Development Hell: Tracing the Origins and Evolution of Trade Industry Discourse

Activity: Talk or presentationInvited talkResearch

Description

Anecdotal and archival evidence indicate that the prevailing logic of cultural production in the film industries is one of the perpetual development of a creative project followed by its eventual abandonment. It appears that a substantial amount of labour, finance, and resource is invested in these unproduced projects and this cycle of ‘unproduction’ (Fenwick 2021; Kunze 2020), with an entire shadow workforce employed on the understanding that their time and effort is being spent on projects everyone knows will never be made. By the 1980s, a term was firmly established to describe this cycle: development hell.
In this talk, I will discuss emergent findings on the trade industry discourse about development hell. Using digitised collections of trade journals, magazines, and relevant newspapers, the research aims to understand how the term development hell originated, how it has evolved, and the divergent meanings that have since resulted. The research is the first step in a wider project to understand the contemporary meaning and experience of development hell and its relationship to creativity, cultural work, unproduction, and policy.
Period20 Nov 2024
Event titleDrama and Film Research Seminar
Event typeSeminar