with first-copy costs and the nobody knows principle”(147). Endemol Entertainment’s Big Brother format, for example, is a “template”complete with a production and marketing “playbook” that can be adapted to a spe-cific locale. “If things go well,” as Magder puts it, “a format becomes an interna-tional brand with distinctive and carefully modulated local variation—the formula istweaked, like the sugar content in Coca-Cola” (147). Pop Idol, for example, wasdeveloped by the U.K. company Fremantle, who sold the concept to Fox. Similarly,CBS has sold Amazing Race to markets in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Israel, andNext Entertainment has sold The Bachelor to Scandinavian markets (Albiniak 2002;Internet Movie Database 2005a, 2005b).

Indeed, the logic of the reality TV model serves as a counterprogramming mecha-nism against the high cost of scripted shows with unionized talent and against thethreat of strikes, but, has reality programming become, in Anna McCarthy’s (2005)words, “a mode of production?” At the very least, reality TV lends credence to theargument that production organization in the television industry is increasingly char-acterized by strategies of flexibility and adaptation (Christopherson 1996). In itsrestructuring of labor relations within the film and television industries generally,“flexible specialization” has created new segmentations within the labor force, redefinedskills, and generally increased conflicts between employers and workers throughoutthe industry (Christopherson and Storper 1989; Paul and Kleingartner 1994). The labormarket for talent, in particular, has become increasingly short term, with more entrantscompeting for fewer union jobs. Although the majority of reality shows are underAFTRA jurisdiction as per the employment of hosts, voice-over narrators, and stuntperformers, the labor of reality TV cast members remains untouched by unionizationas long as the shows’ producers cast people as contestants or as playing themselves,and thus not under any acting directorship. This technicality, coupled with the ever-present need to fill more broadcast time cheaply, compliments the industry’s move-ment toward the flexible model of organizational production. The field for ordinary,untalented people vying for potential fame is virtually inexhaustible, and the produc-tion of short-term, nonskilled, nonunion celebrity generates novelty with minimalfinancial risk and greater control. As Turner (2004) rightly argues, the manufacture ofcelebrity as a programming strategy integral to the reality formats works to containpotential conflicts (commercial or personal) between producers or networks and poten-tial celebrities because these relations are structurally accommodated to each otherfrom the start, meaning “these celebrities are especially dependent upon the programthat made them visible in the first place; they have virtually no other platform fromwhich to address their audience” (54).

Debora Halbert’s (2003) work on reality TV and publicity rights substantiatesreality TV celebrity’s subordination to the shows’ producers, at least insofar as

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CBS’s contractual arrangement with its Survivor contestants attests. CBS controls itscontestant’s access to celebrity status in two ways. First, the contract stipulates thatcontestants are subject to authorization by CBS for any media contact or appearancesfor three years after the show airs. Not only does CBS protect the show’s “trade secrets”through the confidentiality proviso, but contestants are also prohibited from acceptingpaid celebrity work not sanctioned by CBS long after the show’s winner has beendisclosed to the public. A breech in contract entitles CBS to sue the contestants fordamages. In addition, the contract includes a “life story rights” section that effectivelybinds the signatory into relinquishing control over his or her life story and publicimage. Halbert sums up the extent to which CBS retains control and power over thecontestant’s labor and image, and thus its circulation:

Essentially, CBS controls their ability to appear in public and in what type of venue,their ability to talk about the show, and their life stories. CBS owns their public identitiesand the rights to disclose their private identities. CBS owns the telling of the experiencesthat made them who they are. Everything a Survivor cast member could communicateto the public might be construed as the property of CBS. Additionally, CBS owns theserights throughout the universe forever. (45)

In effect, CBS is rationalizing that it is responsible for both transforming the ordinaryperson as “raw material” into a public personality, and disseminating the image tothe public; therefore, since it has invested in the labor of celebrity construction, theresult is the property of CBS. As Halbert points out, this “aggressive extension ofproperty rights” over reality celebrities problematizes the distinctions between therights of “real” celebrities who play fictional characters to control the use of theirpublic image and what should be the rights of reality celebrities who play themselves“living their private lives in public” (Halbert 2003, 45–46). While it is true thatpotential contestants who sign the contract are ostensibly willing to give up controlover their personal lives as a lived story and their public image to take their chanceson the show, this contractual arrangement underscores the enormous differential inpower relations between producer and cultural worker. “The ‘reality’ of power,”Halbert explains, “is invisible to the public who only sees the spectacle” (51).Confidentiality agreements also obscure the conditions of labor for aspiring realitycontestants, as well as for industry analysts, scholars, and cultural critics. We do notknow the specifics of other reality show contracts, but if producers operate off “theplaybook,” then the dispensing of this novel reality celebrity becomes the spectacleitself as the reality model moves into the recombinant stage to reproduce the culturalform and to control the circulation of the celebrity.

The Real World, for example, led the way in reproducing what Caves (2000) callsthe “lottery prize phenomena” (57) by offering its “housemates” the possibility ofbeing invited back to show reunions and spin-offs. Although most reality players willnot cross over to celebrity status, the fact that a few do get more exposure after their

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initial reality experience ends, and that fewer still sustain their visibility throughexposure in other electronic media texts and celebrity print journalism, ensures thatthere will always be cheap labor to perform “the real” in hopes of becoming the nextEric Nies. An original Real World veteran, Nies has appeared in numerous Viacomholdings including The Brady Bunch Movie, VH1’s I Love the 90’s, and over a dozenMTV Real World series, specials, or documentaries, as himself, as a host and cohost,and as an actor, since his debut in 1992. Other popular housemates, such as PuckRainey, Trishelle Cannatella, and Mark Long, have been following Nies’s lead,enjoying exposure primarily in other MTV formats, but also landing small parts infilms, music videos, and commercials. Once select reality celebrities cross over tomedia formats involving hosting or acting, AFTRA membership becomes a mandatoryticket to a higher status of celebrity.26 Appearances on reality formats such as TheSurreal Life or I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, for example, which featurepeople hired for their celebrity status, signify the cross-over point to professionalacting, union wages, health and pension benefits, and AFTRA dues.27 However, whilecelebrity may be the real prize many reality players are after, producers’ objectives areless about cultivating a star system than to use the promise of celebrity as continuouslow-cost bait to gather contestants or players, and ultimately to sell audiences toadvertisers. Borrowing from Real World and Survivor production strategies, TheApprentice started its second season by instructing the two remaining apprentices tocompile a team out of subordinates who had been fired during the first season. Notonly does this strategy eliminate the expense of casting calls, it extends and valorizescompelling narrative structures that keep people watching, and that encourage realityplayers to self-direct their roles to increase their chances of sustaining visibilitythrough other media formats.28

Although it may be the case that reality TV has meant fewer opportunities for talentagents to secure scripted work for their clients, agents are not entirely bypassed bythe reality phenomenon. Aside from the pop idol format, for the most part, the rushto represent reality celebrities is over, but agents keep an eye out for whatever “heat”is generated from after-show exposure. Still, budding reality TV celebrities enteringa field with an oversupply of unemployed talent must do the work of seeking outagents, who, as gatekeepers operating out of a glut of talent, screen the amount andquality of talent they can efficiently represent to match talent with jobs. Since realityplayers are mostly dispensed around other reality formats and short-term mediatexts, established agents are less inclined to forgo commissions as reality celebritiesgain exposure. Perhaps these low-capital celebrities make fodder for a new class ofnovice agents and managers. More likely, agents are concentrating on placing hosts,anchors, disc jockeys and other union-covered talent generated by reality shows intoother paid media texts.

The political economic perspective explains why the industry has embraced realityTV, but why do audiences watch and why do they want to participate? While muchof the popular press has scorned and lamented the public’s preoccupation with

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aspirations of celebrity in Boorstin’s (1987) critical sense of the word, as the vapidand trivial state of being known for “well-knownness,” scholarly work more carefullydeconstructs reality TV to reveal its appeal to audiences in more nuanced, analyticallydistinct ways. Indeed, the promise of celebrity is one of the motivating factors foraudience participation, particularly with respect to the pop show talent format. Ingeneral, all of the formats tap into the fetishism of celebrity by suspending the tradi-tional gate-keeping mechanisms of Hollywood’s hierarchical structure. At the sametime, by claiming to represent “the real,” reality TV shows profess to democratizecelebrity by demystifying access to it or debunking its aura through the normaliza-tion of surveillance techniques to get at the private, intimate, and authentic moments ofindividuals on display (Andrejevic 2003). Interestingly, Andrejevic (2003) intimates,reality TV tries to capitalize on the extraordinary/ordinary paradox theorized in starstudies in a dual sense: by “cultivating the fantasy” of celebrity for the ordinary, itturns real people into celebrities; by “rehabilitating fading stars” in celebrity gamedocs(I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Celebrity Big Brother), it extends the tabloidcoverage of celebrities, rendering them “real” through self-disclosure and “authentic”moments captured by surveillance as voyeuristic entertainment. But as I have stated,I am interested in thinking about how celebrity works to entice audience participa-tion, not with pop show formats structured around the talent contest, but with lessobvious celebrity-manufacturing formats such as the gamedoc and docusoaps involvingordinary people. Here, audience members become contestants or players whosepotential for fame is then contingent on their behavior under arduous competition orbehind-the-scenes challenges, or the spectacle of the “hidden” social experiment(see, for example, Brenton and Cohen 2003; Dovey 2000).

Interestingly, although these formats traffic in potentially embarrassing momentsof intimacy, confession, or humiliation captured by the camera and fashioned intodramatic narratives by editors for the audiences’ pleasurable voyeurism, casting callscontinue to elicit thousands of responses. Survivor producers, for example, claim toget something in the neighborhood of 65,000 self-made audition tapes each season(The Reality of Reality, Bravo Networks, 2003). The mass of applicants is thenreduced to a small portion of the call and subjected to live audition calls and inter-views, which are designed by psychologists to help producers gauge the individual’scoping strategies and characteristics that make for interesting drama (Roscoe 2001).The shows’ producers, then, “cast” the applicants into predictable “types,” and as theseries repeat, the new players learn to perform the roles that get media attention (e.g.,the Big Brother prototypes “Nasty Nick” and “Mistress Andy” in Britain and Australiarespectively; Survivor’s evil Richard Hatch, villainous Jerri Manthey, conniving“Boston Rob” and sweetheart-in-crime Amber Brkich). Murray and Ouellette (2004)point out, “The fifteen minutes of fame that is the principal reward for participatingon the programs limits the selection of ‘real people’ to those who make good copyfor newspaper and magazine articles as well as desirable guests on synergistic talkshows and news specials” (8). Once the numbers are whittled down to the dozen or

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so players, ordinary people begin “the work of being watched,” which in Andrejevic’s(2003) analysis, suggests they “invert” the celebrity frame by exposing the intimatedetails of their lives, and more significantly, invite “the vast majority of noncelebrities”to do the same by normalizing their submission to surveillance as a form of “wagelabor” in the online economy (78). Nick Couldry (2002), noting that most contestantsare explicit about the goal of attaining celebrity, argues that the transition to celebrityis the culmination of Big Brother’s plot. The ritual passage from the ordinary(nonmedia) person to celebrity (media) person is “the master frame without whichthe game [makes] no sense” (289). Because real people are constituted as repeat per-formers for the length of the series, audiences identify with their “media friends” asthey come to care about and strategize with them (or against them), and to predictand “know” the behavior of mediated identities on display, many perhaps imaginingtheir own strategies to win access into the media world.29 Audiences, by their verywatching and more actively by their online and cell phone interactivity, partake inthe fantasy of celebrity’s democratization, although the form of celebrity that is pro-duced, dispensable celebrity, is an ephemeral level of celebrity’s stratification thatgenerates enough value to reproduce itself cheaply as a programming strategy with-out devaluing the larger celebrity field.

Celebrity Place Dispenses “the Real”

So far, I have argued that celebrity is the commodification of fame, its visibility afunction of its reproducibility vis-à-vis a commercial media system. The relationshipof celebrity value to cultural production for producers is measured in terms of audiencevolume and its projected purchasing power. It is in this sense that celebrity’s successis located in its circulation, that is, in the creation of sustained audiences for itsconsumption, and whose attention ultimately deems the reproduction of celebrity status.Yet celebrity is complicated in terms of its analysis as a cultural commodity because itis both part of a cultural product and a product itself whose value is unstable. As con-figurations of celebrity meaning accumulate, audiences and fans, in particular, takeinterest in the many ways that they might “read” the celebrity text.

Celebrity value, then, should be seen as a kind of stratified but also fluid intertextualcapital that gets constructed in two sites: the cultural products or texts that housecelebrity, and the sites of “intertextual circulation” (Holmes 2004), or what I callcelebrity place—the aggregate of media space devoted to celebrity coverage by allfacets of the cultural industries. Celebrity place is the seat next to Leno or Letterman,the guest appearance on Saturday Night Live, the lead to Entertainment Tonight, andthe feature story of People or Entertainment Weekly that function to signify celebrity,symbolically and materially. For analytical purposes, it is the site in the singular thathouses celebrity as a product in and of itself, and it is the infrastructure that gathersaudiences for advertisers as it manages the production and promotion of personalities

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into celebrity status. In other words, celebrity place functions to reconstitute, reproduce,and circulate celebrity, and it is here in contemporary culture that the extraordinary/ordinary paradox theorized in star studies is played out. This dynamic between starperformance and the fans’ engagement with meaning as pleasurable is key to under-standing how reality TV’s dispensable celebrity works as a temporally dispensablecultural commodity.

According to predominate theories in star studies, the film “star image” is themultitude of media texts embodying the person/employee/star—whether in filmperformance or extrafilmic moments—that work to collapse distinctions between thestar-as-person and the star-as-performer (Dyer 1979, [1977] 1991; Ellis 1982). Theconstruction of a star image during the studio era was used to entice fans intofollowing the studios’ star performers’ texts. Knowledge about a star’s identity outsideof the textuality of her films, for example, in fan magazines published by the industry,was restricted so that fans would be under the illusion that the star’s personality infilm was consistent with her off-screen life, and that to follow a star’s film careerwould lead to the pleasurable discovery of the authentic personality (deCordova1990). While the star image may be incoherent and ordinary in extrafilmic discourse,the film performance is thought to offer the promise of its “completeness,” whichreconstitutes the star as extraordinary, thus repeatedly inviting audiences to reestablishthe authentic. It is this paradox of the star as extraordinary and ordinary that contin-ually renews both the star image and the audience’s pleasure in their consumption offilm stars. In a similar way, King (1991) explains the star performance in terms ofcreating and sustaining a persona, which is where cinematic technique and filmicand extrafilmic discourses come together to suggest a coherent subjectivity, or uniquestar personality. Marshall (1997), in summarizing Dyer, explains that the star imageworks to keep the audience “obsessively and incessantly searching the star personafor the real and the authentic” (17).

The broader phenomenon of celebrity, I am arguing, functions similarly but indiffering degrees, depending on celebrity’s stratification. Although star studies theo-rists distinguish between cinema’s “photo effect” and television’s lack of one, bywhich Ellis argues that television does not have stars but “TV personalities,” SuHolmes (2004) rightly points out that “the considerable increase in celebrity coveragein the popular press and magazines has evinced an appetite for disclosing the off-screenlives of all types of celebrities, thus demanding a reconceptualization of television’sintertextual frameworks” (124). Indeed, much of the fun of consuming celebrity formany is making sense of what Turner (2004) highlights as its contradictions:celebrity is deserved and arbitrary, authentic and manufactured, extraordinary andordinary. In contemporary culture, celebrity place is the site where audiences takepleasure in working through these contradictions, “enjoying the hype,” and discoveringthe authentic, real identities of celebrities. It is also the site of cultural production inwhich a large share of the negotiation around celebrity’s value as a product itself isconducted.

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What is particularly noteworthy about reality celebrity is the way these individualsare dispensed through celebrity place along synergistic paths. For example, in additionto appearing on the Survivor remakes series Survivor: All-Stars, and Survivor: TheReunion, as well as providing footage for other Survivor productions such as TheGreatest and Most Outrageous Moments video documentary, popular CBS Survivorcontestants are effectively cross-promoted through various Viacom holdings, insome cases as actors, but most often as guests, playing themselves. Rupert Boneham,of Survivor: Pearl Islands, appeared on The Early Show (six times since his Survivordebut), The Saturday Early Show, the CBS and Eye Productions show Half & Half,VH1’s Best Week Ever, and a CBS’s upfront presentation to advertisers at CarnegieHall. Jerri Manthey’s credits are more extensive, but dominated by appearances andcameos in Viacom-owned, or partly owned, and distributed productions such as TheEarly Show (at least five times), The Late Show with David Letterman, The Late LateShow with Craig Kilborn, The Young and the Restless, MTV’s The New Tom GreenShow, Spike TV’s The Joe Schmo Show, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, RendezView, VH1’s The Surreal Life, and VH1 Goes Inside. Similarly, Amber Brkich hasappeared on The Early Show (at least five times), The Late Show with DavidLetterman (twice), The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, CBS’s Amazing Race,and the Rob and Amber Get Married two-hour CBS special. Other networks havefollowed suit. Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter of ABC’s Bachelor and Bachelorettefame have also appeared or been featured on several ABC distributed talk shows andspecials, including Trista & Ryan’s Wedding and Trista and Ryan’s Honeymoon HotSpots. Likewise, Bill Rancic of NBC’s The Apprentice has been a guest on TheTonight Show, The Tony Danza Show, MSNBC’s Deborah Norville Tonight, andCNBC’s The Big Idea (three times), while Omarosa Manigualt-Stalworth of TheApprentice 2 became a contestant on NBC’s Fear Factor, and appeared on TheApprentice 3, The Big Idea (three times), and Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown.30

Audiences who watch reality shows and partake in celebrity consumption through-out celebrity place are attentive, no doubt, to celebrity’s stratification. But, theonscreen and offscreen dynamic particular to stardom, or celebrities high in intertex-tual value, is distinct from the media “flashpoints” of which reality TV celebritiesare the object in predominately two ways. First, these low-capital celebrities providea one-hit-wonder kind of novelty and timeliness to celebrity place, particularly as thereality shows’ publicity apparatuses harvest attention across various media formats.Reality celebrities might make it on The Tonight Show or The Late Show, whichprimarily book A-level talent, but they are unlikely to displace stars looking to bebooked or to become part of the stable of regular guests needed to sustain the shows.Nonunionized reality celebrities help “fill” the spaces of celebrity bookings on talkand variety shows, which by one estimate requires some 4,500 celebrity guests per year(Spring 1998). It is also worth noting that, in general, nonunion reality celebrities donot collect the scale wages nor benefits to which actors are entitled when appearingon shows under AFTRA’s jurisdiction, while news shows, such as CBS’s The EarlyShow, do not pay their guests.

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Second, as audience reception studies on reality TV have shown, a large part ofthe pleasure for audiences is to look for the “authentic” moments within the tensionbetween the constructed and the real as ordinary people cross over to celebrity (Hill2002; Johnson-Woods 2002; Jones 2003). When reality TV’s contestants and castmembers experience the media attention of celebrity status after they finish theshows,31 that is, when they are effectively cross-promoted or dispensed throughoutcelebrity place, their actual status as dispensable celebrities blocks their entry intothe larger system of celebrity valorization. I have discussed how CBS is able to con-trol its Survivor reality players’ access to potentially significant media formats. Butthis is also the case because the reality celebrities’ acting “talent” is largely dis-missed by the industry; they have not achieved extraordinary status in the conven-tional sense of stardom, thus they are low in intertextual capital, and audiences have,for the most part, exhausted locating their “authentic” identities in the intersticesbetween their reality texts and celebrity place. In deCordova’s (1990) sense, they are“personalities,” whose intertextual value is relegated to the real, ephemeral texts ofreality TV. They are what Chris Rojek (2001) calls “celetoids,” extremely short-lived“accessories of culture organized around mass communication and staged authen-ticity” (20–21). On the rare occasions when reality celebrities win parts on fictionalgenres, such as Rupert Boneham did with the sitcoms Half & Half and Yes, Dear, orwhen UPN’s America’s Next Top Model contestant Eva Pigford appeared on UPN’sKevin Hill, these dispensable celebrities signify the immediacy of the episode inrelation to the reality celebrity’s success and the recentness of the episode, whichsoon appears dated during repeats, rather than the “potentially infinitely repeatableaura of stardom” garnered from “real” celebrities.32 By reminding audiences of whatthey are not, dispensable celebrities reaffirm the star system.

For cultural producers, the reality TV audience is both the source of unlimited low-paid or unpaid labor that displaces union actors from scarce production opportunities,and it is what gets sold to advertisers. The gamedoc format generates a form ofcelebrity that is new and limited in its circulation. Reality TV celebrity produces nov-elty while also shielding the larger field of celebrity from excess value. Dispensablecelebrity both creates its own scarce value and verifies the upper strata of celebrityvalue manifest in the star system. With respect to audiences, reality TV keeps viewerswatching with its promise to democratize celebrity, while also keeping the boundariesdistinct between the “real celebrities” and the wannabes, perhaps, like you or me.

Notes

1. According to Groves (2003), “below-the-line” labor may be shouting the loudest to challenge realityTV’s business model because reality programming has been a boon for nonunion cameramen and editors.

2. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) continues to address jurisdiction over reality TV in itscontract negotiations at the time of this writing.

3. These figures include both television and theatrical productions and exclude commercials andanimation.

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4. AFTRA reads the situation somewhat differently. According to Chris de Haan, press spokesperson,while reality programming has decreased opportunities for unionized actors on network slots, a multitudeof cable channels with scripted programming have created opportunities for dramatic work (personalcommunications).

5. By the term cultural producers, I mean to include a variety of media professionals involved in theproduction, management, and distribution of celebrity, whose differentiations I discuss presently.

6. I am grateful to David Morley for turning my attention to thinking about celebrity production morespecifically as a process, which indicates to me that its commodity form from an economic standpoint isbest understood in terms of varying degrees of potential economic value. This process is operationalizedin the site of production I refer to as celebrity place later in this piece.

7. Su Holmes (2004) makes the important point that theoretical approaches to conceptualizing famein relation to reality TV must take care not to conflate the formats such that significant differencesbetween the programs are neglected in analysis. While her thoughtful analysis examines constructions offame in the well-received U.K. programs Popstars and Pop Idols, I am interested in thinking about howthe gamedoc and docusoap afford cultural producers celebrity value.

8. Here I am taking issue with Daniel Boorstin’s (1987) assertion that celebrity reproduction is what “over-shadows everything else,” such that a celebrity is simply anyone who is “known for his well-knownness” (57).

9. John Thompson’s (1990) theory of “mediazation,” while not specifically addressing celebrity, is use-ful for understanding how symbolic forms become cultural commodities. In short, Thompson argues thatwhen symbolic forms become cultural forms—that is, when they are constituted as commodities to bebought and sold in the marketplace—symbolic value provides meaning or pleasure for people so that theyattend to or consume them, while economic value is a reflection of how producers see the worth of productsnot based on their form as art or intrinsically valuable as per meaning, but as reliably profitable. Theexchange of symbolic form between producers and receivers, or their cultural transmission, takes placethrough mediazation, a framework that involves considerations of the technical medium of transmission, thephenomenology of space–time distanciation, and the institutional structures of the media industries.

10. The discourses on celebrity, of course, are not restricted to the denizens of Hollywood. For broaderhistorical arguments, see Braudy (1986) and Ponce de Leon (2002); for literary celebrity, see Moran(2000); for political celebrity, see Street (2003); for nonscholarly accounts and do-it-yourself celebrity,see Aronson (1983), Sudjic (1990), and Rein, Kotler, and Stoller (1997).

11. Richard deCordova’s (1990) study on the early star system shows how stars, as opposed to “picturepersonalities,” emerged out of the industry’s construction of audience knowledge about the actors’ livesoutside their film work. Serialized stories “disclosing” the private lives of stars were strategically releasedto suggest that the actor’s “real” personality was consistent with the screen image; Jane Gaines (1991) inher discussion of intellectual property law and star contracts also identifies the bifurcation of star imagesinto two “basic zones of utilization—the product and its exploitation” (157).

12. Joshua Gamson (1994) found in his study Claims to Fame that audiences in their consumption ofcelebrity, by being privy to the commercial process as fabrication, have also learned to transcend the valueof belief and disbelief in meaning and simply enjoy the hype. Here the postmodern irony of celebrity isa “combination of exposure of the celebrity-and-image-manufacturing processes and mockery of it”which serves to diffuse a “threat to admiration by offering the audience a position of control” (18) in theiruse of symbol meaning.

13. Hesmondhalgh (2002) provides a precise definition of the cultural industries: “those institutions(mainly profit-making companies, but also state organizations and non-profit organizations) which are mostdirectly involved in the production of social meaning,” or “the primary aim of which is to communicate toan audience, to create texts.” The core cultural industries (film, broadcasting, publishing, music, advertisingand marketing, and new media) all involve the “industrial production and circulation of texts” (11–12).

14. Because development in the cultural industries is characterized by uncertain and uneven produc-tion, Miège (1989) is careful to argue for distinct analysis with respect to cultural products. While he doesnot consider celebrity in terms of the symbolic structuring of cultural workers who are themselves featured

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in the texts of cultural products, I argue that the ways in which celebrity is symbolically constructed andnegotiated, packaged, and disseminated within media organizations is a function of the complicated inter-play among strategies of capital constrained by the “logics” of production Miège identifies, particularly, inthe case of reality TV, the “flow logic” by which broadcast audiences are created and sold to advertisers.

15. Gitlin (1983) shows in his study of television production that “recombinant” forms result whenbroadcasters practice a “logic of safety” by repeating profitable program formulas. Similarly, Caves’s(2000) identification of the “nobody knows” principle echoes the sentiment of uncertainty shared by cul-tural producers.

16. Caves (2000) identifies this practice as the “A list/B list” property, but as Hesmondhalgh (2002)points out, Miège implies that the notion of “catalogue” is highly stratified as per value afforded culturalproducers and as an indicator of celebrity success.

17. Gorham Kindem (1985) argues that SAG’s classification of members inherited from the studio eraand its postwar history of cooperative interaction with producers have functioned largely to benefit its mostvisible and better-known actors. After the immediate break-up of the studio system, greater competitionand uncertainty caused the studios to produce fewer films with the most popular stars, while the 1970s sawa turn by Hollywood toward using stars in other media such as television and the recording industry.

18. Hesmondhalgh (2002) is careful to note that these are not discrete stages. They “overlap, interactand sometime conflict” (55).

19. This period is referred to by Hesmondhalgh (2002) as “the complex professional era.”20. Turner, Bonner, and Marshall (2000), in their study of celebrity production from the Australian pro-

motion industry perspective, highlight the extent to which publicity apparatuses use celebrities as “bait” forgeneral media coverage and cross-promotion, and the occasional “flashpoints” of media saturation in whichcelebrity dominates most media coverage.

21. It is important to note that the concentration of media ownership and strategies of synergy increas-ingly blur distinctions between revenue gathered from Miège’s distinctions among “publishing,” “flow,”and “written press” logics. Film and television stars promote their cultural products across a media firm’sholdings by appearing in made-for-TV movies, on talk shows, by granting magazine interviews, andappearing at publicized events for photo-opts, etc.

22. Hesmondhalgh (2002) borrows this term from Ryan (1992).23. Raphael (2004) notes this phase began with the success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 1999

and Survivor in 2000.24. Raphael uses the neologism Reali-TV in his analysis as a device for emphasizing the political

economy of the television industry without neglecting the genre’s claims to represent “the real” throughdistinct formats.

25. The WGA strike in 1988, which had little negative effect on the production of reality shows, alsoserved as an impetus for producers to develop more reality programming during the delay of the season.The same likely applies to the current WGA strike.

26. Although many reality celebrities get agency representation or manage their marketability frompersonal web sites, union membership is less transparent. SAG will not disclose membership but willlocate an actor’s agency if the actor is listed in their database. AFTRA will indicate membership but notan actor’s current status as a member. Nies disclosed that he is currently an AFTRA member and was aSAG member for ten years. Mark Long is both an AFTRA and SAG member. Trishelle Cannatella andPuck Rainey did not respond to my queries, but AFTRA lists Trishelle Cannatella as a member.

27. Although I am not addressing the format here, it should be noted that reality TV also providescost-effective opportunities to revitalize C-list celebrities with shows that pit celebrity against celebrity orexpose “the real person” behind the fading celebrity. According to an AFTRA representative, all celebritiesappearing on The Surreal Life are covered by AFTRA because they have been employed on the basis oftheir celebrity status, so that budding reality celebrities who make it onto this show are at the very leastcovered under the Taft-Hartley law.

28. It is the case that some neophyte and aspiring actors make their way onto reality shows, but theydo so by claiming to be “ordinary,” and without invoking the privilege of union membership or protection

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of agency representation. CBS Survivor villain Jerri Manthey, for example, was both a SAG and AFTRAmember, having performed in two music videos and a made-for-TV movie, before her participation onSurvivor. Despite SAG’s strict no nonunion work policy and AFTRA’s discouragement of nonunionemployment, the majority of Manthey’s involvement on Survivor series and specials classified her as acontestant, which, consistent with other game shows, is not covered by union jurisdiction. It is not knownhow CBS exercises its rights to publicity with respect to Manthey.

29. Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) uses the “media friends” construct to suggest that parasocial interaction(Horton and Wohl 1956) can apply to relations between actors in fictional roles and fans.

30. Of course, reality celebrities are also guests, hosts, and actors on shows distributed by networksother than their home-based network, but combined searches on Internet Movie Data Base Pro and Lexis-Nexis yield credits for reality celebrities predominantly synergized around the holdings of the media com-pany that houses the reality show in which they got their initial exposure.

31. Roscoe (2001), for example, details how eviction from the Big Brother house is turned into a spectacle,and Johnson-Woods (2002) documents the postshow mediated activities of some of the popular players.

32. I am grateful to Moya Luckett for providing this insightful example and for her commentary.

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Sue Collins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New YorkUniversity, where she is writing her dissertation on celebrity in the public sphere during World War I. Shewishes to thank Ted Magder, Susan Murray, Bilge Yesil, Shannon Mattern, and Rick Maxwell for theirinsightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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