Reading between the Lines: Gender and Viral Marketing

Gender changes the way independent filmmakers work, and it must change the way we understand their work. Traditionally, below-the-line labor is differentiated from above-the-line labor within media industries as being skill-based rather than creative, and thus compensated at scale and standardized through various guilds and unions. In recent years, scholars like John Caldwell, Miranda Banks, and Vicki Mayer have challenged perceptions about the lack of creativity in below-the-line labor, as well as the ways in which such labor is delegitimated through industrial and cultural processes of gendering.¹ But scholarship also needs to focus on the ways in which gender and social media convergence blur the boundaries between above-the-line and below-the-line labor in independent American microbudget film-making. As Chris Atton observes, working between these lines is often a practical reality for independent media production.² The binary may also be destabilized by female creative laborers who occupy above-the-line positions, carry out below-the-line promotional labor for microbudget film projects, and engage with multiple digital media platforms to make their labor visible and commodifiable.

Take, for example, the viral marketing campaign of the independent film Best Friends Forever (Brea Grant, 2013). Completed in the fall of 2012, the film focuses on two friends who embark on a road trip to Texas as the apocalypse nips at their hub caps; its online fund-raising campaign demonstrates how digital communication can support the production and distribution of independent film, particularly within industrial limitations that force independent productions to consolidate their labor force.

This specific case study also demonstrates the political potential of female media professionals taking on both above- and below-the-line labor roles. This shift should challenge our definitions of below- and above-the-line labor, particularly for independent or amateur filmmakers who take on a variety of work roles, including masculinized technical labor as well as the more associatively feminized labor of casting, marketing, and promotion. Most notably, director-producer-writer-star Brea Grant and produce-writer-star Vera Miao’s fund-raising efforts challenge the notion that above-and below-the-line labor are necessarily distinct from each other. By analyzing the ways in which independent filmmakers’ labor is articulated, this case study addresses how we view women’s numerous roles as creative laborers in contemporary American independent cinema. It also considers how they negotiate their myriad professional identities while working toward gender parity in the industry.

Matt Hills’s concept of counterauthorship is especially provocative. Hills argues that scholars should think of authorship as processual and paratextual, as labor forces and industries evolve, produce, and interact “across-the-line,” rather than reinforcing stable concepts located around one show runner, producer, director, or screenwriter over the course of a text’s production history.³ To wit, while Grant and Miao wrote, produced, directed, and starred in their own feature film, they also took on traditionally below-the-line labor, particularly while serving as the film’s promotion team. Counterauthorship also accounts for the ways in which marginalized authors insist on their authorial legitimacy in their work and industrial disclosures. That is, we need to consider the various meanings of author for above-the-line workers who are women, queer, people of color, or from non-Western countries, and who thus face a different set of obstacles in getting their work produced and in claiming authorship of those texts. Theorizing authorship in concert with counterauthorship allows us to better understand the struggle for recognition in above-the-line communities peopled by women. Furthermore, it enables us to better analyze independent film productions that require laborers—like Grant and Miao—to work above and below the line simultaneously to complete their film and prepare it for distribution. These hierarchies unfold in a postfeminist cultural moment that operates beside a long history of women slowly integrating into the creative industries without the legislative guarantee of equal pay.

For the unique production history of Best Friends Forever to help us to problematize industrial standards of labor distinctions, we must first rethink the ways in...