Chris Rock Calls Los Angeles A 'Weird Town' Where Whites Expect Mexicans To Care For Them

Published Dec 4, 2014 11:00 PM

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Chris Rock has been on a tear in the last month, giving outspoken interviews to Vulture, The New Yorker, Grantland and Rolling Stones in anticipation of the release of the upcoming film he wrote and directed "Top Five."

But Rock wrote his own essay for The Hollywood Reporter this week that describes what it's like working in a "white industry." Most of the essay deals with his experience as a black man and the racial trends he's noticed on the screen and behind the scenes. But he writes that they odd thing about the entertainment machine might not be how underrepresented blacks are but how few Mexicans make it—even in the lower ranks—in an apparently liberal industry in an ostensibly progressive city like Los Angeles (though it sounds like the word he is looking for is not "Mexicans" but "latinos"):

But forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough? You're in L.A, you've got to try not to hire Mexicans. It's the most liberal town in the world, and there's a part of it that's kind of racist — not racist like "F— you, nigger" racist, but just an acceptance that there's a slave state in L.A. There's this acceptance that Mexicans are going to take care of white people in L.A. that doesn't exist anywhere else. I remember I was renting a house in Beverly Park while doing some movie, and you just see all of the Mexican people at 8 o'clock in the morning in a line driving into Beverly Park like it's General Motors. It's this weird town. You're telling me no Mexicans are qualified to do anything at a studio? Really? Nothing but mop up? What are the odds that that's true? The odds are, because people are people, that there's probably a Mexican David Geffen mopping up for somebody's company right now. The odds are that there's probably a Mexican who's that smart who's never going to be given a shot. And it's not about being given a shot to greenlight a movie because nobody is going to give you that — you've got to take that. The shot is that a Mexican guy or a black guy is qualified to go and give his opinion about how loud the boings are in Dodgeball or whether it's the right shit sound you hear when Jeff Daniels is on the toilet in Dumb and Dumber. It's like, "We only let white people do that." This is a system where only white people can chime in on that. There would be a little naivete to sitting around and going, "Oh, no black person has ever greenlighted a movie," but those other jobs? You're kidding me, right? They don't even require education. When you're on the lower levels, they're just about taste, nothing else. And you don't have to go to Harvard to have taste.

He also complains that black women have few roles on the screen, and that neither black men nor women are rarely "in the mix" for hot parts. He says it as only Chris Rock can: "It was never like, 'Is it going to be Ryan Gosling or Chiwetel Ejiofor for Fifty Shades of Grey?' And you know, black people f—, too. White women actually want to f— black guys, sometimes more than white guys. More women want to f— Tyrese than Jamie Dornan, and it's not even close. It's not a contest. Even Jamie would go, 'OK, you got it.'"