Last Friday night, following a trio of data-filled presentations that elucidated the paucity of minorities in key roles and positions inside the film and television industry, communication professor Stacy L. Smith posed a question to Ava DuVernay.
DuVernay and Smith were two of the five primary participants in the panel discussion held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and co-presented and co-organized by the International Communication Association (ICA) and USC Annenberg.
The panel was titled “The Hollywood Shuffle: Exploring Race and Ethnicity Behind and In Front of the Camera.” The name was an apparent hat tip to the 1987 Robert Townsend film, Hollywood Shuffle, a cutting satire about racism and stereotyping in the entertainment industry.
DuVernay is the highly accomplished independent filmmaker whose second feature, “Middle of Nowhere” earned her Best Director honors at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
Smith was the Friday night event’s moderator and is the director of USC Annenberg’s Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative. Since 2005, Smith and her colleagues and team have released nearly three-dozen studies about ethnicity and gender employment patterns and show business barriers.
So, Smith asked DuVernay, what did the director – an African-American woman – think about what she’d just seen and heard presented? “My reaction was one of in some ways of horror and in some ways relief,” DuVernay said.
Horror because of stats Smith exhibited such as that of the 1,100 top-grossing films from 2002-2012, 95.6 percent were directed by men. And relief, DuVernay said, because: “I’ve chosen not to knock on a closed door.”
DuVernay explained that she makes her films outside the studio system. And that, in part to make certain her films are seen, she founded AFFRM, the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement.
AFFRM (pronounced, “affirm”) is a national collaborative distribution network that combines the auditorium availability and marketing muscle of various local organizations to forge a broader release. The group has distributed five films, with a sixth due soon.
In addition to Smith and DuVernay, the panel’s other primary participants were a pair of decorated California-based academics – Darnell Hunt and Russell Robinson – and Tim Story, the accomplished and prolific major motion picture director, writer and producer.
Story has directed prominent films across a range of genres. Those titles include “Barber Shop,” Think Like a Man” and “Fantastic Four.” For that latter, Story cast actress Kerry Washington to play a character who in source material comic books is drawn as blond-haired, blue-eyed and Caucasian. Washington is African-American.
Hunt is a UCLA Sociology professor and the director of the university’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. His Friday evening presentation was titled, “Writing Wrongs: Industry Diversity (or the Lack Thereof).” Hunt graduated with a USC journalism degree and worked in broadcast news prior to becoming a professor.
Since 2005, Hunt has produced a series of reports for the Writers Guild of America (WGA) that help quantify just how significantly women and minorities are under-represented as Hollywood writers. There is a disconnect, Hunt said Friday night, between the ethnic and gender make-up of the union’s working writers and the growing diversity of the United States.
“Women [writers] in the past 20 years have remained under-represented by a factor of three to one in film,” Hunt said. “Minority writers have actually fallen further behind.”
Robinson, the third academic on the Friday night panel, is a professor at Berkeley Law and that school’s Distinguished Haas Chair in LGBT Equity. Robinson began his presentation by saying how excited he was to see so many people on hand to hear about a topic that, the professor said, “often times makes people uncomfortable.”
Robinson spoke about a law review article he wrote that studied the career arcs of African-American and non-African-American Academy Awards winners. “We wanted to ask, ‘Have we seen progress?’” Robinson said. “Have we seen change that opened the floodgates for people of color?”
By way of answering that question, Robinson noted the title of that study: “Not Quite A Breakthrough.” Many in the packed crowd laughed, knowingly.
Robinson also spoke about the casting notices for actors that are standard throughout the entertainment industry. These notices often describe the desired physical appearance and ethnic background sought for specific character roles.
“If this were any another profession, this would clearly violate the law,” Robinson said, as he pondered what – if anything – affords Hollywood immunity.
Throughout the evening, members of the audience shuddered and gasped at times when panelists shared particularly damning information and anecdotes about Hollywood’s apparent lack of diversity.
“The information that was presented was palpable,” Smith said during an interview conducted just after the formal event concluded and just prior to the reception that followed. “People have realized how little has changed over time.”
In addition to the industry professionals in the crowd – various people introduced themselves as writers, directors and cinematographers – the audience also included USC Annenberg students who had made the trip across town to LACMA.
Second-year students Sabrina Wang and Daisy Sun each take Smith’s COMM 203: Introduction to Mass Communication course. “I’m very surprised to see this data,” Wang said, afterward.
Added Sun: “Before this presentation, I never thought of how many people are represented like that. I just watched what was presented.” But now? “When I watch movies or TV programs, I will start thinking about or questioning the motivation to them,” Sun said.
Prior to the panel discussion, USC Annenberg Dean Ernest J. Wilson III helped set the stage for what would follow by talking about diversity-related topics such as “the scissors effect” in contemporary media and society.
The consumption of media by people of color is going up, the Dean told the audience, while ownership of media is going down. “And,” the Dean said, “our ability to understand culture in the United States is getting cut in the middle.”
[For more information on the above, read Dean Wilson’s recent essay, “The Second Digital Divide.”]
ICA President Cynthia Stohl and Communication Director John Paul Gutierrez also delivered brief introductory remarks. Stohl welcomed those assembled and described how this was the first in a series of related gatherings that the ICA was sponsoring in cities throughout the world.
Related: USC Annenberg is the 2012 winner of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Equity and Diversity Award .
