ABSTRACT
Since its beginnings, film and television industries have profited from their fleet-footed ability to produce anytime, anywhere. Media cities have favored these film and television industries as part of their own development strategies for at least the past 20 years. In 2020, the synergy between media cities and their favored industries came to a halt and film and television workers were caught in the middle. This chapter begins with a short history of urban development and the film industry, a relationship that predates the existence of Hollywood and continues today in technocracies around the world. Inside this frame for a media city, the chapter sketches the work of making places in production. Namely, locational scouts are charged with the work of finding the perfect places to fit a script and a budget. These routine decisions provide a lens into how media workers negotiate the local and the global, as well as place and placelessness, in a media city. These routines have been upended by Covid-19, which begs a question as to how pandemic production impacts the coziness between urban development and global media industries.
