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On order to supplement the full-length articles presented in this issue, we approached a number of well-known scholars working with the intersection of media, space, and architecture. We invited participants to address the ways in which media spaces are created; how spaces, places, and architectures have been represented; shifting ideas about geographies of cultural production; and the importance of space as an analytical construct for media and cinema studies. The scholars who answered our call-Miranda Banks, Michael Curtin, Nitin Govil, James Hay, Scott Higgins, Derek Kompare, Vicki Mayer, Lisa Nakamura, and Serra Tinic-offer a wide range of insights touching on issues such as the geography and visibility of cultural labor; digitization and the reconfiguration of place; places of media production and spaces of decay; media mapping and mobility; the use of color in representing space; and racialized spaces in virtual environments. We hope that the reader will find this a thought-provoking and engaging collection of statements that complements and extends the concerns raised elsewhere in this issue.
Company Town: Production Communities and the Myth of a Unified Hollywood
Miranda Banks
Last year the voice of Hollywood went silent. Jack Valenti, Hollywood lobbyist and head of the Motion Picture Association of America for almost forty years, died at the age of eighty-five in Washington, D.C. Officially, Valenti spoke as the "voice of Hollywood" in Washington, but his prominence within the motion picture production community, his showmanship, his professional tenacity, and his eagerness to go on record for any reporter made Valenti (for better or worse) a national, even global, ambassador for Hollywood. For almost forty years Hollywood's leading man lived and worked in Washington. I point to this geographical peculiarity as an apt entry into a discussion of how Hollywood-as both an urban space and an industry-has been redefining its visibility and its voice.
Ideas of what Hollywood is have changed in its almost hundred-year history. The district, which sits at the center of the city of Los Angeles, no longer holds within its boundaries a majority of the screen production industry, even of those sectors of the industry still headquartered in Los Angeles. Historically, many of the major motion picture production studios as well as ancillary industries of screen production-postproduction houses, costume warehouses, and...