By
Peter Kiefer And Peter Savodnik For Dailymail.Com 05:43 EDT, 12 January 2022
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..... But no one dared to criticize her openly. 'I'm not crazy,' one screenwriter said.
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.
'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?
'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.'
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. 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.
'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 ****.'
'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.'
'HI AGENTS AND MANAGERS of white folks in this industry,' the actor and director Natalie Morales
tweeted in November. 'For f---ks 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 f-----king 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 **** if they're nervous.'
The showrunner said that the new politics is making it hard to get work done. 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.'
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.'
