My dad left me that article with that note around this date in 2016.
In2016 Oscars – Jenny Beaven won her Oscar for Best Costume Design and Alejandro Inarritu, Tom McCarthy and Steve Golin - men revered by many aspiring filmmakers - openly made fools of themselves as Beaven approached the stage to receive her award. These men made something very clear that day: this is their business, and they are free to behave in whatever manner they choose.
Fortunately, I don’t think a woman who owns a jacket as badass as Jenny Beaven’s is so easily humiliated.
The 2016 Oscars were special for a much bigger reason though - all twenty nominees in lead and supporting categories were white. But in fact, 2016 wasn’t all that special because this had happened the year before as well, and in 2014 only three of the nominees in lead and supporting roles were people of colour - and those three nominees were all from the same movie. There is no year on the Oscar’s transcript that has actually ever nailed diversity – naturally the farther back you go, the worse it gets - Hollywood's diversity problem has existed since its inception.
You see even after they tempered their output of openly racist and sexist content with more subtle versions of the two, Hollywood had discovered something very interesting – a formula for how to make money. Put a certain amount of money into a film, attach a few key names and watch the return on your investment come flooding in.
Financial institutions love this game. Find a way to make money and don’t mess with the formula. How safe is your investment? Well films with white male leads have the best rating and its pretty much all downhill from there. It’s a simple and effective formula you can’t deny it – just under 1.2 billion movie tickets were sold in the U.S. in 2016, Film and TV worldwide revenue topped 286 billion dollars that same year.
Media impacts our lives daily whether that is the intention or not, whether we want it to or not. I can watch any number of films with female characters who seem to have no ambition beyond finding a mate and say that it doesn’t bother me, I can even say that I enjoyed them. But unfortunately, that’s not how any of this works and in fact if it were all that simple we might have gotten to the root of this problem a very long time ago.
It’s a slow burn – until you wake up one day and realize you don’t like what you see in the mirror, or you walk into a room and feel like you don’t belong there.
The world of film and television exists in a bubble, and it is exceedingly rare that content is in touch reality. We like to think we’ve come a lot farther than we have but the fact of the matter is that this fight has only just begun. This industry operates on a code of ethics which relies on the willingness of each individual member to maintain a degree of personal and professional integrity.
So how do you renovate an industry with little to no structure? I talked to a few Toronto based women who so graciously and enthusiastically offered their ideas on how film and television can work towards true representation. They offered ideas, links, quotes and words of encouragement for those who are ready to be part of the solution.