שיעור 12 - Making the Most out of 15 Minutes. Colins

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Making the Most out of 15 Minutes : Reality TV's Dispensable Celebrity

Sue Collins Television New Media 2008 9: 87 originally published online 16 January 2008 DOI: 10.1177/1527476407313814 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/9/2/87
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Making the Most out of 15 Minutes

Reality TVs Dispensable Celebrity
Sue Collins
New York University
Television & New Media Volume 9 Number 2 March 2008 87-110 2008 Sage Publications 10.1177/1527476407313814 http://tvnm.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com
Reality TV invites new considerations for theorizing celebrity as a cultural commodity whose economic value is based on potential exchange. In this article, I argue that reality TVs construction of a new stratum of celebrity valueordinary people performing the realsupports claims that the industry is moving toward a flexible model of economic organization. The production of reality TV expands the labor stock to include nonunionized, nonpaid or low-paid contestants playing themselves, while also displacing unionized actors from production opportunities. Moreover, reality TVs D-level celebrity generates novelty out of audience self-reflexivity with minimal risk and temporal flexibility. Celebrity value, as a mechanism to gather audiences, undergoes a new form of dispensable synergy that shelters the larger system of celebrity valorization from the dual problems of scarcity and clutter. Keywords: reality TV; celebrity; political economy; cultural labor
n February 2004, Bunim/Murray Productions bestowed on Philadelphias civic tourism and marketing officials the kind of cool publicity that cant be bought: they decided to shoot the fifteenth season of the MTV reality series The Real World in Phillys Old City neighborhood. In their efforts to remodel the former Seamens Church Institute, the shows producers hired nonunion labor, a practice they had been following in thirteen Real World cities since 1992. But this time, the producers encountered the unbridled wrath of a union towns organized labor, which after two weeks of picketing effectively prompted producers to pull out with 70 percent of construction complete and three weeks left before taping was scheduled to begin (Klein 2004b). It took a fan-based, tech-savvy grassroots movement, civic sycophancy, and a secret unprecedented agreement to include union workers along with nonunion at the job site to get MTV back (Anderson 2004; Klein 2004a, 2004b; Tkacik 2004). In this case, however, Phillys trade unions claimed the job site as their turf, and not as a television set that would normally employ the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (I.A.T.S.E.; Klein 2004b). Reality TVs production principles have triggered widespread displacement for Hollywoods unionized labor. Challenges to the genres encroaching colonization of prime time have been mildly successful, as in the case of I.A.T.S.E. winning
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unionization for Big Brother1 and the Writers Guild of America2 securing union work for some host introductions and voice-over scripts (Rendon 2004). Because of the enormous popularity of network reality shows such as Survivor, American Idol, Joe Millionaire, and The Apprentice, among others, reality TV has precipitated a radical restructuring of the network business (Carter 2003), which calls attention to the new industry practice of bypassing costly unionized actors. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) have been unable to contest the hiring of ordinary people, the staple of unscripted reality formats, because these shows, in general, do not fall outside of preexisting rules of AFTRA coverage. The fact that reality formats are popular with producers and audiences alike, however, is reducing the opportunities for scripted work on broadcast space across union membership. With employment dropping 1.6 percent in 2003, 6.5 percent in 2002, 9.3 percent in 20013 and 15 percent from the highpoint of employment in 1998, SAG claims to be taking a hit for the popularity of reality shows too, over which it has no jurisdiction, alongside the ever-present threat of American productions shot on foreign soil without SAG contracts (Brodesser 2004; Kiefer 2002; McNary 2002; Screen Actors Guild 2005a). With some forty reality shows occupying broadcast and cable space in the spring of 2003 (Groves 2003), and 20.5 primetime hours allotted to reality programming in Fall 2004, SAG and AFTRA projected a loss of over nine thousand union jobs between Spring 2004 and 2005 (Screen Actors Guild 2005b).4 Although the industrys trades warn of continuing unrest and the unions confer with each on how to combat the displacement of actors, this is not to say that celebrity as a cultural commodity will suffer under the new economic logic of reality programming. On the contrary, reality TV invites new considerations for theorizing production strategies of celebrity, particularly with respect to formats that do not deal in talent per se, but with the performance of the everyday (Roscoe 2001). Recent scholarship has engaged theoretically with reality TVs promise to democratize celebrity as a way to explain the genres widespread appeal, but the question of how reality TV alters celebrity production within the cultural industries warrants more exploration. In particular, I ask: What happens when an influx of reality TVs cast members try to enter the celebrity field? To what extent are they absorbed and how does this affect the larger system of celebrity valorization? The Real World cast members left the first season in 1992 to be greeted by the immediate buzz of the celebrity infrastructure: talk show guest appearances, profile articles, commercial endorsements, mall openings appearances, lectures, and the like. After the first Survivor finale, which attracted 51.7 million viewers, reality TV veterans were showered with interview requests, sitcom cameos, and managers and agents pleading to represent them (Wolk 2002, 33). While some go on to bigger and better celebrity valorization, such as original Survivor contestant Colleen Haskell, who managed to land a part in Rob Schneiders film The Animal and an appearance on That 70s Show, others such as George Boswell, a 43-year-old commercial roofer
Collins / Reality TVs Dispensable Celebrity 89
who was voted out of the Big Brother house, give up their day job believing they are destined for show business. Most of these reality TV vets find that in the sixteenth minute, they are not absorbed into the celebrity system; rather, their celebrity currency runs out and they are channeled back into obscurity. Yet, this D-level reality TV celebrity has very real benefits for cultural producers,5 broadcasters, advertisers, and a host of related cottage industries borne out of reality TVs system of production. The making of celebrity, as with most cultural products, is configured around what has worked before. Reality TVs recombinant nature proves the point that new cultural products are structured to standardize them, and the genres production of celebrity is no exception. With this in mind, Mark Andrejevics (2003) claim that reality programming has, paradoxically, undermined the uniqueness of celebrity, and rendered star quality fungible (11), needs to be modified to account for the system of stratified production in which the economic value of celebrity is a function of potential exchange.6 In other words, what needs to be emphasized in an understanding of the production of celebrity is the degree to which celebritys intertextual property, as a function of symbolic valorization through which audiences derive meaning, pleasure, or distaste, determines its economic value. Although celebrity success is located in its distribution, that is, in the creation of sustained audiences for its consumption, what is new with reality TV is the construction of a new category of celebritywhat I am calling dispensable celebritythat generates novelty out of audience self-reflexivity with minimal risk and temporal flexibility. This lower stratum of celebrity value affords both surplus for cultural industries and the maintenance of the larger system of celebrity valorization, which, as with other commodities, is based on scarcity. Ostensibly, reality shows featuring ordinary, real people demonstrate that the genesis of celebrity as a top-down production of the cultural industries is being challenged by the audiences attention to itself. The talent shows such as American Idol and Last Comic Standing, recombinant forms from old pop talent show formats such as Star Search, openly mine celebrity from talented contestants. In this format, audiences are interpellated into a discourse of care as they engage in the fantasy of participatory democracy by casting their vote for their new idol or star (Cowell 2003), and at the same time, virtually guaranteeing producers surplus, for example in record sales, when they contract both winners and losers. Through the use of personal backstage narrative constructed by a visual aesthetic characteristic of reality TV, the pop shows also promise to reveal the internal workings of the music industry, and crucially, its manufacture of fame and stardom (Holmes 2004, 148). Many of the high ratings reality TV shows, however, while competition based, do not place the cultivation of celebrity at their center.7 Rather, shows such as the gamedoc (Survivor, Big Brother, The Apprentice, etc.), purport to represent ordinary, real individuals in competitive situations that require astute manipulation and resiliency, while the docusoap (Real World, High School Reunion, My Life as a Sitcom, etc.) places them in natural settings, and uses documentary style production values to
focus on their everyday lives but with the intervention of soap opera structuring techniques (Murray 2004). As Murray and Ouellette (2004) put it, the reality show works by promising viewers revelatory insight into the lives of others as it withholds and subverts full access to it (6). The reality gamedoc and docusoap formats, in particular, highlight the utility of celebrity stratification for cultural producers. Within the production of reality TV, celebrity operates out of an expanded field of labor stock to include nonunion low-cost workers, the risk of celebrity production is minimized, the temporal boundaries for celebritys success are flexible, and celebrity itself undergoes a new form of dispensable synergy that shelters the larger system of celebrity valorization from the dual problems of scarcity and clutter.
Celebrity Is a Commodity
To understand the system of reality TV celebrity production and how its operations compliment the organizational restructuring of the television industry currently underway, celebrity needs to be situated as a commodity form meaningful to media theory. Celebrity, understood in modern terms, is a product of the nineteenth century graphic revolution, in which image reproduction facilitated by advances in print technology enabled the manufacture of fame (Boorstin 1987) and subsequent human interest journalism (Ponce de Leon 2002; Schickel 1985). But a celebritys reproduction, while a necessary condition, is not a sufficient one.8 Celebrity should also be conceptually differentiated from fame, a precapitalist conception of visibility, which while having carried over to modernity had been restricted by precapitalist technology, time and space contingencies, and the designations of the heroic by the ruling class to the great men of royalty, aristocracy, nobility, and the church. Only after the invention of the printing press and the rise of early forms of capitalist production did an economics of publicity emerge to augment the visibility of selfproclaimed and celebrated authors as well as to protect the ownership of their work (Braudy 1986; Eisenstein 1979; Ong 1982). Celebrity is distinctly a capitalist phenomenon coinciding with changes in communication technology that enabled news forms of social mobility, the democratization of the consumption of cultural goods, and the production of secular notions of popular culture (Benjamin 1969; Ewen 1988; Gabler 1998). Celebrity is the democratization of fame, but more importantly, it is fame commodified. That is, it is a symbolic form whose transmission and reception within a commercial media system renders it a cultural commodity.9 Celebrity is established by its visibility as a function of its reproducibility, or by its exposure to audiences, who subjectively participate in the discursive construction and maintenance of celebrity through their reception. Graeme Turner (2004) argues that celebrity is not produced uniformly within the cultural industries nor without (for example, in business, politics, journalism, etc). It exists as a genre of representation and a discursive
effect, but also as a commodity produced and distributed by the promotions, publicity, and media industries, and it is a cultural formation whose social functions involves forms of pleasure and constructions of identity (9). These generic and intertextual properties, together with the fluctuations in the marketplace for celebrity consumption, enable entertainment celebrity to act as an audience-gathering mechanism whose properties as labor power and capital represent stratified value to cultural producers.10
The Political Economy of Entertainment Celebrity

Similar to other cultural goods, celebrity is the outcome of complex interplay among processes of production, mediation, and reception. Foremost, it is dependent on strategies of capitalist production that try to predict the capriciousness of audiences preferences and tastes. But celebrity is complicated as a cultural commodity because it is both part of a cultural product, such as a film or TV show, and a commodity itself. Richard Dyer (1986), whose work has been predominately concerned with the production of film stars and the star image, points out the complex market function of stars. They are a category of property in the form of brand name and image that can be used to raise capital for a film; they are part of how films get sold to audiences who expect certain meanings from the stars presence in the film; they are an asset to the star him or herself and to the studio and professionals involved in their promotion; they are a major expense in the production of a film; and they are a part of the labor that goes into the film as a commodity. In short, stars are both labor and the thing that labor produces (Dyer 1986, 5). Once the raw material of the person has been fashioned into the star by a host of professionals who perform labor onto the star (hairdressers, coaches, dieticians, make-up artists, etc.) and by the professionals involved in the making of the film as well as the performances of the star , the star image can be seen as congealed labor, that is, something that is used with further labor (scripting, acting, directing, managing, filming, editing) to produce another commodity, the film (6). Since the beginning of the film star system in the second decade of the twentieth century, star value has been managed as a form of product differentiation to satisfy audience demand (Kindem 1985; Klaprat 1985), but also as meaning that could be distributed throughout extrafilmic texts such as popular, trade, and fan magazines (deCordova 1990).11 Cultural producers of stars were limited to film studio heads and their producers and directors. In the poststudio era, star management and control over access to stars was taken up by a new set of players such as talent agents and personal managers (Litwak 1986; Wasko 2003). More recently, celebrity production is thought about in broader terms such as a promotional culture, which involves media professionals who make decisions about hiring talent, agents and managers who negotiate with these producers on behalf of their clients, and other intermediaries such as publicists who work between producers and agents on the one side, and various media outlets on the other (Turner, Bonner, and Marshall 2000).
In contemporary terms, celebrity autonomy has enhanced the potential value a celebrity can claim, or perhaps more accurately, what agents or managers can negotiate, but it has also increased the risk for unstable meaning when celebrity moves among other spheres of activity besides entertainment. For example, an increase in symbolic value (more visibility and therefore more meaning) may not increase economic value, such as in the case of celebrity personal scandal or high involvement with controversial sociopolitical issues. On the other hand, as Thompson (1990) argues, the symbolic value of a good may be inversely related to its economic value, in the sense that, the less commercial it is, the more worthy it is seen to be (156), which, of course, does not negate real commercial value.12 In any case, strategies of production surely take into account and monitor celebritys dynamic symbolic meanings as a direct function of its profitability. In this sense, celebrity should be seen as a kind of intertextually fluid capital that gets deployed with the intention of gaining advantage in the entertainment market and making profits for cultural producers and the celebrity him or herself (McDonald 2000, 5). Given the unstable and unpredictable nature of celebrity value, key objectives for the production of celebrity are to manage the problem of novelty and the problem of scarcity vis--vis media reproduction. Aside from marketing studies on the value of celebrity endorsements and economic analyses that try to account for market values of film stars or predict their box office appeal or marketing cachet, there are few studies in cultural studies or the political economy of the cultural industries that make the production of celebrity as a commodity their focal point. A few scholars, however, have done important work on the cultural industries in general that is useful for thinking about dispensable celebrity.13 In his analysis of cultural production, Bernard Mige (1989) argues that producers must concern themselves with the risks and uncertainty that characterizes cultural products and so they become an intervening factor in the production of the text.14 To spread the risks associated with uniqueness and to militate against the demands of cultural labor, the producer intervenes to ensure the product is marked by the stamp of the unique, of genius, in order to be standardized (Mige 1989, 29). In other words, reproducibility both standardizes types (e.g., rat pack, brat pack, etc.) and facilitates the potential for intertextual meanings that potentially increase symbolic value. However, these constructions are no easy matter to predict, evident by the fact that both large and small production companies meet with success and failure.15 Mige explains that because producers need to spread the risks, they construct catalogues, operating by a policy that requires direct access to cultural workers and implies their rapid renewal and rotation according to the swings of fashion (30).16 Thus, celebrity needs to be seen as a cultural product that is born out of a vast reservoir of cultural workers who are ready to work without wage retainers in which very few make it and whose success is not predictable nor necessarily sustainable. The entertainment industry, in fact, is characterized by a massive earnings disparity and high unemployment for up to 90 percent of its union membership on any given
day (Gray and Seeber 1996). Only about three-quarters of SAG members earn the $9,000 yearly minimum to qualify for health and pension benefits, while 8 to 10 percent earn a middle class standing and only 2 percent enjoy superstar earnings (Bloom 2002).17 While a few of these stars use their capital to enhance their power as directors or producers themselves, most actors are in constant competition for work in a field with excess supply, and they experience little autonomy or creative freedom in their work (Peters and Cantor 1982). Indeed, David Hesmondhalgh (2002) observes, The poor working conditions and rewards for creative cultural work have been obscured by the fact that, in a complex professional era, very generous rewards are available for symbol creators who achieve name recognition in the minds of audience members (58). The star system, which gives the highest marketing priority to star symbol creators, in Hesmondhalghs terms, is employed by producers as a type of formatting that links stars with privileged texts (hits) to offset misses. Additionally, stars can be seen as brands that act as guarantors of meaning across a variety of texts with which audiences can identify, including the capture of a stars image as a type-set for the purposes of endorsing goods and services outside of the entertainment industry. Nicholas Garnham (1990) also underscores the importance of what he calls the editorial function: that is, the commensurate matching of the cultural repertoire and its production costs with audience taste and spending power. Because demand for cultural products is unpredictable, the cultural industries offer audiences a cultural repertoire of goods to spread the risks. Increased productivity in this context takes the form of expanding the audience for the product by offering symbolic values in the form of novelty or difference. There is a constant need to create new products which are all in a sense prototypes while, at the same time, commodities produced are not destroyed in the process of consumption (160). Scarcity, on which price or value is based for most commodities, must be artificially created by using strategies of vertical integration such as monopoly control over distribution to limit access to the reproduction of cultural products. These factors lead Garnham (1990) to argue that it is cultural distribution, not cultural production, that is the key locus of power and profit (162). Borrowing from Mige (1989), Garnham (1990), Ryan (1992), and Hesmondhalgh (2002) outlines four stages of cultural production: creation, reproduction, circulation, and retailing/exhibition/ broadcast.18 In response to the unique problems facing the cultural production (high risk and unpredictability, high first copy costs and low reproduction costs, and the need to create artificial scarcity), the cultural industries organize with respect to a number of practices: misses offsetting hits, concentration and integration, creation of artificial scarcity, and formatting strategies using stars, genres, and serials. Given these dynamic conditions, Hesmondhalgh concludes that the principal organizing response of the cultural industries since the 1980s and 1990s19 to their distinctive problems has been to oversee creative input of cultural products with loose control while tightening control over reproduction and distributiontwo distinct stages, the latter of which he refers to as circulation (5556). Circulation
signifies a more comprehensive process than distribution and wholesaling; it also includes marketing and promotions, which are critical processes for the reproducing of celebrity as a commodity in and of itself (56). More specifically, there are two key ways these analyses inform celebrity. First, it is clear that celebritys symbolic value is a function of its novelty or difference within its class as a cultural product (both part of a product and a product itself), yet its production as a commodity is generally similar for any single celebrity. Efforts to market, publicize, and cross-promote a new celebrity or to sustain a celebritys audience base are undertaken in ways that are commensurate with a celebritys potential or projected value. For example, arrangements for celebrities to appear in various media formats and at PR events are often written directly into the celebrity contract.20 However, an analysis of celebritys reproduction is problematic because unlike the material production process (in which the cost of materials and scale wage, or below-the-line cultural labor, is generally fixed), or cultural production in which celebrity is an input of fixed creative cost, celebritys reproduction cost is complicated when by reproduction we now mean reproducing a single celebrity in subsequent cultural products. Celebrity value from a political economic perspective, as I have been arguing, is best understood as a function of visibility based on potential reproducibility and the subsequent sustaining of an audience base. Its economic valorization, then, is constantly shifting as celebrity intertextuality accumulates as a function of exposure within texts and around them (i.e., marketing, publicity, and cross-promotion in relation to specific texts, celebrity self-promotion, and celebrity exposure outside of the entertainment sphere). Stable intertextual meanings from the perspective of cultural producers may constitute surplus value or loss in the case of overexposure until celebrity renegotiates its value in relation to the production of some text, but novelty implies some shift in celebrity meaning, or the introduction of new celebrity. Second, when Garnham argues that distribution is the key factor of power and profit, we can infer that celebritys success is located in the creation of audiences for its consumption. Distribution in this sense for celebrity means the degree to which celebritys intertextual property (a function of its symbolic value for audiences) determines its economic value, in terms of box office draw for a particular text and in terms of gathering audiences for advertisers.21 As Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944] 1997) noted, the logic of cultural production, while an interdependent process, is much less about the differentiation of content of cultural products, than it is about how consumers are classified, organized, and labeled to receive cultural commodities. In more contemporary terms, Magder (2004) argues that the logic of commercial broadcasting is not to give audiences what they need or say they want to watch but to give people what they are willing to watch, or at the very least, programming from which they will not turn away (143). To amass a public that can be sold somewhat reliably to advertisers, cultural producers try to reduce uncertainty by offering a range of mass-produced products that vary in quality, while triangulating between the wants and needs of advertisers and the wants and needs of viewers
(142). With respect to celebrity production, the cultural industries recruit talent, manage and control the construction and reproduction of their personae, and execute diffusion processes as strategies dictate what will secure a reliable audience base. How celebrity gets reproduced across various texts depends on the processes of circulation that work to distribute celebrity beyond broadcasting and film distribution. Marketing and publicity are key to celebritys accumulation of symbolic value that, in turn, determines its reproducibility. In this way, the producers of celebrity, which is a form of congealed labor, include not only the owners and executives who exhibit loose control over creative decisions, but also the creative managers22 who intervene in the ways Mige (1989) and Garnham (1990) suggest, as well as the host of people involved in the promotions business who distribute celebrity among the texts that feature celebrity as a commodity itself. But the processes of celebrity reproduction and circulation are largely predictions made by cultural producers, and at the same time, they are vulnerable to the problem of clutter. In conventional economic theory, more celebrity (as a class of cultural products) would suggest the value of each member would diminish. However, the system of celebrity valorization seems to defy this law. A unit of celebrity can increase in value (both symbolic and economic) with the increase in its reproduction and its access by audiences. The celebrity system as a whole has not suffered from diminishing returns, if the burgeoning celebrity journalism industry is any indication. The system of stratification seems to profit from the traversing play of celebrity as abstract value among the strata. Celebrity value at lower levels of stratification valorizes the star system because it serves as points of lesser comparison with A-list celebrities, while the existence of a star system stimulates the continuing production of aspiring celebrity. The celebrity system as stratified value transcends the laws of the market economy in that its reproduction at some point within the strata assures its larger reception as a system. Moreover, as distinct living human beings, celebrities bring idiosyncrasies to the equation that are not fully controllable, or even explainable for that matter, and it is this potential instability in celebrity meaning combined with shifting audience tastes that makes celebrity value particularly difficult to pin down. Still, reproduction and circulation processes work to create celebrity scarcity. For the production of television celebrity, this implies variously limiting access to higher values of celebrity while also maintaining some optimal degree of celebrity circulation as an audience-gathering mechanism for advertisers. Herein lies the economic beauty of reality TV for cultural producers: a new level of celebrity stratification produces novelty that is easily and cheaply produced, while circulation, the key to creating scarcity as a measure of value, intrinsically limits access to higher values of celebrity because ordinary people in reality television, ironically, are not real actors with accumulated intertextual capital. They do not have access to wider circulation by which to accrue sustained symbolic and economic value. They do earn value, however, as a form of dispensable celebrity that pleases audiences for its novelty and self-reflexivity, and producers for its financial
and temporal expediency. Let us look more closely at how reality TV has developed as a production logic and why dispensability is the defining feature of this new mode of celebrity.
The Real-ization of Dispensable Celebrity

The success of reality television, particularly its second wave,23 has spawned a great deal of scholarly research that attends to close readings of specific texts, industry perspectives, and audience reception to explain its widespread popularity and cultural significance. Chad Raphael (2004) analyses the political economy of realiTV,24 arguing that this mode of television production emerged in the late 1980s as a cost-cutting fiscal strategy in response to a new Hollywood economic environment characterized by the rising costs of network program production, competition for advertising revenue among more distributors, greater debt incurred by the networks, media industry deregulation, and new audience measuring techniques designed to measure segmented markets. In addition, reality programming offered producers a way to prepare for potential strikes because these shows did not rely on scripts or acting talent, which also meant bypassing Hollywood agents commission fees, and because they could be produced more quickly than fictional shows.25 Reality shows gained currency in this environment of relative financial scarcity and labor unrest, Raphael suggests, largely doing away with higher-priced stars and union talent (124). Moreover, low-end production values were embraced as a costcutting strategy, while also operating to make rhetorical claims on representing the real (see, for example, Dovey 2000). Raphael points out that in the early 1990s, reality television was the only category of prime-time programming in most cases not to operate on deficit financing. Today, the average scripted show can cost $1 to $2 million for a prime-time hour, while an hour of reality programming costs about $700,000 to produce (Rendon 2004). The higher the prime-time climb up the celebrity ladder, the higher the price tag. Magder (2004) shows that in the 2001-to-2002 season, for example, NBCs hit drama ER cost the network some $13 million, while Friends had a production cost of $7 million per episode. CBSs Survivor, one of the few gamedocs that still captures the coveted 18- to 35year-old demographic, was the most expensive reality show, costing the network $1.4 million per episode. In this case, savings from above-the-line labor can be used to cross-subsidize higher budgets to pay for insurance premiums that cover increasingly daring stunts as well as the infrastructures to build sets and maintain contestants and crew in exotic places. In fact, Magder argues, the Survivor business model represents a larger shift in network programming currently underway. This new business model operates off of preproduction sponsorship to offset the cost of having the show made (which the network would normally pay via a licensing fee and then hope for advertisers interest), using product placement,
merchandizing tie-ins, and subscription web site interactivity. Despite the fact that reality programming doesnt lend itself to syndication, it has proven profitable, at least so far, because its reliance on preestablished, successful formats greatly reduces the risks associated with first-copy costs and the nobody knows principle (147). Endemol Entertainments Big Brother format, for example, is a template complete with a production and marketing playbook that can be adapted to a specific locale. If things go well, as Magder puts it, a format becomes an international brand with distinctive and carefully modulated local variationthe formula is tweaked, like the sugar content in Coca-Cola (147). Pop Idol, for example, was developed by the U.K. company Fremantle, who sold the concept to Fox. Similarly, CBS has sold Amazing Race to markets in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Israel, and Next Entertainment has sold The Bachelor to Scandinavian markets (Albiniak 2002; Internet Movie Database 2005a, 2005b). Indeed, the logic of the reality TV model serves as a counterprogramming mechanism against the high cost of scripted shows with unionized talent and against the threat of strikes, but, has reality programming become, in Anna McCarthys (2005) words, a mode of production? At the very least, reality TV lends credence to the argument that production organization in the television industry is increasingly characterized by strategies of flexibility and adaptation (Christopherson 1996). In its restructuring of labor relations within the film and television industries generally, flexible specialization has created new segmentations within the labor force, redefined skills, and generally increased conflicts between employers and workers throughout the industry (Christopherson and Storper 1989; Paul and Kleingartner 1994). The labor market for talent, in particular, has become increasingly short term, with more entrants competing for fewer union jobs. Although the majority of reality shows are under AFTRA jurisdiction as per the employment of hosts, voice-over narrators, and stunt performers, the labor of reality TV cast members remains untouched by unionization as long as the shows producers cast people as contestants or as playing themselves, and thus not under any acting directorship. This technicality, coupled with the everpresent need to fill more broadcast time cheaply, compliments the industrys movement toward the flexible model of organizational production. The field for ordinary, untalented people vying for potential fame is virtually inexhaustible, and the production of short-term, nonskilled, nonunion celebrity generates novelty with minimal financial risk and greater control. As Turner (2004) rightly argues, the manufacture of celebrity as a programming strategy integral to the reality formats works to contain potential conflicts (commercial or personal) between producers or networks and potential celebrities because these relations are structurally accommodated to each other from the start, meaning these celebrities are especially dependent upon the program that made them visible in the first place; they have virtually no other platform from which to address their audience (54). Debora Halberts (2003) work on reality TV and publicity rights substantiates reality TV celebritys subordination to the shows producers, at least insofar as
CBSs contractual arrangement with its Survivor contestants attests. CBS controls its contestants access to celebrity status in two ways. First, the contract stipulates that contestants are subject to authorization by CBS for any media contact or appearances for three years after the show airs. Not only does CBS protect the shows trade secrets through the confidentiality proviso, but contestants are also prohibited from accepting paid celebrity work not sanctioned by CBS long after the shows winner has been disclosed to the public. A breech in contract entitles CBS to sue the contestants for damages. In addition, the contract includes a life story rights section that effectively binds the signatory into relinquishing control over his or her life story and public image. Halbert sums up the extent to which CBS retains control and power over the contestants labor and image, and thus its circulation:
Essentially, CBS controls their ability to appear in public and in what type of venue, their ability to talk about the show, and their life stories. CBS owns their public identities and the rights to disclose their private identities. CBS owns the telling of the experiences that made them who they are. Everything a Survivor cast member could communicate to the public might be construed as the property of CBS. Additionally, CBS owns these rights throughout the universe forever. (45)
In effect, CBS is rationalizing that it is responsible for both transforming the ordinary person as raw material into a public personality, and disseminating the image to the public; therefore, since it has invested in the labor of celebrity construction, the result is the property of CBS. As Halbert points out, this aggressive extension of property rights over reality celebrities problematizes the distinctions between the rights of real celebrities who play fictional characters to control the use of their public image and what should be the rights of reality celebrities who play themselves living their private lives in public (Halbert 2003, 4546). While it is true that potential contestants who sign the contract are ostensibly willing to give up control over their personal lives as a lived story and their public image to take their chances on the show, this contractual arrangement underscores the enormous differential in power relations between producer and cultural worker. The reality of power, Halbert explains, is invisible to the public who only sees the spectacle (51). Confidentiality agreements also obscure the conditions of labor for aspiring reality contestants, as well as for industry analysts, scholars, and cultural critics. We do not know the specifics of other reality show contracts, but if producers operate off the playbook, then the dispensing of this novel reality celebrity becomes the spectacle itself as the reality model moves into the recombinant stage to reproduce the cultural form and to control the circulation of the celebrity. The Real World, for example, led the way in reproducing what Caves (2000) calls the lottery prize phenomena (57) by offering its housemates the possibility of being invited back to show reunions and spin-offs. Although most reality players will not cross over to celebrity status, the fact that a few do get more exposure after their
initial reality experience ends, and that fewer still sustain their visibility through exposure in other electronic media texts and celebrity print journalism, ensures that there will always be cheap labor to perform the real in hopes of becoming the next Eric Nies. An original Real World veteran, Nies has appeared in numerous Viacom holdings including The Brady Bunch Movie, VH1s I Love the 90s, and over a dozen MTV Real World series, specials, or documentaries, as himself, as a host and cohost, and as an actor, since his debut in 1992. Other popular housemates, such as Puck Rainey, Trishelle Cannatella, and Mark Long, have been following Niess lead, enjoying exposure primarily in other MTV formats, but also landing small parts in films, music videos, and commercials. Once select reality celebrities cross over to media formats involving hosting or acting, AFTRA membership becomes a mandatory ticket to a higher status of celebrity.26 Appearances on reality formats such as The Surreal Life or Im a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, for example, which feature people hired for their celebrity status, signify the cross-over point to professional acting, union wages, health and pension benefits, and AFTRA dues.27 However, while celebrity may be the real prize many reality players are after, producers objectives are less about cultivating a star system than to use the promise of celebrity as continuous low-cost bait to gather contestants or players, and ultimately to sell audiences to advertisers. Borrowing from Real World and Survivor production strategies, The Apprentice started its second season by instructing the two remaining apprentices to compile a team out of subordinates who had been fired during the first season. Not only does this strategy eliminate the expense of casting calls, it extends and valorizes compelling narrative structures that keep people watching, and that encourage reality players to self-direct their roles to increase their chances of sustaining visibility through other media formats.28 Although it may be the case that reality TV has meant fewer opportunities for talent agents to secure scripted work for their clients, agents are not entirely bypassed by the reality phenomenon. Aside from the pop idol format, for the most part, the rush to represent reality celebrities is over, but agents keep an eye out for whatever heat is generated from after-show exposure. Still, budding reality TV celebrities entering a field with an oversupply of unemployed talent must do the work of seeking out agents, who, as gatekeepers operating out of a glut of talent, screen the amount and quality of talent they can efficiently represent to match talent with jobs. Since reality players are mostly dispensed around other reality formats and short-term media texts, established agents are less inclined to forgo commissions as reality celebrities gain exposure. Perhaps these low-capital celebrities make fodder for a new class of novice agents and managers. More likely, agents are concentrating on placing hosts, anchors, disc jockeys and other union-covered talent generated by reality shows into other paid media texts. The political economic perspective explains why the industry has embraced reality TV, but why do audiences watch and why do they want to participate? While much of the popular press has scorned and lamented the publics preoccupation with
aspirations of celebrity in Boorstins (1987) critical sense of the word, as the vapid and trivial state of being known for well-knownness, scholarly work more carefully deconstructs reality TV to reveal its appeal to audiences in more nuanced, analytically distinct ways. Indeed, the promise of celebrity is one of the motivating factors for audience participation, particularly with respect to the pop show talent format. In general, all of the formats tap into the fetishism of celebrity by suspending the traditional gate-keeping mechanisms of Hollywoods hierarchical structure. At the same time, by claiming to represent the real, reality TV shows profess to democratize celebrity by demystifying access to it or debunking its aura through the normalization of surveillance techniques to get at the private, intimate, and authentic moments of individuals on display (Andrejevic 2003). Interestingly, Andrejevic (2003) intimates, reality TV tries to capitalize on the extraordinary/ordinary paradox theorized in star studies in a dual sense: by cultivating the fantasy of celebrity for the ordinary, it turns real people into celebrities; by rehabilitating fading stars in celebrity gamedocs (Im a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Celebrity Big Brother), it extends the tabloid coverage of celebrities, rendering them real through self-disclosure and authentic moments captured by surveillance as voyeuristic entertainment. But as I have stated, I am interested in thinking about how celebrity works to entice audience participation, not with pop show formats structured around the talent contest, but with less obvious celebrity-manufacturing formats such as the gamedoc and docusoaps involving ordinary people. Here, audience members become contestants or players whose potential for fame is then contingent on their behavior under arduous competition or behind-the-scenes challenges, or the spectacle of the hidden social experiment (see, for example, Brenton and Cohen 2003; Dovey 2000). Interestingly, although these formats traffic in potentially embarrassing moments of intimacy, confession, or humiliation captured by the camera and fashioned into dramatic narratives by editors for the audiences pleasurable voyeurism, casting calls continue to elicit thousands of responses. Survivor producers, for example, claim to get something in the neighborhood of 65,000 self-made audition tapes each season (The Reality of Reality, Bravo Networks, 2003). The mass of applicants is then reduced to a small portion of the call and subjected to live audition calls and interviews, which are designed by psychologists to help producers gauge the individuals coping strategies and characteristics that make for interesting drama (Roscoe 2001). The shows producers, then, cast the applicants into predictable types, and as the series repeat, the new players learn to perform the roles that get media attention (e.g., the Big Brother prototypes Nasty Nick and Mistress Andy in Britain and Australia respectively; Survivors evil Richard Hatch, villainous Jerri Manthey, conniving Boston Rob and sweetheart-in-crime Amber Brkich). Murray and Ouellette (2004) point out, The fifteen minutes of fame that is the principal reward for participating on the programs limits the selection of real people to those who make good copy for newspaper and magazine articles as well as desirable guests on synergistic talk shows and news specials (8). Once the numbers are whittled down to the dozen or
so players, ordinary people begin the work of being watched, which in Andrejevics (2003) analysis, suggests they invert the celebrity frame by exposing the intimate details of their lives, and more significantly, invite the vast majority of noncelebrities to do the same by normalizing their submission to surveillance as a form of wage labor in the online economy (78). Nick Couldry (2002), noting that most contestants are explicit about the goal of attaining celebrity, argues that the transition to celebrity is the culmination of Big Brothers plot. The ritual passage from the ordinary (nonmedia) person to celebrity (media) person is the master frame without which the game [makes] no sense (289). Because real people are constituted as repeat performers for the length of the series, audiences identify with their media friends as they come to care about and strategize with them (or against them), and to predict and know the behavior of mediated identities on display, many perhaps imagining their own strategies to win access into the media world.29 Audiences, by their very watching and more actively by their online and cell phone interactivity, partake in the fantasy of celebritys democratization, although the form of celebrity that is produced, dispensable celebrity, is an ephemeral level of celebritys stratification that generates enough value to reproduce itself cheaply as a programming strategy without devaluing the larger celebrity field.
Celebrity Place Dispenses the Real

So far, I have argued that celebrity is the commodification of fame, its visibility a function of its reproducibility vis--vis a commercial media system. The relationship of celebrity value to cultural production for producers is measured in terms of audience volume and its projected purchasing power. It is in this sense that celebritys success is located in its circulation, that is, in the creation of sustained audiences for its consumption, and whose attention ultimately deems the reproduction of celebrity status. Yet celebrity is complicated in terms of its analysis as a cultural commodity because it is both part of a cultural product and a product itself whose value is unstable. As configurations of celebrity meaning accumulate, audiences and fans, in particular, take interest in the many ways that they might read the celebrity text. Celebrity value, then, should be seen as a kind of stratified but also fluid intertextual capital that gets constructed in two sites: the cultural products or texts that house celebrity, and the sites of intertextual circulation (Holmes 2004), or what I call celebrity placethe aggregate of media space devoted to celebrity coverage by all facets of the cultural industries. Celebrity place is the seat next to Leno or Letterman, the guest appearance on Saturday Night Live, the lead to Entertainment Tonight, and the feature story of People or Entertainment Weekly that function to signify celebrity, symbolically and materially. For analytical purposes, it is the site in the singular that houses celebrity as a product in and of itself, and it is the infrastructure that gathers audiences for advertisers as it manages the production and promotion of personalities
into celebrity status. In other words, celebrity place functions to reconstitute, reproduce, and circulate celebrity, and it is here in contemporary culture that the extraordinary/ ordinary paradox theorized in star studies is played out. This dynamic between star performance and the fans engagement with meaning as pleasurable is key to understanding how reality TVs dispensable celebrity works as a temporally dispensable cultural commodity. According to predominate theories in star studies, the film star image is the multitude of media texts embodying the person/employee/starwhether in film performance or extrafilmic momentsthat work to collapse distinctions between the star-as-person and the star-as-performer (Dyer 1979, [1977] 1991; Ellis 1982). The construction of a star image during the studio era was used to entice fans into following the studios star performers texts. Knowledge about a stars identity outside of the textuality of her films, for example, in fan magazines published by the industry, was restricted so that fans would be under the illusion that the stars personality in film was consistent with her off-screen life, and that to follow a stars film career would lead to the pleasurable discovery of the authentic personality (deCordova 1990). While the star image may be incoherent and ordinary in extrafilmic discourse, the film performance is thought to offer the promise of its completeness, which reconstitutes the star as extraordinary, thus repeatedly inviting audiences to reestablish the authentic. It is this paradox of the star as extraordinary and ordinary that continually renews both the star image and the audiences pleasure in their consumption of film stars. In a similar way, King (1991) explains the star performance in terms of creating and sustaining a persona, which is where cinematic technique and filmic and extrafilmic discourses come together to suggest a coherent subjectivity, or unique star personality. Marshall (1997), in summarizing Dyer, explains that the star image works to keep the audience obsessively and incessantly searching the star persona for the real and the authentic (17). The broader phenomenon of celebrity, I am arguing, functions similarly but in differing degrees, depending on celebritys stratification. Although star studies theorists distinguish between cinemas photo effect and televisions lack of one, by which Ellis argues that television does not have stars but TV personalities, Su Holmes (2004) rightly points out that the considerable increase in celebrity coverage in the popular press and magazines has evinced an appetite for disclosing the off-screen lives of all types of celebrities, thus demanding a reconceptualization of televisions intertextual frameworks (124). Indeed, much of the fun of consuming celebrity for many is making sense of what Turner (2004) highlights as its contradictions: celebrity is deserved and arbitrary, authentic and manufactured, extraordinary and ordinary. In contemporary culture, celebrity place is the site where audiences take pleasure in working through these contradictions, enjoying the hype, and discovering the authentic, real identities of celebrities. It is also the site of cultural production in which a large share of the negotiation around celebritys value as a product itself is conducted.
What is particularly noteworthy about reality celebrity is the way these individuals are dispensed through celebrity place along synergistic paths. For example, in addition to appearing on the Survivor remakes series Survivor: All-Stars, and Survivor: The Reunion, as well as providing footage for other Survivor productions such as The Greatest and Most Outrageous Moments video documentary, popular CBS Survivor contestants are effectively cross-promoted through various Viacom holdings, in some cases as actors, but most often as guests, playing themselves. Rupert Boneham, of Survivor: Pearl Islands, appeared on The Early Show (six times since his Survivor debut), The Saturday Early Show, the CBS and Eye Productions show Half & Half, VH1s Best Week Ever, and a CBSs upfront presentation to advertisers at Carnegie Hall. Jerri Mantheys credits are more extensive, but dominated by appearances and cameos in Viacom-owned, or partly owned, and distributed productions such as The Early Show (at least five times), The Late Show with David Letterman, The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, The Young and the Restless, MTVs The New Tom Green Show, Spike TVs The Joe Schmo Show, Comedy Centrals The Daily Show, Rendez View, VH1s The Surreal Life, and VH1 Goes Inside. Similarly, Amber Brkich has appeared on The Early Show (at least five times), The Late Show with David Letterman (twice), The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, CBSs Amazing Race, and the Rob and Amber Get Married two-hour CBS special. Other networks have followed suit. Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter of ABCs Bachelor and Bachelorette fame have also appeared or been featured on several ABC distributed talk shows and specials, including Trista & Ryans Wedding and Trista and Ryans Honeymoon Hot Spots. Likewise, Bill Rancic of NBCs The Apprentice has been a guest on The Tonight Show, The Tony Danza Show, MSNBCs Deborah Norville Tonight, and CNBCs The Big Idea (three times), while Omarosa Manigualt-Stalworth of The Apprentice 2 became a contestant on NBCs Fear Factor, and appeared on The Apprentice 3, The Big Idea (three times), and Bravos Celebrity Poker Showdown.30 Audiences who watch reality shows and partake in celebrity consumption throughout celebrity place are attentive, no doubt, to celebritys stratification. But, the onscreen and offscreen dynamic particular to stardom, or celebrities high in intertextual value, is distinct from the media flashpoints of which reality TV celebrities are the object in predominately two ways. First, these low-capital celebrities provide a one-hit-wonder kind of novelty and timeliness to celebrity place, particularly as the reality shows publicity apparatuses harvest attention across various media formats. Reality celebrities might make it on The Tonight Show or The Late Show, which primarily book A-level talent, but they are unlikely to displace stars looking to be booked or to become part of the stable of regular guests needed to sustain the shows. Nonunionized reality celebrities help fill the spaces of celebrity bookings on talk and variety shows, which by one estimate requires some 4,500 celebrity guests per year (Spring 1998). It is also worth noting that, in general, nonunion reality celebrities do not collect the scale wages nor benefits to which actors are entitled when appearing on shows under AFTRAs jurisdiction, while news shows, such as CBSs The Early Show, do not pay their guests.
Second, as audience reception studies on reality TV have shown, a large part of the pleasure for audiences is to look for the authentic moments within the tension between the constructed and the real as ordinary people cross over to celebrity (Hill 2002; Johnson-Woods 2002; Jones 2003). When reality TVs contestants and cast members experience the media attention of celebrity status after they finish the shows,31 that is, when they are effectively cross-promoted or dispensed throughout celebrity place, their actual status as dispensable celebrities blocks their entry into the larger system of celebrity valorization. I have discussed how CBS is able to control its Survivor reality players access to potentially significant media formats. But this is also the case because the reality celebrities acting talent is largely dismissed by the industry; they have not achieved extraordinary status in the conventional sense of stardom, thus they are low in intertextual capital, and audiences have, for the most part, exhausted locating their authentic identities in the interstices between their reality texts and celebrity place. In deCordovas (1990) sense, they are personalities, whose intertextual value is relegated to the real, ephemeral texts of reality TV. They are what Chris Rojek (2001) calls celetoids, extremely short-lived accessories of culture organized around mass communication and staged authenticity (2021). On the rare occasions when reality celebrities win parts on fictional genres, such as Rupert Boneham did with the sitcoms Half & Half and Yes, Dear, or when UPNs Americas Next Top Model contestant Eva Pigford appeared on UPNs Kevin Hill, these dispensable celebrities signify the immediacy of the episode in relation to the reality celebritys success and the recentness of the episode, which soon appears dated during repeats, rather than the potentially infinitely repeatable aura of stardom garnered from real celebrities.32 By reminding audiences of what they are not, dispensable celebrities reaffirm the star system. For cultural producers, the reality TV audience is both the source of unlimited lowpaid or unpaid labor that displaces union actors from scarce production opportunities, and it is what gets sold to advertisers. The gamedoc format generates a form of celebrity that is new and limited in its circulation. Reality TV celebrity produces novelty while also shielding the larger field of celebrity from excess value. Dispensable celebrity both creates its own scarce value and verifies the upper strata of celebrity value manifest in the star system. With respect to audiences, reality TV keeps viewers watching with its promise to democratize celebrity, while also keeping the boundaries distinct between the real celebrities and the wannabes, perhaps, like you or me.
Notes
1. According to Groves (2003), below-the-line labor may be shouting the loudest to challenge reality TVs business model because reality programming has been a boon for nonunion cameramen and editors. 2. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) continues to address jurisdiction over reality TV in its contract negotiations at the time of this writing. 3. These figures include both television and theatrical productions and exclude commercials and animation.
4. AFTRA reads the situation somewhat differently. According to Chris de Haan, press spokesperson, while reality programming has decreased opportunities for unionized actors on network slots, a multitude of cable channels with scripted programming have created opportunities for dramatic work (personal communications). 5. By the term cultural producers, I mean to include a variety of media professionals involved in the production, management, and distribution of celebrity, whose differentiations I discuss presently. 6. I am grateful to David Morley for turning my attention to thinking about celebrity production more specifically as a process, which indicates to me that its commodity form from an economic standpoint is best understood in terms of varying degrees of potential economic value. This process is operationalized in the site of production I refer to as celebrity place later in this piece. 7. Su Holmes (2004) makes the important point that theoretical approaches to conceptualizing fame in relation to reality TV must take care not to conflate the formats such that significant differences between the programs are neglected in analysis. While her thoughtful analysis examines constructions of fame in the well-received U.K. programs Popstars and Pop Idols, I am interested in thinking about how the gamedoc and docusoap afford cultural producers celebrity value. 8. Here I am taking issue with Daniel Boorstins (1987) assertion that celebrity reproduction is what overshadows everything else, such that a celebrity is simply anyone who is known for his well-knownness (57). 9. John Thompsons (1990) theory of mediazation, while not specifically addressing celebrity, is useful for understanding how symbolic forms become cultural commodities. In short, Thompson argues that when symbolic forms become cultural formsthat is, when they are constituted as commodities to be bought and sold in the marketplacesymbolic value provides meaning or pleasure for people so that they attend to or consume them, while economic value is a reflection of how producers see the worth of products not based on their form as art or intrinsically valuable as per meaning, but as reliably profitable. The exchange of symbolic form between producers and receivers, or their cultural transmission, takes place through mediazation, a framework that involves considerations of the technical medium of transmission, the phenomenology of spacetime distanciation, and the institutional structures of the media industries. 10. The discourses on celebrity, of course, are not restricted to the denizens of Hollywood. For broader historical arguments, see Braudy (1986) and Ponce de Leon (2002); for literary celebrity, see Moran (2000); for political celebrity, see Street (2003); for nonscholarly accounts and do-it-yourself celebrity, see Aronson (1983), Sudjic (1990), and Rein, Kotler, and Stoller (1997). 11. Richard deCordovas (1990) study on the early star system shows how stars, as opposed to picture personalities, emerged out of the industrys construction of audience knowledge about the actors lives outside their film work. Serialized stories disclosing the private lives of stars were strategically released to suggest that the actors real personality was consistent with the screen image; Jane Gaines (1991) in her discussion of intellectual property law and star contracts also identifies the bifurcation of star images into two basic zones of utilizationthe product and its exploitation (157). 12. Joshua Gamson (1994) found in his study Claims to Fame that audiences in their consumption of celebrity, by being privy to the commercial process as fabrication, have also learned to transcend the value of belief and disbelief in meaning and simply enjoy the hype. Here the postmodern irony of celebrity is a combination of exposure of the celebrity-and-image-manufacturing processes and mockery of it which serves to diffuse a threat to admiration by offering the audience a position of control (18) in their use of symbol meaning. 13. Hesmondhalgh (2002) provides a precise definition of the cultural industries: those institutions (mainly profit-making companies, but also state organizations and non-profit organizations) which are most directly involved in the production of social meaning, or the primary aim of which is to communicate to an audience, to create texts. The core cultural industries (film, broadcasting, publishing, music, advertising and marketing, and new media) all involve the industrial production and circulation of texts (1112). 14. Because development in the cultural industries is characterized by uncertain and uneven production, Mige (1989) is careful to argue for distinct analysis with respect to cultural products. While he does not consider celebrity in terms of the symbolic structuring of cultural workers who are themselves featured
in the texts of cultural products, I argue that the ways in which celebrity is symbolically constructed and negotiated, packaged, and disseminated within media organizations is a function of the complicated interplay among strategies of capital constrained by the logics of production Mige identifies, particularly, in the case of reality TV, the flow logic by which broadcast audiences are created and sold to advertisers. 15. Gitlin (1983) shows in his study of television production that recombinant forms result when broadcasters practice a logic of safety by repeating profitable program formulas. Similarly, Cavess (2000) identification of the nobody knows principle echoes the sentiment of uncertainty shared by cultural producers. 16. Caves (2000) identifies this practice as the A list/B list property, but as Hesmondhalgh (2002) points out, Mige implies that the notion of catalogue is highly stratified as per value afforded cultural producers and as an indicator of celebrity success. 17. Gorham Kindem (1985) argues that SAGs classification of members inherited from the studio era and its postwar history of cooperative interaction with producers have functioned largely to benefit its most visible and better-known actors. After the immediate break-up of the studio system, greater competition and uncertainty caused the studios to produce fewer films with the most popular stars, while the 1970s saw a turn by Hollywood toward using stars in other media such as television and the recording industry. 18. Hesmondhalgh (2002) is careful to note that these are not discrete stages. They overlap, interact and sometime conflict (55). 19. This period is referred to by Hesmondhalgh (2002) as the complex professional era. 20. Turner, Bonner, and Marshall (2000), in their study of celebrity production from the Australian promotion industry perspective, highlight the extent to which publicity apparatuses use celebrities as bait for general media coverage and cross-promotion, and the occasional flashpoints of media saturation in which celebrity dominates most media coverage. 21. It is important to note that the concentration of media ownership and strategies of synergy increasingly blur distinctions between revenue gathered from Miges distinctions among publishing, flow, and written press logics. Film and television stars promote their cultural products across a media firms holdings by appearing in made-for-TV movies, on talk shows, by granting magazine interviews, and appearing at publicized events for photo-opts, etc. 22. Hesmondhalgh (2002) borrows this term from Ryan (1992). 23. Raphael (2004) notes this phase began with the success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 1999 and Survivor in 2000. 24. Raphael uses the neologism Reali-TV in his analysis as a device for emphasizing the political economy of the television industry without neglecting the genres claims to represent the real through distinct formats. 25. The WGA strike in 1988, which had little negative effect on the production of reality shows, also served as an impetus for producers to develop more reality programming during the delay of the season. The same likely applies to the current WGA strike. 26. Although many reality celebrities get agency representation or manage their marketability from personal web sites, union membership is less transparent. SAG will not disclose membership but will locate an actors agency if the actor is listed in their database. AFTRA will indicate membership but not an actors current status as a member. Nies disclosed that he is currently an AFTRA member and was a SAG member for ten years. Mark Long is both an AFTRA and SAG member. Trishelle Cannatella and Puck Rainey did not respond to my queries, but AFTRA lists Trishelle Cannatella as a member. 27. Although I am not addressing the format here, it should be noted that reality TV also provides cost-effective opportunities to revitalize C-list celebrities with shows that pit celebrity against celebrity or expose the real person behind the fading celebrity. According to an AFTRA representative, all celebrities appearing on The Surreal Life are covered by AFTRA because they have been employed on the basis of their celebrity status, so that budding reality celebrities who make it onto this show are at the very least covered under the Taft-Hartley law. 28. It is the case that some neophyte and aspiring actors make their way onto reality shows, but they do so by claiming to be ordinary, and without invoking the privilege of union membership or protection
of agency representation. CBS Survivor villain Jerri Manthey, for example, was both a SAG and AFTRA member, having performed in two music videos and a made-for-TV movie, before her participation on Survivor. Despite SAGs strict no nonunion work policy and AFTRAs discouragement of nonunion employment, the majority of Mantheys involvement on Survivor series and specials classified her as a contestant, which, consistent with other game shows, is not covered by union jurisdiction. It is not known how CBS exercises its rights to publicity with respect to Manthey. 29. Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) uses the media friends construct to suggest that parasocial interaction (Horton and Wohl 1956) can apply to relations between actors in fictional roles and fans. 30. Of course, reality celebrities are also guests, hosts, and actors on shows distributed by networks other than their home-based network, but combined searches on Internet Movie Data Base Pro and LexisNexis yield credits for reality celebrities predominantly synergized around the holdings of the media company that houses the reality show in which they got their initial exposure. 31. Roscoe (2001), for example, details how eviction from the Big Brother house is turned into a spectacle, and Johnson-Woods (2002) documents the postshow mediated activities of some of the popular players. 32. I am grateful to Moya Luckett for providing this insightful example and for her commentary.
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Sue Collins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she is writing her dissertation on celebrity in the public sphere during World War I. She wishes to thank Ted Magder, Susan Murray, Bilge Yesil, Shannon Mattern, and Rick Maxwell for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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