Hollywood Accounting: Technologies of Surveillance, Knowledge and Power in Paramount Budget Documents, 1927–58

Abstract

Film production at Paramount Pictures during the so-called classical era required the mobilisation of massive material and human capital that depended on institutional systems of surveillance, knowledge creation and control ranging from departmental affiliations to the pre-printed budget forms. This article focuses on those pre-printed budget forms as technologies of knowledge and power, revealing that the necessities of creating and managing coalitions of expert labourers created alternative power centres and spaces where being the object of surveillance was itself a source of power. It concludes by discussing the implications of this ecology for the historiography of Hollywood.