Interview: Darnell Hunt (Hollywood Diversity Report) — Part 4

One of the aspects about what the Black List does I resonate with most is the number of initiatives it sponsors to open doors for writers outside the Hollywood system. Initiatives like:

Partnership with producer Cassian Elwes

Partnership with producer Martin Katz

I want to see a wider variety of scripted entertainment created a more diverse group of writers. Different types of narratives. Different subcultures explored. Different voices heard. Unfortunately Hollywood does not have a good track record when it comes to diversity.

Recently I had the opportunity to speak with Darnell Hunt, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles and director of the university’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American studies. There is perhaps no one more qualified to speak on the subject than Darnell for reasons that are readily apparent in this interview.

Today in Part 4, Darnell discusses the uptick in female-driven movie projects and the impact of the internationalization of the Hollywood entertainment industry on the issue of diversity:

Scott: I think one of the strongest points of what you’re doing with the Hollywood Diversity Report is getting the message out there, the fact that films with relatively diverse casts excel at the box office and also excel in terms of return on investment.

The economics of it. I’d be interested to see what your next study does because I think we’re seeing something here with regard to women. The success of movies like The Heat, Frozen, and The Hunger Games, and now they’re doing a reboot of Ghostbusters, which is going to feature three female leads. I know Lisa Joy, the screenwriter who’s writing the first female superhero movie for Marvel.

Are we reaching a tipping point, do you think, at least in terms of gender?

Darnell: We hope so. That’s what we’re trying to show. As I said, our next annual 2015 report comes out in February. We time it each year to come out right as we’re getting into Oscar season and people are talking about these issues. With each successive report, we think we’ll be on firmer and firmer ground and it’ll be much, much harder to argue with the conclusion if we keep discovering the same thing over and over again, which we fully expect to find. That is that diversity does sell.

Look at the Fast Five series. That franchise is making an amazing amount of money, it’s directed by an Asian American director, it’s got this incredibly diverse cast, and not only does it do well in the U.S., but also overseas.

Scott: That leads to my next question which is about the internationalization of the entertainment marketplace. If more and more of Hollywood movie revenues derive from foreign countries, might that be a way to increase diversity in front of the camera and perhaps behind the cameras well? Do you think that internationalization is going to be a contributing factor to expand diversity in film and TV?

Darnell: Yeah, it has to. Diversity is a small word that means lots of things. There’s American diversity in terms of traditionally underrepresented groups we’ve talked about. Then there’s global diversity in terms of different cultures, different languages, different ethnicities, et cetera that also factors into this.

Hollywood film and TV today is a global business. The U.S. market is a huge, but then, there’s a lot of marketing to be done beyond the U.S. borders. Depending upon where the studios or where the multinationals that own the studios and networks decide to target the product has to travel somehow.

One thing we know from sociological and other studies is that a story itself is adaptive. You can tell a story, root it in one culture, and people in other cultures can relate to it. There’s this famous study of the TV show “Dallas,” that was immensely popular in Israel, of all places.

It wasn’t because people in Israel were daydreaming about the American southwest. It was because the themes, the family themes, the other issues going on in the show “Dallas” resonated with the experiences of the people in Israel.

The same could be said for probably “Scandal”. We know a lot of these American prime time soap operas now are based on telenovellas. There are certain universals that people relate to that can traverse cultures. I think having the sensitivity to storytelling that has that gravitas, people from other places are likely to relate to.

The more people you have in the room who have more experiences and come from different places, the more likely it is you’re going to hit some of those points in your storytelling, be it a movie or a TV show.

It just makes sense to me in terms of if you really want to make money and if the industry is going to continue to be viable that you have to find ways to chip away at this old, longstanding structure that’s prevented diversity from coming into the process.

Again going back to the success of the Fast Five franchise. That destroys another pillar of conventional wisdom that these diverse films just don’t sell internationally.

The more exceptions to the rule you find, after a while you can destroy the rule and you can make the point that diversity does sell and it’s good for business.

Scott: Let me end by asking you this: Are you optimistic?

Darnell: Yeah, I’m cautiously optimistic. The reason I say that is because the last couple of years as we’ve been vetting this project in the industry, we decided from the very beginning we’re like a think tank.

We’re independent. We don’t have a financial stake in the industry. We’re at a public university ‑‑ UCLA. This is a public service for us, basically. It’s a topic we think is important, not just because of access to employment for women and minorities, but also, because we know that the Hollywood industry is really powerful in terms of the images it creates.

When it’s run by a homogeneous group telling stories which marginalize other people or stereotypes them, unfortunately, in some cases, that’s problematic in terms of our advancement as a society.

We think there are two dimensions this particular project feeds into that are important. We decided from the very beginning when we did this report, we were going to reach out to the industry itself for support, but not to one or two entities, because we don’t want to be beholden to their internal agendas. Instead, we wanted to market the Bunche Center and UCLA as the Nielsen, so to speak, of diversity.

We’re going to produce the objective numbers that everyone’s going to use to diagnose whether or not we’re actually making progress or whether we’re standing still.

Moreover, if we are making progress, what are the best practices? What should we be doing? What we’ve been doing is going around to studios, networks, independent production companies, advocacy groups, guilds, to whoever has a stake in the industry and asking for a nominal amount of support.

When that’s all combined, we have the budget to produce the study. The benefit of that, of course, is if you have a stake in the study, you’re probably going to read it. In fact, all of the corporate supporters we’ve had so far have read the study.

Part of the deal is that we’re meeting with their executives and going over the data. In some cases, looking at the data broken out for their company specifically so they can diagnose what they could be doing better.

Because of that, I fervently believe that some of the changes we’re seeing this year are related to those conversations. I’m hoping we’ll continue to see progress in that regard as some of these newer, diverse shows actually do well in terms of ratings and some of the films do well at the box office. It’s a wait and see type of thing, but I’m cautiously optimistic.

I thought an appropriate way to wrap up this series would be to include the speech Harry Belafonte gave recently upon receiving the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 2014 Governors Awards.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

You may follow Darnell Hunt on Twitter: @darnell_hunt.

To download a copy of the “2014 Hollywood Diversity Report: Making Sense of the Disconnect” mentioned in the interview, click here.