The Movie Business as Waste Management Industry

Abstract

This essay examines two instances of “waste management” in the movie industry. First, it compares Blockbuster Video to Waste Management Inc., as both companies were run by Wayne Huizenga and similarly capitalized on economies of scale and geographic scope, centralized ownership, and standardization. Second, it draws from personal interviews with archive workers at a major Hollywood studio. Although these workers are tasked with saving and maintaining media materials, they cannot keep everything. What they save has value, what they discard does not, and in making the decisions about which is which, these people provide a critical understanding of how garbage is imagined within this company. Together, these two case studies illustrate how the media industry follows a number of different “garbage logics” of waste management