The social organisation of film production:
- A comparative study of institutions, network structures, and performance in the Danish, US, and Indian film industries.

Managed by Mark Lorenzen (CBS).

Project participants: Mark Lorenzen (CBS), Trine Bille (CBS), Kristina Vaarst Andersen (CBS).

This is a research project under the research programme "The Socio-economic organisation of creative industries", headed by Professor Brian Moeran from CBS' imagine .. Creative Industries Research Centre.

Film production is the most complex of the Creative Industries, encompassing thousands of specialised tasks and hundreds of skill-holders, collaborating in temporary development projects. Due to the complexity, it has been argued that the social organisation of film production is of immense importance for commercial performance. More specifically, a research tradition has emerged, focusing upon how network structures of film projects influence the box office success of the completed films.

This research has largely concentrated its efforts upon the US film industry. Because of its relevance for both the scientific community (where the study of social networks is a rapidly growing field) and practitioners (i.e., film producers in search of more efficient ways of organising film production), this area of enquiry is gaining ground within film research. Nevertheless, there has, so far, been little research of this kind on film industries, the organisation of which differ substantially from that of the US film industry. For example, whereas there is a slowly growing research on a few European film industries, the small, subsidised Danish film industry has not been researched in this perspective. Similarly, there have been no studies of those major non-subsidised film industries of Asia, such as Manila, Hong Kong or Mumbai (even if the annual output of the latter is comparable to that of Hollywood and the consumption of its products).

Because of the lack of non-US studies, there are as yet no cross-country comparative studies. This, in turn, explains why the current research of the social organisation of film production has been limited to the project level, neglecting the national or industry level of analysis. In short, research has so far not addressed the crucial question: If network structures of film projects influence commercial performance, what then influences network structures themselves? This is a question that most efficiently can be addressed by cross-country comparison.

This project attempts to build such missing knowledge about the social organisation of film production, to the benefit of the scientific community working on Creative Industries in general and on film production in particular, but also to film industry practitioners, particularly those in hitherto understudied film industries, such as European or Asian. We pick the Danish and Indian (more specifically, Mumbai) film industries for a study, as no research on their social organisation yet exists, and because they constitute useful cases for cross-country comparison with each other and the USA (more specifically, Hollywood).

The project carries out first-ever studies of network structures in the Danish and Mumbai film industries, and through being able to compare across national context with each other and existing research on Hollywood, it also seeks to create insight for the first time into the importance of national, regional and industry-level institutions for network structures at film project level. While the study of Danish film is bound to have a notable impact upon European film research, the study of the Mumbai film industry, as well as the cross-country comparisons, given their pioneering nature, will attract very substantial scientific attention globally.

The research questions asked are:

Contact: Mark Lorenzen