Christy Collis
Alan McKee
Ben Hamley
2010
Entertainment industries at university: Designing a curriculum

A theme here is the fight with humanities scholars for entertainment not to be seen as a derogative term. See p. 930.

921
Definition-entertainment:
“audience-centred commercial culture”

“‘because it [entertainment] is so easy to use the term, I don’t think we easily know what it means and involves’ (Dyer, 1992, ix)”

“‘considering the prominence of entertainment in our daily lives, it is perplexing that the academic effort to deal with this phenomenon has remained rather weak’ (Sayre, King, 2003, xviii)”

922
“Three years of research with entertainment industry professionals demonstrated that while work in each of the entertainment subsectors differed, the role of producer was constant across the entire industry. Entertainment producing is a largely intellectual role: it does not necessarily involve discrete technical skills such as camera-handling, singing or accountancy. Although their exact job titles differ from subsector to subsector (what is a ‘producer’ in television may be more like a ‘creative director’ in the theatre or an ‘executive’ in the pop music industry), entertainment producers across the entertainment industries are the people who make entertainment projects happen: the people who spot potential entertainment properties or ideas, understand potential audiences and audience research, develop creative projects, and assemble and manage production teams, while ensuring that the project works within legal boundaries, and that it makes money.”

“This is the point at which the practice of entertainment is most clearly differentiated from the practice of art. A guitar player might use similar skills to play on a piece of art music, or a piece of mainstream commercial entertainment. But the record industry executives working on those projects are likely to bring quite different perspectives and business models to the process. Indeed, we propose that the ‘producer’ category is a central defining feature of entertainment. Art can be created by an artist purely for the purpose of self-expression. Entertainment always has an audience in mind, and the question of how to make money from that audience to pay for the product is central to the development of all entertainment projects.”

Definition-entertainment:
“a ‘constructed product designed to stimulate a mass audience in an agreeable way in exchange for money’ (Sayre, King,2003, 1)”

924
“We have noticed with interest an emerging attention to particular entertainment products – particularly television programs – which have a clear author- Figure (Twin Peaks, The X-Files, The Sopranos, Buffy). But the vast majority of entertainment workers remain, to academic humanities study, faceless.”

925
“On one side of this divide are those who see tertiary education as focused on graduate employability and the application of learning to problems and situations beyond the university; on the other side are those who see tertiary education as focused on learning for learning’s sake.” Having to choose between the two is imho wrong.

930
“the fact that there exists no history of an academic discipline called ‘Entertainment’ also caused some concern that it did not exist as a coherent object for study. Our findings from research with industry partners are that this concern is not shared by those people working within the entertainment industries. Interestingly, this concern came only from within the Humanities – in faculties other than the Humanities – such as Business and Law – entertainment is firmly established as an object of study.”

“It seems that ‘critical’ means different things in different contexts; for some, ‘critical’ means ‘critical of entertainment’, while for others, ‘critical’ means ‘critical practitioners of entertainment’.”

930f
“the concern was raised that everybody working in the entertainment industries must have a series of technical skills, and that there are no generic ‘producing’ skills across the industries. Again, our research with industry partners showed that this is not the case. For entertainment producers, the intellectual work of balancing creative, business, and legal perspectives in the creation of audience-centred culture is their core generic skill.”