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Media Franchising
P O STMILLENNIAL P OP
General Editors: Karen Tongson and Henry Jenkins

Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages Media Franchising: Creative License

of Empire and Collaboration in the
Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns Culture Industries
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Derek Johnson
Meaning in a Networked Culture Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Guerrilla Marketing
Joshua Green Michael Serazio
Media Franchising

Creative License and Collaboration in the

Culture Industries

Derek Johnson

a
NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org

© 2013 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet Websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.

Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnson, Derek, 1979–
Media franchising : creative license and collaboration in the culture
industries / Derek Johnson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8147-4347-8 (hbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8147-4348-5
(pbk : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8147-4349-2 (ebk.) —
ISBN 978-0-8147-4389-8 (ebk.)
1. Cultural industries. 2. Franchises (Retail trade) I. Title.
HD9999.C9472J64 2013
658.8'708 — dc23 2012040758

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,

and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: An Industrial Way of Life 1

1. Imagining the Franchise: Structures, Social Relations,
and Cultural Work 27
2. From Ownership to Partnership: The Institutionalization
of Franchise Relations 67
3. Sharing Worlds: Difference, Deference, and the
Creative Context of Franchising 107
4. “A Complicated Genesis”: Transnational Production
and Transgenerational Marketing 153
5. Occupying Industries: The Collaborative Labor
of Enfranchised Consumers 197
Conclusion: Future Exchanges and Iterations 233

Notes 243
Index 279
About the Author 291

>> v
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

Like the media franchising it explores, the production of this book was an
ongoing, iterative process spanning many years in which multiple collabora-
tors contributed across different sites and communities of inquiry, scholarly
in this case instead of industrial. Though I may claim authorship (and NYU
Press ownership), many other stakeholders should claim this work as well.
I am indebted to Michael Curtin, Mary Beltrán, Jeff Smith, Nan Enstad,
Julie D’Acci, and especially my advisor Michele Hilmes, who helped set me
on this course and guided my PhD research at the University of Wiscon-
sin from 2006 to 2009. Lisa Nakamura, Shanti Kumar, and David Bordwell
served as key influences and supporters too. As I continued to develop
that research into this book, I depended heavily on the generous advice
and good friendship of Jonathan Gray, who was somehow never too busy
to share his thoughts long distance. Denise Mann has been a strong advo-
cate for the project, while the manuscript also benefited from the thoughtful
comments of Barbara Selznick as well as a number of anonymous review-
ers. My friend and colleague Aswin Punathambekar also offered invaluable
comments. NYU Press provided an incredibly nurturing environment for
this collaborative process, thanks to supportive direction by Eric Zinner and
Ciara McLaughlin. Although I joined their series later on, the contributions
of series editors Karen Tongson and Henry Jenkins were no less significant,
particularly in helping me stand behind my claims with conviction. Henry
has long acted as a champion for my work — even and perhaps especially
when it has challenged his — so it seems appropriate that my gratitude to him
would continue here.
Many of the ideas in this book also benefited from having been previ-
ously worked through or expanded upon in other publications whose editors
also deserve my thanks. Portions of chapter 2 developed out of beginnings in
“Will the Real Wolverine Please Stand Up?” from Film and Comics, edited by
Ian Gordon and Matthew McAllister (University Press of Mississippi, 2007)
and “Franchise Histories” in Convergence Media History, edited by Janet
Staiger and Sabine Hake (Routledge, 2009). Elements of chapter 5 built upon
ideas iterated in much earlier forms as “The Fictional Institutions of Lost,” in
>> vii
viii << Acknowledgments

Reading Lost, edited by Roberta Pearson (2007), as well as the article “Invit-
ing Audiences In” from New Review of Film and Television Studies 5.1 (2007),
which owed much to the insight of Matt Hills. My more focused discussion
of the gendered dimensions of media franchising in chapter 1 profited from
the opportunity I had to engage in an expanded exploration of those issues as
“Devaluing and Revaluing Seriality” in Media, Culture & Society 33.7 (2011).
Numerous other colleagues, students, and friends contributed to this
project either through direct support or just good conversation, including
Megan Ankerson, Ivan Askwith, Ben Aslinger, Laurie Baird, Nancy Baym,
Colin Burnett, Kristina Busse, Norma Coates, Gail de Koznik, Sam Ford,
Joshua Green, Sean Griffin, Germaine Halegoua, Lee Harrington, Lindsay
Hogan, Kit Hughes, Josh Jackson, Derek Kompare, Shanti Kumar, Elana
Levine, Geoffrey Long, Amanda Lotz, Myles McNutt, Jason Mittell, Maurício
Mota, Sarah Murray, Daniel Pereira, Chris Russell, Kevin Sandler, Avi Santo,
Suzanne Scott, Erin Copple Smith, Louisa Stein, Serra Tinic, and Shawn
Vancour. Evan Elkins’s eagle eye was particularly helpful. Having returned
to UW– Madison, I am also grateful for the support of my colleagues in the
Communication Arts department and across campus, especially the feedback
of Jeremy Morris and the guidance of my faculty mentor Rob Howard. Harry
Benshoff deserves special mention as my previous mentor at the University
of North Texas. The Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (and later,
the Futures of Entertainment group) also provided institutional support as
well as plentiful opportunities to workshop my ideas. Equal thanks go out to
the search committees that hosted me for job talks and allowed me to share
works in progress. My archival research would not have been possible with-
out the help of Ned Comstock at the USC Cinematic Arts Library and Lauren
Buisson at the UCLA Arts Special Collections Library, or the repeated hospi-
tality of my friends Scott Gillies and Holly Brobst. My gratitude also goes out
to Danny Bilson, Flint Dille, Kelly Kahl, Hassan Kazmi, Justin Lambros, Bear
McCreary, Marti Noxon, Brian Raffel, Ed Skolarus, Jim Tso, Dan Vondrak,
Mark Warshaw, and all the anonymous industry professionals who took time
out of their busy days to chat with me. As my research assistants at the Uni-
versity of North Texas, Aaron Martin and Dave Hartwell made helpful con-
tributions too. A subvention for this book was also awarded through a com-
petitive grant from the University of Wisconsin– Madison Provost’s Office
and the Graduate School. Graduate School funding has been provided by the
Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) with income generated by
patents filed through WARF by UW– Madison faculty and staff.
The most important contributor, however, has been my wife Colleen. I
wish I could say that I have been as supportive of her pursuits as she has been
 Acknowledgments >> ix

of mine, but since she has set the bar impossibly high, I hope my love for her
can cover the difference somehow. A book dedication might also help, but
unfortunately that honor goes to someone else — our clever, funny, and beau-
tiful daughter Dahlia. Having finished the book, I hope I have not just freed
up more quality time for all three of us, but also written something that will
one day make Dahlia half as proud of me as I already am of her.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction

An Industrial Way of Life

To some, media franchising is a bit of a joke. In the 2010 mock educational

video “The Science Behind Law & Order,” for example, CollegeHumor.com
offers a satirical skewering of the “regenerative properties” that support the
ongoing and multiplied industrial reproduction of the NBC television police
procedural, spun off four times since 1990. “To understand the future of
the Law & Order franchise,” the didactic narrator explains, “you must first
explore the complex biological system that has sustained the show for two
decades.” What that complex system has produced, it appears, is a cultural
monster: “like the mythological beast Hydra, when one Law & Order meets
its demise, two more sprout in its place.” The irony of the franchise’s mon-
strous longevity lies in its “awe-inspiring resilience to harsh predatory fac-
tors such as changing tastes, aging actors, much better shows, and Benjamin
Bratt. As the mother pod reaches maturity, and begins to sense its impend-
ing extinction, its outer membrane sends out a series of rerun seedlings . . .
assimilating the entire ecosystem into one homogeneous blob.”1 The humor,
yet implied cultural tragedy, of media franchising derives here from the
dominance of its patterned sameness and the imposition of an unthink-
ing, instinctual biology over any human creativity or social agency within
the media industries. A video on The Onion News Network in 2011 similarly
skewered the industrial practices of franchising by pointing to the mind-
less drive toward self-replication animating Hollywood blockbusters like the
comic book superhero adaptation Green Lantern: “A Green Lantern sequel
is already rumored to be in the works,” the fake newscaster explains despite
public indifference to the film, “due to the fact that this franchise has now
been created.”2 As an awkward punchline, franchising explains the creative
bankruptcy and foregone economic determination of contemporary media
industries. Sometimes, that joke extends to the masculinized juvenility of
those industries as well, as in another Onion video that portrays the screen-
writer of the 2011 Fast and the Furious sequel Fast Five as a five-year-old boy
who “wanted to return to the franchise’s roots of cars driving, going boom.”3
This understanding of franchising as monstrously homogenized, self-
determining, and childish has not merely been the province of humorists.
>> 1
2 << Introduction

Media critics too lambast the culture industries for their franchising prac-
tice. Summarizing the 2004– 2005 television season in terms of the “good”
and the “bad,” USA Today television critic Robert Bianco awarded “TV fran-
chisation” a spot on the latter list. “In September, we wondered how many
Law & Orders and CSIs were too many. Now we know: for L&O, four; for
CSI, three. As it turns out, it takes more than a name to make a show. You
also have to come up with a few compelling characters and some workable
distinction that separates the copy from the original.” For this critic, the
“franchise creep” colonizing primetime programming endangered the art
of television in favor of replicated, multiplied sameness.4 Time’s Feifei Sun
similarly marked the release of the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid with an
online feature on “The Top 10 Franchises That Won’t Die.” Captured in the
insistence that these film franchises “just won’t go away” was frustration over
the persistence of their industrial multiplication over time.5 Moreover, when
Salon’s Matt Seitz lamented the reliance of Hollywood studios on comic
book adaptations, he simply deployed the one-word exclamation “Fran-
chise!” to forward a culturally legible critique of industrialized media cul-
ture.6 So commonsense had the cultural bankruptcy of franchising become
that it worked as punctuated shorthand. Even the most rigorous of media
scholars cannot help but confront franchising as a cultural blight. “Such is
the nature of the successful media franchise,” Bob Rehak wordsmithed in
2007, “doomed to plow forward under the ever-increasing inertia of its own
fecund replication.”7
The perceived mediocrity of Law & Order, Green Lantern, or Karate Kid
might not make such franchising seem worthy of all the fuss, much less a
whole book. At stake in the multiplication and replication of these media
properties over time, however, is the very manner and logic by which popu-
lar culture is produced and, crucially, reproduced. Through franchising — an
industrially driven process perceived as unchecked expansion and assimila-
tion across cultural contexts — media products have proved culturally threat-
ening not just in their seeming lack of sophistication, but in the challenge to
choice, diversity, and creativity posed by their mechanistic, almost viral drive
toward self-replication. Yet to truly understand that reproduction and prob-
lematize the terms by which franchising has been popularly and critically
conceived, this book develops a more complex picture of franchised cultural
production that challenges assumptions about self-replication to more effec-
tively account for human agency and social meaning within the industrial
institutions that produce culture.
Too often, we assume that all we need to do to understand franchises is
to track their monolithic replication, counting up the number of spin-offs,
 Introduction >> 3

tie-ins, and other branded products across the unified corporate footprint
of conglomerates like Time Warner, NewsCorp, or Disney. When we focus
on the replication over time of the franchised media content controlled by
these companies, the persistence of these major media brands seems to bear
out the inane repetitiveness and stagnation of their cultural production over
the past 30 years. The longevity of science fiction franchises like Star Trek
and Battlestar Galactica, for example, made 2009 look at least on the surface
much like 1979. Thirty years after introducing the cast of Star Trek to the
silver screen, Paramount released an eleventh film with a new cast and new
narrative continuity to move forward as if the previous three decades never
happened. On television, the conclusion of a similarly reimagined Battlestar
Galactica in 2009 amid plans for a planet-bound spin-off called Caprica only
added to a litany of formulaic reworking, recalling both the cancellation of
the original Battlestar Galactica in 1979 and its retooled, Earth-set replace-
ment Galactica 1980. To quote the oft-repeated line from the reimagined
Battlestar, “all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.” To
comprehend these repeated happenings, however, we must go beyond rec-
ognizing, counting, and bemoaning their occurrence; we must ask how and
why they have propagated in meaningful ways. Franchises do not replicate
themselves: they are produced in negotiated social and cultural contexts that
demand exploration. Even if wedded to the notion that franchises pose a cul-
tural threat, we can only really grasp the scope of that threat by giving seri-
ous consideration to how industrial processes and cultures of creation have
unfolded over time and across different sites of production. This requires
inquiry not just into the products of media franchises, but rather the process
of media franchising constituted by complex social interactions within the
industry structures supporting and driving cultural replication.
To understand how and why franchising has developed as it has over
the past several decades, we have to go beyond the glib suggestion made by
College Humor that franchises might be powered “by a unique electromag-
netic force of depression given off by sad old people sitting in front of a tele-
vision.”8 Instead, we have to take seriously the investment of popular audi-
ences and the meaningful labor of social actors working through franchising.
By what patterns, practices, and strategies do producers working within
industrial franchising structures engage in these multiplications and replica-
tions of culture? How is that replication shaped and reshaped by the ways
producers conceive and manage their own professional identities within
those structures? If franchises prove as culturally monstrous as critics main-
tain, what kinds of negotiations and struggles must producers perform to
understand their creative practice within them? How do workers embedded
4 << Introduction

in the culture industries serve as a front line in making sense of, manag-
ing, or enabling that challenge to perceptions of their own creative agency
and identities? The replication of franchising extends not from the agency of
corporate monoliths, but from producers working for and within industrial
power structures. Without attention to the experiences of those cultural pro-
ducers, the replication implied by franchising remains mythologized rather
than theorized.

The Context for Franchising

Toward this more complex conception of franchising, this book asks how
institutionally situated media producers have managed the continuous pro-
duction of culture from intellectual property resources shared across multiple
sites of production. How has franchised media production generated social
relations, market discourses, creative identities, collaborative exchanges, and
above all, tensions and struggles among stakeholders imagined into indus-
trial relationships through use of the same shared, branded resources? This
inquiry has been designed as a historical project, exploring the emergence
of franchising as a production logic within specific industrial and cultural
circumstances throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into
the twenty-first. The scope of that historical examination, which spans from
discourses about franchising in 1950s business culture to the emergence and
dominance of franchising logics in the production of contemporary media
culture, has been defined by at least four crucial shifts.
First, on an economic level, the culture industries have been marked by a
coordinated push toward both deregulated consolidation and post-Fordist
flexibility. In the 1970s, a few companies controlled each media industry:
ABC, NBC, and CBS dominated television; Warner Bros., Paramount, 20th
Century Fox, Universal, and Columbia controlled the film industry; Mar-
vel and DC Comics split the comics industry. By the 1980s and ’90s, those
oligopolies had extended across media, with larger conglomerates like Time
Warner, Viacom, NewsCorp, and Disney operating across multiple media
sectors. As Michael Curtin, Simone Murray, and Reeves et al. argue, these
structural changes made the production of content more important, rather
than less, as corporations sought to develop brands that could be deployed
across media channels.9 However, in the shift toward post-Fordism, where
corporations favored flexible, temporary labor arrangements that reduced
operating costs and limited long-term corporate risk, cultural production
need not be fully consolidated under a single corporate umbrella. Instead,
conglomerates frequently joined with independent partners to develop and
 Introduction >> 5

extend intellectual properties across those multiple delivery channels. In

this context, control of intellectual property resources became increasingly
central to corporate strategy, both in their potential to be protected as pro-
prietary and their potential to be widely shared and flexibly multiplied on a
production level.
Emerging media technology such as personal computers, the Internet,
and video game consoles have also created new markets in which intellec-
tual property resources could be multiplied and leveraged as franchises. On
the one hand, new technologies since the 1980s provided a host of venues
into which established media companies could insert themselves via fran-
chising. As Broadcasting & Cable reported in 2006, video games and other
digital technologies generated an audience segment — the so-called lost boys
— whose interests could no longer be held by traditional media platforms
like television.10 Yet while established media institutions aimed to adapt
their franchisable properties to digital markets that attracted these valuable,
assumedly male audiences, the games, web video, iPhone apps, and other
new products to which they turned were on the other hand just as much the
source of new competition. The markets surrounding digital technologies
have supported new media institutions similarly reliant on the older pro-
duction logic of franchising — game publishers like Nintendo, Eidos Interac-
tive, or Rock Star, for example, whose Super Mario, Tomb Raider, and Grand
Theft Auto franchises, respectively, depended on multiplied, successive pro-
duction over time. So while new technologies sustained industrial reliance
on franchising, they did so in fragmented, competitive markets as much as
media oligopolies.
Changes in the social character of media consumption have shaped the
emergence of franchising over the past several decades as well. According
to Joseph Turow, the swing from mass popular culture to targeted niche seg-
ments reduced the size of “primary media communities” or “image tribes,”
transforming “society-making media” into “segment-making media.”11 So
while content came to be replicated across a multiplicity of media channels,
the total audience for that content often contracted; the seeming expansive-
ness of franchising sat in tension with its deployment in search of smaller
audience groups. Moreover, as markets shrank quantitatively, qualitative
relationships between audiences and media also shifted at the end of the
twentieth century. Thanks to online and social media, audiences could more
easily communicate with one another, enabling and encouraging participa-
tory responses to popular media. In parallel to industrial reiterations of fran-
chised culture, consumers crafted and distributed their own contributions
to corporately owned properties like Star Wars, as Henry Jenkins shows.12
6 << Introduction

Participatory consumers seized their own stakes in corporate cultural pro-

duction — so much so that scholars Simone Murray and Sara Gwenllian-
Jones consider audience practices as part and parcel of the culture industries,
regardless and perhaps in light of industrial attempts at disciplining those
practices.13 Franchising, therefore, has developed as a logic of multiplied cul-
tural production alongside an increasing industrial focus on niche groups
and their social capacity for participation.
A final, crucial shift that defines the franchising of media production as
a historical phenomenon concerns a migration to the media industries of
market logics from other business sectors. As a means of describing media
production over the last three decades, the idea of “franchising” came bor-
rowed. Prior to the 1980s, the term “franchise” held two primary meanings:
first, the right to vote and exercise agency as the subject of an institution; and
second, a retail operation (like McDonald’s) in which independent operators
in local markets paid a license fee for the right to conduct ongoing business
under a shared, corporate trademark. In the last 30 years, however, franchis-
ing took on a third cultural significance, used as in the critical and come-
dic forms discussed above to explain the multiplied replication of culture
from intellectual property resources (the expansive product lines described
as “the Star Trek franchise” or “the Lord of the Rings franchise”). If the retail
industries made networks of cooperating outlets legible as “franchising,” the
later emergence of media franchising implied a new way of thinking about
networks of collaborative content production constituted across multiple
industrial sites. To adapt a basic definition from Robert Iger, who as pres-
ident and CEO led Disney’s embrace of the strategy since 1999, the fran-
chising of media content production came to be understood as “something
that creates value across multiple businesses and across multiple territories
over a long period of time.”14 The adoption of franchising as a conceptual
model for organizing media production evinced media industries in search
of new ways to understand and make sense of their businesses. This means
that in addition to its strategic and organizational dimensions, franchising
played an imaginative role in the media industries, framing their responses
to other economic, technological, and sociocultural shifts in a specific set of
cultural terms.
With these shifts in mind, this book theorizes franchising not as proof of
the self-propagating and seamless nature of the industrial production of cul-
ture, but instead the ongoing industrial negotiation of tensions surrounding
cultural production by social agents. Particularly in the past three decades,
franchising has put into tension the conglomerate consolidation of intellec-
tual property and a drive toward sharing it; the utility of emerging media to
 Introduction >> 7

established institutions and the potential threat of those same media; market
expansion through multiplication and niche market contraction; economic
rationalization and the affective imagination of new models for generating
culture. By situating the industrial organizations and cultural patterns of
franchising within their historical contexts, this study captures the nuance
and complexity of its production. From that position, this book argues
that the media franchise of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centu-
ries has constituted and been constituted by the shared exchange of content
resources across multiple industrial sites and contexts of production operat-
ing in collaborative but contested ways through networked relation to one
another (frequently across boundaries of media platform, production com-
munity, and geography). At each of these industrial sites, media institutions
and producers laboring on their behalf have become stakeholders that, even
when lacking ownership of a shared property, develop vested interests in its
ongoing productive use. Conceived in this manner, the participatory con-
sumers of contemporary social media too might be considered stakehold-
ers, lacking economic claim, but developing a wide range of interests and
sometimes even performing labor as part of the economic organization of
franchised production. In negotiation of industry tensions, shifts in genre
and narrative boundaries, differences of media specificity, as well as a host
of increasingly interactive and collaborative reception practices, franchising
has situated multiple industrial stakeholders in economic but also creative
production relations with one another. The products and content offered by
media franchising, therefore, might be considered less in terms of unified
brands and singular corporate interests, but instead as contested grounds of
collaborative creativity where networked stakeholders have negotiated the
ongoing generation, exchange, and use of shared cultural resources. As a
result, the history of franchising has been marked by institutional relations,
claims to creative identity, and the production of heterogeneous cultural dif-
ferences — all meaningfully imagined in the context of the industrial produc-
tion of culture.
While production and exchange of intellectual properties sit at the heart
of these industrial collaborations, this book is not focused on intellectual
property law. Many scholars have juxtaposed the idea of intellectual property
with creativity. Siva Vaidhyanathan suggests that the intellectual property
regimes of modern capitalism pose a threat to creative cultures.15 Similarly,
in discussing authorship, Matt Stahl makes a careful distinction between cre-
ativity and the intellectual property structures that support legal claims to
creative work: “authorship is a function not of creativity or responsibility or
originality but of the ability to employ or contract with creative workers.”16
8 << Introduction

Intellectual property is not creativity or the product of creativity, therefore,

but a result of contractual and legal control over creativity. To be sure, fran-
chising has depended on contractually defined creative relationships, where
the unequal autonomies of “franchisees” (whether paying licensees or for-
hire creative labor) and “franchisors” (intellectual property owners) have
been codified. This book takes these contractual and legal dimensions of
media franchising as a given, but it is less interested in analyzing contracts
and ownership claims than in examining how the resulting unequal relations
of exchange between producers working in franchise structures have been
socially negotiated, managed, and imagined in production practice. While
interested in claims to intellectual property, this book looks beyond the for-
mal and legal dimensions of those claims to consider the practical and lived
experience of their negotiation in production contexts. Intellectual property
is relevant here to the extent suggested by Albert Moran that it is a format for
cultural production and a “technology of exchange.”17 Although intellectual
property claims must never be confused with creativity itself, the cultural
resources protected and monopolized by intellectual property law might
simultaneously be considered a shared medium of exchange and social inter-
action obfuscated by the more stark claims of intellectual property law. By
considering how the shared use of cultural resources in highly industrial
contexts exceeds the precise prescriptions of intellectual property law and
ownership, we can start theorizing franchising beyond the business terms of
contracts to look to the cultural realms of discourse, affect, and creativity.

Existing Paradigms and New Directions

To that end, the following chapters complicate the purely economic inter-
pretation of Robert Iger’s insistence that franchising “creates value” (that it
does so on behalf of intellectual property owning institutions like Disney)
to consider how media producers generate, hold investment in, and extract
other kinds of value from creative resources. The multiplied media produc-
tion under examination here will highlight franchising not just as indus-
try and business, but as shared and iterative culture. This intervention into
popular and critical assumptions alike draws significantly upon a foundation
of research in business and organizational communication that has already
conceived franchise structures in social terms by examining the interactions
and tensions in traditional retail franchisor-franchisee relations.18 In media
studies specifically, this books also interfaces with a number of key works
that aim to make sense of franchising in the media industries. Scholars like
Geoff King and Brad Schauer have held up blockbuster film franchising as
 Introduction >> 9

popular art.19 In his book, Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins argues simi-
larly that the industrial push toward franchising has enabled the emergence
of a “transmedia storytelling” that generates narratives across multiple media
platforms and markets.20 Though Jenkins does not suggest that franchises
are themselves new, he sees transmedia storytelling as a participatory mode
of culture enabled by the decentralized collective intelligences of emerging
media. By tracing a longer history of franchising on its own terms, however,
we can both challenge the understanding of franchising as a strictly trans-
media phenomenon while also uncovering some of the cultural ground-
work for that convergence. Franchising is addressed by name in The Frodo
Franchise, an analysis by Kristin Thompson of the production of the Lord
of the Rings films. Yet her rich, detailed focus on one particular franchise
outweighs considerations of wider industrial interest in franchising, leaving
room for further consideration of the implications of these multiplied pro-
duction practices.21 And though Jonathan Gray offers a theoretical model
for understanding the constellations of licensed products in media franchis-
ing as “paratexts,” his keen insight into how meaning is shaped, erased, and
augmented across texts leaves significant room to consider how different
producers imagine, manage, and negotiate that paratextuality in collabo-
ration with one another.22 In situating paratextual formations within the
decentralized production networks of a larger franchise culture, this book
aims not just to identify paratextually related constellations of content, nor to
acknowledge those products as art, but also to examine the constellations of
social and institutional relations surrounding the production of that content.
Far more controversially, however, my intent to embrace the creative and
sociocultural dimensions of franchising puts this project at a potentially
contentious crossroads between two overlapping, but often conflicting intel-
lectual perspectives on the relationship between industrial structures and
subjective experiences within them: political economy and cultural studies.
While a summary of the complex history of political economy lies outside the
scope of this project, a study of franchising in relation to industrial structures
of cultural production necessarily engages with a field that Vincent Mosco
describes as a study of “the social relations, particularly the power relations,
that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of
resources, including communication resources.”23 For political economists
of the media such as Janet Wasko and Eileen Meehan, for example, the
examination of these social relations has turned to the study of how media
conglomerates like Disney and Time Warner establish monopolies over cul-
tural and communicative resources and exert corporate control over their
use.24 Political economic examination of franchising means appropriately
10 << Introduction

considering the organization of the social relations of the media business,

and the unequal exchange of creative resources within it, asking who has the
power to produce culture in what ways. However, as Keith Negus has argued,
one of the challenges of industrial approaches to the social relations of the
culture industries “is that the form, content, and meaning of texts are often
neglected or assumed from patterns of ownership or structures of owner-
ship.”25 In the work of Robert McChesney and others, structural approaches
too frequently stop at who owns media channels without paying full atten-
tion to social complexities and tensions within that conglomerated media
environment.26 Nevertheless, political economists of the media like Bernard
Miège have, to their credit, accounted for the role of smaller, independent
firms in introducing innovation into, absorbing risk for and supplying cre-
ativity to monopolistic media institutions.27 So while a political economic
study of franchising can interrogate the power relations shaping industrial-
ized production and reproduction of culture, that structural concern need
not be economically determined if it looks beyond ownership to the social
relations whereby licensees, consumers, and other non-owning stakeholders
negotiate their own interests in production resources.
Yet a cultural studies of media production would go beyond even this
political economic approach to production in the media industries to con-
sider power in the terms of meaning, identity, and representation. While
a recounting of the history of cultural studies would similarly waylay this
short introduction, Julie D’Acci offers at least one definition of the inter-
disciplinary field as “the study of cultural products from their subjective
and consciousness-oriented points of view.”28 Cultural studies of the media
do not merely critique complex networks of power relations within struc-
tures of communication; instead, they are attuned to how subjectively and
affectively meaningful textualities, identities, and discourses emerge within
social relations and structures marked by power. If political economy asks
how domination occurs within social relations, cultural studies frequently
explore how those subject to that domination understand and make mean-
ing of those circumstances. In contrast to the focus on political economy
of media institutions, this focus on subjectivity often leads cultural studies
to examine consumers and their everyday lives. While often criticized for
overplaying the possibility of subjective resistance to structural domination,
cultural studies’ interest in what Antonio Gramsci called “hegemony” offers
productive models for understanding how cultural subjects also come to
consent to their domination by making it meaningful.29Although the focus
is not on media consumers per se, it is in this cultural studies tradition that
this book also seeks to understand media franchising; media professionals
 Introduction >> 11

can be conceived as subjective users of cultural resources who have to make

meaningful sense of and form professional identities within industrial rela-
tions marked by power. A cultural studies approach informed by a Foucauld-
ian model of power — where power is dispersed and regulated across social
networks and practice, rather than by centralized nodes — allows for a more
complex model of media franchising than the structural approaches of polit-
ical economy alone would suggest.30
A significant challenge in marrying these two seemingly complemen-
tary approaches to understanding cultural production lies in their historical
animosity. In claiming allegiance to either tradition, I risk alienating those
too invested in ongoing, binaristic debate to see the potential for produc-
tive dialogue. This book is certainly not the first, however, to propose such
integration. Robert Babe, for example, has recently argued for the urgency
of bringing together these two modes of cultural analysis, seeing potential
to account for human volition and freedom without mistakenly ignoring
elite control of political, economic, and cultural resources.31 In advocat-
ing rapprochement, Babe is hardly an impartial mediator, blaming the rift
between the two perspectives on the poststructuralist turn in cultural stud-
ies and its problematization of objective reality and rationality in favor of a
subjective, relativistic interpretation (thus hindering the critical evaluations
necessary to pursue social justice). In his hostility to radical contextuality,
Babe makes for an ineffective peacemaker. Yet in identifying between politi-
cal economy and cultural studies a shared interest in cultural materialism
— where material conditions sit in dialectic tension with language and other
cultural practices — Babe synthetizes culture both as a means of maintain-
ing asymmetries of power and a meaningful struggle with those conditions.
Indeed, Babe even grants begrudging approval of a poststructuralist project
that defines culture and language in the terms of such struggle.32 Appealing
to foundational theorists in both fields, Babe ties Harold Innis’s and Theodor
Adorno’s political economic concern for how culture organizes and controls
social relations with Raymond Williams’ cultural interest in social totalities
and “relations between elements in a whole way of life.”33
While not endorsing Babe’s rejection of poststructuralism and his pre-
scription for its elimination, this book nevertheless seizes on his call for an
integrated, cultural materialist approach by considering how franchising has
been organized as a way of life by and within the culture industries. How
is the multiplied cultural reproduction of media franchising, as a materi-
ally structured industrial practice, tied into more subjective struggles over
identity, meaning, and affect? In taking media franchising seriously as an
industrial way of life, this book aims to make contributions to both political
12 << Introduction

economy and cultural studies, but in doing so, it also has the potential to be
seriously misunderstood. Taking media franchising seriously does not signal
an endorsement of that industrial way of life and its unequal exchange of cul-
tural resources. To calm the fears of political economists but also tamp down
the more celebratory impulse of cultural studies, we should proceed from
the assumption that franchising is not simply “good” by virtue of support-
ing negotiations over creative agency, collaboration, and autonomy. A refusal
to make claims about the goodness of franchising, however, is not the same
thing as accepting the popular and critical assumptions about it as “bad” by
virtue of its industrialized structures. Without identifying the openings for
difference, innovation, and agency by subjects within industrial structures of
repetition, we cannot hope to imagine the possibility of change. So instead
of simply endorsing or dismissing franchising, this book argues that the
creativity and collaborative relations constituted by media franchising are
instructive for how they illustrate the complex operation of power in cul-
tural production. Any political economic orientation that would dismiss the
study of media franchising as a waste of time, because of what can be simply
imputed and listed based on its corporate structures, is a political economy
of far less critical value than one that can account for the subjective struggles
and tensions that occur within those structures. Meanwhile, a denial of the
industrial basis of franchising in favor of its operation as popular art would
ignore critical concerns about control of cultural resources while also side-
stepping more complex and pressing cultural studies questions about how
art, creativity, and value are constructed by and negotiated in industrial prac-
tice. Both political economy and cultural studies have the potential to resist
the serious scholarly examination of franchising in the media industries —
yet both might see their projects enhanced by it.
While political economy and cultural studies may offer broad theoretical
frameworks, a foundational model with which to pursue this integration of
the structural and the subjective comes from the production of culture per-
spective — or what Andy Pratt appropriately calls “the study of the material
culture of production.”34 Early scholars working in this vein suggested that
the organization of cultural production influenced its content.35 From this,
an increasing number of scholars have considered how that organization of
cultural production also works to shape, construct, and manage reflexive
understandings of the creative process itself. This means studying not just
the production of culture, but also the cultures of production in which that
work unfolds. For example, Keith Negus complicates the notion that creativ-
ity is a conflict between artists and industry, suggesting instead that creative
work is something codified by rules, conventions, and expectations within
 Introduction >> 13

industrial cultures and genres.36 Pratt similarly uses the culture of produc-
tion perspective to point to the construction, coordination, and control of
creativity with and across different institutional contexts. Studies of cultural
production and production cultures should perform, in his view, “the analy-
sis of complex organizational forms that constitute particular cultural forms,
as well as individual positioning within them. Production in this sense is not
only suggestive of creative and innovative ideas, but also of the conditions
under which those ideas may be mobilized.”37 For Pratt and the emerging
group of researchers, the production of culture is institutional and personal,
economic and social, public and private.
The utility of these perspectives to theorizing creativity, therefore, under-
girded scholarly research into the “creative industries.” Growing out of
national policy discourses that recognized in the new millennium the value
of intellectual property generation to emerging information economies, the
term “creative industries” attracted scholarly interest both in theorizing the
media labor these policies meant to support, and in inquiry into the role of
individual creativity within the structures of mass produced media indus-
tries.38 To theorize the creative nature of media work in contemporary con-
vergence culture, Mark Deuze draws both from Manuel Castells’ notion of
“networked individualism,” in which the networked users of digital culture
collaborate but do so to enact their own interests, as well as Hallett and Ven-
tresca’s “inhabited institutions,” where people situated within and across dif-
ferent positions within transnational corporations “do things together and
in doing so struggle for symbolic power in their respective fields of work.”39
Yet Deuze does not downplay the continued power of institutional structures
over creativity. “The creative industries approach to sites of cultural pro-
duction also focuses our attention,” he writes, “on the seminal role that (the
management and organization of) creativity plays in any consideration of
media work.”40 Even when cultural production occurs under significant cor-
porate control, Deuze suggests, scholars can examine creativity as that which
is institutionally managed and organized. In situating the creativity of media
work in tension between the corporate control of institutions and the poten-
tial for autonomy and self-determining interest within those structures,
Deuze and other proponents of creative industries research offer a produc-
tive model for starting to conceptualize the tensions of media franchising.
Nevertheless, that examination of franchising would be wise to avoid
some of the potential blind spots creative industries research faces. Both
Deuze and William Uricchio deploy a creative industry approach to sug-
gest that contemporary convergence culture has enabled greater creativity
and autonomy from corporate control, thanks to open source movements,
14 << Introduction

“copyleft” discourses, peer-to-peer sharing, and other heterarchical chal-

lenges to hierarchical logics in the media industries.41 Though both fully
acknowledge the persistence of corporate hierarchy, their identification of a
net gain in creativity via alternatives to industrial hierarchy risks losing sight
of creativity as something equally structured and managed in industry. A
study of franchising as a means of organizing creative cultural production,
therefore, could usefully call attention to the complex and negotiated status
of creativity in the persistence of closed and proprietary industrial models.
Jing Wang also reminds us of the specific national policy contexts in which
the rebranding of culture industries as creative industries occurred, arguing
that the notion of “creative industries” is a traveling discourse with vary-
ing power to make sense of media in different global contexts. The privi-
lege accorded to individual autonomy and freedom by Western discourses
of creativity have held less explanatory power in China, for example, where
imagination and content production remain subject to state surveillance.42
As a discourse, creativity seems biased toward making distinctions between
modes of cultural production, with only some formations of media work
being recognized as creative, and only some media workers recognized as
part of a creative class. As a production logic marked by a managerial sur-
veillance and branded homogeneity not often recognized as “creative,” fran-
chising thus offers a useful test case for challenging scholarly inquiry into
industrialized creativity. That test should not seek to identify franchising as
another site of celebrated creative freedom, but instead as a site where the
autonomy and freedom of individuals laboring within media institutions
might be imagined, organized, and contested. So defined, creativity is not
something that emerges despite industry, but true to Deuze’s reminder, is
something at play in any media work. Openly hostile to creative industries
research, Toby Miller suggests that scholars should work to problematize
creativity rather than endorse it.43 This suggestion should be taken to heart,
but not in a way that dismisses — as Miller risks — the existence of creativity.
Instead, by considering creativity as something constructed, managed, nego-
tiated, and imagined in direct relation to industrialized structures like fran-
chising, we might find surprisingly complex answers to Miller’s interest in
“how an international division of labor links productivity, exploitation, and
social control.”44
David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, however, caution against con-
cluding simply that “recognition, self-realisation and creativity become the
basis for exploitation” within that industrial division of labor.45 Character-
izing both creativity and the quest for autonomy within the media industries
as contradictory and ambivalent, they argue for analytical balance among
 Introduction >> 15

the recognition that these workers may not always be fully aware of their
own conditions and experiences; the need to analyse the forms of struc-
tural causality that influence these conditions and experiences, and which
result in profound inequality of access and reward; and the obligation to
take seriously these workers when they recount positive experiences and
not dismiss these as the product of ideology and disciplinary discourses.46

Moreover, the authors firmly situate creativity within the frame of culture,
arguing that what defines media work as cultural work (distinct from some-
thing like information work) is the status of media workers as makers of
expressive and symbolic products that carry social meaning.47 Creativity,
they suggest, is that which generates meaningful culture — allowing for dif-
ferent organization dynamics and power relations within culture industries
compared to other industries.48 Configured in this way, analysis of indus-
trial creativity demands the structural and subjective tools both of political
economy and cultural studies. Acknowledgment of franchising as creative
does not therefore constitute an endorsement of it, but recognition that it is
an expressive and meaningful enterprise that unfolds within the structures
of industry.
John Caldwell’s Production Culture offers an excellent model with which
to understand the industrial machinations of franchised media production as
meaningful. Caldwell understands media production as defined by meaning,
imagination, and community as much as it is structurally determined, inves-
tigating the managed discourses, “self-disclosures” and “deep texts” through
which Hollywood producers collectively imagine themselves as communities
and construct culturally meaningful identities for themselves. This research
even includes a brief discussion of franchising in which he discusses ten-
sions between the singular, homogeneous brand images of media franchises
and the heterogeneous production communities working to produce them.
Shared so widely, franchise brands represent “a systematic denial of certain
fundamental identities (the corporations, networks, or workers that make
the franchise) in order to spotlight an identity that is institutionally tran-
scendent, transportable, and event oriented.”49 Caldwell recognizes in this
analysis the multiple production communities laboring under the sign of a
franchise, contrary to assumptions about the industrial homogeneity behind
such monolithic brands. In holding franchise identities in opposition to
local production identities, however, Caldwell leaves room to consider how
the identities of production communities might also be constituted by and
through their franchise work and in relation to the other production com-
munities sharing franchise identities. At the same time as it obscures them,
16 << Introduction

franchising might also productively generate identities, deep texts, and self-
reflexive disclosures about that potential sense of shared work (even, or espe-
cially, in a conflicted, ambivalent sense). This might also make the cultural
products of franchising into sites at which the multiple production identities
colliding through franchising would be differentially expressed.
Looking at franchising in terms of these multiple industrial identities
and communities in collision further means recognizing production as net-
worked. Media studies have long concerned themselves with networks like
NBC and CBS that distribute commercial content in U.S. broadcasting. More
recently in studies of online and social media, networks have attracted atten-
tion not just as means of delivering content digitally, but as social relations
shared by users that can support collaborative, peer-based content creation.
Axel Bruns, for one, argues that new media networks have begun supplant-
ing proprietary models of industrial production with the hybrid model of
“produsage,” in which content is productively generated through continual
use and reuse by networked consumers.50 His argument echoes Don Tap-
scott and Anthony Williams, who herald “wikinomics” as a new model of
cultural production supported by open, peer-based collaborative networks.51
These authors identify shared use and networked collaboration as an emerg-
ing alternative to industrial modes of production. Yet in identifying fran-
chising as an industrial production logic that works by exchanging cultural
resources over time and across multiple communities of workers, this project
complicates claims about networked production, extending our concern for
collaborative creative use to the proprietary media culture these authors see
emerging media moving past. As an analog antecedent to the digital “social
networks” that support contemporary forms of collaborative creativity, the
media franchise demands that we consider industrial networks beyond dis-
tribution and delivery, and into the realm of collaborative production. Of
course, like online communities, media workers engaged in franchising may
never meet or exchange direct dialogue with their creative collaborators. Yet
Phillip Gochenour defines such a networked community as “a coordinated
set of behaviors” and “a distributed communications system, in which indi-
viduals function as nodes in the overall system.”52 In this sense of distributed
networked communities and nodal subjectivity, it is not direct interaction
that defines the industrial communities engaged in and to some degree con-
stituted by media franchising, but instead the communicative exchange and
use of shared cultural resources.
From these community and network frameworks, we might ultimately
understand franchising in terms of shared relations — often ambivalent —
within a wider industrial system of creative cultural production. In his study
 Introduction >> 17

of “media capitals,” Michael Curtin identifies regional hubs of media pro-

duction in the global economy like Hollywood, Chicago, and Hong Kong
not as containers determined by the domination of national and economic
forces, but as “switching points” or “sites of mediation” where a number of
complex social and cultural forces interact. For Curtin, the theorization
of media capitals “is a relational concept, not simply an acknowledgement
of dominance.”53 Similarly, this book proposes that media franchises are sites
of mediation where complex relationships between social and cultural forces
complicate the economic function of media institutions. Although not rely-
ing on cultural geography, as Curtin does, this examination of franchising
shares his aim of forwarding empirically grounded analysis of the temporal
dynamics and spatial complexity of the media industries.54 By conceiving
franchising in terms of a multiplicity of production communities dispersed
in time and across space, but working in social relations to one another, we
uncover a more complex array of forces shaping cultural production than
institutional analysis alone would suggest. Just as Curtin suggests that the
nation proves an insufficient site of analysis compared to the complexity of
local and regional relations within it, we cannot rest our analysis of fran-
chising at the level of a conglomerate intellectual property holder without
concern for the network of creative relations constituted by franchised pro-
duction from the wider and more complex exchange of its intellectual prop-
erty resources.

A Way of Study

To specifically examine the networked production relations of media fran-

chising along both their structural and subjective dimensions, this book
has gathered its evidence by four primary means. First and foremost, media
trade journals such as Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and Advertising Age pro-
vide an invaluable means of assessing the economics and strategic logic of
media franchising as well as its redefinition and elaboration over time as a
discursively institutionalized way of life. To gain a supplementary sense of
the cultural imagination and management of franchising from positions out-
side the media industries, this research also consulted popular publications,
online magazines, and fan websites. To actually access the production prac-
tices and production relations undergirding media franchising, however, it
was necessary to examine the everyday conditions under which franchised
production has been historically sustained. Without that, my view would be
limited to either the institutional perspective of the trades or popular percep-
tion, obscuring the subjective perspectives of professionals participating in
18 << Introduction

and identifying with the creative production of franchises from a number of

different positions. Therefore, archival sources provide a third, historical set
of insights into the development, imagination, and management franchising
by those laboring within media industries. The Gene Roddenberry papers
housed at the University of California, Los Angeles proved particularly use-
ful as a historical lens to detail the early, proto-franchising of the Star Trek
property between 1965 and 1969. The Ronald D. Moore collection at the
University of Southern California provides a useful point of comparison in
an era of franchise ascendancy; Moore’s career as a writer for Star Trek: The
Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the 1990s and developer
of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica in the 2000s provides insight into how
creativity changed and multiplied through franchising. Meanwhile, a set of
loosely ethnographic interviews conducted with media workers between
2007 and 2009 provide a final means of accessing the experiences and
identities of those currently working with the industrial production logics
of franchising.
I call these interviews loosely ethnographic because, unlike traditional
ethnography, my relationships with research subjects did not afford real entry
into the spaces, practices, and communities of franchised production under
examination. Though this extended as much from the secrecy preferred by
risk-averse media industries, it also followed one of the methodological dif-
ficulties of studying franchises as a distributed, networked community —
the only way to enter the communicative system would be to participate in
the industrialized creative exchange of resources and become as researcher
another subjective node in the network (something a media manager would
not likely permit). Thus, interviews only offer a partial glimpse into the cul-
tural life of franchising. Further complicating analysis, as Philip Howard
suggests, is the fact that ethnographic observations are “confined to content
analysis of the subjects’ analytical frame.”55 Interviews rely on the subject’s
own interpretation of his or her social world, and while that may provide
a rich, descriptive picture, they also demand skepticism about what indus-
trial motives or narcissistic investments motivate respondents’ answers. As
a result, interviews alone would not have sufficed, demanding the equal
attention paid here to trade, popular, and archival sources. Nevertheless,
if analyzed not for their truth value but for their self-reflexive attempts to
imagine and position media franchising in ways advantageous to or pre-
ferred by media workers, these interviews (and trade, archival, and popu-
lar sources alike) can still tell us much about subjective negotiations of and
identification with the relations of franchising. Without even these limited
interviews, moreover, this research would be hobbled by what Howard calls
 Introduction >> 19

“organizational determination,” where the community and culture of fran-

chising would be baldly inputed from an analysis of the formal structure of
its hierarchies and social networks alone.56 By articulating in-depth individ-
ual subjectivity and experiences of franchised media workers to analysis of
wider industrial organization, this project aims to approximate the “network
ethnography” that Howard mobilizes to situate “micro-level group inter-
actions” within the “large-scale machinations” of wider social structures.
While Howard proposes network ethnography as a means of understanding
digital social networks, I aimed for an at least evocative approach that could
be attuned to the similarly “trans-organizational” networks of franchising.57
These interviews relied upon a “snowballing sampling method,”58 in
which I started with a single contact and then asked at the end of each inter-
view for further referrals. By the end, I had conducted at least one in-depth
interview with more than 15 executive and creative professionals (and one
aspiring amateur) working with key franchises in the television, film, video
game, and comic book industries. At CBS Television, I was able to discuss
the programming and management of franchises like CSI with Senior Execu-
tive Vice President of Programming Operations Kelly Kahl, as well as with
key executives in the business affairs and interactive media divisions (who
spoke with me on the condition of anonymity). Ed Skolarus, a senior pro-
gramming executive at the Fox Reality Channel, proved similarly crucial in
framing reality television in terms of franchising. Another anonymous net-
work executive shared with me his insights into the relationship between
television programming and the game and video content developed for
mobile media platforms. Elsewhere, I interviewed a number of creative pro-
fessionals who have worked with franchised intellectual properties across a
wide range of media. These included Marti Noxon, a television writer and
showrunner whose franchise credits include Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
the Grey’s Anatomy spin-off Private Practice; Flint Dille, who has written for
the Transformers toy franchise in its television, film, and video game incar-
nations; Jeff Gomez, a writer who has produced narrative worlds for Turok:
The Dinosaur Hunter and Hot Wheels in comics, television, and video games;
Danny Bilson, a writer whose credits include The Rocketeer in film, The Sen-
tinel on television, and the James Bond game Everything or Nothing; Mark
Warshaw, a writer who has produced webisodes and other transmedia con-
tent for television series like Smallville, Heroes, and Melrose Place; and Bear
McCreary, the key music composer on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica
television series. Finally, the video game industry in particular proved a
fruitful site through which to examine collaboration among licensors, licens-
ees, and other contracted production partners. This included interviews with
20 << Introduction

Justin Lambros, a Marvel Studios licensing executive; Brian Raffel, president

of Raven Software, a game studio that has frequently worked with Marvel’s
licenses; Dan Vondrak, the project lead for Raven games like X-Men Leg-
ends 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance; Jim Tso, a producer who has worked on
numerous Star Wars games (both on behalf of the licensor, Lucas Arts, and
later licensee Pandemic Studios); and Hassan “Karajorma” Kazmi, the proj-
ect lead for an amateur yet professional-quality Battlestar Galactica game.
The evidence drawn upon here admittedly betrays several cultural biases,
perhaps most obvious in terms of gender. Most of the professionals inter-
viewed were men, and many of the media properties they worked with cater
at an industrial level to male-centric gaming, comic book, and blockbuster
cinema markets. Indeed, while I have as author selected detailed case studies
like X-Men or Transformers because of the analytic advantages offered by my
own lifelong familiarity with them, I recognize that familiarity was acquired
in the course of having been invited and encouraged since childhood to
adopt a masculine (and also consumerist) subject position. This suggests a
fascinating connection between the cultural reproduction of something like
masculinity and the ongoing reproduction of masculinized culture through
franchising (one explored in chapter 1). Yet none of this is to suggest that
franchising is an exclusively masculinized terrain. Franchising industrially
targeted at girls and women — from Barbie to Hannah Montana to Glee to
Oprah — proves equally rich for analysis, and whenever possible, such femi-
nized sites of franchising will be examined in parallel to their masculinized
counterparts. Nevertheless, as an industrial practice, the masculinist bias of
franchising persists, undoubtedly shaping this project. In the management
of even feminized franchises like Twilight, Melissa Click and Jennifer Aubrey
argue, marketers drift toward “clinging too tightly to the well-established for-
mulas of male-targeted franchises” and “missing an incredible opportunity
to develop the terms for future female franchises.”59 Yet despite the fact that
franchising leans toward genres and markets industrially aimed toward boys
and men, cultural products like Battlestar Galactica and X-Men do draw sig-
nificant interest from girls and women and extend from the participation
of women on a production level (despite being obscured by gendered mar-
keting and promotional strategies). Furthermore, as a form of ongoing cul-
tural production, franchising shares key cultural characteristics with femi-
nized forms like the soap opera. As scholars from Andreas Huyssen to Elana
Levine argue, soap operas, seriality, and mass culture writ large have been
historically devalued and discursively gendered as irrational and feminine.60
Even as we might read it as somehow more masculine (likely thanks to prac-
tices and discourses that imagine mass production of culture as franchising
 Introduction >> 21

instead of as soap seriality), franchising shares much of the cultural devalu-

ation more typically accorded to femininity. Thus, it would be a mistake to
look at many of the genres and case studies selected for examination here as
a move to consider franchising solely and essentially in terms of privileged
masculinity. Masculinized or feminized, the fact that so many of these fran-
chises do have a specific gender orientation (heavily policed especially in the
case of cultural products targeted at children) hints at a fundamental rela-
tionship between franchising and the cultural reproduction of gender wor-
thy of exploration here. We might easily wonder the same thing about race,
class, and sexuality.
From the evidence and examples gathered across all these sites, histori-
cal contexts, and communities of production, each chapter in this book
explores a central set of tensions between the structural and the subjective
that has worked to define franchising as an industrialized means of repro-
ducing culture. Chapter 1 situates franchising in tension between rational-
ized economic logic and cultural imaginary, theorizing how the networks,
practices, and discourses of media industry have been organized and ulti-
mately imagined as franchising. This examination considers where the eco-
nomic logic of franchising came from, tracing the emergence of retail fran-
chise strategies and discourses in the 1950s. However, instead of generating
a homogenized, McDonaldized culture, as some critics might suggest, the
importation of franchise logic from retail brought with it ambivalent indus-
trial relations in which contractually constituted business networks con-
tained multiple competing and unequal stakeholders. So although media
franchises, like McDonald’s, offered unified, branded, and shared cultural
experiences across markets, they remained relationally constituted through
licensing agreements and other formalized practices of collaboration. At the
same time, because this logic of production propagated through language
— a process of conceptualizing media production as “franchising” — the first
chapter acknowledges the imaginative and cultural history of the franchise,
not only its economic and practical evolution. So while licensing and other
collaborative industrial arrangements now understood as media franchising
existed in earlier moments in the history of commercial media, their concep-
tualization in terms of franchise relationships can be traced historically to a
cultural imaginary coming into dominance in the 1980s. Within this context
of this imaginary, chapter 1 also considers the cultural work franchising has
performed in disciplining and giving gendered meaning to industrial mar-
kets, practices, and strategies.
Building on this framework, chapter 2 examines historical tensions in
media franchising between the control of consolidated ownership and the
22 << Introduction

autonomy of independent production. Exploring in greater depth the cor-

porate pursuit of “synergy” by developing content brands across parallel
culture industries, the chapter suggests that institutionalization of franchise
strategies and practices starting in the 1980s problematized common claims
about media consolidation. Instead, as multiple industries came into inter-
operation, franchised production networks served as sites of struggle and
negotiation for and between media institutions (often thwarting synergy in
the process). Chapter 2 identifies three distinct stages in the institutionaliza-
tion of media franchising: first, a moment in the early 1980s when autono-
mous, non-conglomerated companies sought to multiply their production
operations in response to market challenges; second, a moment in the late
1980s and early 1990s when conglomerates tried but often failed to mobilize
franchising in service of consolidated ownership; and third, a moment in the
late 1990s when franchising offered more flexible production relationships as
alternatives to conglomerate ownership. To illustrate these shifts, the chapter
explores the franchising of X-Men by Marvel Comics, tracing its evolution
from a “family” of comic book titles in the 1980s, to a means of supporting
corporate consolidation across media in the 1990s, and finally a means of
recovering from bankruptcy in the 2000s by granting increased autonomy to
licensees and other corporate partners.
Zeroing in on the negotiation of shared creativity by production com-
munities networked via franchise relations, chapter 3 considers tensions
between hierarchy and openness as well as between rationalized efficiency
and creative excess. While scholars like Jenkins and Thompson acknowl-
edge franchise creativity in terms of the art of “world building,” this chapter
shifts that focus to the significance of world sharing, where multiple com-
munities of production share that process of construction in collaborative
but also ambivalently competitive ways.61 Central to this examination is how
creators make authorial claims about their labor while working in relation
to one another, how they identify that cultural labor with privileged loci of
creativity, and how they situate themselves within self-reflexive discourses
of distinction. By focusing historically on the creative management of both
Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, science fiction franchises shared among
a number of creative stakeholders across multiple production communi-
ties, this chapter defines franchise worlds as contexts for the production of
creative resources, the exchange of them across industrial contexts, and the
meaningful negotiation of the legitimacy of their uses within the unequal
power relations of industrial hierarchies. On one level, the excessive design
of these shared franchise worlds facilitated decentered, open production that
in some cases generated divergent iterations independent of a centralized
 Introduction >> 23

authorship and in service of competing claims to creativity. Yet chapter 3 also

elaborates how power differentials shaped and structured the shared use of
seemingly open franchise worlds. Taken together, producers working within
media franchising situate and have made sense of their own creativity by
subjectively negotiating a pull between difference and deference. “Peer” pro-
ducers working from similar institutional positions and identifications could
position their parallel uses of shared worlds through difference, while pro-
ducers in subordinate industrial positions deferred to authorial privilege and
preferred uses. This tension between open difference and hierarchical defer-
ence suggests that while many subjective claims to creativity have been made
in franchised production networks, such claims remain structured by power.
Chapter 4 builds upon this understanding of franchise creativity by con-
sidering collaboration in terms of globalized exchange of franchise resources,
asking how networked industrial production puts into tension cultural con-
tinuity across geographic space and cultural change over time. In this case,
the history of the Transformers franchise — an intellectual property formed
in 1984 from a partnership between American and Japanese toymakers, and
sustained since through successive reiterations across both markets — dem-
onstrates that franchises are not only replicated products traded between
and often imposed upon global markets, but formatted processes whereby
local franchising has fed back into an evolving transnational system of cre-
ative cultural production. The chapter first identifies transnational exchange
between global production communities as integral to the media industries’
attempts to sustain franchise production over time despite diminishing audi-
ence returns. From there, the chapter contrasts the transnational infrastruc-
ture of franchises like Transformers to historical popular discourses about
its perceived singularly American or Japanese national origins, identifying a
nostalgia that anchors franchise production in specific places and times, de-
spite an ever-shifting global constitution. These discourses — and the moral
panics they included — illustrate both cultural anxieties surrounding fran-
chising and the role of nostalgia in sustaining it contextually over time. In
Japan, marketers used this nostalgia to transition consumers from toy mar-
kets to luxury markets as they aged, whereas in the United States, nostalgia
allowed marketers to transfer consumer patterns from parents to children.
The transnational character of franchise production ultimately fed its trans-
generational persistence.
The final chapter extends these concerns about creative collaboration to
tensions between production and consumption, labor and leisure, and the
use of the cultural resources controlled by industrial regimes. Drawing sig-
nificantly from the work of Erica Rand, this chapter explores the double
24 << Introduction

meaning of “collaboration” within franchised production.62 While collabora-

tion can refer to the decentralized or distributed co-creativity of media users
(and has most often in studies of media participation), it also carries a politi-
cal meaning: cooperation with an occupational regime. Through an exami-
nation of contemporary television series like The Office, Lost, and Battlestar
Galactica — which have all invited and directly licensed their audiences to
become laborers on behalf of the franchise — the social production rela-
tions of franchising are revealed to extend past the professionalized realms
of media industries proper. In this network of production relations in which
they take up their own subjectivities, consumers too become franchisees
pursuing creativity in ambivalent ways. Of particular interest here will be
the amateur video game production Diaspora, a “mod” that uses Microsoft’s
FreeSpace 2 game engine to create a play experience in the world of Battlestar
Galactica. This amateur game can be understood as a collaboration both in
the sense that its production relies upon the collective labor of media users
working outside the hierarchies and intellectual property claims of industry,
but also in that their creative labor has been deployed both indirectly and
directly in service of the industrial regime that makes hierarchical claims to
those resources. Ultimately, this analysis unpacks the politics of franchising,
arguing that collaborative participation in the reiteration of franchises con-
stitutes an ambivalent but hegemonic form of media reproduction, where
users of shared creative resources reproduce themselves the hierarchies
that structure their subjective experiences. Furthermore, if professionalized
media workers are also creative “users” of franchise resources, chapter 5 asks
how the politics of franchised collaboration extends to industrialized labor
as well.
A brief reflection on the subtitle of this book offers some final clarifica-
tion on its aim. In positing the culture of media franchising in terms of a
“creative license” and a dynamic of “collaboration,” I seek to explore both the
subjective experiences of collaborative creativity within media franchising
and the licensing relationships and other hierarchical industrial structures
shaping it. Through franchising, the media industries exert a cultural license
to shape creative practice and even what workers, critics, and consumers
imagine and understand as creative practice. Yet I also mean to take license
myself with accepted assumptions about terms like creativity and collabora-
tion — refusing to understand them as simple autonomy from industry, con-
ceiving them instead as something understood and constructed in relation to
industry, and exploring them through a form of cultural reproduction often
considered to be the replicative antithesis of a creativity defined by original-
ity. There is some license taken with the very idea of licensing as well, in that
 Introduction >> 25

this project considers not just licensees proper (those who pay a fee to gain
access to creative resources), but a wider range of creative and collabora-
tive relations situated within for-hire industrial labor and institutional work
structures. In denaturalizing the terms and conventions by which we under-
stand popular culture, I believe I may also be taking license with what some
scholars may see as disciplinary boundaries between cultural studies and
political economy; but my aim is to problematize easy assumptions about
the social relations and cultural ways of life of concern to both intellectual
traditions. Instead, by examining “creative license and collaboration in the
culture industries,” I mean to explore franchising as a mediation of creativ-
ity and highly industrialized collaborative production that calls into question
our assumptions about both.
So while critiques of franchising like those of The Onion or College
Humor often prove quite funny, media franchising itself is no joke. Though
we certainly may look at it with a skeptical eye due to its constant repro-
duction of cultural products deemed kids’ stuff, commercial fluff, or even
worse, franchising has proven to be both an economically significant and
culturally meaningful way of life in the media industries of the past three
decades or more. Franchising has offered a cultural imaginary with which
industry analysts, media workers, and critics alike have tried to make sense
of the ongoing production of cultural goods over time and across networks
of creative stakeholders. As media firms have pushed toward expansion
and consolidation, franchising has served as a key strategy by which those
aims have been pursued, but also by which partnerships have been forged
by and with smaller independents. Media workers within these franchised
industrial structures have forged their own professional identities in relation
to the wider production networks in which cultural resources have circu-
lated, navigating industrial hierarchies in the course of their creative labor.
The creative exchanges demanded by the industrial practices of franchising
have also supported collaboration on a global level, paradoxically extending
the replication of homogeneous media brands by inviting local production
communities to develop their own iterations. And into this collaborative net-
work of cultural reproduction, consumers too have been invited, performing
their own labor in the process of reiterating a shared and ongoing culture.
Thus, the intellectual properties that enable franchised exchange must be
considered more than mere corporate holdings: they have transformed into
cultural resources upon which a host of other parties have made competing
claims of use and interest.
Yet the importance of franchising might be best conveyed by reference to
its industrial meaningfulness. For many consumers who engaged with the
26 << Introduction

media culture of the late twentieth century and beyond (like myself), the
persistent reproduction of these media franchises has played a meaningful
role in the ongoing process of identity formation and a sense of a culture that
might be shared across both geographies and generations. There is no reason
to expect that franchising would work any differently for the media profes-
sionals working with shared cultural resources across creative, corporate, and
global boundaries and the networks of relations between them. Franchising
is something with which participants in the media industries have imagined,
negotiated, and identified in their attempts to navigate both economies and
creativities. Its significance and complexity as a production logic derives
from providing creative resources to a wide range of social actors struggling
for autonomy within an industrial system while also disciplining those actors
and asking them to adopt certain industrial subjectivities. So even while it
may be devalued as a cultural joke, franchising — and the study of it — should
remain of significant value to those who want to understand how and why
the culture industries reproduce shared culture.
1

Imagining the Franchise

Structures, Social Relations, and Cultural Work

In August 2007, the premiere of High School Musical 2 on the Disney Chan-
nel drew an estimated 17.2 million viewers, setting a new record for basic
cable television viewership in the United States. The phenomenal reach of
this made-for-television movie about singing teenage athletes extended far
beyond the television screen, however. As an intellectual property owned by
Disney, High School Musical provided the germ for film sequels, ice shows,
concert tours, character dolls, tween apparel, and sing-along CDs and DVDs.
Considering all these offerings, the New York Times described High School
Musical simply and without reflection as “a budding franchise” that rivaled
Mickey Mouse.1 Irreducible to a single media platform, this migratory prop-
erty could be more easily understood as a coordinated system in which mul-
tiple profit centers worked under a shared brand name — just as the McDon-
ald’s franchise unites hamburger shops in different locales to function more
efficiently and profitably under a standardized corporate umbrella. The
Times spent no time explaining this metaphor to its readers; instead, the idea
of media franchising had clearly become cultural shorthand for understand-
ing the expansion of cultural production across different media and indus-
try sectors.
Similar shorthand marked the January 2008 premiere of Terminator: The
Sarah Connor Chronicles on the Fox broadcast network. From the shared
premise of killer robots sent back in time to kill the humans that oppose
them in a post-apocalyptic future, the original 1984 Arnold Schwarzeneg-
ger Terminator film had already spawned the sequels Terminator 2: Judgment
Day in 1991 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003, while also sup-
porting action figures, video games, and even 3D theme park experiences.
Though the ongoing writers’ strike may have helped bring script-starved
viewers to the next iteration in Sarah Connor, making its delayed debut the
top-rated premiere of the 2007– 2008 season, many critics applauded the
series for successfully reinvigorating a wilting Terminator property.2 In USA
Today, for example, Robert Bianco exclaimed, “Now this is how you rejuve-
nate a franchise.”3 Terminator, therefore, evidenced the critical and popular
>> 27
28 << Imagining the Franchise

grasp of media franchising not only as cultural production spanning mul-

tiple industries, but also as persisting over time.
Of course, Terminator and High School Musical were only two examples
of television and other media industries’ embrace of franchising. That same
year, trade publication Variety reported that the 2008 remakes of “dusted-
off franchises” Knight Rider and Beverly Hills 90210 generated more audience
awareness than any other freshmen television series premiering that fall.4
Even if dusty, franchising offered an industrially celebrated potential to mul-
tiply and extend brands with a proven history of success. In that context, it
was less surprising when Variety suggested two days later that premium cable
outlet Showtime would apply the same production logic to niche lesbian
drama, “hoping to extend the life of its ‘L Word’ franchise with a spinoff.”5 By
2011, film studios similarly dependent on this kind of multiplied production
envisioned the conclusions of serialized Harry Potter and Twilight franchises
as reason to acquire the rights to other fantasy book series with “the poten-
tial to spin off sequels” anew.6
From these brief examples, one could define media franchising in the
terms of products and intellectual properties extended in an ongoing fash-
ion within the culture industries. Such a definition would include repeat-
edly reproduced or reinvented intellectual properties as James Bond, Star
Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Law & Order, CSI, The Matrix, Pokémon,
X-Men, Batman, Teen Wolf, Sex and the City, and Transformers. Newer
properties such Glee could be considered emerging franchises, positioned
for long-term management and investment across a range of media mar-
kets. Properties like The Golden Compass constitute would-be franchises,
intended to support long-term development but mismanaged at some point
to impede continuance. Despite many such franchises sharing roots in sci-
ence fiction and fantasy genres, franchising clearly cuts across genres. It is
not a generic category of its own. Yet any attempt to define media franchising
by reference to the texts it produces invokes many similar challenges to those
facing genre analysis. Andrew Tudor has identified an “empiricist dilemma,”
in which genre means to generate deeper understanding of a group of texts,
but the genre category itself is paradoxically defined by way of texts already
assumed to fit the analytic conclusions that constitute the category.7As Jason
Mittell argues more recently, when we define cultural categories like genre
according to the texts we already assume to be contained by them, we lose
sight of the dynamic industrial and cultural factors that shape and trans-
form the categories over time. Instead, “by regarding genre as a property and
function of discourse, we can examine the ways in which various forms of
communication work to constitute generic definitions, meanings, and values
 Imagining the Franchise >> 29

within particular historical contexts.”8 My aim is not to make an argument

for franchises as a genre (there are already too many generic categories oper-
ating across franchising: Lord of the Rings as fantasy, James Bond as thriller,
to name just two). Nevertheless, as a cultural category, the franchise must
be understood not just as a function of textuality, but as an industrially and
socially contextual dynamic constituted by historical processes and dis-
courses. If we claim that Star Wars is a franchise, but cannot explain fran-
chising without reference to Star Wars, we can only tread intellectual water.
Instead of trying to define franchising in terms of lists of products, the key
here will be to consider the economic and cultural forces that have shaped,
imagined, and structured franchising, as well as the industrial structures,
social relations, and cultural imaginaries that franchising has in turned facil-
itated. We must explore the way that franchise structures enable exchanges
between nodes in industrial networks, and how social relations on an indus-
trial level underpin those exchanges. From there, we must also consider more
thoroughly how media came to be understood through the lens of franchis-
ing in the first place, how that imaginary developed in response to specific
institutional and cultural conditions and struggles, and how that imaginary
makes meaningful sense of those conditions and struggles. As a way of orga-
nizing, enabling, and giving meaning to collaboration across multiple sites
of production, the franchise has been a shifting, slippery, and historically
contingent phenomenon. Given that complexity and contingency, the media
franchise will not be reducible to a tidy, universal definition. While at the
most broad level, we might start by conceiving of franchising as an economic
system for exchanging cultural resources across a network of industrial rela-
tions, we also have to recognize it as a shifting set of structures, relations,
and imaginative frames for organizing and making sense of the industrial
exchange and reproduction of culture.
In pursuit of this understanding, this chapter will identify the social rela-
tions of franchising, the industrial structures they enable, as well as the cul-
tural discourses historically brought to bear on media objects to conceive
them in the terms of “franchising.” This requires an analysis that begins out-
side of media studies proper to consider the history of franchising as a means
of sharing business formats within the retail industries. The origins of the
franchised media of the latter twentieth century lie as much in the culture
of McDonald’s, Mr. Goodwrench, and Chicken Delight that emerged in the
1950s and ’60s as any specific media culture. As previous research in business
management and organizational communication has shown, these business
systems operated not just through economic structures, but through social
and cultural relations as well. With that social and cultural understanding in
30 << Imagining the Franchise

mind, we can then ask how similarly franchised relationships might structure
and enable production in the media industries. Although retail franchising
does not perfectly map onto media production, the social relations shared by
both allow us to better understand the industrial exchanges facilitated in and
by media franchising. Rather than impose this borrowed franchising logic
upon media production in pursuit of a new theory, however, this chapter
also seeks to examine how media work has already been theorized and imag-
ined as franchising by practitioners, critics, and consumers. How did fran-
chising emerge as a cultural logic to explain these relations and exchanges
in the media industries of the late twentieth century, and what impact did
that imaginary have on the organization of and meanings attached to cul-
tural production? To explore the cultural work performed by this imaginary,
this chapter will examine the cultural consequences of franchising through
the lens of gender. On the one hand, franchising has enabled on a structural
level the differentiation and multiplication of production along gendered
lines of marketing and consumer appeal. On the other, the multiplication of
production itself has been imagined in gendered terms through franchising,
ascribing to these industrial structures and practices culturally constructed
meanings and values. From these analyses, this chapter argues that franchis-
ing works to both organize and give meaning to production practices of the
culture industries.

Franchising Beyond Transmedia

Any study of the franchised production of culture must acknowledge Henry

Jenkins’ theorizations of transmedia storytelling and world-building in their
keen understanding of the formal and practical relationships between texts
in different media. Jenkins analyzes media franchises as a manifestation of
“transmedia storytelling, . . . a new aesthetic that has emerged in response
to media convergence — one that places new demands on consumers and
depends on the active participation of knowledge communities.”9 Trans-
media storytelling results in the production and maintenance of fictional
“worlds,” like those of The Matrix and Harry Potter, that consumers experi-
ence in collaboration with one another by piecing together narrative mate-
rials professional producers have strewn across media platforms. Yet as
a paradigm for understanding franchising in its historical and discursive
industrial dimensions, transmedia storytelling remains somewhat limited.
First, the privilege accorded to transmedia storytelling by its association with
the “new” formal relationships, productive practices, and digital platforms of
convergence culture points us away from consideration of the longer indus-
 Imagining the Franchise >> 31

trial history of franchising. Second, while Jenkins’ exemplars of transmedia

storytelling feature serialized narratives in which each piece of the dispersed
story plays a unique, integral role, franchises like Star Trek, Batman, and
X-Men have also been extended in narratively episodic, redundant, even
clumsy ways that do not fit this more coherent, unified aesthetic. Further,
while Jenkins recognizes audience participation in transmedia storytelling,
he privileges franchises like The Matrix in which strong authorial figures
like the Wachowski brothers manage the worlds “co-created” across plat-
forms.10 Transmedia storytelling envisions a unified, serialized, and centrally
authored mode of franchising, but provides less insight into decentralized,
episodic, and non-narrative modes of multiplied industrial production.
However, franchising has been both overshadowed by and synonymized
with transmedia. Long before Jenkins’ descriptions of convergence culture,
Marsha Kinder identified in the late 1980s another set of textual forms and
practices of production and consumption as “transmedia.” Exploring how
children consumed film, television, and video games in tandem, Kinder
observed a “transmedia intertextuality” positioning children to recognize
genres, identify with characters, and perceive the value of systemic op-
erations across media.11 Feeding this transmedia intertextuality were what
Kinder called “entertainment super systems”: properties like Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles and The Muppets that could be experienced in unique ways
through textual offerings in different media. While Kinder’s descriptions
differed from Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling, one could retrospectively hy-
pothesize that entertainment super systems prepared children of the 1980s
for the aesthetics of adult franchises like The Matrix a decade later, evincing
the historical character of transmedia beyond contemporary convergence
culture. Michael Kackman, in fact, articulates transmedia to his historical
study of product licensing for the 1950s Hopalong Cassidy television series.
Kackman demonstrates how a set of industrial circumstances and intellec-
tual property logics led to a specific and historical form of cultural produc-
tion and consumption defined primarily by licensing agreements between
companies, the growth of international television trade, and trademark law.12
Jenkins, Kinder, and Kackman each examine different contextual manifes-
tations of transmedia culture, identifying a shared historical trajectory into
which franchising might be situated.
Nevertheless, the study of franchising as an industrial structure, set of
social relations, and cultural imaginary cannot be fully subsumed within the
scholarly inquiry into transmedia. Though the term “transmedia” has taken
on industrial use, with the Producers Guild of America introducing trans-
media producer credits in 2010,13 this current institutional vogue obscures
32 << Imagining the Franchise

other discursive buzzwords and logics that have alternately imagined creativ-
ity within intellectual property management, each with their own histories,
biases, and industrial meanings attached (including “franchising” but also
including “total merchandising,” “toyetic” media, or “synergy”). Theories of
transmedia also offer reduced insight into the production of franchises like
Star Trek, Law & Order, or CSI that multiply within a single medium like
television (resulting in spin-off series like Star Trek: The Next Generation,
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, CSI: Miami,
and CSI: New York, for example). Similar dynamics structure the comic book
industry (with franchises like X-Men supporting numerous monthly titles)
and the sequel-driven film and video game industries (which depend and
thrive upon perennial franchises like Saw and Halo, respectively). The ques-
tion of the multiplied production and reproduction of franchising is not
always one of transmedia. Nevertheless, the two terms have become nearly
inseparable in contemporary media scholarship. In addition to individual
research projects that link the two inquiries, whole academic conferences
(often in partnership with the industry) have dedicated themselves to an
interest in “transmedia franchises.”14 We have become too enamored with
the sexiness of the transmedia in transmedia franchising to think much
about what other cultural trajectories and industrial formations have been
entangled in franchising. So while franchising has been most commonly
understood as a function of transmedia storytelling, this remains only one
manifestation within a much longer and more complex history that demands
greater attention.
While some scholarship has tackled franchising on its own terms, this
work rarely aims to illuminate the historical structures, relations, and imagi-
nation of media franchising at large. Most scholars do not make the explicit
connection between media culture and franchise culture. In his study of
the global influence of American popular culture, Lane Crothers comes ex-
tremely close to articulating the two, but pulls back by situating global fran-
chise businesses like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola as something to be exam-
ined “in addition to American music, movies, and television programs.”15
Though addressing some interplay between these retail franchises and the
media industries through promotional tie-ins, Crothers stops short of con-
sidering media culture as something that is itself franchised. Other scholars
more explicitly recognize the franchising of media culture, but still avoid ex-
ploring what that might actually mean. Lord of the Rings is certainly extraor-
dinary in terms of its critical and commercial success, and Thompson’s sub-
sequent treatment of it in The Frodo Franchise as an exemplary case obscures
its participation in a longer history of franchise development. It remains up
 Imagining the Franchise >> 33

to the reader to draw connections between her single case study and other
franchised content systems. Similarly, Matthew Kapell and William Doty’s
edited anthology, Jacking in to the Matrix Franchise: Cultural Reception and
Interpretation, adds to the academic research on media franchising with-
out stopping to problematize the terms of that focus. In their introduction,
the authors share in the “vast international fascination with the franchise,”
describing The Matrix as such at every opportunity, but they never explore
what is implied in imagining the property as a franchise.16 One contribu-
tion to their collection by Bruce Isaacs and Theodore Louis Troust defines a
“franchise aesthetic” based in consumer participation in which “[e]ach prod-
uct purchased, each viewing of a film, or, for that matter, each chapter in a
book that deals with the subject of the Matrix franchise, implicates and wel-
comes the consumer into the franchise fold.”17 Yet still confined, as is the rest
of the book, to the bounds of The Matrix, this work struggles to connect in-
sights such as these to wider industrial and cultural contexts of franchising.
One of the few scholars to make that connection, Albert Moran, does so by
considering the business formats of retail franchising in relation to program
formats that enable industrial exchange across global markets.18
Taking that kind of interest in industrial exchanges as a starting point,
this project shifts the site of analysis beyond transmedia products to con-
sider what franchising has connoted and enabled at the levels of both cul-
ture and industry. Whereas transmedia storytelling suggests cultural artistry
and participatory culture, “franchising” calls equal if not more attention to
corporate structure and the economic organization of that productive labor.
Franchising recalls popular yet culturally maligned systems of mass produc-
tion like McDonald’s, suggesting familiar, undifferentiated, homogeneous
cultural products churned out ad nauseum without innovation or creativ-
ity. As George Ritzer laments in The McDonaldization of Society, fast food
chains offer a seemingly irresistible model of rationalized culture catered to
local conditions based in efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control
over consumers, workers, and managers alike.19 In describing the global
trade and localization of television formats like Big Brother as “McTV,” Sil-
vio Waisbord recognizes the capacity for local variation within a franchise
system, yet critiques broadcasting structures on the whole as “a global indus-
try solely concerned with quick commercial success and no patience for
innovation.”20 Framing multiplied media production in terms of franchising
therefore demands that any cultural innovations or production cultures be
considered in relation to industrial structures that manage and shape them.
The potential pitfall, of course, lies in following this path to an economically
determined end. Yet even a cultural analysis of media franchising must take
34 << Imagining the Franchise

into consideration the powerful and meaningful role that this industrially
oriented language plays in making sense of production. By calling the atten-
tion of critics, consumers, and practitioners alike to industry structures,
often instead of creative concerns, franchising performs significant cultural
work worthy of greater critical attention.
So instead of shying away from the idea of franchising, we can embrace
it to account for both the cultural and industrial consequences of organiz-
ing and imagining cultural production in those terms. By adopting an inte-
grated, “cultural economy”21 approach that would problematize more deter-
ministic accounts like Ritzer’s, franchising can be understood both as an
industrial and a cultural logic in which product innovation, decision-making
processes, and cultures of production become sites of negotiation among a
range of stakeholders. To fill this gap in scholarly accounts of franchising,
it will therefore be advantageous to consider how studies of corporate orga-
nization have previously unpacked not only the structural logic of franchis-
ing, but also its negotiated social and cultural logics. This allows us to take
ownership of the shared heritage between media production and operations
like McDonald’s and explore it in greater detail: how might our understand-
ing of franchising as a business practice affirm or challenge the economic
and cultural assumptions we make about this industrialized reproduction of
media culture?

The Business and Culture of Franchising

The first structural attempts to understand franchising emerge in the post–

World War II context as American business management and organizational
communication scholars grappled with emerging forms of American cor-
porate organization. Among the first of these voices was David Schwartz, a
researcher from Georgia State University’s School of Business Administration
who penned a 1959 research paper entitled “The Franchise System for Estab-
lishing Independent Retail Outlets.” While the franchise system predated the
1950s, Schwartz attributed its significant postwar growth to corporate desires
to build sales volume across a range of retail and service industries: fast food,
laundromats, car washes, hotels, and accounting services. Schwartz identi-
fied the franchise as an agreement between stakeholders — a franchisor who
develops the system and a franchisee who invests independently in that sys-
tem: “The franchisor advertises nationally . . . and in other ways attempts
to create public recognition of the franchised outlets. The franchisee, fol-
lowing the merchandising and business procedures outlined by the franchi-
sor, proceeds to operate his outlet as an independent establishment . . . to
 Imagining the Franchise >> 35

develop a ‘chain’ of independent business. In the ideal situation, the franchise

system has the advantage of both the large and small business.”22 Compli-
cating Ritzer’s later portrait of a monolithic McDonald’s, Schwartz empha-
sized franchising as cooperative enterprise. As part of its agreement to create
national recognition for the franchise, the franchisor assigned and protected
territories, supplied merchandise, and developed trademarks, signage, and
logos to identify each franchisee as a member of its affiliate network. For its
part, the franchisee paid a fee to invest in the system, purchased merchan-
dise and supplies from the franchisor, and used those materials “in exactly
the manner prescribed.”23
For this relationship to be successful, Schwartz wrote that each party must
share a cooperative attitude. According to one executive quoted by Schwartz,
“the greatest problem in working with franchised independent operators
is to cause them to think and act as a group instead of as individuals — to
integrate them into a smooth-functioning team.”24 Undoubtedly, these sys-
tems provided numerous benefits to each party: franchisors could develop
new products and markets with little capital risk and without the admin-
istrative headaches of managing so many outlets; independent franchisees
gained national identities and proven merchandising programs. Yet crucially,
Schwartz acknowledged tension inherent in franchise relationships: “To
achieve maximum success . . . [f]ranchisees must be willing to sacrifice some
independence of action and conform to a substantial degree to the franchi-
sor’s methods. By the same token, franchisors must accept the fact that com-
plete control over the franchise outlet is impossible because it is an inde-
pendent business.”25 Recognizing these dissimilar goals, Schwartz devised a
series of guidelines to help shape each party’s expectations. Even at this early
stage, franchising was understood to be a site of negotiation between distinct
stakeholders, rather than an entirely perfected tool for top-down corporate
control, calculability, efficiency, or predictability.
Other analyses followed in Schwartz’s footsteps. In 1968, subsequent
Georgia State researchers Robert Mockler and Harrison Easop traced the
emergence of franchise practices to 1898, when automobile manufacturers
signed independent dealerships as authorized local dealers. By the 1920s,
grocery, drug, hardware, and auto parts wholesalers had formed alliances
across networks of independently owned stores to compete with expanding
national chains. Though Mockler and Easop did not include them in their
analysis, the emergence of broadcast networks and theater chains too might
be considered as part of this general shift in business strategy. Only after
World War II, however, did franchising move to the center of corporate strat-
egy, thanks to key social, psychological, and economic shifts identified by
36 << Imagining the Franchise

the authors. Suburbanization necessitated smaller but more numerous retail

outlets, while participation in franchising proved attractive to ex-GIs and
other entrepreneurs supported by the expanded credit market of the 1950s as
well as by Title IV of the Economic Opportunities Act of 1964 (which aimed
to extend start-up support to African Americans and other disadvantaged
groups).26 Moreover, for corporations facing increased competition in the
booming postwar economy, franchising offered relatively low-cost means
to develop specialized products, strengthen distribution, and expand mar-
ket reach.27
Institutionalizing this franchise boom, the International Franchise Asso-
ciation formed in 1960 “to promote better franchising, to protect the inves-
tor in franchised businesses, and, through this activity, to better guarantee
the efficient marketing of goods and services to the American consumer.”28
Self-help publishers also fed this boom by promoting investment in fran-
chise outlets as a means of achieving the American Dream. As Robert Metz
writes in his 1969 book, Franchising: How to Select a Business of Your Own,
“in this country we have that wonderful quality in our society which the
social scientists call upward mobility. There are few barriers to the man who
wishes to make something of himself. Our society may not be perfect, but
the man who has talent, drive, and strength of purpose can succeed. Social
barriers can be easily overcome through business success.”29 Metz and others
imagined franchising in the mythic terms of upward mobility. Writing for
similarly entrepreneurial readers, Harry Kursh characterized the franchise
boom as “just a new American opportunity to make good if you are wise
in your choice and prepared to work for it.”30 Kursh further suggested that
franchising was not just a business model, but a social phenomenon con-
tingent upon changing cultural meanings and values as well. Explaining the
term’s derivation from the French verb franchir (to free), Kursh noted that
in pre-industrial contexts, “franchise” commonly expressed a freedom from
restraint, and in political and policy matters specifically, privileges accorded
to an individual or group by a sovereign institutional force. Yet this positive
right to do something (to vote, etc.) took on more sinister connotations in
the late 1800s, Kursh explained, as franchise became “the word that was bat-
ted around . . . when tycoons slit each other’s corporate throats in bloody bat-
tles over the right to buy, sell, or exploit utility, streetcar, and railroad fran-
chises.”31 As a business practice, he suggested, franchising also held cultural
meaning and value that shaped how those practices would be understood.
During the 1960s franchise boom, therefore, the emergent economic mod-
els subsumed under the name franchising could sometimes be viewed with
similar contempt, a dirty word soiled by the acts of “shady operators.”32 In
 Imagining the Franchise >> 37

popular discourse of the 1960s, retail franchising was already caught contra-
dictorily between the promise of the American dream and a perceived threat
of cutthroat capitalism.
In his more cultural understanding of franchising, Kursh argued that
“there is no single definition of franchising”33 and that “[a]ny attempt to
define a franchise, in effect, is nothing more than an exercise in academic
pedantry.”34 Although not couched in such theoretical language, Kursh’s
argument portrays franchising as a meaningful discourse that unites diverse
practices as a recognizable cultural unity. Fittingly then, Kursh, Metz, and
their contemporaries in postwar America did not merely study franchising,
but helped to constitute it as a historical imaginary by producing knowledge
about it. As T. S. Dicke argues, the term franchise did not function in the
American business vocabulary to describe such retail outlets until 195935
— just as Kursh and the George State researchers first started to understand
this organizational phenomenon. Dicke, too, traces the development of
American franchising back to the nineteenth century, but clarifies that these
franchised business operations only later came to be legible as such. Though
franchising has a longer structural history, Dicke shows us that it was con-
stituted as a meaningful cultural discourse by the very attempts of those like
Kursh and Schwartz to understand those business relations and practices in
the postwar period.
Kursh also recognized that the “key to a successful franchise is continu-
ing relations” — an observation that more contemporary business manage-
ment researchers and organizational sociologists reinforce in theorizing the
inherent inequalities that lead to discontent and struggle within franchisor-
franchisee relations.36 Exploring the perspective of the franchisee, Peter
Birkeland has conducted participatory ethnographic research as a mock em-
ployee of several retail and service outlets. Of primary concern to Birkeland
are antagonisms and “inherent tensions” in relations with franchisors result-
ing from the geographic dispersal of each franchisee and their incongruous
interests in that relationship.37 Birkeland frames this differential — the extent
to which franchisors and franchisees truly share the same interests and goals
— as lack of “alignment.”38 Though Blair and Lafontaine explore this issue
from the alternative perspective of the franchisor, they identify a similarly
antagonistic relationship. Though franchising is in their view a contractual
alternative to vertical integration that combines national brands and econo-
mies of scale with the knowledge and drive of local entrepreneurs, Blair and
Lafontaine demonstrate that internal corporate relationships prove far more
fraught in franchising than vertical integration.39As they explain it, franchi-
sors generally pursue quality and lower prices across the entire franchise
38 << Imagining the Franchise

system in order to protect system integrity and raise demand, whereas indi-
vidual franchisees work to reduce operating costs, raise prices, and maximize
local profits.40 What results from these accounts is a portrait of franchising as
an imperfect system based on negotiated relationships of economic inequal-
ity. Furthermore, Birkeland reminds us, the dyadic franchisor-franchisee
relationship alone proves insufficient for us to understand the scope of the
social relations undergirding that economic system: “The complexity of fran-
chising extends far beyond the franchisor-franchisee relationship to include
other obvious parties such as customers and suppliers, but also not-so-obvi-
ous parties as relatives and friends.”41 As Birkeland describes them, franchi-
sees also frequently express feelings of regret, “compounded by the high cost
disillusioned franchisees had paid to enter the system.”42 The disillusioned in
Birkeland’s experience became the “malcontents of the system. . . . They har-
bored a skepticism and cynicism about franchising and directed their anger
toward the franchisor.”43
These relational dynamics have informed several of the key historical
practices of franchising. While they exist to enable the efficiency, calcula-
bility, predictability, and control that critics like Ritzer ascribe to economic
rationalization, these practices also mitigate the sociocultural relational fac-
tors that push against compliance with top-down hierarchy. In The Corporate
Paradox, Alan Felstead examines “how franchisors organize their networks,
and how they motivate, lead and control their franchises.”44 Control can be
authoritarian in nature, he argues, but can just as frequently result from prac-
tices designed to facilitate a stable, cooperative, and supportive relationship
with franchisees. As Mockler and Easop similarly recognized in 1968, “The
line which divides franchisor services from franchisor controls is often a thin
one. In many instances, controls are another aspect of franchisor services, for
they protect the franchisee from costly errors and guide him towards more
profitable operations.”45 Too stringent control practices, Mockler and Easop
argued, can impede the success of franchising:

To avoid conflicts in the franchise relationship a partnership attitude must

be developed. The franchisor is the managing partner and the franchisee
is the operating partner, but each should have a voice in determining the
policies of the organization, each should be able to suggest changes, and
each should share in the problems as well as the rewards of the system.46

Birkeland echoes this position: control mechanisms must give franchisees

a desire to be independently efficient without franchisors providing direct
management.47 The practices of franchising, therefore, have aimed to engen-
 Imagining the Franchise >> 39

der a sense of cooperation and perceived common interest despite the coun-
tervailing interests of franchisors and franchisees.
The primary practice that has structured franchise organization is entry
into franchising contracts: temporary licensing agreements that grant rights
to product and territory while formalizing the responsibilities of each
party.48 Mockler and Easop identified four general types of legal clauses in
1960s franchise contracts. Informational clauses established fees and services
exchanged between parties; the franchisee generally paid an upfront fran-
chise fee and future sales royalties to buy into the system, while the franchisor
provided management advice and training. Regulatory clauses set controls
on how franchisees could operate. Procedural clauses prescribed strategies
for managing potential threats to the franchise relationship. Finally, termina-
tion clauses provided the parties with devices for severing relations in the
event of dissatisfaction.49 Despite the fact that the customization of franchise
contracts to local market conditions might help to maximize profits, most
contemporary franchise agreements remain in practice very uniform so as to
enable easier enforcement across the entire franchise system.50 In doing so,
contracts give franchisors dominion over the franchise relationship, setting
up procedures of reward and punishment that motivate franchisees to self-
police their own behaviors in the interests of the overall system. Moreover,
the franchise contract does not extend any kind of ownership of the shared
franchise system to the franchisee. From a contractual standpoint, franchis-
ing offers tenancy in that one party maintains economic and legal ownership
over a property used by another.
Trademark and intellectual property management practices have also
structured franchise relations. On the one hand, the trademark shared with
franchisees provides the franchisor with control over both the local outlet
and the consumer markets they serve. Not only do shared trademarks force
franchisees to submit to a position of identification with the franchise sys-
tem, they also mitigate the threat of franchisees going into business on their
own once provided training by the franchisor. As Tom Arnold argued in a
legal conference on franchising in 1968, the shared trademark provides an
“artistic theme” under intellectual property protection that cannot be used
without authorization.51 The rogue franchisee might be able to replicate
the operating procedures shared with him by the franchisor, but he or she
could not copy the trademark that made those business models legible and
meaningful to others. Thus, trademarks also had utility in managing con-
sumer markets. Mockler and Easop identitified as particularly amenable
to franchising any product “that is distinctive and has a readily identifi-
able trademark, so that the customer will put forth more effort than usual
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 Give back to old Poland her bright days of yore,
To her fields and her cities the blessings of peace.
Give plenty, give freedom, give joy as before;
Oh! cease to chastise us and fill us with grace.

V.

O merciful God! by thy marvellous might

Keep far from us slaughter and war’s fierce despair;
‘Neath the sway of the angel of peace and of light
Let all be united in love and in prayer.

Great God! to thine altars we suppliants come;

Give us back the blest freedom of faith, hearth, and home.

The soldiers, kneeling, repeated this in chorus, and, rising, gave

another cheer for Poland. Then Gen. Chmielinski, who was standing
to the right of Father Benvenuto, turned to them and said: “Now,
my children, go and rest and recruit your strength. You will need it
all; for the enemy we have to fight is strong and numerous, and
many among us will appear before God to-morrow.”
The soldiers did as they were bid, and prepared themselves to
pass the night as comfortably as they could, feeling that it was
indeed the last many would spend on earth. I was going to do the
same when I was sent for by Gen. Sokol, whom I found talking
over plans with Gen. Chmielinski. “Lieut. L——,” he said to me, “we
are very anxious for exact information as to the amount of the
Russian force. Are you tired?”
“Yes, but not enough to refuse a perilous mission. What is there
to be done?”
“To go with a picked body of men on whom you can rely, and
reconnoitre the Russian strength and position; but, for heaven’s
sake, be very prudent. You know the full extent of the danger.”
 “Yes. Thanks for having chosen me,” I replied; and, bowing to the
two officers, I withdrew and told Badecki to have my horse saddled
immediately. Whilst I was looking to the loading of my pistols young
Charles M—— came up.
“Lieutenant,” he exclaimed, “you are going to reconnoitre the
Russian army?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”
“Will you let me go with you?”
“No, my boy. To-morrow’s fight may be a serious one, for which
you will need all your strength.”
The poor little fellow made a wry face, but went and lay down
again at the foot of a tree. I only took with me Badecki and an old
soldier named Zeromski, who had distinguished himself in the
campaign of 1830. He had an austere and severe countenance,
which, however, brightened into the sweetest and gentlest smile
possible when you spoke to him. He was as laconic as a Spartan
and kept himself always aloof; but under fire his bravery was
heroic, and almost amounted to rashness. His comrades had
nicknamed him Stalowy-serce (heart of steel).
We reconnoitred the enemy’s position without being discovered,
and were returning towards the edge of the camp, when my horse
stumbled against the root of a tree and fell on one knee. My
orderly, Badecki, looked at me anxiously, shook his head, coughed,
sighed, and turned uneasily in his saddle.
“What on earth is the matter, Badecki?” I exclaimed. “One would
think you were sitting on a wasp’s nest.”
“Lieutenant,” he answered, sighing, “it is because your horse
stumbled just now.”
“Well, and what is that to you?” I replied.
“Don’t you know, lieutenant, that if a horse stumbles before a
battle it forebodes misfortune to his rider? I always remarked that
in the campaign of 1830.”
“Oh! you believe that, do you?” I said, smiling. “And you,
Zeromski—have you remarked it too?”
“No, I have not done so myself, but I have been always told so.”
Arrived at the camp, I hastened to give in my report to General
Sokol. He thanked me warmly, and added:
“Now is your opportunity, lieutenant, to win your captain’s
epaulets.”
“Yes, general, or a good sabre-cut. I hope it may be one or the
other.”
Sokol laughed and said:
“It is certain that, if these unlicked cubs of Russians are as
numerous as you say, they will give us trouble.”
Leaving the general’s quarters, I went and wrapped myself up in
my bear-skin, and, throwing myself under a tree, fell asleep in a
moment. I was completely worn out with fatigue.
Only two hours later, however, I was awakened by the sentries
being relieved. The day had just dawned. The first thing which
recurred to my memory was Badecki’s words. I had a sort of
presentiment that they would turn out to be true. After a few
moments of fervent prayer I took out my pocket-book and made a
slight sketch of the spot where the battle would most likely be
fought, and where, perhaps, that very night they would dig my
grave. I wrote a few lines with the sketch, folded them up, and
directed it.
Scarcely had I made my last preparations in this way than our
advanced posts gave the signal that the enemy was approaching. It
was part of the army of Gen. C——, and consisted of two battalions
of infantry, several soterias of Cossacks and dragoons, and four
pieces of artillery. They numbered upwards of three thousand men.
We had only twelve hundred, many of whom were but raw recruits.
 Very soon every soul was on the alert and armed. Father
Benvenuto was the first to appear.
“My children!” he cried, “many amongst us will fall this day. You
are all, thank God! prepared for whatever may be his will. Kneel,
and I will give you all a last absolution and benediction.”
Every one knelt with the venerable priest, who prayed for a few
minutes in a low voice and commended us all to God. Then, rising,
he added with emotion:
“My children, I absolve you and bless you all, in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
“Amen!” we all responded, and rose filled with fresh strength and
courage.
“Let every one of you do his duty,” continued he; “that is all I will
say at this moment to patriots who wish to free our dear and holy
Poland or die in the attempt.”
The men went silently to take each his place in the ranks. Gen.
Zaremba was to assume the chief command that day.
“What will do us the most mischief and paralyze our operations,”
he said, “are those field-pieces. If they had not those cannon we
should win.”
Count S——, captain of artillery, came forward. “If you will give
me leave, general, I will go and spike their guns. Are there two
hundred men amongst you who will follow me to certain death? Let
them make the sacrifice of their lives for the safety of all.”
Nearly a thousand men volunteered for this terrible service,
though they knew perfectly well that, in all probability, not one
would return alive.
“Well,” exclaimed the general, “we are twelve hundred men; let
us draw lots.”
A few minutes later the two hundred, favored by fate and their
own heroism, separated themselves from the rest and gathered
round their intrepid leader, forming what might well be called the
phalanx of death. Charles M—— burst into tears at not having been
one of those selected.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said to him; “to-day we shall all be equally
favored.”
The general then disposed of his small force in the best manner
he could. He desired no one to fire a single shot till the enemy was
within one hundred paces. Those among the sharpshooters and
zouaves who had breech-loaders were to reserve their second shots
till those who had only single-barrelled guns were reloading. In the
event of confusion or defeat I was ordered with my Uhlans to
charge the fugitives, always taking care to double back with my
column behind the fusileers. These dispositions having been made,
and distinct orders given to each corps, we all remained at our
posts in silence, awaiting the enemy’s approach. On they came, in
the well-known serried masses of the Russian troops, and not a
shot was fired till they arrived at the appointed distance. Then, with
a shout and a sharp cry, the signal was given, our men fired, and
upwards of one hundred Russians fell. So unprepared were they for
this sudden discharge that the men behind the front rank fell back,
in spite of the efforts of their officers, and, scattering to the right
and left, became the victims of my Uhlans or were cut to pieces by
the scythes of the kopinicry. Then the Russians in their turn fired,
and twenty of our Poles fell. This was the moment chosen by Count
S—— and his two hundred heroes to dash in amidst the Russian
artillery and try and silence their cannon. Passing through the
Russian ranks like a flash of lightning, the count and my brave old
Zeromski succeeded in spiking two of their field-pieces. Whilst
ramming in his gun a ball broke the count’s arm; the next took off
his head. Zeromski had his head broken by the butt-end of a
musket, and fell at the very moment when he had succeeded in
spiking a gun to the cry of “Niech zeja Polske!” (Hurrah for Poland!)
We could not look on in cold blood and see the horrible massacre
of these two hundred. Comrades and all with one accord threw
themselves into the enemy’s ranks. The voice of our officers fell on
dead ears; we were engaged in a hand-to-hand fight with equal
fury on both sides. Now and then, when our Poles gave way before
superior numbers, the Russian artillery had time to load their
remaining guns, and when our poor fellows came back to the
charge they were simply mowed down before the heavy fire that
opened upon them. But still no one thought of self-preservation,
only how to deal the hardest blows. All strategy or tactics had
become impossible, and officers and men alike fought inch by inch
for their lives. From the first moment when the fighting had become
general I was attacked by a quartermaster of dragoons. We both
fought with swords; but I was so exhausted that I could hardly
keep my saddle, and all I could do was to try and parry the strokes
of my adversary. All of a sudden a violent cramp seized my right
arm; but at that critical moment I heard the voice of little Charles
behind me: “Hold on for a minute longer!” he cried; and, galloping
with his pony across a heap of dead, he fired off his pistol close to
the head of my enemy, who dropped without a word. But at the
same instant I saw the heroic child stagger and turn deadly white;
a ball had struck him in the chest.
“Adieu, lieutenant! Adieu, brother!” he murmured, as he slipped
off his horse to the ground. “My poor mother! How she will cry! My
Lord and my God, have mercy upon me!”
Those were his last words. I bore him on my shoulders, and
carried him out of the field of battle, and laid him down under a
tree. I put my hand on his heart; it had ceased to beat. The
generous child had died to save me. He had a beautiful smile on his
face, and two tears glistened on his cheeks. I closed his eyes, and,
kissing his forehead, said: “Sleep in peace, my brave boy! If I
survive this day I will carry these tears to your poor mother.”
I called two of the pioneers, and told them to dig a separate
grave for poor Charles, that his body might not fall into the enemy’s
hands; and then, jumping on the horse of a Cossack who had just
been killed, I threw myself again into the fray. All my strength had
come back. I fought like one possessed; and this over-excitement
lasted till I felt the cold steel going through me. A Cossack had
thrust his lance into my left breast. I lifted up my heart to God for
one moment, and then fell, pressing my crucifix convulsively. My
orderly, seeing me fall, carried me off rapidly to a carriage which
was already full of wounded men. Thanks to Father Benvenuto,
who never ceased watching over me, I came back to life again and
met the loving and sisterly eyes of Mother Alexandra, who again
insisted on my sharing her cell. I was in great danger for five days,
and, if I did not sink under my sufferings, it was owing to the
devoted care of which I was the object. One night my secret was
well-nigh discovered. Mother Alexandra had been called away to
some other patient and had left me to the care of a young sister.
My fever ran high, and, being delirious, I tore off the bandages
from my wound and threw them away. Frightened at my state, the
sister luckily ran to fetch Mother Alexandra, exclaiming: “Come as
quickly as you can; the lieutenant is dying!” She flew back to me,
and remained alone by my bedside. Her presence calmed me at
once, and I allowed her to bandage me up again and stop the
blood, which had burst out in streams from the wound.
In the same house we had forty-five wounded from this battle,
wherein the Poles had displayed prodigies of valor. The Russian loss
was very great, and if they were not altogether crushed, it was
owing to their numerical superiority. As it was, they retired in good
order, for we had not sufficient men to follow them in their retreat.
When I was allowed to go out of my cell I went to see my
comrades. I helped the sisters in dressing their wounds, and, when
my strength would allow me, I used to read aloud to them as we
sat round the stove. At the end of a month, out of forty-five
wounded thirty-two were convalescent.
At the end of six weeks I felt myself strong enough to bear the
motion of a horse, and so accepted a mission for my old general,
who, by the orders of the Central Committee, came to take the
command of the forces in the place of General Iskra, who had been
condemned to death for high treason. As ill-luck would have it, on
this occasion my usual good-fortune deserted me and I fell into the
hands of a Russian patrol, who seized me, tied my hands behind
my back, and marched me off to the little town of Kielce. As I was
still very weak and walked with difficulty, they accelerated my
march by blows from the butt-ends of their muskets. At Kielce I was
taken straight to the headquarters of Gen. C——. All Polish soldiers
who had fallen into the hands of this brute since the beginning of
the war had been hanged. From the window, close to which I had
been placed, I could see the gibbet, with two shapeless bodies
hanging from it on which birds of prey were already feasting. The
sight filled me with horror, and feeling sure this time that my last
hour was at hand, I recommended my soul to God, made a fervent
act of contrition, and prepared myself as well as I could to die.
The general came in for the usual interrogatory, and frowned
when he looked at me.
“You are from the rebel army?” he exclaimed in bad Polish.
“I do not know any rebels,” I replied proudly. “I am of the army
of the Crusaders.” (We called the war a Crusade, and all of us wore
a white cross sewed on our uniforms.)
At this reply General C——’s face darkened and, with a furious
gesture, he made a step toward me. “Do you know,” he cried, “to
what fate you have exposed yourself by falling into my hands?”
“Yes, perfectly,” I replied, turning my head in the direction of the
dead bodies.
“And you are not afraid?”
“No. I belong to a nation which does not know the feeling.”
“Yet you are very pale.”
“Oh!” I replied eagerly, “do not think it is from fear. Six weeks
ago I was wounded in an engagement with your troops, and to-day
I have gone out for the first time.”
Here the Muscovite smiled.
 “What is your age? Nineteen? Do you know that there are very
few Poles as young as you are who would face death in this way
without a shudder?”
“But I am not a Pole; I am French.”
“Do you speak the truth?”
“I never lie,” I replied, presenting him my man’s passport.
He examined it carefully.
“This saves you,” he said at last, beginning to be almost civil. “We
have not yet the right to hang the French, even though they may
have fought with the rebel troops. I shall send you with an escort
across the frontier of Silesia; but if ever you again set foot on
Russian soil you will be hanged without mercy and without shrift.”
I was sent out of his presence, escorted by two Cossacks,
thoroughly unlicked bears, who had orders to shoot me on the least
suspicious movement on my part. I had the pleasure of these
gentlemen’s society in a third-class carriage during the whole
journey from Myszkow to Szczakowa—that is, for four mortal hours.
You can imagine, therefore, that I did not breathe freely till I had
stepped out of the carriage and found myself once more on Silesian
soil, released from their attentions.
I felt now that my vow had been kept and my promise fulfilled. I
had shed my blood for Poland, and any further effort on my part
would have been worse than useless.
I determined, therefore, to rejoin the countess and her children,
who were at that moment at the waters of Altwasser. I pass over
the joy of our reunion. We soon went on to Dresden for the winter,
and once more that happy family were together, though in exile.
I heard soon after that Father Benvenuto had been struck by a
ball in the heart at the battle of Swientz-Krszysz, at the very
moment when he was lifting up the crucifix to bless his soldiers.
The memory of this saint will be for ever revered in Poland, and in
the hearts of all those who had the happiness of knowing him. With
his heroic death I close my account of this episode in a war which,
however mistaken on the part of those who first conceived so
hopeless an attempt, was carried on to the last with a faith, a
courage, and a patriotism that deserve to be immortalized in the
history of any country, and will redound to the eternal honor of this
persecuted and unhappy people.
 THE LATE DR. T. W. MARSHALL.
The renaissance of English Catholic literature has been a growth
of the last quarter of a century. From the time when Dr. Newman
became a convert to the church there has been a continual stream
of the most ardent Catholic literature, didactic, controversial, and
devotional. Of devotional works we need hardly speak at all, since
they are much the same in all Catholic countries, and are mostly
modelled on one spirit of one faith. Of works which are didactic it is
superfluous to say anything, for all teachers of the Catholic faith
teach the same thing. But of works which are controversial it is
desirable to take notice, because they indicate the peculiar spirit of
the age, the nature of the anti-Catholic opposition, and the growth
or the decay of old prejudices. There is probably no literature in any
country in the world which is so full of original lines of pure
controversy as that of the modern English school of Catholic
converts. Nor is there any difficulty in accounting for this fact. When
we remember that English converts have stepped across that huge
gulf which divides old-fashioned Protestantism from Catholicity; that
they have brought with them from the “Establishment” the most
perfect knowledge of all the arguments which can be devised
against the acceptance of “the faith”; that they are often highly
educated men, who have been as “intellectually” as they have been
“spiritually” converted—we should be surprised if they did not
sometimes write controversy with both a newness and a richness of
intuition.
For example, let us take the great Dr. Newman, whose vast
stores of digested learning often sparkle or are sweetened with
delicious touches of the perception of the humorous—a boon to his
readers which is not only due to his wit but to the drolleries of the
old heresy which he has left. Or let us take Dr. Faber—that “poet of
Catholic dogmas,” as a Protestant lady has described him—and note
the exquisite appreciation with which he contrasts Catholic truths
with their denial or their imitation in Protestantism. These two
writers could not have written as they have done unless they had
been brought up as Protestants. They might have been equally
luminous and profound; they might have wanted nothing of
Catholic science; but their appreciation of contrast, which is one of
the essentials of humor, could not have been nearly so developed.
Yet, delightful as it would be to dwell on the rich gifts of these
two writers—the profound Newman and the poetical Faber—it is
with reference to another writer that we would say something at
this time—to one who has but recently passed away. Dr. T. W.
Marshall, who twice visited the United States, and who gained great
repute as a lecturer, was among the most gifted of the
controversialists—in some senses he was unique—who have
contributed to English Catholic literature. We are not speaking of his
learning, though this was considerable; nor of his reasoning power,
though this, too, was very striking; for there are many English
Catholic writers who, both in learning and in reasoning, may be
esteemed to have surpassed Dr. Marshall; but we are speaking of
him as a “pure controversialist,” as one who made controversy his
sole pursuit, or who, at least, will be always remembered as a
polemic, and this both as a speaker and as a writer. Now, in the
capacity of a polemic—of a “popular” polemic—we have affirmed
that Dr. Marshall was unique; and let us indicate briefly in what
respects.
We have spoken at the beginning of the immense advantage
which is possessed by those Catholics who attempt to write
controversy when their first years have been passed in the camp of
the Anglican “Establishment,” and so they have learned all its
secrets. Dr. Marshall was “bred and born” an Anglican. He was the
descendant of a long line of Protestants. He was educated at two
English public schools, and subsequently spent three years at
Cambridge; emerging from the university to “take orders” in the
Establishment, and soon becoming incumbent of a parish. Finding
his lot cast in a pleasant rural district, where he had but very few
clerical duties, he devoted his spare time to the study of the
Fathers; and, while reading, he made copious notes. The present
writer, who had the happiness to be his pupil, remembers well with
what avidity he used to devour the big tomes which he borrowed
from the not distant cathedral library. Finding, as he read on, that
the Fathers were “strangely Roman Catholic,” that “they most
distinctly were none of them Protestants,” he may be said to have
read and to have written himself into the faith, which he embraced
the moment that he realized it. And no sooner was he received into
the Catholic Church than he devoted all his talents to the proving to
English Protestants the truths of which he himself was convinced.
Christian Missions was his first great work, though it had been
preceded by more than one brilliant pamphlet; and My Clerical
Friends and Protestant Journalism followed in much later years.
Besides these works there was the unceasing contribution to more
than one of the English Catholic papers, to several magazines or
periodicals, and also to a few secular weeklies. It may be
remembered with what raciness, and at the same time with what
depth, he used to punish “our Protestant contemporaries” for their
inventions and their puerilities about the church. His series on the
“Russian Church” was especially brilliant, and produced much
sensation among High-Churchmen. But his many other series, such
as “Fictitious Appeals to a General Council,” “Sketches of the
Reformation,” “Two Churches,” “Modern Science,” were all deserving
of most careful digestion, and produced their due effect upon
Anglicans. It was when probing the Ritualists, week after week,
with the most terrible weapons of Catholic logic, that Dr. Marshall
was seized with his last illness, and he laid aside for ever that pen
which, for thirty years, had been the dread of many insincere
Protestants.
If we examine critically into the merits and demerits of this
accomplished theologian and controversialist, we shall find three
points in particular which mark him off from other men, and which
render him, as we have said, unique. First, he had the capacity of
uniting extensive learning with a lightness, even a gayety, of style;
weaving scores of quotations into a few pages of easy writing,
without ever for a moment becoming dull. He played and he toyed
with any number of quotations, as though he had them all at his
fingers’ ends; and he “brought them in” in such a way that, instead
of cumbering his pages, they made them more diverting and light.
Let it be asked whether this one particular art is not worthy of
universal imitation? Nine out of every ten of even good polemical
writers “drag their quotations in by the head and shoulders,” or hurl
them down upon the pages as though they had been carted with
pitch-forks and had to be uncarted in similar fashion. A lightness
and a tripping ease in the introduction of quotations is one of the
most captivating of gifts; for it takes the weight off the learning, the
drag off the style, the “bore” off the effort of controversy. It would
be very easy to name half a score of good books, vastly learned
and admirably fitted for the shelves, which are simply rendered
unreadable by that after-dinner sleepiness which comes from too
heavy a table. Now, is it not desirable that even wise men should
make a study of this art of trippingly weaving quotations?—for, as a
matter of fact, a quotation badly used might just as well not be
used at all. Dr. Marshall made quotations a grace of his style,
instead of an interruption of his text; and so neatly did he
“Tunbridge-ware” them into his pages that they fitted without joint
and without fissure. This is, we think, a great merit; and if Dr.
Marshall had done nothing more than suggest to learned writers
that it is possible to quote immensely yet trippingly, he would have
rendered a service to all polemics. He has been, perhaps, “an
original” in this respect; or, if not an original, he has at least been
unique in the excellence of the practice of the art.
The second feature in his writings which strikes us as admirable
is an individuality in the neatness of expression. Short sentences,
quite as pithy as short, with a calm grace of defiant
imperturbability, make his writings equally caustic and gay.
Scholarly those writings certainly are; they have all the honeyed
temperance of art and much of the perfection of habit. No one
could write as Dr. Marshall could write unless he had made writing
his study. No doubt style “is born, not made”; but most styles are
better for education, and we could name but few writers of whom
we could say that their style was apparently more natural than it
was acquired. Of Dr. Newman it might be said “the style is the
man,” for there is a personal repose in his writings; and we could
imagine Dr. Newman, even if he had not been a great student, still
writing most beautifully and serenely. “The perfection of Dr.
Newman’s style is that he has no style” was a very good remark of
a learned critic; but then we cannot talk of such very exceptional
men as giving a rule for lesser writers. Now, Dr. Marshall had a very
marked style. It was ease, with equal art and equal care. The care
was as striking as the ease. This, it will be said, proves at once that
Dr. Marshall was not what is called “a genius.” Well, no one ever
pretended that he was. A man may be both admirable and unique
without having one spark of real genius; and a man may have
graces of style, with highly cultured arts of fascination, and yet be
no more than just sufficiently original to attract a marked popular
attention. Few men attain even to this standard; and certainly, as
writers of controversy, very few men even approach to it. What we
assert is that to be “controversially unique” a writer must be
exceptional in certain ways, and especially in the two ways we have
particularized—namely, light quoting and light writing. We return,
then, to the opinion that for neatness of phraseology; for the “art,”
if you will, of suave cuttingness; for the clever combination of the
caustic with the calm, of the profoundly indisputable with the
playful, Dr. Marshall was really remarkable. He could say a thing
quietly which, if robbed of its quietness, would have been, perhaps,
a veritable insult. Perhaps it was the more pungent because quiet;
and here we touch the third and last of the literary characteristics
which we propose to notice briefly at this time.
“Milk and gall are not a pleasing combination,” observed a
gentleman—who was an Anglican at the time—after reading Our
Protestant Contemporaries. He added that he did not care for milk
—he was too old to find it sufficiently stimulating—but he objected
to gall, at least when it was directed against some favorite
convictions of his own mind. Most persons will agree with this old
gentleman, who, however, became a convert to the church. Yet it
may be said that there are two apologies which may be offered for
this defect—if defect, indeed, it be—of “milk and gall.” First, let it be
remembered that the keen perception of the ridiculous, which is
generally a characteristic of superior minds, finds its richest
exploration in what, from a certain point of view, may be regarded
as those immense fields of folly which are popularly denominated
English Protestantism. To the humorous mind there is nothing so
humorous as the mental gymnastics of Protestants. To suppress this
humorous sense becomes impossible to any writer who does not
look on gloom as a duty. Dr. Newman only suppresses it in this way:
that his huge mind works above the mere playground, or avoids it
as too provocative of games. He descended into it once in Loss and
Gain, and he became fairly romping towards the close; now and
then, too, we can detect the laughing spirit which only veils itself,
for decorum, in his grave writings; but he feels probably that his
weapons are too sharp to need satire, for he is not a
controversialist, but a reasoner. When he does, for the moment,
write satire, he shows what he could do, if he would; but we are
glad that the normal attitude of his mind is rather didactic than
playful.
Of lesser writers we cannot expect that their discrimination
should be hampered by a grave sense of doctorship; it is not
necessary that they should sit in professors’ chairs; they are writing
for the million, whose perceptions of what is true must be aided by
their perceptions of what is false. Moreover, the English mind, not
being normally humorous—which is a great national loss in all
respects—requires to be jolted and jerked into an attitude which
would be most useful for the intelligence of truth. If we could only
get Englishmen to see the comedy of heresy, they might soon want
the gravity of truth; but they are constitutionally dull in
apprehending those fallacies which southern peoples can see
through in a moment. Now, a writer who can teach Englishmen to
laugh at their Protestantism, to appreciate its anomalies and its
shams, to see the difference between a parson and a priest,
between ten thousand opinions and one faith, and generally to get
rid of morbid sentiment and prejudice, and to look at things in a
thoroughly healthful way, has “taken a line” which is as salutary for
feeble souls as is bright mountain air for feeble bodies. Dr. Marshall
used to laugh with Protestants at their shams much more than he
used to laugh at the victims. But it is true that there was sometimes
an acerbity in his remarks which gave offence to those who loved
not the humor. Could this be helped? Be it remembered that
acerbity, in the apparent mood of expression, is often more
intellectual than it is moral; it is simply an attitude of conviction, or
it is the natural vexation of a profound religious faith which cannot
calm itself when protesting against folly. Nor do we think it at all
probable that, if there were no gall in controversy, more converts
would be made to the truth. And, after all, what do we mean by the
word “gall”? Is humor gall? Is satire gall? Is even acerbity, when it
is obviously but vexation, a fatal undoing of good? Much will
depend on the mood of the reader. Some readers like spice and
cayenne even in their “religious” opponents. Most readers know
that mere literary temperament cannot make a syllogism out of a
fallacy. All readers distinguish between caprices of temperament
and the attitude of the reason and the soul. It is only on account of
the mental babes among Protestants that it is to be regretted that
all Catholics are human. For the ordinary, strong reader a good
dash of human nature is much better than is too much of “the
angel.” Take mankind for what they are, and we like the honesty of
the irritation which sometimes puts the gall into the milk. It might
be desirable that our first parent had not fallen. If he had not fallen
we should not have had controversy. But since he has fallen, and
since we must have controversy, we must also of necessity have
gall.[183]
We have only to express regret that so useful a writer as Dr.
Marshall has passed away out of the ranks of controversialists. As a
speaker, too, Dr. Marshall was most delightful; indeed, he spoke
quite as well as he wrote. At the time when he was in the United
States it was thought by some persons that Dr. Marshall was quite
the model of a speaker; for he was at once gentle and
commanding, refined yet highly pungent, scholarly yet most easy to
be understood. These praises were allowed by every one to be his
due. We have, then, to lament the loss of a really richly-gifted
Catholic, who, though an Englishman, was cosmopolitan. And when
we remember that such men as Dr. Marshall (with Dr. Faber, or Mr.
Allies, or Canon Oakeley) were born Protestant—intensely
Protestant—Englishmen, we can appreciate what was involved in
their conversion to the church, both in the intellectual and in the
purely social sense. Conversion means more than a change of
conviction to such Englishmen as have been born of Protestant
parents; it means the revolution of the whole life of the man, as
well as of the whole life of the Christian. Such men seem to be born
over again. When they have passed away we can say for them,
with as much hope as charity, Requiescant in pace.
 PAPAL ELECTIONS.
II.

In the twelfth century the cardinals of the Holy Roman Church

were in full and undisputed possession of the right of electing the
Sovereign Pontiff; and although the exercise of this right is
commonly attributed to the Sacred College, only from the passing
of the famous decree of the Third Council of Lateran, in 1179,
beginning Licet de vitanda discordia in electione Romani Pontificis
(cap. vi. de Elect.), it rather supposes the cardinals to be already
the sole papal electors, and merely determines what majority of
their votes shall constitute a valid election.[184] Factious and semi-
ignorant persons have often protested against this exclusive right of
the cardinals to elect the visible head of the church. Of such a kind
was Wycliffe, whose diatribe, Electio Papæ a cardinalibus per
diabolum est introducta, was condemned by the Council of
Constance (artic. xl. sess. viii.); and Eybel, whose errors were
exposed by Mamacchi, under his poetical name of Pisti Alethini, as
a member of the Academy of the Arcadians.[185]
In early times, when the pope died at Rome the cardinals met to
elect a successor in the Lateran or the Vatican basilica, or in the
cathedral of any other city in which they might have determined to
hold the election. Conclave is the term used exclusively for many
centuries for the place in which the cardinals meet in private to
elect a pope; but it was used in the early middle ages of any room
securely shut,[186] just as, among the ancient Romans, conclave was
a covered and enclosed apartment or hall that could be fastened
with a lock and key—cum clavi. Long before the pontificate of
Gregory X. the cardinals who assembled for a papal election met in
some part of a large and noble building—generally the sacristy of a
cathedral—where they transacted the business of the day, and
returned after each session to their private abodes. The gloss
Nullatenus, on the decree of Alexander III., says that if two-thirds—
the majority required—of the cardinals will not agree upon a
candidate, they should be closely confined until they do—
includantur in aliquo loco de quo exire non valeant donec
consenserint—and mentions several popes elected after the
cardinals had been subjected to a reasonable duress. This is
precisely the conclave. It was not, however, until the year 1274 that
the mode of procedure in a papal election was settled—after the
incursions of the barbarians and the many vicissitudes to which the
Holy See then became subject had deranged the earlier and
apostolic manner—and the rules and regulations of the modern
conclave were published. After the death of Clement IV. in Viterbo,
on Nov. 22, 1268, the eighteen cardinals composing the Sacred
College met there to elect his successor; but not agreeing after a
year and a half, although the kings of France and Sicily, St.
Bonaventure, General of the Franciscans, and many influential,
learned, and holy men came in person to urge them to compose
their differences and relieve the church of her long widowhood,
they were all got together one day, by some artifice, in the
episcopal palace, which was instantly closed upon them and
surrounded with guards. Even this imprisonment did not change
their temper, and after some further delay the captain of the town,
Raniero Gatti, took the bold resolution of removing the entire roof
and otherwise dilapidating the edifice, in hopes that the discomforts
of the season, added to their confinement, might break the
stubbornness of the venerable fathers.[187] This move succeeded,
and a compromise was effected among the discordant cardinals on
the 7th of September, 1271, in virtue of which the papal legate in
Syria, Theobald Visconti, Archdeacon of Liege, was elected. This
was not the first time that extraordinary and almost violent
measures had been taken to bring the cardinals to make a prompt
election. At Viterbo the captain of the town coerced their liberty; at
Naples the commandant of the castle bridled their appetite when,
after the death of Innocent IV., in 1254, he diminished day by day
the quantity of food sent in to them—cibo per singulos dies
imminuto—until they agreed upon a worthy subject.[188]
 Gregory X., who was so singularly elected at Viterbo while far
away in Palestine, called a general council, which met at Lyons on
May 2, 1274. Five hundred bishops, over a thousand mitred abbots
and other privileged ecclesiastics, the patriarchs of Constantinople
and Antioch, the grand master of the famous Knights of St. John of
Jerusalem, the kings of France and Aragon, besides ambassadors
from Germany, England, Sicily, and other important nations, took
part in it. The pope was resolved to establish the manner of
electing the Roman Pontiff on a better principle, and now drew up a
constitution which, in spite of considerable opposition from the
cardinals, was read between the fourth and fifth sessions, and
finally received the approbation of the fathers. This is substantially
the code that still regulates the conclave. The original constitution,
which had been suspended by some popes and not observed by the
cardinals in several elections, was introduced into the body of
canon law[189] by Boniface VIII., in order to impress it, if possible,
with a more solemn and perpetual obligation of observance; and
when some of the cardinals, incensed at the transfer of the see to
Avignon, maintained that, despite all this, the Sacred College could
modify or abolish it at discretion, it was confirmed by the General
Council of Vienne and their factious spirit reproved. This conciliar
decree has also a place in the canon law, where it is found among
the Clementines (Ne Romani, 2 de elect.)[190]
“Where the danger is known to be greatest,” says the preamble
to Pope Gregory’s constitution, “there should most care be taken.
How many risks and what great inconvenience a long vacancy of
the Holy See entails is shown by looking back upon the disorders of
other days. It is, therefore, wise that, while diligently engaged in
reforming minor evils, we should not neglect to provide against
calamity. Now, therefore, whatever our predecessors, and
particularly Alexander III., of happy memory, have done to remove
a spirit of discord in the election of the Roman Pontiff, the same we
desire to remain in full force; for we do not intend to annul their
decrees, but only by our present constitution to supply what
experience points out to be wanting.”
 The whole decree may be divided into fifteen paragraphs, which
are called the Fifteen Laws of the Conclave. They are summarized
as follows:
On the death of the pope the cardinals, having celebrated for
nine days his obsequies in the city where he died, shall enter the
conclave on the tenth day, whether absent colleagues have arrived
or not, and be accompanied by a single attendant, whether lay or
clerical, or at most, in case of evident necessity, by two attendants.
The conclave shall be held in the palace last occupied by the pope,
and there the cardinals must live in common, occupying a single
spacious hall not cut off by curtains or partitions, and so carefully
closed on every side that no one can secretly pass in or out. One
room, however, may be cut off for private purposes—reservato
libero ad secretam cameram aditu—but no access shall be allowed
to any cardinal, nor private conversation with nor visits to him,
except from those who, by consent of all the other cardinals, may
be summoned to consult on matters germane to the affair in hand;
nor shall any one send letters or messages to their lordships or to
any of their familiars, on pain of excommunication. A window or
other opening shall be left in the hall of conclave, through which
the meals are introduced, but it must be of such a size and shape
that no human being can penetrate thereby. If, after three days
from the opening of the conclave, no election has been made, the
prelates appointed to attend to this shall allow each cardinal no
more than one dish at dinner and supper during the next five days,
after which only bread and water until they come to a conclusion.
The cardinals shall take nothing from the papal treasury during the
vacancy of the see; but all its revenues are to be carefully collected
and watched over by the proper officers. They shall treat of nothing
but the election, unless some imminent danger to the temporalities
of the Holy See may demand their attention; and, laying aside all
private interests, let them devote themselves entirely to the
common weal; but if any cardinal shall presume to attempt by
bribes, compacts, or other arts to entice his brethren to his own
side, he shall suffer excommunication, nor shall any manner of
agreement, even if sworn to, be valid. If a cardinal draw off from
the conclave, or should he retire from motives of health, the
election must still proceed; yet, if he recover, he shall be
readmitted. Cardinals arriving late or at any stage of the
proceedings, as also those who may be under censures, shall be
received. No one can give his vote outside of the conclave. Two-
thirds of the votes of all the electors present[191] are requisite to
elect; and any one not radically disqualified[192] is eligible to the
Papacy. The feudal superiors of the territory and the municipal
officers of the city in which the conclave is held are charged to
observe these regulations, and shall swear in presence of the clergy
and people to do so. If they fail to do their duty they shall be
excommunicated, be declared infamous and lose their fiefs, and the
city itself shall be interdicted and deprived of its episcopal dignity.
Solemn funeral services are to be held in every important place
throughout the Catholic world as soon as news arrives of the pope’s
death; prayers are to be recited daily and fast days appointed for
the speedy and concordant election of an excellent pontiff.
In this provident constitution of Gregory X. are contained in brief
the rules and regulations which have ever since governed the
conclave. In a few points, however, its severity has been relaxed,
particularly by Clement VI. in the bull Licet de Constitutione, dated
December 6, 1351; and in others some small modifications have
been introduced, in accordance with the manners and customs of a
more refined age, by Gregory XV. (Ludovisi, 1621–1623) in his
comprehensive ceremonial.[193] Thus Clement VI. (De Beaufort,
1342–1352), while recommending the greatest frugality at table
during the seclusion of the conclave, removed the alimentary
restrictions and left it to the cardinals themselves to select the kind,
quality, and amount of their food, but forbade the prandial civilities
of sending tidbits from one table to another. The same pope
allowed each cardinal to have his bed enclosed by curtains, and to
have two attendants, or conclavists, in every case. The monastic
simplicity of a common sleeping-room was done away with in the
sixteenth century, when each cardinal was allowed the use of a
separate cell, which Pius IV. commanded should be assigned by lot.
When a cardinal’s name and number have been drawn, his
domestics upholster it with purple serge or cloth, if their master
was created by the late pope; but if by a former one, with green—a
difference in color that was first observed in the conclave for the
election of Leo X. A few articles of necessary furniture, such as a
bed, table, kneeling-bench, and a couple of chairs, complete the
interior arrangements. On the outside of his cell each cardinal
affixes a small escutcheon emblazoned with his arms, which serves
as a substitute for that vulgar modern thing called a door-plate.
While great care is still taken to hinder suspicious communications
between the conclave and the outer world, it is no longer prohibited
to visit a cardinal or member of his suite, although the colloquy
must be held at some one of the entries, and whatever is spoken
be heard by the prelates doing duty there. Instead of the single
small window—more like an oubliette than anything else—which
Gregory prescribed, openings in the shape of pivotal or revolving
wooden frames, like those used in nunneries and called tours in
French, were adopted at the suggestion of Paride de’ Grassi, master
of ceremonies to Leo X. Eight of them are always connected on
different sides with the hall of conclave, wherever it may be. The
ten days before the conclave can open begin from the very day of
the pope’s death; but sometimes a much longer time has elapsed—
as, for instance, after the death of Alexander VI., when the violence
of Cæsar Borgia and the presence of a French army in Rome
occasioned a delay of thirty days; and again, when Cardinal Ferreri
was arrested on his way from Vercelli to the conclave by the Duke
of Milan, his loyal colleagues waited for him eight days beyond the
usual time. The conclave in which Julius III. was elected in 1550
was not opened until nineteen days after his predecessor’s death,
to oblige the French cardinals, who had not yet all arrived at Rome.
In early ages, before it became customary to give the hat to
occupants of episcopal sees other than the seven suburbican ones,
and when cardinals were strictly bound to reside in curia—i.e., to
live near the pope of whose court they were the principal
personages—there was generally no necessity for a considerable
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