Supply Chain Cinema

This book investigates how big budget filmmaking has come to adopt supply chain practices, with a specific focus on how higher education produces workers compliant with that system.

Why are big budget films typically made across an array of seemingly dissociated sites? Supply Chain Cinema shows how the production journeys of such films exemplify the principles of the supply chain, whose core imperative is to nimbly and opportunistically manufacturing wherever is most amenable and efficient. Through extensive on-site investigations and in-depth interviews with film professionals, Kay Dickinson delivers nuanced insight into working practices in the UK and the UAE. Among the sites she examines is Warner Bros’ permanent base at Leavesden Studios near London. From tax breaks designed to attract foreign projects to infrastructures, logistical support and expertise offered, she considers why Hollywood giants elect to make more of their films in Britain than in the USA. Dickinson goes on to show how the UK’s ambitions to enlarge its creative economies has opened up a host of competitive advantages with British higher education increasingly fashioned to conform to the needs of border-hopping enterprise, thus generating a workforce keenly adapted to the demands of blockbuster moviemaking.