David Minor Post/Comment #3

 I found Marez’s piece really interesting and it got me thinking about what the tangible, actionable steps towards increasing opportunities for people of color – both behind and in front of the camera. UCLA did a study on Hollywood’s 2023’s diversity report – which is released annually – and it found that “films directed by white men tend to have less diverse casts than those directed by women and people of color. About half of the top theatrical releases and 38% of top streaming films directed by white men had casts that were less than 30% minority.” This means that there is a compounding effect in hiring diverse directors/showrunners in terms of increasing overall diversity in Hollywood. This seems to be trending more positively in streaming, where “people of color had a much larger proportion of directing jobs in streaming (23%) than they did in theatrical releases (17%).” But such directors were also given smaller budgets – roughly 75% – had a budget below $20million, whereas 60% of the films directed by white men had budgets of $30 million or more. A part of this is that the industry just needs time to catch up. Projects with larger budgets and scope are allocated to directors with a proven track record (in a general sense), and given the history of Hollywood it’s unsurprising that more experienced directors are white. And so it seems like generally providing more opportunities in front of the camera for diverse creatives will both 1) increase diversity behind the camera, and 2) give them the requisite experience to be directors of larger budget-movies and media down the line, 3) which in turns allows for more diverse hiring on a larger scale in the future.