A new report on diversity in Hollywood finds the film and television industry is "a straight, white boys club." The USC's Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg tracked the representation of women, people of color, and the LGBT community. And they give report cards to companies for their level of inclusivity. Then co-star and co-creator of the HBO show 'Togetherness', Steve Zissis, mines his own life --failures and all-- for the show. Finally, comedian Kamau Bell is excited to see Chris Rock turn #OscarsSoWhite into comic gold at the Academy Awards.
Hollywood is still 'a straight, white boys club,' study finds
A new study finds Hollywood's diversity problem runs much deeper than minority representation at its premier awards show.
Researchers at the University of Southern California say the entire media landscape "is still largely whitewashed" and that women and minorities are caught in an "epidemic of invisibility" running throughout popular stories, whether on film, TV or digital platforms.
The Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment analyzed 414 different stories, including 109 motion pictures and 305 broadcast, cable, and digital series, for performance in diversity and inclusion.
The report, released by USC's Institute for Diversity and Empowerment as part of their Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative comes from USC's journalism and communications school. It uses data from 2014 that was collected by 100 researchers to identify which film studios and TV networks hired women behind the camera and represented women and other "underrepresented" people — by race, ethnicity and sexuality — on screen.
The study authors concluded that the "film industry still functions as a straight, White, boy's club."
Among the key findings, women and girls made up less than one-third of speaking characters.
Behind the camera, for every one female screenwriter there were 2.5 male screenwriters. In film, only 3.4 percent of all directors were female. Television and digital series did slightly better, with 37.1 percent of characters and 42 percent of series regulars being female, and a higher proportion of women steering the production as directors or writers.
The study also found that there is still no platform that matches anything like a proportional representation of racial and ethnic minorities.
More than half of all productions featured not a single Asian with a speaking part, and 22 percent included no black characters. As one of the USC researchers, Stacy L. Smith, PhD, told The Frame:
There are certain groups that are still facing erasure or complete invisibility on screen.
She notes that among the 414 stories they studied:
Over 20% didn't feature one Black or African-American speaking character and over 50% didn't feature one Asian or Asian American speaking character. So when we talk about the issue of diversity in Hollywood, it's not a problem. It's a crisis.
Even more underrepresented were people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. In all, only 2 percent of speaking roles were LGBT. Only seven transgender characters were represented in the sample, and four of those characters were in the same series. LGBT characters were also predominantly white and male, according to the study.
The study did not examine reality or talk shows. It also only looked at the first episode of each series when evaluating content and the race and ethnicity of the director.
The study's authors noted that a closer look at producers might be warranted, as well, since they "may arguably play a more important role in hiring and casting."
In addition to analyzing individual stories, the study scored distributors with an overall diversity index that included five metrics: female character inclusion, underrepresented character inclusion, LGBT inclusion, percent of female directors and percent of female writers.
"The company scorecard illustrates that film distributors are failing when it comes to representing their audience on screen and in their behind the camera hires," the authors concluded.
Only two companies, Sony and Paramount, managed "Full Inclusivity" on the study's scale.
Other notable exceptions were the CW, The Walt Disney Company, Amazon and Hulu, all of which "demonstrated strong performances across television and digital programming."
Guests
Host John Horn is joined by the study's authors, Stacy L. Smith and Katherine Pieper, to discuss the findings and their suggestions for how to make Hollywood more inclusive. They say "It's not a problem. It's a crisis...What we're seeing is a straight, white boys club." Click the blue play button at the top of this post to hear the interview.
This report involves a lot of research — more than a year and more than 100 research assistants. How'd you break down the research areas and the approach to collecting data?
Smith: It was a large and daunting process, to be perfectly honest. We broke this study into three different silos — the on-screen component, where every story in the study, there were 414 stories from film, television, and digital offerings. Every story was watched independently by three research assistants, disagreements were discussed with a member of the leadership team at MDSC, and then it was quality-checked by a fourth person.
So imagine — 414 stories times four. Then there's the length of time it takes to evaluate that story. That's a tremendous undertaking, but it also gives us the confidence to discuss the types of findings we have that are really unique to this investigation.
When a student gets a failing report card, their parents meet with the school. Are you hoping there's some of that involved, or is there an element of public shaming to this?
Pieper: We're never interested in shaming anyone, and if you look across the report cards, you'll see that we're categorizing this as "room for improvement." The conclusion of the executive summary and the longer report outline concrete steps that companies can take.
We're absolutely hoping that they take these steps, that they enact real strategies for creating more inclusive content, for improving hiring practices so that they become more open to women and people of color behind the camera, and we're happy to help!
We're invested in grading not because it brings shame or punishment, but because it acts as a metric for how much we can watch these companies improve over time.
W. Kamau Bell: Oscar host Chris Rock 'rubbing his hands together and evilly laughing'
When the 2016 Academy Award nominees were announced and another #OscarsSoWhite controversy ignited, many wondered whether Chris Rock would pull out of his hosting appointment in protest. This is the second year in a row that the Academy nominated no actors of color, causing some film professionals to call for a boycott of the event.
But
thinks that Chris Rock's set-up couldn't be more perfect. Bell is a political comedian who tackles issues of race and diversity head-on in his performances, and he does the same in his upcoming CNN docuseries "United Shades of America." His FX comedy series, "Totally Unbiased," was executive-produced by Rock.
As Bell told the Frame:
There's no other place [Chris] would rather be in the middle of this controversy than onstage hosting the Academy Awards. So I think he's probably sitting somewhere rubbing his hands together and evilly laughing about like, You have no idea what you've just done here. So I'm excited like everybody else. I'm getting my popcorn ready . . . [Chris Rock is] in the exact place he wants to be. If he could have written this, he would have written it this way.
In the wake of internet fury, the Academy revised several longstanding rules about membership in an effort to double the number of diverse members and women by the year 2020. Older members who are no longer active in filmmaking will lose voting rights within 10 years, and the Academy will launch a campaign to recruit diverse members. It's a sign of good faith — but if Kamau Bell is right, it won't save them from the royal roasting Chris Rock has in store for them.
The Oscars will air this Sunday, February 28 at 5:30pm PST.
How the struggles of Steve Zissis turned into HBO's hit 'Togetherness'
Things don't always work out as you expect.
That's particularly true for actor Steve Zissis, a self-described "early peaker" who took years to break into the acting business. His biggest role — as balding, struggling, middle-aged actor Alex on "Togetherness" — draws on the experience of one guy: Steve Zissis.
When Zissis joined us on The Frame, he talked about the ways his life has provided material for "Togetherness," his long friendship with the Duplass brothers and how he went from igniting cheese at The Grove to co-creating a hit HBO show.
Interview Highlights:
I want to talk a bit about what your character, Alex, has gone through from season one to season two. Oddly enough, Alex is really the guy who's gotten his stuff together. Suddenly he's really figured out while everybody else is falling apart. How did your character change over the course of this show, and what interests you about that change?
We knew from the beginning that we wanted Alex to go on a physical and psychological transformation over the course of the first two seasons. So we definitely had that mapped out. Starting at the beginning of the second season, you sort of see Alex reaching the heights that he wanted to reach. Whether or not he's happy when he's gotten what he thought he wanted is another question. [laughs]
In general, there are elements of discovery as we go, but in terms of Alex's transformation, that was by design. We knew that we wanted to do it, and that's a good thing, because there were logistical things I needed to do, too. [laughs] I needed to drop over 30 pounds of weight, so we had to put things in place to assist me in my physical transformation.
But that's been a part of the show — your relationship to your own body, what that means to you as an actor, and that's something you've talked about in the past in term of what's happened to you as an actor before this show aired.
Absolutely. In the first season, Alex found himself being pigeonholed by his physical appearance, in terms of acting. But it's interesting that in the second season, he gets pigeonholed in a different, unexpected way. And even though he's reached his goal, he's dealing with relative dissatisfaction based on this new plateau he's achieved.
How much of all of that is something that you and Mark and Jay Duplass talk about from your own experience? How much does your own experience inform or inspire what you're writing about?
We are largely drawing upon our own stories, our own lives and the lives of our friends, families, and friends of friends. Yesterday, an international journalist asked us a similar question, and then I realized: Don't become friends with us if you don't want to see your life fictionalized on our show at some point. [laughs] Once you're in the vortex of friendship with us, we will use your life.
We interviewed Mark Duplass, with whom you created, wrote, and star in "Togetherness," when season one debuted. And here's what he had to say about the show, and specifically about you.
Duplass: Steve was a golden god. He was the guy who hit puberty at 11, he was the president of the student council at 15. He is the most autobiographical character we've ever written, and he knows this. We honestly built the show for Steve, because we wanted the world to see how talented he was. Literally, we all thought Steve was going to be the President, or [the next] Tom Hanks, or both. And that didn't happen for him. It kills us, and it killed him, and so we just said, "All right, we'll just make the show that shows it happening."
That's a little bit funny, but it's a little bit serious too.
Yeah, well, Mark, Jay and I all went to the same high school, and that's a true story. Mark was a year below me and he looked up to me back then — he saw me act in these plays, and I was president of the student council.
So I was an early peaker, and then I went through a depressive part of my life and had some struggles personally. Things don't always happen as you'd expect them to happen, but there's always a second act. And that's part of what this show's about.
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Even with all those setbacks, were you always committed to acting? Or did you reach a point where you said, "Why am I doing this?"
I was deceiving myself for a lot of my life about acting. Acting is something I've done since I was in high school, but I never had a model in my life, whether it was a mentor or a parent, where I could realize that acting could actually be a career.
I'm Greek-American and I come from an immigrant-type background, and Greek-American parents want you to be a doctor or a lawyer. [laughs] Because that's how you make money and it's very respectable. So I never had a model for being an artist and making money from that.
But I always did plays, and when I went to NYU, and I didn't go to Tisch, the theater school, because I was like, Well, acting's not realistic, you can't make a career out of it. So I just studied general studies and humanities at NYU, but I was doing plays while I was there. So I was sort of cheating. [laughs] I just didn't have the self-awareness to make this a career.
If I remember correctly, you were still waiting tables while the show was going into production, correct?
Yep. I was lighting cheese on fire at a Greek restaurant in the Grove. [laughs] Yeah, I was the cliche, I was the struggling actor in L.A. waiting tables. That was it.
So what's happened since, now that the show's succeeding? Are you still igniting cheese?
I'm not igniting cheese any more. I would just say that the main difference is that I've had the luxury to be a full-time artist now. Before, I had to juggle survival, paying bills and trying to be an artist. Now my focus is more peaceful. I'm more relaxed and all of my time is dedicated to being an artist. And that's like a thousand-pound weight being lifted from me.