Mobile Production: Spatialized Labor, Location Professionals, and the Expanding Geography of Television Production

Abstract

This article addresses the spatial challenges facing television laborers amid an increasingly expansive and conngent environment of local production incentives. Pushing away from the term runaway production and its limited engagement with local, spatialized dynamics of labor, I argue for a consideration of “mobile production,” wherein television series are capable of being executed in an increasingly wide range of locations—not necessarily Los Angeles—and capable of being moved should changes in an incentive system create the need to do so. Through personal interviews and analysis of industry discourse, this case study of location professionals considers how the mobility of production affects below-the-line local laborers. Mobile production relies on location workers more than any other job category, but the capacities of these workers are geographically specific: while they make the globalized mobile production apparatus viable, they are also the most likely to be left behind if incentive structures shift and Hollywood producers “go mobile” and move on.