ABSTRACT
This chapter examines ethnographic interviews as a critical method in production studies and reviews the process for constructing a project based on ethnographic interviews. It utilises examples from an ethnographically-based project in production studies. The chapter also utilises ethnographic interviews to uncover and map the changes in the neo-arthouse movie theater industry in the US, particularly how women’s labor is constituted within it. Exhibition as a whole is understudied within cinema studies, and contemporary exhibition landscapes and practices doubly so. The point of conducting ethnographic interviews as a production studies method is to expose those corners of the film industry that remain hidden or clouded in secrecy by signal boosting the voices of the people who do the work day in and day out. To do so means their voices – not the voice of the researcher – must be amplified in the written text.
