Parallel Hierarchies: Navigating Assistantship in Hollywood’s Above and Below the Line Divide
Kiah Bennett / Muhlenberg College
In summer 2019, I began collecting data for my dissertation on Hollywood assistants and struggled to understand how they fit into media industries and production culture literature.[1] I sat down with then showrunner’s assistant, Izzy, and then office assistant, Hailey. In my attempt to understand late-stage capitalist Hollywood, or like one of my interviewees described “the latest stage of capitalism” in Hollywood, I inquired about assistants’ rank and labor in the above-the-line/below-the-line construction of Hollywood. We collectively struggled in this effort. After some back and forth of Hailey explaining the assistantship hierarchy, I echo back to her, “So, it’s like this parallel hierarchy that doesn’t fit in above-the-line, below-the-line but it runs [tangentially] parallel to whomever your boss is, [and where they fall within that hierarchy]?” After which, Izzy and Hailey worked to clarify even further:
Hailey: Yes. To tie it back to above the line, below the line, I wouldn’t say that there are a lot of assistants in below-the-line in general, because it’s just not, it doesn’t work that way. …
Izzy: They’re [“below-the-line assistants”] more in the apprenticeship line. …[Below-the-line workers] don’t need [assistants].
Hailey: You don’t need them or you can enter below the line at that same age that you would be an assistant, if that’s your choice. You can use below the line to try and get to above the line, but it isn’t guaranteed. … I would say that assistants are removed from below the line, almost completely. Is that true? I don’t know. There’s development assistants and stuff too but it’s not the same assistant culture, I guess.
Izzy: I’m a little torn on it because I think, very technically speaking, we are below the line, but I almost like the parallel track metaphor better because our labor is- it’s almost like the blue-collar, white-collar conversation we had earlier, that our work is more white-collar, for lack of a better term, I guess.
Packed into just this excerpt of a much longer conversation is, among many other things, one of the central dilemmas I ran into when writing my dissertation: how do I categorize this group of people into the extant hierarchy and scholarly discussion of Hollywood production cultures? I begin with this dilemma because it sets the stage for the purpose of this blog post.
I echo Eva Novrup Redvall’s excitement in being able to use a platform like Flow as an opportunity to work through burgeoning ideas. My intent here is to explore these liminal positions and rifts of lesser theorized production cultures and how they fit into our contemporary structure. I also invite other scholars working in or tangential to these rifts of early career Hollywood workers to explore these challenges with me.
To provide more context, my dissertation argues that the role of assistant to above-the-line executives and creatives works as a gatekeeping mechanism to maintain Hollywood’s white, able-bodied, middle-to-upper class patriarchal status quo through its work conditions, promotion and hiring practices. While gathering this data, and trying to make sense of how assistants fit into Hollywood’s hierarchy, I also began the process of uncovering how members of this industrial subculture understand their place within Hollywood and how they relate to each other. They self-constitute as not quite above-the-line (though that is where they aspire to be), and not below-the-line, but rather in some parallel hierarchy and production culture that, though not completely independent from above-the-line work, functions as its own production culture.
Before I get too far ahead of myself, I want to explain the population of assistants I am talking about. My research subjects are executive assistants (i.e. assistants to executives in above-the-line positions), some personal assistants to executives/above-the-line creatives, writers room assistants, and script coordinators. Key here is that these assistants—save for two subgroups of assistants—are almost entirely removed from the “production” of a film or TV show and are largely ununionized.[2] Additionally, by and large, these assistants are in these positions with the goal of eventually being promoted into the same above-the-line positions as their supervisors.[3] In Figure 2, which displays the long chain of imagined hierarchies in Hollywood, these assistants work alongside (but not exactly in) the realms of “above-the-line creatives” and “distribution.” And while this infographic suggests that this is a relatively small group of Hollywood workers, in reality these assistants have a huge impact on the day-to-day functions of Hollywood.[4]
Indeed, in season six of Netflix’s dark sitcom BoJack Horseman, “Hollywood” assistants, tired of being overworked and underpaid in the name of “paying dues,”[5] go on strike and the industry crumbles into the hellscape depicted in Figure 1. Despite being a satire, BoJack Horseman captures the necessity and distinct nature of assistantship and other early career support staffers who aspire into above-the-line positions. BoJack illustrates how assistants constitute their own collectively disenfranchised production culture, distinct from above-the-line and below-the-line. This distinction also fits with Caldwell’s Production Culture (2008) categorization, depicted in Figure 3.
I suggest here that we further theorize this group of support staffers with more granularity, going beyond “unregulated and nonsignatory,” though these descriptors are apt considering assistants (except for two positions) are not able to unionize. Moreover, understanding assistants alongside the likes of agents, reps, and career clerical workers obfuscates their working conditions, intra-subcultural discourses, and how these factors shape later generations of above-the-line demographics and cultural outlook. While academic publishing, with its necessarily thorough review process, can’t always “keep up” with the rapid evolution of Hollywood’s economic, cultural, and industrial shifts, a more granular understanding of assistants’/executive support staffers’ production subculture can aid in how we think about Hollywood’s ongoing neoliberalization. A shorthand for this group of workers, not unlike how we use “above-the-line” or “below-the-line,” provides some ease in understanding how mythologies of “paying dues” become ingrained in the fabric of how Hollywood runs, or how assistants work to shield interns from their supervisor’s abuses (as Maureen Ryan discusses in her exposé, Burn It Down), and how these ethos of shielding the underlings doesn’t necessarily translate once assistants are promoted to above-the-line positions and they rise through the ranks.
For example, the treatment assistants receive can set the standard for when they are in above-the-line managerial positions, considering above-the-line executives and creatives’ only source of institutional management “training” is what they observed when they were assistants of their previous supervisors. Moreover, as my previous publication illustrates, Hollywood’s institutional whiteness gatekeeps BIPOC assistants out of above-the-line positions. In my research, I found that similar gatekeeping tactics are enacted to keep certain women and femme assistants, disabled assistants, and assistants from working class backgrounds out of above-the-line positions.
Therefore, I suggest “across-the-line” as a designation to identify those workers who strive to get across the line, and their positions and production culture as an industrial “training grounds” wherein Hollywood’s above-the-line cultural expectations are shored up. These workers are made up of “outsiders” who have their foot in the door as support staffers to their “insider” supervisors. In my next Flow article, I will expand on the conditions of what it means to be “across-the-line,” gatekeeping techniques therein, and the long-term effects of this promotional structure and cultural conditioning.
Image Credits:
- “The Kidney Stays in the Picture.” Season 6, Episode 6, BoJack Horseman (Netflix), October 25, 2019. Screengrab by author.
- SetHero. “ULTIMATE Film Crew Positions Breakdown + Infographic.”
- Caldwell, J. 2008. Production Culture : Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Duke University Press), 38. Screengrab by author (highlight added).
- John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, Console-Ing Passions (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); Vicki Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Vicki Mayer, John T. Caldwell, and Miranda J. Banks, Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, Production Studies (London: Taylor and Francis, 2009); Erin Hill, Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2016); Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare, and Avi Santo, eds., Making Media Work : Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries, Making Media Work : Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries, Critical Cultural Communication (New York: New York University Press, 2014). [↩]
- Notably, the two subgroups of assistants who are not removed from production are: (1) writers’ room assistants and script coordinators who have a brief period in unionized “production” positions before promotion into staff writer positions, and (2) showrunner’s assistant whose labor can support their supervisor from development to distribution. [↩]
- John Thornton Caldwell, Specworld : Folds, Faults, and Fractures in Embedded Creator Industries (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2023), 156, https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=30159250. [↩]
- Caldwell, 37; Hill, Never Done, 218. [↩]
- Hill, Never Done; Lesley Stevenson, “Writers and Actors Can Strike, But Not Their Assistants: On Paying ‘Real Money’ for Unskilled Labor,” In Media Res, October 2, 2023, https://mediacommons.org/imr/content/writers-and-actors-can-strike-not-their-assistants-paying-%E2%80%98real-money%E2%80%99-unskilled-labor. [↩]