Top Film Industry Stories of 2015
#10: Equality and Hollywood
By Ben Willoughby
January 18, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Birth of a Nation’s obvious racism crossed a line by 1915 standards and was heavily criticized. There were protests, and the NAACP called for the film to be banned. It was also the most popular film of the year, earning over $48 million in 1915 dollars at the box office, about $640 million in today’s money. Griffith’s next film, Intolerance, was aimed at critics who wanted to ban Birth of a Nation and argued that his critics were the real bad guys, which is often the same way these debates turn out today. Intolerance was also a financial flop that ultimately led to the sale of its studio, and its enormous Babylon set was left to decay in downtown Los Angeles.
A hundred years on, Hollywood and its audience have both changed immeasurably, but the issues of how Hollywood depicts race, gender, sexuality, history and victimhood are still discussed and debated. 2015 was a banner year – maybe even a tipping point year – as every month seemed to bring a fresh conversation about how different groups of people were treated by the industry, and how Hollywood could do better in representing them.
For women, the conversations focused on equality of opportunity. Patricia Arquette used her Oscar speech to draw attention to the lack of pay equality in Hollywood and America as a whole. Jennifer Lawrence, probably the biggest female star in Hollywood right now – but not yet the best paid, expanded on these issues in an essay on Lena Dunham’s blog Lenny, remarking that male actors were expected to be tough negotiators for their salaries and creative choices and rewarded for this, but women who did the same were seen as difficult to work with, if not spoiled brats - as the leaked Sony emails described Angelina Jolie.
Meanwhile, Amy Schumer’s “last f*able year” sketch barely had to stray from reality as Maggie Gyllenhall talked about how at 37, she was deemed too old to play the love interest for a 55-year old actor and Anne Hathaway revealed that she was losing roles for being too old at 28. Mae Whitman, who played the daughter of President Bill Pullman in the first Independence Day movie, was not even considered to reprise the role in the 2016 sequel, which went to It Girl of the moment Maika Monroe.
Women behind the camera – or the lack of them, and the lack of good opportunities for them – also came under scrutiny. Ava DuVernay tells a story of how her independent film was well-received at Sundance, and she signed to direct Selma – but had the wind taken out of her sails when speaking with a colleague who also had a Sundance hit and had been given the next Jurassic Park movie. Obviously, directing Selma was a great opportunity, but there’s an obvious question about whether these opportunities are equal. This is just one story, but the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is currently investigating the under-employment of female directors in the film and television industry.
Even choices in film merchandising came under criticism, with Disney choosing to release action figures for every Avengers character except Black Widow. Disney's merchandising team obviously didn't learn much from the experience, given the lack of Rey toys in stores for Christmas, even though she was the movie's protagonist. Black Widow came in for more controversy after Joss Whedon promised an exciting story-line for the character in Avengers: Age of Ultron, only for the movie to reveal she had been sterilized, and Jeremy Renner had to apologize for calling the character "a slut," before doing it again.
In cases where movies did offer better storylines for women, there was also pushback – the leading example being Mad Max: Fury Road, with its anti-patriarchy theme and the prominent role given to Charlize Theron’s character Imperator Furiosa at the expense of Max. In early 2016, the line between men's rights activists and publicity-seekers became incredibly thin when a group declared victory over Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
These issues are not black and white. “Pity the poor underpaid actresses” and “Actors bring in more box office” are common refrains. Anne Hathaway, having benefited from the system when she was a younger actress, made the point that she cannot immediately turn around and complain that the system is unfair. Jennifer Lawrence noted that “an element of wanting to be liked” impacted her decision not to negotiate harder for her paycheck. Change is not going to happen overnight, but actresses talking openly about their Hollywood experiences is going to help drive it forward.
Equality of opportunity was also of concern to non-white actors as movies such as Aloha and Pan were accused of white-washing through their casting choices of Emma Stone as the Hawaiian/Chinese/Swedish Alison Ng and Rooney Mara as the Native American princess Tiger Lily in Pan. Even The Martian, which featured one of the more diverse casts in 2015 Hollywood, was challenged for casting a white actress in a role that was Korean-American in the original novel. These issues are not going away in 2016, with Doctor Strange’s choice of Tilda Swinton to play The Ancient One – depicted as an elderly Tibetan man in the comics, or Scarlet Johansson playing the lead in the film version of Ghost in the Shell.
The issue of non-white actors taking on traditionally white roles also cropped up, most notably with the suggestion that Idris Elba could possibly play James Bond, and whether the core James Bond audience would still be able to relate to the character. (Michael B. Jordan playing Johnny Storm was so 2014!)
Behind the camera, the return of Project Greenlight started a discussion about the role that diversity plays in creating film and whether it should be determined through casting (as suggested by Matt Damon, who was probably more focussed on creating a successful The Apprentice-like TV show), or more broadly through the collaborative process of film-making.
Again, these issues are complex and require perspective. As Viola Davis pointed out in her Emmy acceptance speech, “you cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there”, which is one reason why every Oscar nominee in 2015 was white. Opportunities for actors of color are much rarer than opportunities for white actors, so it matters more when a white actor is cast in an “Asian” role than it does when an Asian actor is cast in a “white” one. But signing big movie stars helps get movies financed, and most of the big movie stars happen to be white – which is why Christian Bale was cast as Moses in 2014's Exodus: Gods and Kings.
The Martian did have a diverse cast and scheduling problems for Irfan Khan meant he was replaced by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the biggest name the film-makers could get at short notice. But on the other, “sorry, only one East Asian person can work at NASA” is not a great reason to not cast an Asian actor in an Asian role. And ultimately, the lack of acting opportunities for non-white actors, and the roles (as Aziz Ansari observed) are “often defined by ethnicity and often require accents” means that fewer non-white people pursue acting as a career, which in turn means that it’s harder to find the right actors for non-white roles.
Although LGBT characters are nearly absent in mainstream film, there were plenty of independent and prestige films focussed on LGBT issues, such as Carol, Stonewall, About Ray, Freeheld and The Danish Girl. Yet these were not free of controversy, either. Stonewall received the most attention for its choice of a fictional white Midwesterner as the main character, while characters based on real life Latina and black trans protestors were pushed into secondary roles. Other films such as Freeheld and The Danish Girl were pointed out for telling their stories from the straight perspective with straight characters responding to a trans person in their life, while About Ray suffered some criticism for casting a straight actress, Elle Fanning, in the lead trans role – trans-actors facing a similar Catch-22 as non-white actors.
These discussions are starting to have an impact on Hollywood, which is re-evaluating itself to address its biggest challenge of how to extract more revenue from an increasingly diverse America and a global audience.
Diversity is becoming a bigger selling point – the most touted example being Furious 7, which took in over $350 domestic and a further $1.16 billion internationally. No matter where they lived, audiences were able to see someone like themselves doing cool stuff, and they responded by opening their wallets. The diversity in the film is one of the elements of that franchise’s continued success, and other studios are looking to crack that formula (if they haven’t already done so – see Star Wars: The Force Awakens).
Similarly, the success of Straight Outta Compton (which faced questions of its own around the treatment of women) demonstrated once again that there is always an audience waiting for the right movie to come out. Meanwhile, bombs such as Pan and Aloha didn’t fail because of their white-washed casting – they were just bad movies – but those casting choices did turn off a section of the potential audience and ended up making a bad thing worse. So, just as the enormous box office from Birth of a Nation overrode all other concerns, so too is the enormous box office from movies that play to a diverse audience, or that effectively target a large segment of it.
In October, Hollywood bigwigs met for two days to discuss how to address gender parity. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences send out a record number of invitations to join in 2015 with the explicit goal of increasing (albeit fractionally) the diversity of its membership. Over time, the dialogue around equality of opportunity, what it means and - most importantly - how much money it is going to bring in is going to impact the types of movies that get made, the people who are going to make them and potentially even the people who decide which movies get made.
While 2016 is too early to see the full impact of the debates we saw in 2015, you can see which way the wind is blowing. Looking at the release schedule, the all-female Ghostbusters reboot is the only movie that stands out as possibly bringing a different perspective, but other re-treads such as Tarzan, The Jungle Book and Ben-Hur have had to factor in modern sensitivities in plot and/or casting decisions. Meanwhile, Lionsgate and Alex Proyas have taken the unprecedented step of issuing a pre-emptive apology for the casting in Gods of Egypt, stating unequivocally that it did not meet their standards. (From seeing the trailer, they should be apologizing for the movie). Looking further ahead, Disney has signed Ryan Coogler to direct Black Panther and is actively seeking female directors for upcoming Marvel and Star Wars movies.
But regardless of these changes, debates about race, gender, sexuality, equality and how these are treated in Hollywood will be around for the next hundred years.