New Report: Same Disappointing Results on Diversity on Film and in the Film Industry

Posted on August 14, 2015 at 10:24 am

A new study from USC’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism documents the vastly over-proportionate portrayals of white males on film and in filmmaking. Their review of 700 top-grossing films from 2007-2014 found:

Gender. Only 30.2% of the 30,835 speaking characters evaluated were female across the 700 top‐grossing films
from 2007 to 2014. This calculates to a gender ratio of 2.3 to 1. Only 11% of 700 films had gender‐balanced casts
or featured girls/women in roughly half (45‐54.9%) of the speaking roles.

Race/Ethnicity. Of those characters coded for race/ethnicity across 100 top films of 2014, 73.1% were White, 4.9% were Hispanic/Latino, 12.5% were Black, 5.3% were Asian, 2.9% were Middle Eastern, <1% were American Indian/Alaskan Native or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 1.2% were from “other” racial and/or ethnic groupings. This represents no change in the portrayal of apparent race/ethnicity from 2007‐2014.

LGBT. Across 4,610 speaking characters in the 100 top films of 2014, only 19 were Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual. Not one Transgender character was portrayed. Ten characters were coded as Gay, 4 were Lesbian, and 5 were Bisexual. Only 14 movies sample wide featured an LGB depiction and none of those films were animated. Of the LGB characters coded, nearly two‐thirds were male (63.2%) and only 36.8% were female. LGB characters were also predominantly White (84.2%). Only 15.8% were from underrepresented racial/ethnic backgrounds.

Behind the scenes is even worse.

The landscape of popular cinema in 2014 remains skewed and stereotypical. Across 700 films and over 30,000 speaking characters from 2007 to present, movies continue to distort the demographic reality of their audience. Film characters are overwhelmingly White and male, despite both population statistics and viewing patterns.

Employment trends behind the camera evidence a similar dearth of diversity. Only five Black directors helmed top movies in 2014, and women were underrepresented by a factor of 5.3 to 1 as directors, writers, and producers in 2014. Further, the 100 top films of 2014 featured no Asian directors. Despite activism, attention, and statements about addressing the issue, Hollywood’s default setting for characters and content creators remains fixed on “status quo.”

Billy Ray on Hollywood’s Writer Problems

Posted on August 12, 2015 at 3:55 pm

Oscar nominated screenwriter Billy Ray (“The Hunger Games,” “Shattered Glass”) has a warning for “our next great screenwriters.” Hollywood will not help you. It will work against you. In a speech later adapted for an article on Medium, he explained:

When I started writing there were still a few mavericks out there; a few gunslingers who ran studios.

These were people who went with their guts and would make a movie just because they believed in it.

But that’s not the process anymore.

Today, before a studio chair can green-light a movie, that movie must also be blessed by the head of marketing, the head of foreign sales, and the head of home video.

It must be subjected to a process called “running the numbers,” which means that the movie’s cost — or, downside — is compared against its potential value because of its cast and what it might do in foreign markets.

This process takes into account every variable except the variable which actually matters — the one that can’t possibly be gauged by any sort of calculus — which is whether or not the movie’s going to be any good.

The good news is that technology has made it possible for singular creative visions to be realized for budgets low enough that they are within reach for passionate filmmakers. But it is called “show business,” and business comes first when corporate conglomerates are allocating tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars.

What if the (Dead) Subject of the Movie Would Have Objected?

Posted on August 9, 2015 at 3:44 pm

David Foster Wallace was a very private person who committed suicide in 2008. He is also one of the foremost authors of contemporary literature. After his death, writer David Lipsky published a book based on the audiotapes from a four-day interview with Wallace, and now that book has become a movie called “The End of the Tour,” with Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky.

Wallace’s friends and family have objected to the film. I watched the film sitting next to Glenn Kenny, who wrote in The Guardian:

I found The End of the Tour risible. In my own film criticism I’ve often defended work that comes up short on historical accuracy, insisting that each picture is a circumscribed world in and of itself, for better or worse. This posture of detachment went out the window the first time I saw the movie.

And on Slate, Forrest Wickman says that the movie got its final scene completely wrong. He admits that this is in part due to misdirection from Wallace himself, so perhaps at least in this respect, he would have approved of the film.

Private people can become public property, sometimes by writing an important work and sometimes by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or even the right place at the right time, as happened when a man was outed after a heroic rescue. There is no good answer for this. Wallace himself wrote a lot of non-fiction and portrayed real-life individuals in unflattering ways. And as a fiction writer he tried to illuminate the human experience through art, which is what this movie tries to do as well.

Perhaps the best we can do is look at the movie on its own merits, as The New York Times critic A.O. Scott suggests, and continue the separate conversation about what is right and what, at the end of the day, we can ever truly understand about one another. Which, by the way, is the theme of the film.

A “Star Wars” Superfan Breaks Down All the Changes and Tweaks

Posted on August 3, 2015 at 8:00 am

Bugs Bunny Turns 75

Posted on July 28, 2015 at 3:21 pm

A fascinating look at what made Warner Brothers cartoons work. Surprisingly, within these anarchic worlds, there were a lot of rules. This video has some very thoughtful commentary, including Leonard Maltin and Steven Spielberg.