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Hollywood's New Rules
The old boys club is dead. But a new one—with its own litmus
tests and landmines—is rapidly replacing it. 'This is all going to end in a
giant class-action lawsuit.'
A few years ago, the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter
pitched a story to the newsroom. He had just come back from lunch with a
well-known agent, who had suggested the paper take a look at the unintended
consequences of Hollywood’s efforts to diversify. Those white men who had
spent decades writing scripts—which had been turned into blockbuster movies
and hit television shows—were no longer getting hired.
The newsroom blew up. The reporters, especially the younger
ones, mocked the idea that white men were on the outs. The editor-in-chief,
normally self-assured, immediately backtracked. He looked rattled.
It was a missed opportunity. The story wasn’t just about white
guys not getting jobs. Nor was it really about the economics of Hollywood. It
was about the stories Hollywood told and distributed and streamed on screens
around the globe every day. It was about this massively lucrative industry
that had been birthed by outsiders and emerged, out of lemon groves, into a
glamorous, glitzy mosh pit teeming with chutzpah and broken hearts and
unbelievable success stories that had made the American Dream a real,
pulsating thing—for Americans and billions of other people who thought that
if you could imagine something, anything, you could will it into
being. It was a story about who we aspired to be.
After the meeting, a reporter approached another editor about
pursuing it. The editor told the reporter to drop it. No one, he said, at The
Hollywood Reporter—one of a handful of trade publications that covers the ins
and outs of the entertainment industry—was going to risk blowing up their
career over this.
The “explosion of woke,” as one longtime producer put it,
didn’t come out of nowhere.
Hollywood had always pushed boundaries—from the 1947 “Gentleman’s
Agreement,” which confronted antisemitism, to “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”
(1967), which tackled interracial marriage, to “All in the Family”
(1971-1979), which grappled with race and women’s liberation. The original
run of “Will and Grace” (1998-2006), did more to advance the cause of gay
marriage than anything else pre-Obergefell.
And then there were the villains: The vast majority—from the
Terminator to Hannibal Lecter to Gordon Gekko—were uber-white: an
Austrian (robot), a Lithuanian, a WASPy, pinstriped capitalist. (For the
insider’s list, see this from The
Hollywood Reporter.)
But it wasn’t until 2015—when the #OscarsSoWhite controversy
engulfed the 87th Academy Awards—that studio chiefs and producers really
started to rethink how they did business. This gained momentum in 2016, and
even more in late 2017, with #MeToo.
Then came George Floyd, and, in the summer of 2020, everything
that had been happening in slow motion started to happen much faster.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences—the
industry’s central nervous system—had been founded in 1927, and now it had
8,469 voting members. It had tried over the years, and especially since
Donald Trump’s election, to catch up with the zeitgeist, inviting into its
ranks a record number of new members who were black, Latino, women or
foreign-born.
But that wasn’t going to cut it any longer.
So, in September 2020, the Academy launched its
Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (or RAISE). For a movie
to qualify for Best Picture, producers not only had to register detailed
personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie, but
the movie had to meet two of the Academy’s four diversity
standards—touching on everything from on-screen representation to
creative leadership. (An Academy spokesperson said “only select staff” would
have access to data collected on the platform.)
The Academy explained that movies failing to meet these
standards would not be barred from qualifying for Best Picture until 2024.
But producers are already complying: In 2020, data from 366 productions were
submitted to the platform.
Meanwhile, CBS mandated that
writers’ rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color
(or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the
2022-2023 season. ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of “inclusion
standards.” (“I guarantee you every studio has something like that,” a
longtime writer and director said.)
To help producers meet the new standards, the filmmaker Ava
DuVernay—who was recently added to Forbes’ list of
“The Most Powerful Women in Entertainment” along with Oprah Winfrey and
Taylor Swift—last year created ARRAY Crew, a database of women, people of
color, and others from underrepresented groups who work on day-to-day
production: line producers, camera operators, art directors, sound mixers and
so on. The Hollywood Reporter declared
that ARRAY Crew has “fundamentally changed how Hollywood productions will be
staffed going forward.”
More than 900 productions, including “Yellowstone” and “Mare
of Easttown,” have used ARRAY Crew, said Jeffrey Tobler, the chief marketing
officer of ARRAY, DuVernay’s production company. Privately, directors and
writers voiced irritation with DuVernay, who, they said, had exploited the
“post-George Floyd moment.” But no one dared to criticize her openly. “I’m
not crazy,” one screenwriter said.
Of course, Hollywood, like many industries, does have a
clubiness about it. And pretty much everyone on the inside insists it should
open up to those who had, for decades, been kept out. But the heavy-handed
mandates, the databases, the shifting culture—in which pretty much all white
men were assumed to have gotten their jobs because they had the right tennis
buddies or ZIP code or skin color—raised the possibility of a new kind of
clubiness. When asked whether ARRAY Crew was just replacing one kind of
exclusion with another, Tobler sidestepped the question, saying the
organization had sought to “amplify underrepresented professionals.”
But the result has not just been a demographic change. It has
been an ideological and cultural transformation. We spoke to more than 25
writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of
whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. This was
the case not just among the high command at companies like Netflix, Amazon,
and Hulu, but at every level of production.
How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent
supporter. “Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke
everyone, including the woke,” one writer said. Suddenly, every conversation
with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC
attached to this?
The old-timers accustomed to being on the inside—and the
(non-BIPOC) up-and-comers afraid they’d never get there—were one-part
confused, one-part angry, and 10,000-parts scared.
“Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings
about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO
comedy-drama “The White Lotus.” “If you voice things in a certain way it can
really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you
could be racist, or you could be seen as misogynist.”
Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more
than 60 movies, including such classics as “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,”
and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts &
Sciences, said: “I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females,
whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of
content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone
too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because
they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.”
Another writer, who, like most of the writers we interviewed,
was afraid to speak openly for fear of never working again, said: “I get so
paranoid about even phone calls. It’s so scary. My close friends and my
family are just like, ‘Don’t say anything.’ It is one of those things, ‘Will
I be able to sleep at night if I say anything?’ Getting jobs in this town is
so hard, and I’m very grateful to have a great job. If there’s any so-called
ding on my record, that would just be an argument against hiring me.”
It is, said Sam Wasson, the author of “The Big Goodbye:
Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” not so different from the
McCarthy era, when everyone in Hollywood professed to believe something that
they thought everyone outside Hollywood—the country, their audience—believed.
“Hollywood was never anti-Communist,” Wasson said. “It just pretended to be.
In fact, Hollywood was never anti- or pro- anything. It was show business.
There’s no morality here.”
That amorality, coupled with a finely tuned sense of what the
audience is hungry for, what’s trending, has left Hollywood more susceptible
to the vagaries of the culture war.
“Now, they’ll just say, ‘Sorry, diversity quotas. We’re just
not allowed to hire you,’” said a 48-year-old white, male comedy writer who
was recently dropped by his agent.
Zack Stentz, a writer and producer who was a screenwriter on
“Agent Cody Banks” and the Marvel movie “Thor,” said, “A really toxic thing
that does happen is that agents will tell their clients, especially white
clients, when they don’t get a job, ‘Oh yeah, it’s because they had to hire a
minority writer.’” Stentz added: “Even if it’s true, it’s not a helpful thing
to say.”
One showrunner, afraid to send his emails to us out of fear of
them accidentally winding up on the wrong screen, agreed to show us
correspondence with agents, writers, and studio chiefs that capture the new
thinking at the highest levels of the Hollywood food chain.
Sitting in his office, in a casita behind his house and next
to the pool, we scrolled through the emails on his laptop:
“This one a dead end — they are going to limit search to women
and bipoc candidates”
“How tied to hiring him are you? There are some internally
that don’t like the idea of hiring a white guy. I wish I had a better way to
frame it. Hate this shit.”
“Studio now telling us this job must go to a female / bipoc
writer. Sorry — it sucks”
When we wrapped up, the showrunner said: “This is all going to
end in a giant class-action lawsuit.”
The creatives who embrace this agenda think all of this is
laughable, a lie, a rationalization. “HI AGENTS AND MANAGERS of white folks
in this industry,” the actor and director Natalie Morales tweeted in
November. “For fucks sake, please stop blaming ‘diversity hires’ for why your
client isn’t getting a job. It’s either that you’re not working hard enough
or that they’re not good enough. Be honest with them. You are harming us.”
Rochée Jeffrey, a black writer on “Grownish,” “Santa Inc.,”
and “Woke,” said: “I don’t care if white people aren’t comfortable because black
people are uncomfortable all the fucking time. I can’t tell you how many
times I’ve had to bite my tongue so as not to offend white sensibilities, so
I don’t give a shit if they’re nervous.”
The showrunner said that the new politics is making it hard to
get work done. He added that Human Resources departments at the studios and
streaming services are awash in complaints directed at white, male
showrunners just for doing their job. “It’s gotten to the point where I won’t
give notes on a script any longer to a woman or person of color.”
Stentz said that he hasn’t run into any problems with “young
millennial staffers with more, shall we say, of a social justice emphasis.”
But, he added, “I know other people have had less happy experiences.”
The writers’ room is supposed to be smart, funny, nasty, a
little bawdy, the kind of place where people can make jokes and riff and
wonder aloud and vomit out ideas that might become an unforgettable scene.
Another showrunner in his mid-fifties (white, male, unfortunately) said:
“You’re not allowed to pick your staff anymore, and studios won’t let you
interview anybody who isn’t a person of color.”
He added that the culture of documenting even the slightest of
slights makes him anxious. “I’m sitting in a room trying to run a show with a
collection of people I don’t totally trust.”
The politicization of content production, creatives said, was
going to be the industry’s death knell. “Especially this past year, ideology
has become more important than art,” Quentin Tarantino said in June on
Bill Maher’s show. “It’s like ideology trumps art. Ideology trumps individual
effort. Ideology trumps good.”
Exhibit A: “Woke.”
The comedy series, which premiered on Hulu in September 2020,
should have been the statement on America right now. It’s about
a black cartoonist who is awakened to systemic racism after a run-in with the
cops.
The show started off on the right foot: the showrunner, Aeysha
Carr, and the writers room she oversaw, delivered a strong batch of early
scripts, according to several writers on the show.
Then the producers weighed in. “The notes were all so
sanctimonious,” one writer said. “It was never supposed to be as serious as
it was. We wanted a thought-provoking show that made fun of woke culture and
explored notions of what a black artist’s life would be like in San Francisco
among white liberals. But we could only punch down at the safest
targets”—white men.
The irony was not lost on anyone: The black writers, starting
with Carr, were more willing to take risks and poke fun at antiracist
orthodoxy.
This led to creative differences, and soon, Carr, a black
woman, was out. She was replaced by Zander Lehmann, a white man.
Then, Lehman was out, too—replaced by Jay Dyer, who is black.
“Jay was brought on toward the end for optics,” a black writer on the show
said. “Any black guy would do. That was the energy I got.” (Carr and Keith
Knight, a co-creator of the semi-autobiographical show, declined to comment.)
The quality of the scripts suffered, and the show, which
premiered in September 2020, landed a 53 percent “green splat” average
audience review on Rotten Tomatoes.
In late 2020, Hulu renewed “Woke” for a second season. It also
replaced Dyer with a fourth showrunner—Anthony King, who is white. (King did
not reply to an email seeking comment.)
Kevin Parker, a black talent manager at Artists First, said the
skeptics miss the point. “This whole diversity thing—it’s about money,”
Parker said. Artists First represents some of the most successful black
people in Hollywood, including Jordan Peele, Tiffany Haddish, Regina Hall,
Kenya Barris, the creator of “Black-ish,” and Marshall Todd, a co-creator of
“Woke.” Recently, the firm moved from its old digs, in Beverly Hills, to a
bigger office in Century City. “It’s good business to tell more stories from
different perspectives, and that’s all this really is,” Parker
said.
Shows like Donald Glover’s award-winning “Atlanta,” Issa Rae’s
“Insecure” and Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You” are all part of this new
investment. The first two episodes of “Atlanta,” which aired September 6,
2016, reeled in 1.6 million viewers, surpassing the
record for a basic cable comedy premiere, previously held by “Inside Amy
Schumer.” “Insecure” just wrapped up a five-season run.
“Maybe it’s 15 percent about the belief that it will bring
more people into viewing content, and 85 percent about the fear of being
attacked on social media or in places like the Hollywood press or The New
York Times,” a writer and producer said. “You’ve got to be insane not to have
at the forefront of your mind all of these racial and gender and trans issues
when you’re writing something. You have to worry about the impact that
everything you do will have on your career. And that has an obvious chilling
effect on creativity.”
We emailed Franklin Leonard, the founder of the Black List—the
point of which is to elevate voices that might otherwise not get elevated—to
talk about the industry’s marked shift: What was driving it? And where did it
go next? He declined to comment.
There was a feeling, among those who didn’t hew to the new
orthodoxy, that it was becoming harder not only for certain people to find
work but for a certain kind of content—ballsier, more provocative—to get
made.
They were scared of what was happening. The fear, one
prominent director said in an email, is “the audience stops trusting us. They
begin to see us as a community twisting ourselves into a pretzel to make
every movie as woke as possible, every relationship mixed racially, every
character sexually fluid, and they decide that we are telling stories set in
a fantasyland instead of a world they know and live in. If that happens, and
they decide to throw themselves instead into video games 24/7, we will lose
them.”
Movies and shows that were once widely acclaimed but are now
verboten, writers and directors said, included “Blazing Saddles,” even though
it was co-written by Richard Pryor; “The Bad News Bears,” even though it
featured a multiracial cast; “Tootsie,” because transgender activists; and
“Rocky” (“bad guy CANNOT be black,” a director explained in an email). Nor
would “The Wizard of Oz” get greenlit. (“The munchkins? Forget it,” the
director said). Nor would “All in the Family,” probably the most influential
show of the 1970s. (“Archie Bunker”—the main character—“is basically a Trump
voter,” a producer explained.) “South Park,” which debuted in 1997, has been
grandfathered in. “Otherwise, no way,” another producer said.
All of which may explain the very strange story of the brand
new $484 million Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
In September, the Academy threw a gala celebrating the opening
of the museum. Attendees included Sophia Loren, Guillermo del Toro, Jennifer
Hudson, Issae Rae, Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry. Lady Gaga performed. Vogue covered it the
way Vogue covers things. Ted Sarandos, a co-CEO of Netflix and the chair of
the museum’s board, gave a speech. (In what is now common practice in places
like Los Angeles, an elder from the local Tongva tribe kicked things off with
a blessing and “land acknowledgement.” The sanitation worker whose job it was
to clean the podium between speakers dutifully wore his mask. The speakers
did not.)
The museum features an iconic, spherical 33,000-square-foot
theater designed by Renzo Piano, stunning exhibitions, and a two-story
restaurant called Fanny’s, named after Fanny Brice, the actor and comedienne.
But, oddly, it’s missing any mention of the small band of
mostly Jewish emigres from Eastern Europe, who created the film industry. The
people without whom there would be no entertainment industry.
In today’s climate—in which inclusion and diversity are said
to be so important—it was an especially ironic omission: The Jews were
excluded from almost everywhere. Their success signaled the
inclusivity and possibility that only Hollywood could afford them. The rise
of the industry’s founding fathers should have been an inspiring origin story
around which everyone in the community could rally. The link between then and
now seemed obvious.
Most of the media that reported on the museum missed this.
(Sharon Rosen Leib, writing in the Jewish newspaper The Forward, did
not.) It was as if they wanted to pretend that huge chunks of Hollywood’s
past hadn’t been airbrushed out.
More to the point, it was as if they wanted to forget that
Hollywood was not the cartoon it was being made out to be, suggested Sam
Wasson, the author. “Hollywood, at its best, was meritocratic,” said Wasson,
who wrote about the museum for Airmail. “If you
don’t believe me, just watch the movies of the great filmmaking eras.”
Howard Koch, who ran the Academy when it greenlit the museum,
said the museum’s higher-ups had been made aware of their oversight. “Let me
say that that wrong will be righted very soon,” he said. (This appears to be
a six-week program on
Jewish, Austrian emigres who fled the Nazis to make movies in Hollywood.)
It is important not to lose sight of the backdrop against
which all of the above has happened. On this, pretty much everyone agrees.
Over the past decade, the streaming services have upended old
business models and imposed a new ruthlessness on an industry that was
already pretty ruthless.
For years, the real money in Hollywood came from the
television channels that broadcast reruns and old movies; residuals meant
creatives were paid handsomely. But with the rise of Netflix, Amazon and
other streaming services, that model collapsed. And the vast majority of
creatives had to make do with less.
Now, most people in the industry do not earn enough to support
a family of four in Los Angeles. As money has gotten tighter, people have
gotten angrier, and things have gotten uglier. “I’d say all that probably
expedited the radicalization,” a longtime Hollywood creative said of the
shifting marketplace.
Mike White said that it is a lot easier for Hollywood to talk
about race than class. We asked him if the two college women in “The White
Lotus”—which revolves around a handful of guests at a Hawaiian resort—were
inspired by the twentysomethings starting out in writers’ rooms in Hollywood.
He said he didn’t know. (White wrote “The White Lotus” by himself.)
“But yeah,” White said, “young girls are kind of a good
vehicle to explore that, because it has this sense of trendiness and lingo
and hip speak mixed with this idea of who’s cool and who’s not cool and has
very little to do with—they have very little skin in the game. That’s the
essence of what I find disturbing about some of the stuff on the left. Does
this have anything to do with making life better for anyone, or is this just
a game? Is this just about making you feel superior?”
Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik are both writers based in Los
Angeles. Peter Kiefer’s latest story, for Los Angeles Magazine, was
about the ultimate Twitter power
broker. Peter Savodnik’s most recent story for Common Sense was
about Havana Syndrome.
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