At long last, it seems like Hollywood is on the brink of substantive change. Stacy Smith, Kalpana Kotagal, and Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni are among those pushing the needle towards a more inclusive film industry. As a means of encouraging tangible shifts behind the scenes and on-screen, the three joined forces to create the inclusion rider, which made headlines after Frances McDormand referenced the clause in her Oscar acceptance speech this year.
As Deadline summarizes, “The rider is a provision added to a contract of an actor to ensure that casting and production staff meet certain levels of diversity; for example, regarding the inclusion of women, people of color, LGBTQ people, or people with disabilities.” Brie Larson, Michael B. Jordan, Paul Feig, and other Hollywood heavyweights have publicly agreed to adopt the inclusion rider.
Smith, Kotagal, and Cox DiGiovanni spoke with Deadline about the impetus behind the rider and how they hope it will impact the industry.
“The goal is to make hiring practices transparent to the extent that the inclusion rider isn’t necessary and we have stamped out nepotism,” said Smith. “We would like to see many of the closed networks of hiring talent broken up. When only four percent of directors across the last 1,100 Hollywood movies are women and only eight of those are women of color, it’s fair to say that the deep bench of talent is not being recognized. It’s a broken talent pipeline,” she emphasized.
Research — including Smith’s own — shows that directors are overwhelmingly white and male, and men outnumber women on-screen. Women of color are especially underrepresented, both on-screen and behind the camera. Contrary to what some idealists would like to think, talent can’t just rise to the top — the opportunity needs to be there. And it’s clear that Hollywood gives better and more opportunities to white men — including inexperienced ones — than women and people of color. Study after study proves Smith’s point that the talent pipeline isn’t functioning as it should.
Smith also touched on the influence of #TimesUp and how to effect lasting change. “We haven’t seen anything like Time’s Up before. We haven’t seen a force like this with women coming together in unison,” she observed. “We’re also in a season in which there’s a huge return on investment for female-driven content and content with powerfully diverse elements. Seeing the choices that Disney has made around its directing talent is encouraging. The early numbers from the broadcast networks around female directors are encouraging.”
But that’s only part of the solution. The Founder and Director of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative hastily added, “For true change to happen we need film schools to see women and people of color leading classes. We need schools to ensure that this talent is encouraged and fostered. We need film festivals to have programmers and to have boards and lineups which reflect the world we live in. We need folks of VP and above to be hiring and fostering talent that doesn’t reflect narrow parameters. All of that needs to happen.”
Smith explained, “This is about people making choices that are different to those they have made in the past. We often hear executives saying, ‘We need the best person for the job.’ That misses the point. That concept is a narrowly constructed ideal in someone’s mind. Why hasn’t a woman been considered to direct a tentpole? It’s not that they’re not available.” It’s that execs’s perceptions are influenced by their own bias — unconscious or not — about what and who makes a good director.
