THE SURPRISINGLY FANTASTIC SCRIPT: IMAGINATIVE IMMATERIAL LABOR, "MULTITUDINOUS" SCREENWRITING, AND GENRE INNOVATION WITHIN PEAK TV A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH JULY 2018 By Ida Yoshinaga Dissertation Committee: John Rieder, Chairperson Cristina Bacchilega kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui Cynthia Franklin Rodney Morales Vilsoni Hereniko Keywords: Screenwriting, television studies, creative labor, creative writing, production studies, creative industries, fantasy, genre theory, diversity, authorship ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In a city embraced by visiting neighbors from other parts of the Midwest for its low- taxed beer, fireworks, tires, and porn, I sit in a student dormitory at Marquette University, near the close of the Science Fiction Research Association conference where I have just presented a paper on Disney’s production relations, looking down through my window at the spaghetti tangle of crisscrossing freeways, marveling on what an odd journey it has been. Milwaukee seems a fitting place in which to end my 25-year journey towards researching and authoring a dissertation that has occupied almost half my life. The Wisconsin city feels simultaneously industrial and poor, messy and hopeful, unsure of the future yet solidly grounded in a past marked by both capital and labor. In other words, it resembles me. The urban landscape is being torn down, emptied out for just-over-the-horizon gentrification, yet flowered with the most beautiful of European-American architecture constructed sturdily by early-twentieth-century immigrant workers. As if uncertain of the genre language through which to articulate these discordant historical textures and temporalities, so as to represent the unrepresentable. As if to ask, how can I express something as huge as a multitude? This is a personal project that I have resided with for a long time and that I struggled to understand for many years and across multiple disciplines until I found the proper genre syntax. Even then, I am almost certain that the experiment has failed linguistically and even empirically…but nonetheless experience a deep rush of satisfaction as I put to bed this weird snarl of ideas, facts, reflections. Something has been said, in some imperfect way, that endeavors some kind of impact—I think. Sometimes, I’m not a very good writer. Or perhaps words are the weakest of all worldly energies, which is why I place so much trust in the audiovisual. At any rate: I am grateful to my ancestors from Yamaguchi and Kumamoto, whose creativity and workaholism, whose skepticism and spirituality, whose effortful and troubled ethics I feel in my Aikidō “one-point” (gut) every day, especially my parents who were both alive when I started on this path and who no doubt shake their heads and smile, thinking how typical of me to end it in this inimitable, idiosyncratic way. As I finish this, I am struck by a memory of my grandmother Sadako, my mother’s mother, who advised me near her death that “jinsei wa benkyō,” life is to be learned, which it most certainly is. I am also indebted to my husband’s family from Gushikawa and Yamaguchi for their work and love and their ii durable, working-class sense of right and wrong that my own clans have often historically lacked, especially to Nobuko, my mother-in-law. I’m thankful to my dissertation committee for their flexibility and forbearance and presence of mind (despite the summer’s late-doctoral-defense crunch) to provide tough criticisms that will someday be spun with this document into far better work than I present here now. I am deeply arigatai first and foremost to kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui and to Vili Hereniko for advising me to attend to those necessary things that I cannot ignore; to Cindy Franklin as always for her fiercely intellectual work work work (after all, this project is about labor); to Rodney Morales for his sardonic artist’s sensibility about truth v. bullshit; especially to the brilliant but more importantly kind John Rieder for indulging me with his prodigious and rapid feedback and for saying yes, even though he knows (by now) that I’m more creative writer than scholar; and of course always to Cristina for, well, you know, literally everything. I am truly honored and privileged to have learned from all of them, as their time has been like life to me. Since this dissertation in part tracks the work of mentors both unusual and outstanding, I must recognize the many exceptional teachers who have crossed my path, some who no longer inhabit this plane of existence and some who reside elsewhere than my current sphere of life. Among the guides who helped shape my writer’s voice are Kiyoshi Ikeda, Joyce Chinen, Eiko Kosasa, Maivan Lam, Patricia Steinhoff, Juliana Spahr, Glenn Man, Candace Fujikane, Janice Ito, Hans Katayama, Masako Fukui, Yoko and Yasuo Tateoka, Haunani-Kay Trask, Victoria Knebuhl, Joy Harjo, Darlene Rodrigues, Anne Kennedy, Manu Meyer, Hoʻoipo DeCambra, Michael Shapiro, Susan Schultz, Ruth Hsu, Kathie Kane, Alvin So, Hagen Koo, Donald Thompson, Cindy Martin, Rae Watanabe, Walter Miura, and Peggy Oshiro. Researchers and writers in the field of fantastic storytelling, Jennifer Stevenson, Lynette James, Jonathan Eller, Jill Terry Rudy, Pauline Greenhill, Amy Ransom, Anna Kérchy, Taryne Taylor, Gerry Canavan, Caryn Lesuma, Steven Holmes, Jennifer Orme, and Sherryl Vint are among the many new colleagues who have supported my understanding of this fully fun field of fantastic audiovisual storytelling with which I have always been in love and over which I now can claim a rudimentary level of expertise. Despite the data and the theory, this is essentially a current memoir about my life. And so it’s for Dougy and Yaya and for Kenrick, of course. iii ABSTRACT Analyzing the production relations between television writers, producers, and showrunners, this project conceptualizes connections between diversity labor and the teleplay form, focusing on the negotiated nature of script authorship during the digital era of Peak TV. To map structures of immaterial labor within the global production of corporate fantasy, reposition televisual fantasy as a spiritual storytelling mode of community expression rather than its default definition as a commercial genre, and interrogate the corporate-media conceptualization of “innovation” as individualistic white-male achievement, I integrate economic lessons from teleplay writers’ script development, entertainment news, industry folklore, and my own class history, with life stories of African American, indigenous, LGBTQ, immigrant, and female writers/producers. I conclude that to enrich their exchange value in racialized and gendered labor markets while creating quality TV, teleplay writers from marginalized “multitudinous” groups deploy hybridized genre tactics innovatively by pairing commercial sensibilities of form with cultural knowledges grounded in community. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. POSE-ING QUESTIONS ON THE PRODUCTION RELATIONS OF PEAK TV. .1 CHAPTER 1. AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTEURS BRING ECONOMIC APPROACHES TO GENRE TELEVISION IN THE LONG DOWNTURN . .14 CHAPTER 2. INDIGENOUS SCRIPTERS AND DIRECTORS “SCREEN WRITE” AS INTERNATIONAL IMMATERIAL LABOR IN THE GREAT GLOBAL FANTASY FACTORY. .55 CHAPTER 3. QUEER SPIRITUAL SHOWRUNNERS SLIPSTREAM THE SMALL SCREEN INTO A HARM-REDUCING SENSORIUM. 113 CHAPTER 4. WHEN WOMEN, IMMIGRANTS, AND “MULTITUDINOUS” OTHERS DEVELOP SCRIPTS DIFFERENTLY (OR, MY CREATIVE-WRITING PEDAGOGY) . 149 CHAPTER 5. THE 10 BATTLES FOR INDUSTRIAL INNOVATION FOUGHT BY FANTASTIC TV SCRIPTERS IN A TRANSMEDIAL ERA. .203 v INTRODUCTION. POSE-ING QUESTIONS ON THE PRODUCTION RELATIONS OF PEAK TV Nationally respected male-to-female (MTF) transgender celebrity who also happens to be a Native Hawaiian, African American, and haole “local girl” educated at Farrington High School and the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, Janet Mock recently added three more job titles to her impressive list of occupations that includes journalist, memoirist, media activist, and actress. As of this summer, she is a writer, director, and producer of the prime- time Pose (2018), a scripted series which presents transgender women and cisgender gay male characters of diverse racial and class backgrounds interacting in the ball culture scene of 1980s New York City against the backdrop of the Reagan-era economic rise of Donald Trump. Gay and lesbian entertainment-industry power-players Ryan Murphy and Nina Jacobson, the show’s cisgender executive producers, hired Mock along with white MTF transgender musician and singer Our Lady J for Pose’s writing and producing staff, to create stories about their community for the edgy yet commercial FX network. But for me, the first show scripted by fellow Honolulu-born homegirl Mock is disappointing. The previous episode (“Access,” S1E2, airdate 06/10/18) had been written by the series’ showrunning team, Murphy and his producing partner Brad Falchuk along with their co-executive producer, Steven Canals who came up with the show’s original premise then developed it with Falchuk. That earlier episode had demonstrated all kinds of excellence and sophistication in dramatic writing, continuing to establish the series’ fairy-tale- like language and magical landscape which these executive producers had started to lay down in the pilot. Pose is set in Manhattan’s industrial harbor area where trans women hook “straight” professional customers from the executive and managerial classes and also where young gay men of all backgrounds practice their dance moves. Its stories transpire too at the fabulous evening balls where these women show off their sartorial and performative wit via competitive catwalks and raucous call-and-response audience commentary. This highly stylized story world of the dock area and the balls gets articulated as a lightly fantastic safe space to which trans women and queer men from all over the country flock so that they can dare to love, hope, and dream in spite of an overtly homophobic US society.