Abstract

When Motown Went West: A History of Motown Productions

Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Detroit-based rhythm-and-blues record company Motown charted a move to Los Angeles with the goal of extending its enterprise into film and television. This paper examines how Motown’s move reshaped the company’s relationship to Detroit and reoriented Hollywood as both the region and the industry around which the company organized its identity and pursued its futures. In so doing, I argue for greater scholarly attention to film and media production companies – that is, entities that develop and produce media sold to distributors – in the study of media industries. Such companies – rather than major film studios and broadcast networks – have often constituted the means by which media images of difference are produced and underrepresented groups have pursued commercial media power. As the then-most successful Black-owned enterprise in the United States, Motown was in a position to exercise significant power in terms of expanding Black representation in American entertainment media. Yet this expansion came at a cost in terms of the company’s position in the political economy of Detroit and its cultural and economic meaning to Black Midwesterners. This paper chronicles both the goals of Motown’s reinvention as an entertainment conglomerate seeking to create space for Blackness in Hollywood and the effects of its relocation on the Midwestern city with which the company had long been identified. Motown Productions put forth a distinct notion of what African American media could be within Hollywood by applying an ideology of “uplift” meant to counter images of blaxploitation, producing media for film and television that conveyed narratives of individual Black accomplishment. Yet such images of uplift entailed the company’s material and strategic distancing from Detroit during a critical period in which the city was experiencing economic decline and divestment – an absence that resonated in the city’s cultural and commercial landscape.