Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Poetics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/poetic
“Hustling” in ﬁlm school as socialization for early career work in
media industries
Ritesh Mehta
University of Southern California, USA
A R T I C L E I N F O
Keywords:
hustling
ﬁlm school
ﬁlm students
socialization
work
reputation
professionalization
cultural industries
creative career
precariousness
ethnography
A B S T R A C T
This ethnographic study contributes to the literature on the sociology of work and socialization,
and the literature on creative careers in cultural industries, by describing the various grounded
theory categories of “hustling” by ﬁlm students in the venue of ﬁlm school. Based on 18 months
of participant observation of two student ﬁlms at a Los Angeles-based MFA ﬁlm/TV production
program, I show that students “hustle” to form connections, work continuously across multiple
projects, compete for production classes, and in the process, build their individual and collective
reputations. I argue that hustling is a social process that involves an array of socializations, and is
experienced subjectively as anticipatory work towards careers in the ﬁlm/TV industries. Students
come to realize that their hustling towards curricular and pedagogical requirements is a synecdoche
for the larger industrial careers they aspire to, careers that demand even more hustling
and precariousness, but careers that they are better prepared for than they know. Film students
leave school with certain agency. Future research should take into account how early career
socialization prepares aspirants for later creative work.
1. Introduction
“You’re used to being busy for every waking minute every single day… The ﬁlm industry is all what you make of it. You have to
ﬁnd [the work] yourself. Everybody knows it’s competitive. Do what you can to keep working. You call it hustling. It’s good to
always be hustling, and try to make things happen for yourself.”
Empirical studies on ﬁlm students and ﬁlm schools are exceedingly rare in the ﬁeld of sociology (Bechky, 2006; Henderson, 1995,
1990; Mukerji, 1977; Redvall, 2013). By contrast, there have been historical overviews by cinema studies scholars of the training
provided by ﬁlm schools, and there have been studies on art school, music school, and art school students (Petrie & Stoneman, 2014;
Polan, 2007; Singerman 1999; Thornton, 2008).
Some of these have been inspired by Becker’s (1982) work on various players that make up “art worlds.” Others, however,
particularly from the burgeoning ﬁeld of production studies, express great concern about aspirants or relative outsiders’ careers in the
media industries (Caldwell, 2008). Film students, they surmise, like many media industry workers, face a harsh, bleak industry and
have little agency to realize their creative ambitions (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010). In sociology, Hochschild has coined the term
“emotional labor” – i.e., “inducing or suppressing one’s feelings in order to maintain an outward countenance” of professionalism –
for how agents deal with exploitative work conditions (Hochschild, 1983, p. 7).
This article aims to converse with the sociological literature on precarious work and careers in the creative/cultural industries,
and particularly, research on early careers, by highlighting how ﬁlm students work – or “hustle,” as student cinematographer Mikhail
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2017.05.002
Received 21 April 2016; Received in revised form 29 April 2017; Accepted 31 May 2017
E-mail address: ritesh.mehta.usc@gmail.com.
Poetics 63 (2017) 22–32
Available online 09 June 2017
0304-422X/ © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
MARK
terms it above – their way through ﬁlm school, in anticipation of the media industries. Taking as a starting point Becker and Carper’s
(1956) emphasis on the “development of an identiﬁcation with an occupation” as well as positing as crucial socialization that occurs
in organizational contexts, this article presents “hustling” as a multi-faceted, “grounded” phenomenon that in the milieu of ﬁlm
school allows students to form connections, learn about the industry, consolidate their reputations, and, ultimately, make movies
(Barley & Kunda, 2001).
In doing so, this ethnographic research contributes not just to the general ﬁeld of the sociology of work and occupations but also
joins a small handful of studies in highlighting the importance of attending to career socialization rituals as a type of structuration
(Abbott, 1993; Giddens, 1984). In their hustling within and across the corridors, courtyards, sound stages, elevators, edit suites and
classrooms of ﬁlm school, ﬁlm students partly emulate industry socialization processes, learn about the craft they believe they enjoy,
and come to understand what “creativity” and “precariousness” mean for them as individuals and as cohorts that hope to carve
careers in the ﬁlm, TV and other media industries in the ﬁlm school’s backyard.
The structure of the paper is as follows. I ﬁrst review the classical literature on the sociology of work and careers and on
organizational socialization before turning to the recent literature on creative careers in the cultural industries. I motivate the need
for a concept that covers the work involved in sociality and socialization by early career media industry aspirants. In this article, I
proﬀer “hustling” as that concept. The empirical section that follows delineates four manifestations of hustling among ﬁlm students. I
conclude by theorizing hustling as a type of precarious creative work that facilitates qualiﬁed interpretations of agency in the
otherwise vexed domain of media industries.
2. Literature review
2.1. Socialization as subjective work towards careers
The sociological literature on work and careers has not frequently connected with the literature on organizational socialization
(notable exceptions include Fine, 1996 and Porcello, 2004). A key theoretical contribution this study makes is to argue that socialization,
and in particular hustling, as an intricate set of interactions among ﬁlm students, shapes understandings about career and the
work it takes to proceed through careers. In this sub-section, I will provide a brief overview of the classical sociological understanding
of careers, and using the general notion of subjectivity underlying careers, frame the literature’s understanding of organizational
socialization as a subject-driven career process.
Everett Hughes’ Chicago School of sociology, including ethnographic work by Howard Becker and colleagues (e.g., Becker, 1977/
2002), paved the way for a whole body of research on careers in sociology and organization and management studies in the 1980s
(Arthur, Hall, & Lawrence, 1989). One of the key moves made at this time was to connect the study of the individual and the
institution using the concept of “work.” Thus, one handy early conception of career deﬁnes it as the “evolving sequence of a person’s
work experiences over time” (Arthur et al., 1989, p. 11). This article contributes to career theory by providing an ethnographic
description of one type of media work, using the general perspective and methodology of the Chicago sociologists.
Careers, it has been shown in early studies of graduate students and medical students, often begin with the development of
identiﬁcation with an occupation (Becker & Carper, 1956; Becker, 1977/2002). Researchers attend to how “situations present the
person with experiences… out of which come stabilization of self conceptions into long lasting identities” (Becker & Carper, 1956, p.
289). Such transformations occur via mechanisms such as “internalization of motives,” which brings with it alignment with institutional
positions; or by “acquisition of ideology,” which develops when actors raise questions about the worth of the activity they
are engaged in (Becker & Carper, 1956, pp. 296–297). Thus, even in studies that focus on the individual’s experience, subjectivity is
shown to always be in interaction with institutional factors.
Yet, it can be said that careers begin with the reasoning of subjects. To this end, Barley oﬀers a variety of deﬁnitions of careers, two
of which I represent here: (i) According to Hughes, career is “objectively… a series of statuses and clearly deﬁned oﬃces… [and]
subjectively…, a moving perspective in which a person sees his life as a whole and interprets the meaning of his various attributes
[and] actions;” and (ii) Goﬀman claims that a career is “not a thing that can be brilliant or disappointing… [it] refer[s] to any social
strand of any person’s course through life” (Arthur et al., 1989, pp. 45––46). Notable in these deﬁnitions is the emphasis that subjects
interpret what constitutes work and career. Barley further insists that “when sequences of jobs, formally organized contexts, and
movement up and down a hierarchy are treated as incidentals,” career can properly treated as a “Janus-like concept” that in addition
to its objective emphasis on “institutional forms of participation” in some social world, is remarkable for its subjective aspect wherein
“individuals shift their social footing and reconstru[e] their past and future in order to come to terms with the present” (ibid, p. 49).
This dual perspective is consistent with careers being treated as “properties of collectives.” Even though individuals experience and
reason about careers, they are “not solely of the individuals’ making…. Careers… were pieced together from the string of alternatives
and the set of interpretive resources oﬀered [to] individuals at any point in time by the collectives to which they belonged” (ibid, p.
51).
This article argues that at minimum, socialization is a vital “interpretive resource” oﬀered to individuals by the collectives in
which they are ensconced in order to piece together their careers. Moreover, socialization is not merely an ancillary resource but an
immanent aspect of everyday work itself. With this understanding of socialization as a concrete set of everyday practices, researchers
are in a stronger position to make claims about individual agency.
I will end this sub-section with an overview of some classical deﬁnitions of “socialization.” One of the oldest is: “the process by
which people selectively acquire the values and attitudes, the interests, skills and knowledge – in short, the culture – current in the
groups to which they are, or seek to become, a member” (Harvill, 1981, p. 431). Another goes: “Socialization has generally been seen
R. Mehta Poetics 63 (2017) 22–32
23
as a mechanism for bringing new members into existing teams or groups” (Kozlowski & Bell, 2003, p. 16). Feldman (1981) deﬁnes
socialization as “the process by which employees are transformed from organization outsiders to participating and eﬀective members.”
In these deﬁnitions, we see an aﬃliation with Chicago sociologists’ emphasis on gradual collective change.
The takeaway from the review thus far is that research on careers should attend to the trajectory of individual subjectivity during
socialization and how it portends subjects’ stringing together careers in the contexts of the groups, organizations and industries they
want to become embedded in. This article posits hustling in the social world of ﬁlm school as an example of socialization towards
work and career making in the media industries of ﬁlm and television.
2.2. Precariousness and agency in creative careers
In addition to connecting the classical literature on work and careers with that of organizational socialization, this article also
converses with the recent literature on “creative careers” in the cultural industries (Florida, 2002; Hartley, 2005). It does so by laying
out the various ways a socialization process, hustling, is a mini-career ride ﬁlm students take on, during which they get a preview of
precariousness vis-à-vis the creative careers they might embark upon. Further, this article suggests that in their variegated hustling,
ﬁlm students embody surprising agency, even as they confront overwhelming industry gatekeeping.
Richard Florida, in popularizing Pierre Bourdieu’s wide body of work on class, taste and human capital, oﬀers a theory on
“creative cities” that attempts to explain why “creativity” is what draws workers to the cultural industry. Florida argues that the
geographical relocation of a certain type of professionals, i.e., those engaged in the creating “meaningful new forms,” explains the
agglomeration, explosive economic growth and ﬂight to certain urban locations (Florida, 2002, 2003). His “creative class” encompasses
workers in entertainment and the arts as well as people in ﬁnance, law, academia, and other domains that do not produce
“cultural work” but nevertheless rely on a great deal of independent judgment” and “produce added economic value from knowledge
and creativity” (Comunian, Faggian, & Li, 2010, pp. 390–391). Some of that creativity is towards “artistic” purposes. For instance,
“Bohemian graduates” represent a subset of the creative class—those who received a degree in a “bohemian” or artistic subject such
as design, music, or landscape design [or ﬁlm production] and whose added value is disproportionally greater than any economic
rewards they receive (Comunian et al., 2010).
Further, creative/cultural industry workers, like those in ﬁlm and television, “are not only confronted with tensions between
creativity and commerce when making career path choices” but also “want the products of their labor to reﬂect their personal
identities” (Wei, 2012, p. 446). Wei oﬀers the concept of “identity work—individuals’ active construction of their identities,” work
done by his reality TV editor and producer subjects for whom “identities are multiple, contextual, and shifting” but must always be
“coherent and positively valued” (Wei, 2012). Another ethnographic study on talent agents in Hollywood describes its subjects as
extremely invested in a form of identity work called “reputation work” (Zaﬁrau, 2008). Reputations must also be “continually
achieved, performed and re-performed,” and reputation work, such as maintaining a particular “emotional tone in business meetings,”
consists of the “intentional activities that participants perform in order to create the perception that they are legitimate,
according to institutionalized expectations” (Zaﬁrau, 2008, pp. 100–101).
Identity and reputation work can be thought of as subject-driven work in order to further creative careers. It is worth noting that
examples in both articles do not involve socialization processes to further careers. Yet, both types of work are implicitly framed as
what their subjects might consider as “good work.” A recent comprehensive ethnographic study by Hesmondhalgh and Baker on
cultural workers in the TV, music and magazine industries points out that in order to do good work, workers must have the possibility
for autonomy and self-realization, among other factors. However, they ﬁnd that the “version” of freedom workers actually experience
is highly “complicated” in that, for instance, “pleasure and obligation become blurred in a highly challenging way”
(Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011, p. 18). In doing so, authors join a growing body of research that claims if not strongly criticizes
cultural/creative work as alienating, isolating, self-exploitative—generally “precarious” (McRobbie, 2016; Neﬀ, 2012).
In fact, so commonplace is it for “precarious” and “creative” to be paired together that Curtin and Sanson (2016) commissioned an
edited collection of empirical and theoretical pieces underscoring the “precarious” aspect of “precarious creativity” in global cultural
industries. They emphasize precariousness – signifying a throttling lack of agency – as a “common condition for workers all over the
world… No longer can individual workers expect a single career; instead they must ready themselves for iterative change and
persistent contingency… as indicative of a new world order of social and economic instability” (pp. 5–6).
However, a smaller section of the sociological work on creative careers in the cultural industries has suggested that there is indeed
the possibility for agency, autonomy and self-realization that Hesmondhalgh and Baker value in their social justice framework. These
empirical studies move past the “romanticized assumptions about creative work” that Curtin and Sanson worry about (2016, p. 15).
For instance, one study argues that it is important to attend to “lifestyle studies” as much as political economy: with the former lens,
the “bohemian lifestyle’s” devotion to “art for art’s sake” allows workers to not simply accept but also embrace and cherish precariousness
of creative careers (Eikhof & Haunschild, 2006). An emphasis on lifestyle aligns with the previous section’s focus on
subjectivity and occupational identiﬁcation.
Similarly, recent research on early-career London jazz musicians found that they “manufacture greater precarity in their working
lives” (Umney & Kretsos, 2015, p. 313; emphasis added). They do so in part by oﬀsetting the precarious work that they are passionate
about – music and the quality of the London jazz scene – by “tak[ing] on varying quantities of teaching or other jobs such as theatrical
work… that were typically seen as less fulﬁlling” (Umney & Kretsos, 2015, p. 319). Thus, “rather than transition away from precarious
work” entirely, London jazz musicians “sought to mitigate its negative elements” (Umney & Kretsos, 2015, p. 324) Authors
thereby advocate for a “life course” perspective, asserting that the “fatalism” of critical sociologists and media scholars must be
balanced by focusing on agents’ processing and emphasis of career transitions and trajectories as a matter of the life course.
R. Mehta Poetics 63 (2017) 22–32
24
An emphasis on life course can thus be grafted on to career course, in alignment with Hughes’ understanding of career in the
previous section. Along these lines, a study describes the early career advancement of standup comedians in Los Angeles as a “layered
career,” which is distinguished by subjects continuing to “maintain their participation within prior stages” (Reilly, 2016, p. 3). The
three layers the author oﬀers are: (1) the “proximate layer,” which “involves tight cliques of comedy buddies who facilitate support
[and] creativity”; (2) the “community layer,” which involves broadening social contacts and understanding business practices; and
(3) the “industrial layer,” wherein comedians begin to earn a living from their gigs which they strive to “situate in a coherent
manner” (Reilly, 2016, p. 31–32). Contra viewpoints that understand career as a sequence of statuses, this research suggests that
attending to career over the life course tempers concerns about precariousness because of the beneﬁts of continual nested sociality in
previous layers of socialization.
Finally, some researchers have even attested to the “normalization” of precariousness among early creative career aspirants
(Morgan, Wood, & Nelligan, 2013). They ﬁnd that young people have “accepted the injunction for vocational restlessness in their
industries” and further “feel that not staying in one position too long can be both liberating and adaptive” (Morgan,
Wood, & Nelligan, 2013, p. 397) This is an especially interesting response to the literature on precarious careers, one that advocates
understanding the metrics of the socioeconomic world – including perhaps lifestyle and the life course – squarely from the point of
view of entrants and aspirants.
Thus, what some researchers decry as a “complicated” version of freedom, others interpret positively as “complex notions of
agency” (Morgan et al., 2013, p. 410). This article contributes to the literature on precarious creative careers by attending to sociality
and socialization during the early stages of a profession/career. I argue that hustling socializes students in ways that actually prepares
them for careers in the media industries. I don’t seek to diminish the legitimate worries of scholars who have criticized Florida’s
enthusiasm about creative careers by pointing out, for instance, that the entrepreneurial, “be creative” attitude taken for granted by
young British fashion workers (especially women) that brings about “depoliticization”, “individualization,” and alienation
(Henderson, 2016, p. 4168; McRobbie, 2011, 2016). They worry that “a highly individuated set of freelance pathways and informal
networks” will “exclude as much as they connect” (Henderson, 2016, p. 4168). “Précarité” will not and cannot go away.
However, in delineating four manifestations of hustling and describing them as an intensive socialization process that anticipates
work dynamics in industry careers, I suggest that sociality and socialization partly oﬀset some of the risks of precarity. There is the
possibility of agency when ﬁlm students experience precarious creativity together, as an interpretive resource that gets work done,
even as students face behemoth media industries in their backyard.
3. Methodology
This article is based on 18 months of ethnographic ﬁeldwork – participation observation and interviews – in CAFilm, a wellknown
ﬁlm school located in a university in Los Angeles. I sought access to MFA student productions in the school’s Production
department by emailing production faculty about my project. One student director expressed interest and allowed me to follow the
making of his thesis ﬁlm if I took on the role of 2nd Assistant Director during the shoot. Thus began my immersion into student life at
CAFilm, as participant observer as well as crewmember. Even though students knew of my status as a researcher, they eventually saw
me as one of the team.
Over the years, I followed the making of two short ﬁlms – the second being a ﬁlm for an advanced production class (hereon, “PC”)
– from the pre-production stage all the way through ﬁlming and post-production. I interviewed crewmembers of both ﬁlms during the
post-production stage as well as crewmembers for another ﬁlm being made for PC. The crew size for the thesis ﬁlm was slightly larger
than that of the PC ﬁlm: 30, compared to 20. Faculty members supervised both ﬁlms at various stages, but they were much more
involved for the PC ﬁlms. In total, I conducted and recorded 25 semi-structured interviews (six with faculty members), ranging from
45 to 120 min. Field notes and interview data were coded manually, with the aim of inductively generating grounded theory categories
(Strauss & Corbin, 1998).
This article focuses on ﬁndings from the students’ point of view and what students said and did in the classrooms, corridors,
elevators and sound stages of CAFilm, on shooting locations, in ‘industry’ sites such as casting oﬃces, as well as what they said in the
context of interviews.1
Throughout I sought to understand what motivated student ﬁlmmakers to work together in periods of often
conﬂict-ridden and highly stressful work, to constantly help out on each other’s projects beyond curricular requirements; and in doing
so, how their own relationship to and identiﬁcation with their work, craft and storytelling changed. Put diﬀerently, I was asking,
“Film students work together knowing what?” As I followed crews and began to analyze my ﬁeld notes, I came to realize the crucial
role played by various types of socialization in ﬁlmmaking itself, while training students for careers in the ﬁlm/TV industries.
Pursuing an interpretive line of inquiry (Geertz, 1973; Reed, 2011), I attended to the meanings that mattered to my subjects,
manifested in their everyday interactions, utterances, and stories (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995), all the while trying to ﬁgure out
“what the devil” ﬁlm students “think they are up to” (Geertz, 1983, p. 58). Finally, rather than treat the two ﬁlm projects that I
followed as separate case studies, I heeded Ragin’s (1992) provocation and asked what was it that I had “a case of”? I now turn to my
empirical narrative to outline four main interpretive categories of “hustling” at CAFilm.
1
Although I did interview some faculty members and witness faculty-student interaction in the classroom, the vast majority of my ethnographic and interview data
involves students. “Hustling” is an activity primarily involving students and a term used by students.
R. Mehta Poetics 63 (2017) 22–32
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4. Hustling as forming connections
CAFilm’s courtyards, classrooms, elevators, post-production suites and sound stages are rife with connection-forming. Students
embrace, shake hands, bump ﬁsts, help carry camera equipment, and always, talk. They talk about who was working on whose
project; who was writing what latest script; which faculty member was posing a tough time giving the green light on whose thesis
ﬁlm; who was being a nightmare to work with; and most excitedly, who had what major or minor breakthrough by getting a ﬁlm into
a festival, making the ﬁnal ﬁfty of a screenplay competition, or securing a “ﬁrst look” meeting with an industry executive. The
students in CAFilm are constantly making connections, drawing comparisons, guﬀawing at others’ tactics, throwing out story ideas,
and taking meetings. Their discourse feels cutting-edge and practical. They always have their game face on. They wear multiple hats
and work across several projects. They are constantly posing. They are, in their own words, “hustling.”
Unlike, say, more vocational ﬁlm programs in art schools, CAFilm attracts MFA students from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Some who are accepted have never picked up a camera in their whole lives, a point of pride for the program; others have directed
commercials, shadowed directors, or already made short ﬁlms. My subjects’ undergrad majors ranged from broadcast journalism,
business, English and history to design and media arts, theater, and the ﬁne arts; only some had majored in ﬁlm production or cinema
studies. A small handful had family or friends who worked in the industry. The majority came in with other kinds of work experience,
from retail and marketing to the restaurant industry and news production. Students also started oﬀ with varying degrees of ambitions
regarding external success, ﬁlmmaking vision, and exceling in craft. They diﬀered in their taste about what constitutes a good or
aesthetically appealing story. Thus, students came to CAFilm with diﬀering amounts of relevant social and cultural capital.
Irrespective of their backgrounds and individual diﬀerences, all students were thrust into the same curriculum and had to hustle
hard to make it through. I found that the imperative to socialization became an equalizer of sorts, as students moved from one class
project to the other and competed for courses and ranks. Over the years, their ambitions, taste, skills, conﬁdence, and importantly,
their identities as ﬁlmmakers gradually shifted. An appreciably large component of this evolution, I argue, is due to the various
manifestations of hustling. Students departed ﬁlm school as cohorts with greater social and cultural capital that would inform careers
in industry.
Examples about connection-forming are in order. During the pre-production stage of his comedy Guﬀaw for the highly selective
and competitive advanced production class (PC), Dade, an ambitious student director, was impressed by his otherwise quiet 1st
Assistant Director Tina’s connections to CAFilm’s Animation department. He praised how Tina used her social network to secure
storyboard artists who were in turn eager to work with the “glamorous” Production department. At the end of one of Guﬀaw’s shoot
days, cinematographer Cate thanked a student who had volunteered to be the 1st Assistant Camera for that day. She knew that the 1st
AC’s job is tricky and given that he was only in his ﬁrst semester, she was impressed by his focus pulling. She told him, “It was cool to
work with you,” and added that she would deﬁnitely recommend him for future projects. Right after, the 1st AC and a grip said they
would “friend” each other on Facebook. Later in the semester, when Tina’s commitment as 1st AD on Guﬀaw was completed and she
could focus on other projects, she pitched Kim, the sound designer, an idea for an international project. After all, they had gotten to
know each other better during the intense production period for Guﬀaw, so she could request that favor. Guﬀaw’s key grip and gaﬀer,
enrolled in another ﬁlm LA-based ﬁlm school, said that they were contacted by Mauricio, the cinematographer, who knew them
before he transferred to CAFilm, and they accepted the invitation because they wanted end credits on a CAFilm movie.
Thus, forming connections, securing crew positions on projects, and getting “credits” are expressions of hustling. Students quickly
oﬀer to connect each other, learning that if their recommendations pan out, people will come to trust their opinion. They come to
realize it really is all about who one chooses to call or text to staﬀ on their project, about calling in favors, and being suﬃciently on
the grid in order to be called in.
Hustling, then, is a discursive social process central to ﬁlmmaking, which is surprising since many incoming students consider
ﬁlmmaking to be a predominantly “creative” or craft-based media activity. Vitally, hustling is also a socialization process as students
come to know who in the ﬁlm school is in the know and in the knowhow. Hustling is characterized by its frequently public nature and
its ebullience. Film students are gauging and evaluating from the get go. Hustling as a type of networking is thoroughly subjective:
opinions and connections are often formed partly arbitrarily, partly by word of mouth, and partly grounded in past performance.
These very connections, though, last long into students’ work and careers during and after school. Students learn that “rising up with
their network” might be the most important takeaway from ﬁlm school.
5. Hustling as working continuously
Along with connection formation, working as a crewmember continuously and simultaneously across multiple projects is extraordinarily
commonplace in CAFilm. Producer Tanya said matter-of-factly of this expectation: “That’s the nature of ﬁlm school. You
do it because you want [your peers’] help down the line, and people want you if you have a good reputation.” Hustling as working
continuously on several projects is indicative of a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” attitude pervasive in CAFilm.
Cinematographer Yasha observed that some later-year students had a diﬃcult time attaining key crew positions for their thesis ﬁlms
because they had not adequately volunteered during their ﬁrst and second years, so they just didn’t know enough of their peers to
approach. Some enterprising students developed workarounds. Producer Merle told director Ben that he should recruit ﬁrst year
undergraduates for his thesis Ingrates: “Freshmen are very eager. Working for an MFA thesis ﬁlm for them would be like working on
The Dark Knight,” alluding to the high placement of graduate thesis ﬁlms on the hierarchy of reputation of student projects in CAFilm.
Thus, as students advance in the program and understand the trick of constant socialization, they spread out to help on each
other’s projects. Editor Don said that especially during thesis ﬁlms, “it is basically assumed that people are working on other things”
R. Mehta Poetics 63 (2017) 22–32
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on the side. Don himself was working on some screenplays while cutting (editing) his friends’ projects on the side. Mikhail remarked,
with curious detachment, “Film school in general is making stuﬀ for cheap with no resources, while taking other classes.” I thought
that was a great way to summarize the general experience. So I prodded him in our interview because even after more than a year in
the ﬁeld, I remained impressed if puzzled by how busy ﬁlm students were.
Researcher: “You don’t want to take a break?”
Mikhail: “We’re crazy, man. It’s seriously like we all have problems. After I ﬁnished ADing on Tropos [a ﬁlm for PC], I just needed
to relax. So, I try to sit in my apartment and just watch a movie, and I couldn’t. Not having anything to do gives me anxiety. That
happens every semester. Because you are used to being busy every waking minute for every single day for 16 hours a day. You’re
always doing something… You call it hustling.”
Researcher: “Students seem to be hustling all the time.”
Mikhail: “They want to do good work.”
This was the ﬁrst time I had heard the term “hustling” (a fuller quote is at the top of this article). Immediately, I grasped it as a
highly apt term, arising out of the colloquial “hustle and bustle,” but with several pointed meanings for students seeking creative
careers during and after ﬁlm school. What’s interesting is how Mikhail thinks of hustling as an addiction, a necessity for success and
survival, but also, intriguingly, as a benchmark for quality of work and movies themselves. If you don’t hustle, then, quite simply,
(good) movies don’t get made. I tested this observation in later ﬁeld visits and found it defensible. Movies just don’t sit around waiting
to get made. Film/TV is an industry where relentless self-presentation is normative, for good reason: ﬁlms begin when people hear
out others’ story ideas. Hustling is necessary for moviemaking.
Strikingly, students hustle for future work even while immersed on current projects. During “downtime” on set (when, for instance,
the camera crew is changing setups), I noticed people chatting each other up for upcoming work. Seth, the 1st AD, showed
Nina, the digital intermediate technician, an undergraduate student, his directing reel. Ben, doing Merle a favor for co-producing
Ingrates, agreed to produce a commercial Merle was directing, and during downtime on the set of that commercial, Ben was doing
Ingrates-related work.
Hustling is thus a socialization process involving modes of continuous, simultaneous and multifarious involvement. Ideas are out
to several people at once; only some become movies. Students pitch in to help on several projects; only some pairs or groups become
sustained collaborators. Hustling gets work done, gets students on set, jumpstarts their reputations, and helps them become ﬁlmmakers.
I gather the hustling culture in CAFilm as a bit of chicken-and-egg situation. Students are not clear what comes ﬁrst: the
culture that expects hustling and selectively chooses people and projects, or individual-level hustling that brings about movies, which
in turn creates a culture of movie-making. The point is that the majority jumps right in, assuming it’s a bit of both. Hustling students
want to work on as many good projects because they want to be attached to good movies, do good work. An array of prior credits and
an ability to multi-task are important outcomes that hustling generates, skills students believe are indicative of getting work or simply
getting in among the mighty, elusive industry echelons they aspire to traverse.
6. Hustling as competing
An air of competition permeates the culture of CAFilm’s MFA Production program. It starts oﬀ during the orientation session when
students are asked who wants to be a director, and practically everybody in the room raises their hands. (That this happens with each
incoming cohort has become a running joke in the school.) As they are thrust into the curriculum, students scramble to get into classes
with buzzed-about professors. In this way, they are forced to the idea – taken to new heights in the industry, they anticipate – that for
everything allegedly worth its while, there are waitlists and shortlists: there are those who get in and those who don’t. Even the
skeptical or industry-distancing students come around to throwing their hat in the ring for something; otherwise, quite simply, they
may not be able to complete the program. Hustling as competition seems to be built into the curriculum as a bellwether of industry
dynamics.
The class considered to be the most competitive to get into, and the one that “everyone” wants to get into, is PC, the advanced
production class that I followed for a semester. The faculty member leading that class opened the ﬁrst lecture by asserting that this is
the class that “makes your reputation in this program. After you take this class, people ask, ‘Who should I be working with?”' Mikhail
qualiﬁed this proclamation by noting that you already need to have a good reputation to get into PC, but agreed that the class
“cemented” your reputation, “like, you can work well on a big crew, with lots of people.” Duane, who one faculty member called a
“golden-tongued” producer because of his smooth yet persuasive style of talk, stated, “PC is presented and packaged as the crown
jewel of the Production program.” PC’s student assistant Lavos said, “It’s God, especially for newcomers.” Others noted that even
people in the industry knew about this class, and those alumni who had worked on it bonded with students who had taken it.
Every semester, a signiﬁcant proportion of CAFilm students submit scripts, directors’ reels, and producer credentials to the
application pool for a position on PC. In a series of behind-closed-doors deliberations, CAFilm faculty members make several “cuts,”
narrowing down the pool to separate lists of a dozen or so producers, directors and writers. Over the period of a brutally hectic week,
chosen directors ﬁnd scripts they like and producers they want to work with; similarly, writers ﬁgure out which director might best
bring out their story and characters, and producers take meetings with writers and directors. Once a trio of producer, director and
writer is formed, the second stage commences, involving the assembly of the rest of the crew.
Unfortunately, I did not have access to this arduous industry-mimicking ritual, which producer Tanya aptly and ever so casually
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described as a “meat market/speed dating process.” Other students I spoke to concur. Participating in both stages takes the intensity
of the previously described categories of hustling – as deeply social, and as continuous work – to the next level. Hustling for a spot in
PC encompasses intense rotations of informal questioning, several permutations of sit-down meetings, furtive calling in of references,
but most characteristically, decision-making based on sketchy agglomerations of impressions and reputations, leading frequently to
ﬂawed decision-making. For the careful discerners however, one director pointed out, the meat market/speed dating process can
mark the beginnings of long-term collaborations. I highlight a few students’ experiences from our interviews.
Sid said that he applied to PC not as writer, director, or producer, but as editor, because he was conﬁdent in his editing skills and
was motivated by the competition for slots. Cate, having already been through the ritual the previous semester (you can enroll in PC
twice during your time at CAFilm, as long as you occupy diﬀerent crew positions), was very picky and “thorough” about which crew
she wanted to align herself with and what role (editing or cinematography) would give her the greatest advantage and experience.
Kim had just ﬁnished producing a successful TV pilot for another class, so she entered the arena conﬁdent.
The producer for the TV pilot I was on just left and gave no word as to when she would return… So I just naturally took on all her
duties. The showrunner of the pilot told me halfway through the semester, “You know, you’ve really changed a lot of people’s
opinion about you,” which really is a back-handed compliment… So because I did surprisingly well and everyone thought I was
doing great, [and because] I heard Duane was looking for a producer for Guﬀaw, I… approached him. I felt good about people
feeling good about me.
Kim didn’t eventually bag the producer’s role during the “meat market” hustle, but she agreed to do sound design for Guﬀaw. Sid,
Cate and Kim’s experiences show the diverse motivations for competing for projects but also the diﬀering amount of control students
have over which project they get on and in which role they get staﬀed.
However, that unpredictability is nothing in comparison to the selection for the prized slots of director, writer and producer (three
to four each), which Kim said was akin to “winning the lottery.” And it doesn’t end there. The wooing process for those selected to
ﬁnd the best collaborators puts immense pressure on them and an additional spin on the hustle. Dade, one of the ten semi-ﬁnalist
directors, talks of his experience before the ﬁnal pitch.
I did meet a lot of writers and when I met with Guﬀaw’s writer, we just connected. He didn’t even think his script was going to get
chosen. It was six pages. I’m like, “Dude, this script is funny as hell.” Nobody wanted to touch it because it had “fuck” and every
other word. It was Friday morning, and I was in the courtyard and I was going to go with another script. I was like, “Which script
should I go with? Should I go with Guﬀaw or should I go with this drama?” And then one of the guys that was pitching, he was
like, “Yo Dade. What script are you doing?" I was like, ‘I need to make a decision.’ He was like, “You should pitch Guﬀaw. Nobody
would touch it and nobody else would have the balls to do it but you.” I was like, “You know what? You're right.” I got a call from
the writer [of the drama script] that I wanted to go with. He was like, “Man… I love your ideas but I think I’m going to go with
another director.” I was like, “All right. Great.” So I called the Guﬀaw writer, “I was thinking about going with you. Let’s make it
happen.” He was like, “All right. Let’s do it.”… I ran into Duane soon after. I was like, “Duane, I want you to come with me.” He
was like, “Wow! I’m looking at all these others.” I said, “Get the fuck out of here. Bro, you need to get down with A-Team. Stop
playing around.” We sat down. We talked about it and he was like, “All right. I’ll do it.”
Dade reveals here how much back-and-forth occurred before he got naturally pushed into Guﬀaw, which interestingly was not his
ﬁrst choice, and how he formed the writer-producer trio that would pitch in the ﬁnal round of selection, get chosen, and in turn, hire
the rest of the crew, including Sid, Cate, and Kim. As is evident, already established personal connections and prior working experience
(as with Duane) matter, but Dade describes the serendipity as well. He also admits that he was courted, that somebody
played to his ego by saying that only he, Dade, could, would and should “touch” Guﬀaw.
Not everyone was as lucky as Dade. Ben divulges his critical and gloomy view of the PC selection process, and by extension, of the
industry.
The last ﬁlm I directed [many semesters before his thesis Ingrates], I was really happy with. I remember being at the screening and
how many people came up to me and said, “I love your ﬁlm.” So I really thought I had a strong reel to show oﬀ my work. And I
submitted to the PC director shortlist ﬁve times, and I never got on it. I saw people on that list that I’ve worked with and whose
ﬁlms I’ve seen, and I do not understand how they got on there… There is no reasoning one way or the other. I talked to the lead
faculty member many times and he never game me a straight answer. Nobody could tell me why. That’s the way the industry
works.”
Ben’s reﬂection on the arbitrariness of the PC selection process came after the screening of his thesis ﬁlm, so a couple of semesters
after he had completed coursework for the program and was already working in the industry. In his time at CAFilm, he eventually did
work on a PC project, but in the capacity of cinematographer. Above, his way of making sense of his constant rejection is to undertake
self-appraisal and come to form hardened expectations about the industry.
Film school, then, is not just a trial before industry because students and crews have to hustle to be heard. It’s also a tribulation
because it reﬂects a harsh industrial process that constantly arbitrarily shuts out some (talented) voices and accepts (mediocre)
others. The PC selection process is thus a synecdoche for the ﬁlm school-ﬁlm industry complex, a thoroughgoing competition, a meat
market experienced as speed dating, and an unpredictable rollercoaster of emotions for those who successfully or unsuccessfully
traverse its cuts.
Hustling in this organizational avatar is thus an exhausting, highly competitive, industry-mimicking ritual. It signals to students
the unending pageant of mostly rejections that will stutter their careers. Students come to understand the price of good work – work
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28
that often starts as an individual aspiring towards creativity – is the precarious fragility and distinct un-assuredness of hustling as
competition. The hustle is the work, is the movie, and is the industry. Socialization is competition-soaked, and careers depend on
constant maneuvering. The subjectivity of career formation pivots on students’ being able to swiftly shift shapes, repeatedly reinstate
their subjectivity into the bazaar of socialization, accomplish go-aheads, and only thus, make movies.
7. Hustling as posturing reputations
In this section, I elaborate on the implicit suggestion building across previous sections: what hustling really is, is an industryfacing
practice that students in ﬁlm school have no choice but to practice because it yields students, crews, and their ﬁlms as complex
postures or positionalities with attendant reputations. Hustling through ﬁlm school postures or positions students with reputations for
careers in industries.
Three points connect hustling with reputation consolidation. First, as they form connections and compete to work across multiple
projects, students constantly talk about each other. This means that they talk each other “up” or “down”—i.e., they gossip. Cate said
that even though she didn’t condone it, “talking shit” is normal. Many students preface their opinion by saying, “I love that director,
but…” or “Don’t get me wrong…” People also gossip about crews; for instance, PC students talked about “epic meltdowns” on set and
how some crews had a negative working ambience. Crewmembers of other PC ﬁlms would try to get me, an outsider, to elaborate on
rumors they had heard about heated debates during Guﬀaw production meetings. Gossip, as a form of talk, positions – or postures –
students and crews in the minds of their CAFilm peers. Students latch on to early impressions, like many did with Juan, Guﬀaw’s
outspoken production designer; or like Cate, test their accumulating impressions during school. Either outcome leads to reputation
consolidation and helps students decide whom to work with.
Some people are sharply aware of their reputations as they work down the grapevine of hustling. Lavos almost boasted about his
repute as the “asshole producer.” He said, “A lot of people didn’t like me because I was cutthroat.” I asked him how he felt about this
reputation. He replied nonchalantly, “I am a good producer, but I don’t like [the job]. But I have to do it if I want to direct. Right now,
I don’t have a name as a director, so I’m producing my own stuﬀ so I can create my own name…” Lavos believed ‘small talk’ gossip
was harmless but talking the big talk can work to your advantage if you also show that you do good work. He pointed to the industry
and said that gossip was part and parcel of networking: “Going to parties, talking to people… The key thing in Hollywood is people
talk a lot. So when you talk a lot and actually deliver, then people pay attention.” Thus, for Lavos, being a producer means someone
who delivers, which required being “cutthroat.” Further, gaining a “name” as a good producer was a rite of passage to getting gigs as
a director. So, he did not care about his speciﬁc reputation as a “hard ass” producer. In fact, he implied that he leaned into the
perception about his reputation. Doing so, he believed, was eﬃcacious for his career development.
Second, hustling as socialization that consolidates reputations results in students deciding about future work partners. Students
exchange lore about alumni who worked well together in school and went on to successful collaborations in the industry. So they
come to value ﬁnding good future collaborators in school. Both Abe and Duane said that based on their Guﬀaw experiences, they
knew exactly who they would and wouldn’t work with. Abe even had an idea about who didn’t want to work with him, because once
he was caught “talking shit” about a ﬁlm he had agreed to work on – because the people were cool even though it was “the worst idea
for a movie I had ever heard” – to someone who turned out to be the director’s roommate, who then told the rest of the crew about
Abe’s ethic. Ben stated conﬁdently that he would collaborate with Don, the editor of his thesis, “any time.” Sid explained how he
would only direct a ﬁlm for a future semester of PC if he had clear control on who he was working with: “The only way I would
consider directing is if I could game the system, and by that I mean, the semester before, I know exactly the people I want, I put them
in speciﬁc roles… So it wouldn’t be like when we get greenlit, I start holding interviews. It would be: I get greenlit, I have everything
ready.” So Sid would hustle in advance to ensure a crew that already ‘ﬁt with’ each other: this would guarantee, as much as these
things can, a good reputation at the level of the group, which then improved the chances of making a good ﬁlm.
Finally, some students remained skeptical about “this big idea of reputation,” which Maya thought was “a lot of ridiculousness.”
She elaborated, “I guess that in this program more so than others, you have to work with people who are not in your semester, so you
ask around, “Hey, is this person cool to work with?” At the same time, it didn’t matter to her so much because she thought most
people are friendly, which suggested that they are easy to work with. Further, contra Sid, Maya and Cate pointed out that sometimes
crewmembers work really well together but the resulting ﬁlm can be bad, so there’s no guarantee either way.
Hustling, students come to understand by the end of their ﬁlm school careers, is a series of posturing that cumulatively builds their
reputations as they transition into the industry. It is a masquerade in which people talk each other up (as with Dade), sometimes
backhandedly (Kim), talk each other down (Abe), talk the bigger industrial talk that cashes in on reputations (Lavos), and talk
because ﬁlmmaking and storytelling is a certain kind of talk. I think back to the cafes, corridors and courtyards of CAFilm. All student
and crew talk creates postures. People take stabs, form stances. They are engaged in a battle of impressions. They hustle. They
constantly anticipate each other, even as future work lies in anticipation.
8. Discussion
What I have sketched above are grounded theory categories of the phenomenon of socialization natively termed by my ﬁlm school
subjects as “hustling.” As is characteristic of the Chicago School methodology, there isn’t a grand elegance or standalone coherence
across my categories. Rather, they tentatively build on each other. Hustling, I found, involves forming connections, working simultaneously
across projects, surviving competition rituals, and ultimately, consolidating reputations. It might involve aspects that I
did not interpret. It is also possible that hustling at other ﬁlm schools looks diﬀerent; only additional research can ﬁll in the larger
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picture.
As they approach graduation, students come to see their tenure more holistically: as the beginning of a subjective, i.e., a subjectled,
career, a series of roles and statuses that they have had to work through, practice, interpret. Film students as individuals encounter
the group (crews and cohorts), the organization-institution (ﬁlm school), and the larger socioeconomic context (the ﬁlm industry).
They do so gradually. Many of them start oﬀ school relatively more ambitious, brash, and married to a particular notion of a good
cinematic aesthetic. Others start oﬀ with a less distinct individuality. However, all entrants become immersed in a multi-faceted
socialization process that gets them through classes, on sets, and with reputations. They end up more like ﬁlmmakers – in their own
eyes, in their peers’, and the industry’s – than when they started. A huge factor behind this professional transformation is their
multiform hustling.
Thus, a tentative answer to the question guiding my research, “Film students work together knowing what?” is as follows. Film
students work together coming to realize what exactly it means when experienced ﬁlmmakers – many, their role models – tout in
Q & As that ﬁlmmaking is a deeply collaborative art form. They subjectively experience socialization in the various manners of
hustling as collaborative work, busy work, hard work, social work, competitive work, and reputation work. They come to know that
their training in school – or at least the particular school that CAFilm is – is industry facing, and that hustling in school is merely
practice for relentless hustling in the industry. Film students work together knowing that their fates are partly determined by how
well they socialize, and importantly, how said socialization is the basis for their reputation as co-workers, crewmembers and ﬁlmmakers.
They hustle to make movies together. The lived experience of hustling becomes inextricably intertwined with the work of
ﬁlmmaking and subjectivity about industry careers.
This point cannot be overemphasized. If any of them harbored romantic notions of creativity, then their tenure at school tempers
these notions with an attendant sense of precariousness. If they thought that ﬁlmmaking is about great, individualist, visionary
storytelling, then they come away knowing that great storytelling at minimum necessitates hustling to form trustworthy crews,
hustling to work on other projects in order to ﬁnd the right collaborators, hustling to win the chance for a stage and for mentorship,
and hustling to just be in the know. In brief, ﬁlm students work together coming to know hustling as industrial rather than merely
curricular or pedagogical work that postures them for careers in the ﬁlm/TV industries.
Put yet another way, a signiﬁcant amount of the lived experience around hustling involves thoroughgoing anticipation. This is what
I proﬀer it means to have a career in the creative/cultural/media industries. ‘Career’ is short for anticipation. It is not, as Barley
(1989) suggested, a reconstrual of the past and the future in order to come to terms with the present. Rather, the directionality is
opposite: it is centrifugal. Thoroughgoing anticipation means participating so intensively in the present that one’s past work and
identities closely approach but remain distinguishable from the present; and similarly, one’s future identities emanate from the
present. Mathematical limits work in a similar way: the limit in mathematics is the value of a function that becomes conspicuous as
the input approaches a particular value. Analogically, the shape of an individual’s career becomes conspicuous as their socialization
intensiﬁes towards a certain level. Hustling involves socialization; socialization takes work or is work; work, when practiced, interpreted,
or experienced as thoroughgoing anticipation, approaches whatever a career is and what shape it will take. Framed in this
manner, work, career and socialization become inexorably intertwined in a subjectivity and a subject-drivenness that is rooted in the
present but disposed by the past and towards a future. Can’t such subject-drivenness be thought of as agency? I return to this notion
below.
On the ground, students learn not to have overarching, grand strategies because they understand that they have to continue
working hard well after school. Not a single person I spoke to harbored any impression of making it big immediately. They knew that
they would have to confront tough, opaque institutions. But they also knew they had already been subjugated to the boot camp that is
ﬁlm school. A mini-career in school paves the way for a larger career in industry. Hustling makes student ﬁlmmakers alert and
stealthy, grafting on them a particular subjectivity—like a patina, a second skin, a thicker skin. The skin of thoroughgoing antici-
pation.
Is this argument applicable to all creative work? I would say that situation-activated anticipatory socialization pertains to industry-facing
creative work. Unfortunately, there has not much scholarship on the socialization aspects of creative career building,
though I venture that art schools pose a contrastive case. According to Singerman (1999), they train art subjects as “artists” and are
sites where “the question posed most insistently… is whether the artist is a professional.” (p. 8; emphasis added) By contrast, I found
that at CAFilm, students acted implicitly wondering whether their socialization was professional.
Sociality and socialization compensate for if also remind students of the precariousness of their future work: “I am on a project
now but do I have a project lined up for next week?” Or: “I made a thesis ﬁlm during school but will I be able to direct my own feature
ﬁlm and get it distribution?” To the extent that autonomy, self-conception, identiﬁcation with an occupation, and self-realization are
core aspects of creative work, and to the extent that creative work needs to be processed through the cogs and wheels of industry
structures, ﬁlm students experience the sociality and socialization of hustling as precariousness, indeed, but also, I interpret, as
agency.
Film students are better oﬀ as cohorts with solid proto-industrial reputations. I found my hustling subjects to be more primed,
attentive and ready for behemoth industries. Some ﬁnd pleasure in hustling, and others obligation. Some ﬁnd release, and others
transgression. But many CAFilm students are “hungry” to ﬁnd work and to put across their work, and ﬁlm school is the boot camp that
teaches them how to survive while hungry. Film students have learned better how to capitalize on opportunity. They now walk the
walk as much as they talk the talk. They know how to remain vigilant. Their “vocational restlessness” (lit review) has been made
productive. They exit with a quiver of tactics. They bank on strength in numbers. They have come to know “how to go on” within
everyday routines and structures (Giddens, 1984). They have agency. They are now agents of their creative ﬁlmmaking work. Film
students have hustled to become student ﬁlmmakers.
R. Mehta Poetics 63 (2017) 22–32
30
Student ﬁlmmakers are still students, though. They face the industry, but are not yet enmeshed in industry dynamics. They seek
careers, but they are not completely indoctrinated. They wait in vigil even as they constantly hustle. They are still somewhat free to
deny and turn away, to more carefully stake out their paths, or to more strategically posture their reputations. In this sense, their
hustling might be diﬀerent from that of long-established media workers.
In conclusion, hustling is subjectively experienced in ﬁlm school as anticipatory socialization towards industrial careers. Student
ﬁlmmakers embark on careers having previewed and practiced precariousness. They might still be trying to ﬁgure out their exact
role, position or identity, and they are certainly not yet “professionals.” They have competed to form the most useful connections by
working continuously across a variety of projects. They have a much better idea of their individual and collective abilities and
reputations. Their future work – the course of their careers – lies in anticipation of them. They will continue to shape-shift and hustle
in the hard work they will pour into their creative lives.
Acknowledgments
This article was made possible by the generous ﬁnancial support of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at
the University of Southern California. I would like to thank my PhD advisor Dr. Henry Jenkins for his support and mentorship over
the years. I would also like to thank Dr. Larry Gross Dr. Patricia Riley and Dr. Neta Kligler Vilenchik for their support and encouragement.
Particular to this article, I would like to thank Dr. Paul Lichterman for his extensive comments and guidance, especially
on methodology, and Dr. Andrew R. Schrock for his ideas and advice, and for reading and proofreading an early draft.
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Ritesh Mehta is currently an Adjunct Professor at Woodbury University. He received his PhD in Communication in 2015, from the Annenberg School of
Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Ritesh’s dissertation was an ethnographic study of the professionalization of student ﬁlmmakers
as they make their way through ﬁlm school, in the backyard of the media industries. Ritesh is generally interested in the ﬁlm and television industries with
regard to production practices as well as audience reception and interpretation of popular texts. He has an MA in Philosophy from the University of Missouri St Louis
and a B.Sc. in Marketing from the University of Pennsylvania.
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