This panel explores film labour and creative practices, as filtered through the concept of "The Line." The Line has long been a demarcation device in American commercial cinema. It denotes those film personnel who are able to negotiate the terms of their employment through individual contracts (above the line), and those whose wages are set by unions and guilds engaged collective bargaining (below the line). This financial distinction holds greater rhetorical significance within the filmmaking community, connoting the difference between creative personnel, who are afforded greater esteem than those whose employ falls under mere craft inputs. Yet these demarcations have never been as firm as the above/below-the-line distinction would suggest. The employ of film extras in classical Hollywood, for example, held the implicit promise of background actors being discovered and elevated to the status of headline talent. Recent media scholarship has also examined workers who do not receive credit and are “beyond the line,” but provide crucial labor that supports media industries and content output-- these include the factory workers that assemble televisions and casting directors for reality television. This panel uses the idea of "The Line" as a literal and figurative occasion to explore the legal, contractual, and employment concerns of creative labour in film, television, and other media industries. It addresses the underlying tension between the strict disciplinarity of media industry jobs defined by union and guild contracts and fluid, ad- hoc nature of creative employment. As the organising principle in film labour practice, "The Line" subtends a great number of creative employment decisions in commercial cinema, but it is also subject to being crossed, blurred, bent, sidestepped, broken, and redrawn. These alterations are particularly visible in this contemporary moment where new, relatively inexpensive technologies have lowered the barriers to entry in creative industries, and changed the relationships between creative personnel and the labour organisations that have traditionally structured their employ. Possible paper topics might include, but are not limited to: labour strikes and crossing picket lines; the jurisdictional divisions between competing unions and/or guilds; changing definitions of creative job titles in new media regimes; persistent gendered or racialised associations with below-the-line jobs; or explorations of jobs that support media industries, which might fall outside of credit hierarchies (“beyond the line”). Please submit abstracts (up to 300 words in length) to James Crawford ( [log in to unmask]) and Kate Fortmueller ([log in to unmask]) by Sunday, August 5, 2012. ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]