Lederman: When Hollywood’s voice was needed the most, it shied away

2025/03/05 Leave a comment

Didn’t watch but this is a good take:

….Hollywood does not usually shy away from the political – not in the content it creates and not in speeches past. The self-righteousness can be cringey, sure. But right now, it would be useful – a high-profile spotlight to drive some sort of protest movement. Regrettably, on Sunday night, the urgency of the moment was buried under obligatory thank-yous, shiny sequins and fuzzy platitudes.

Source: When Hollywood’s voice was needed the most, it shied away

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Paul: What Does Hollywood Owe Its Jewish Founders?

2024/05/24 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Jews who founded Hollywood — and make no mistake, the big studio heads were overwhelmingly Jewish — shared several things: ambition, creative vision and killer business instincts.

But more than anything else, the men who were the driving forces behind Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Universal, Columbia and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shared a very 20th-century sense of being Jewish in America. They were assimilationists who considered themselves American above all else and who molded Hollywood to reflect and shape their American ideals.

“Above all things, they wanted to be regarded as Americans, not Jews,” Neal Gabler wrote in his definitive 1988 history, “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.” Louis B. Mayer, a co-founder of MGM, went so far as to claim that his birth papers had been lost during immigration and to declare his birthday henceforth as the Fourth of July.

It was troubling, then, that when the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in 2021, it neglected to integrate Jews into its portrayal of Hollywood’s early days and later successes despite obvious attentiveness to other ethnic and racial groups. Beyond a few brief mentions, including Billy Wilder fleeing Nazi Germany, a photo of the MGM mogul and academy founder Louis B. Mayer looming over Judy Garland, and a few scoundrels in an exhibit on #MeToo, Jews were absent. Jewish studio heads, business leaders and actors were almost entirely shut out, an oversight that led to much outcry.

“It’s sort of like building a museum dedicated to Renaissance painting and ignoring the Italians,” the Hollywood historian and Brandeis University professor Thomas Doherty told Rolling Stoneat the time.

When I asked the museum’s former director and president Bill Kramer, now the C.E.O. of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, what he made of the omission, he did not acknowledge the error but said museum officials took the criticism seriously. “It was clear that this was something that certain stakeholders were expecting,” he said. “That in some visitors’ minds this was an omission that needed to be corrected.” Did he think the criticism was valid? “It was how people felt. And those feelings were real and feelings are valid.”

The museum has compensated for its neglect by creating what it calls its first permanent exhibit, “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” which opened on Sunday.

The exhibit has three components. The first provides a panoramic view of how the city of Los Angeles evolved to accommodate an influx of immigrants, including Jews, the development of the film industry and the needs of its diverse population, from the Oglala Lakota people to Chinese immigrants, reflected in archival footage and an interactive table map. The second part tracks the history of the city’s studios, and the third screens an original documentary, “From the Shtetl to the Studio: The Jewish Story of Hollywood.” The space is intimate but expansive in its vision and is well executed.

So how were Jews left out in the first place? Some sources told Rolling Stone after the opening that those who might have applied more pressure earlier, chose to lay low during the museum’s development. Some of this reticence surely emerged from the tenor of the moment, with its focus on racial representation and what Kramer referred to as “pro-social” causes — gay rights, women’s equality, the labor movement — which the museum details in a dedicated section and weaves in throughout.

It may also be attributable to an uneasy tension among Jews around their place in America — eager to be integrated, included and successful, while at the same time wary of possible exclusion or alternately, too much notice, inciting a backlash and reanimating underlying antisemitism. The recent outburst of antisemitism that we’ve witnessed on college campuses and in protests against Israel had long been stewing within academia and across culturalinstitutions.

Throughout the Academy Museum’s development, much of which occurred after the rise of campaigns like #OscarsSoWhite, officials made clear that it would emphasize diversity and inclusivity. The museum highlights nonwhite and other marginalized contributors to the industry to help remedy the industry’s long record of exclusion.

“I don’t think you open a cultural institution at this historical moment and not be reflective of a diversity of histories and perspectives,” Jacqueline Stewart, the museum’s current director and president, told me when I asked about the museum’s focus on representation. She pushed back on the criticism. “There werereferences to Jewish filmmakers from the very beginning,” she said, mentioning a clip of a Steven Spielberg Oscar acceptance speech. “That seems to get lost.”

But in bending over backward to highlight various identity groups at every point, the museum unintentionally leaves out part of what makes the movies such a unifying and essentially popular medium: the ability to transcend those differences. In a pluralistic, immigrant nation, Hollywood helped create a uniquely American culture that speaks to a broad audience. That’s part of what we call the magic of movies.

If nothing else, Hollywood is relentlessly evolving, perhaps now more than ever under the threat of A.I., increased economic pressures and consolidation. The Academy Museum, too, continues to change. Much of what I saw in the museum — which must be said is a marvel and a must-see for any film lover — had been switched out for new material since I first visited in June 2022. Elements in the core exhibit are in constant rotation, in part due to fragility of its artifacts, like costumes; in part to reflect the immensity of its collection; and in other cases, in a then overt effort to hit all the bases among competing interests.

If this flux is indicative of the Academy Museum’s stated intent to represent the changing priorities of American audiences, then it also holds the potential to move beyond this current moment, with its intentional and unintended divisiveness.

Source: What Does Hollywood Owe Its Jewish Founders?

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Report: Audiences demand diversity in films, Hollywood can do more

2024/03/09 Leave a comment

The regular annual report, just ahead of the Oscars:

Ahead of Hollywood’s biggest night, UCLA published a new study Thursday looking at diversity within the film industry.

It found people of color making gains in the major categories in 2023 — film leads, total actors, directors and writers. However, women suffered losses in the acting and writing categories. Both groups remain underrepresented in all major employment categories, according to the study.

Hollywood was in a tough spot in 2023, still recovering from the pandemic and undergoing strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. But movies such as Barbie and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes helped bolster box offices, according to the study, which examined global and domestic earnings of theatrically released movies.

The study found that in 2023, films with casts that were 31 to 40 percent people of color earned the highest median global box office receipts, while films with casts that were 11 percent people of color were the poorest performers. The study also found that female moviegoers bought the majority of opening weekend domestic tickets for three of the top 10 movies in 2023.

The study noted that franchise films posted the highest earnings of their film series when they embraced more diversity. The examples included movies such as Creed 3, Scream 6, and John Wick: Chapter 4, which featured lead actors of color and casts with 50 percent or more actors of color.

“Films that embrace diversity are more likely to resonate with audiences, leading to box-office success and ultimately long-term sustainability for the industry,” wrote Darnell Hunt in a statement. Hunt is the UCLA executive vice chancellor and provost, and co-founder of the report.

Behind the scenes, representation for lead actors, total actors, directors, and writers of color hit 11-year highs. Also, top films featuring more than 50 percent cast diversity outnumbered less diverse films. But the study cautions that these numbers are likely a reflection of decisions made in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd. “The question is if this upward trend of diversity will continue,” Hunt wrote.

Women did not make any gains in the top Hollywood jobs in 2023, according to the study. The only category where they remained stagnant was in directing, where 1.5 out of 10 theatrical film directors were women. Films directed by white women were found most likely to have the smallest budgets, despite the huge success of Barbie, which made over $1.4 billion globally.

While this study only examined theatrical releases, a separate study looking at the streaming industry is set to come out later this year.

Source: Report: Audiences demand diversity in films, Hollywood can do more

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ICYMI: A Major Hollywood Diversity Report Shows Little Change—Except for One Promising Stat

2023/08/22 Leave a comment

Of note:

Over the last 16 years, Hollywood has certainly discussed the need for better representation in onscreen. Movements like #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo dominated red-carpet conversation and social media. And there has been some change: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences grew and diversified its voting body in hopes of nominating a wider array of movies and performances—and the nominees and winners have in fact been more diverse in recent years. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

But a new study from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative suggests that, despite the talk of progress, not much has actually changed onscreen. Stacy L. Smith, a professor of communications and head of the initiative, led a review of 1,600 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2022. The largest study of its kind, it examines a whopping 69,858 speaking roles across those movies to see whether Hollywood has generated a significant shift in representation in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, LGBTQ+ identity, or disabilities. 

“It’s all talk and little action,” says Smith. “Many of these numbers did not move or went backwards. That shows us that the industry does not know how to change without the intervention of experts to work with them to change the systemic processes that lead to inequality and discrimination.”

But the study did identify one major exception: In the last 16 years, the percentage of Asian characters with speaking roles onscreen skyrocketed from 3.4% to 15.9%. In that same time period, Black characters saw little change, from 13.0% to 13.4%, and the proportion of Latino characters grew from just 3.3% to just 5.2%. “My initial reaction is I’m very happy but very guilty,” says Bing Chen, the CEO and Co-Founder of Gold House, an organization that champions and invests in Asian Pacific creators and companies. “We need to support all multicultural communities.” But he finds the data encouraging: change is achievable across demographics.

Chen identifies three major milestones for Asian characters onscreen in the last several years. In 2018, Crazy Rich Asians, the first film by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority Asian cast in 25 years since The Joy Luck Club premiered in 1993, became a genuine blockbuster. The next year, The Farewell and Parasite—movies partially or completely featuring non-English dialogue—performed well at the box office against their budgets and won awards. Parasite won four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film. “The year former President Trump was spitting all sorts of really anti-Asian xenophobic commentary, talking about ‘kung flu’ and all that nonsense,” says Chen. “So when Parasitewon, that was a really big affirming moment of, we’re actually creatively excellent, even if we don’t speak your language.” 

And last year, Everything Everywhere All at Once became a surprise box office smash and the most-awarded film of all time.

And that’s just in film. On TV, shows like Fresh Off the Boat, Squid Game, and Kim’s Convenience have had a major cultural impact. And cultural exports from Asian countries have gone mainstream in the U.S. “There’s no question that the rise of K-Pop as a institution has directly and indirectly contributed to the acculturation of the masses to K-content, writ-large,” says Chen. Smith agrees that while the U.S. dominated the global pop culture space for decades, much of that power has shifted to Asian countries that are exporting music, television, film, and even social media content to the U.S. at high rates, and K-Pop paved the way for mass cultural events like the Korean show Squid Game.

Here’s why experts think we’ve seen a shift onscreen—and why there’s still work to do.

Most underrepresented groups have seen little progress

Movies remain very white, very straight, very cis, and very male. 

The few highlights in the data come with major caveats. As Barbie‘s massive box office numbers demonstrate, female-led pictures can succeed when studios actually make them. Executives are finally starting to learn that lesson: 44% of leading or co-leading roles went to women and girls in 2022, a 16-year-peak and more than double the number in 2007. But, on the whole, casts are still dominated by men. The percentage of female characters with speaking roles ticked up just 4.7 percentage points from 29.9% in 2007 to 34.6% last year. 

And while women of color made major strides in representation onscreen—19% of movies in 2022 featured a woman of color in a leading role, up from an abysmal 1% in 2007—there has been little progress throughout the late 2010s and 2020s. The percentage of women of color in leading roles has remained flat for years. And 70 of the top 100 films of 2022 featured no women of color in any role. 

“We now have 16 years of evidence that shows that activism failed particularly with girls and women since it’s almost a flatline from 2007 to 2022,” says Smith. The advocacy arm of Time’s Up, the celebrity-filled organization that sprung up in the wake of #MeToo and promised to fight for gender equity in film, imploded last year. Whispers that after all the talk of change in 2017 the pendulum is swinging back to a more regressive approach to business have spread through Hollywood.

Other data points proved even more bleak. Only 2.1% of speaking characters in the top films of 2022 identified as LGBTQ+, a percentage which has not changed meaningfully since 2014 when the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative began measuring. There were 5 transgender characters in the top 100 films of 2022, a 9-year high point, but 4 of these 5 characters appeared in a single film: Bros.

And the number of speaking characters with a disability in a major film was just 1.9% in 2022, a drop from 2.4% in 2015 when Annenberg started recording stats.

In light of these data, the success of Asian characters onscreen stands out even more. Chen argues that those successes have come only after years of advocacy.

There’s been a renaissance of Asian stories onscreen

Chen attributes the rise of Asian representation in film to several factors. One is simply the proliferation of content largely thanks to streamers’ constant quest for new programming to court more subscribers: More storytelling has translated to more diverse storytelling. The rallying cry around #StopAsianHate tied to acts of violence against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic helped motivate activists to push for greater representation of Asian stories onscreen in hopes that movies could evoke empathy and relatability. But Chen says the efforts to tell Asian stories stretch beyond that one movement. “I would say within the community, the way we think about it is of course we still care about #StopAsianHate and ensuring that the safety and belonging of our community, but our community cares even more about creative excellence, as opposed to just sort of representation.”

And then there’s the surge in adaptations of bestselling books written by Asian authors, like Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series, and the forthcoming Interior Chinatown show, based on the book by Charles Yu. “You see a rise in both the number of Asian authors writing books and making the bestseller list but also, equally important, the quick adaptation of those works by Asian producers,” Chen says. “This has been a very concentrated effort in the community over the last three to four years.” 

In terms of original content, Chen points to writer-directors with newfound creative control over their projects. Beef’s Lee Sung Jin, Turning Red’s Domee Shi, Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung, Joy Ride’s Adele Lim, Never Have I Ever’s Mindy Kaling have gotten to tell stories “that reflect their real lived experience,” he says. There have, of course, long been Asian creators in Hollywood, but finally these particular movies and shows in all their specificity and detail have been greenlit. In a previous op-ed for TIME, Chen and his co-founder Jeremy Tran argued that diversity in studio leadership can trickle down to the content itself, pointing to the power of studio big wigs like Bela Bajaria and Marian Lee Dicus at Netflix, Albert Cheng at Amazon Prime Video, and Asad Ayaz and Nancy Lee at Disney.

Smith casts some skepticism on the notion that Hollywood has altered what stories it brings to the big screen—even in the face of massive box office takes. Yes, the ticket sales for Crazy Rich Asians afforded director Jon M. Chu the opportunity to direct other films with notably diverse casts, like In the Heights and the forthcoming Wicked adaptation. And the success of that same film boosted the career of Michelle Yeoh, who went on to win an Oscar for another film with a predominantly Asian cast, Everything Everywhere All at Once. But to Smith, those exceptions can obfuscate the work that still needs to be done.

“If you can think of a few instances, what that does is cause you to overestimate a particular event,” she says. “So if you call up someone like Jon Chu or the Daniels [directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once], you’re going to think, ‘Oh things are actually getting better.’ I would challenge the studios to look at the data.” The data, she says, suggests that shifts in Asian representation in film can largely be attributed to increased audience appetite for foreign films, not efforts by American studios to diversity Hollywood. “It’s a function of the box office changing,” she argues, “not the decisions of legacy studios.”

An influx of international content

What we watch has fundamentally shifted in the last few years. Back in 2020, when he won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film for Parasite, Korean director Bong Joon Ho said in his acceptance speech, “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” He could not have known then how quickly Americans would heed his advice. Parasite went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars and proved to be a box office phenomenon in the U.S.

Around the time of Parasite’s history-making Oscars win, streaming services, particularly Netflix, were taking a more international approach to producing and acquiring content. Audiences seemed decreasingly deterred by those pesky subtitles. Crossover hits like the Korean show Squid Game and the Indian film RRR have become some of the streamer’s biggest hits. (Squid Game set a record for the most watched show on Netflix ever and ranked No. 1 in more than 90 countries across the world.

“Netflix is spending literally billions of dollars in K-content and Indian content,” says Chen. “Korea and India, in particular, are becoming the dominant successful exporters of pop content.” The studio has invested in massive production infrastructure in Korea and is increasingly focused on doing the same thing in India in addition to acquiring original content in those countries.

Netflix is certainly the most globally minded of the American studios. “Bela Bajaria is way out in front as the Chief Content Officer at Netflix,” says Smith. “As a woman who comes from an underrepresented background, she’s hitting it out of the park in terms of curating global talent. The entire industry is following her league.” The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has previously found that Netflix performs better than traditional Hollywood studios on representation metrics, both in the U.S. and globally.

Beyond streaming, content from Asian countries has become increasingly dominant on TikTok and YouTube, platforms where Gen Z especially consumes most of its content. Younger viewers who hail from multicultural homes and are increasingly connected to people across the globe through social media don’t have the same bias toward a single language that past generations do.

In film, Katherine Pieper, program director at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, says the pandemic helped accelerate the shift toward international content as viewers sought out new content while stuck on our couches at home rather than relying on whatever Hollywood was putting in movie theaters for entertainment. “With the change in the box office from 2020 to 2022, we saw a couple of types of broad categories of films in the top 100 that had been relatively minimal in previous years,” she says, “namely anime films, Bollywood films, and international films set primarily in South Asia or in Japan with primarily Asian characters.”

Pieper and Smith attribute the influx in Asian representation largely to those foreign films suddenly overtaking their American counterparts at the domestic box office rather than any major change in how the traditional studios make decisions. “Each year there’s between five and eight films that meet those descriptions that we hadn’t seen before 2021, in addition to a couple of films from the U.S. that might have played the role, like Raya and the Last Dragon, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and The Eternals.” 

But of course, those few North American releases can have an impact as well. The Canadian show Kim’s Convenience found a significant American audience on Netflix and launched the career of Simu Liu, who became the first Asian man to lead a major American superhero film in Marvel’s Shang-Chi. That movie, in turn, afforded him opportunities in other mainstream movies, like Barbie. The impetus shouldn’t be only on creators of color to write for and cast non-white actors. 

“If an Asian writer-producer is producing a piece, there are probably going to be some Asian characters. But if a non-Asian one is, what is their propensity to write an Asian character and why?” asks Chen. “My best inference is that writers’ rooms have become more diverse in general—though there’s still a long way to go obviously.” 

That progress, of course, ties directly to issues being raised by the actors and writers on strike in Hollywood. The WGA has revealed that while the proportion of underrepresented writers has grown in the last several years, they largely occupy lower-level positions and are the first to be put in financial straits when studios decide to forgo writers’ rooms or make major cuts. “Creators of color are the first people to be penalized in these strikes for all sorts of systemic reasons,” says Chen. Both Smith and Chen are eagerly watching the strikes to see how changes to writers’ rooms might impact long-term trends. The ultimate goal, they say, is to empower writers and actors of color to continue to tell their own stories—and pressure studios to back their visions.

Source: A Major Hollywood Diversity Report Shows Little Change—Except for One Promising Stat

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Helping Hollywood Avoid Claims of Bias Is Now a Growing Business

2022/04/04 Leave a comment

Business will find a way…

In the summer of 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd spurred a racial reckoning in America, Carri Twigg’s phone kept ringing.

Ms. Twigg, a founding partner of a production company named Culture House, was asked over and over again if she could take a look at a television or movie script and raise any red flags, particularly on race.

Culture House, which employs mostly women of color, had traditionally specialized in documentaries. But after a few months of fielding the requests about scripts, they decided to make a business of it: They opened a new division dedicated solely to consulting work.

“The frequency of the check-ins was not slowing down,” Ms. Twigg said. “It was like, oh, we need to make this a real thing that we offer consistently — and get paid for.”

Though the company has been consulting for a little more than a year — for clients like Paramount Pictures, MTV and Disney — that work now accounts for 30 percent of Culture House’s revenue.

Culture House is hardly alone. In recent years, entertainment executives have vowed to make a genuine commitment to diversity, but are still routinely criticized for falling short. To signal that they are taking steps to address the issue, Hollywood studios have signed contracts with numerous companies and nonprofits to help them avoid the reputational damage that comes with having a movie or an episode of a TV show face accusations of bias.

“When a great idea is there and then it’s only talked about because of the social implications, that must be heartbreaking for creators who spend years on something,” Ms. Twigg said. “To get it into the world and the only thing anyone wants to talk about are the ways it came up short. So we’re trying to help make that not happen.”

The consulting work runs the gamut of a production. The consulting companies sometimes are asked about casting decisions as well as marketing plans. And they may also read scripts to search for examples of bias and to scrutinize how characters are positioned in a story.

“It’s not only about what characters say, it’s also about when they don’t speak,” Ms. Twigg said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s not enough agency for this character, you’re using this character as an ornament, you’re going to get dinged for that.’”

When a consulting firm is on retainer, it can also come with a guaranteed check every month from a studio. And it’s a revenue stream developed only recently.

“It really exploded in the last two years or so,” said Michelle K. Sugihara, the executive director of Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, a nonprofit. The group, called CAPE, is on retainer to some of the biggest Hollywood studios, including Netflix, Paramount, Warner Bros., Amazon, Sony and A24.

Of the 100 projects that CAPE has consulted on, Ms. Sugihara said, roughly 80 percent have come since 2020, and they “really increased” after the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021. “That really ramped up attention on our community,” she said.

Ms. Sugihara said her group could be actively involved throughout the production process. In one example, she said she told a studio that all of the actors playing the heroes in an upcoming scripted project appeared to be light-skinned East Asian people whereas the villains were portrayed by darker-skinned East Asian actors.

“That’s a red flag,” she said. “And we should talk about how those images may be harmful. Sometimes it’s just things that people aren’t even conscious about until you point it out.”

Ms. Sugihara would not mention the name of the project or the studio behind it. In interviews, many cited nondisclosure agreements with the studios and a reluctance to embarrass a filmmaker as reasons they could not divulge specifics.

Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization, said her group had been doing consulting work informally for years with the networks and studios. Finally, she decided to start charging the studios for their labor — work that she compared to “billable hours.”

“Here we were consulting with all these content creators across Hollywood and not being compensated,” said Ms. Ellis, the organization’s president since 2013. “When I started at GLAAD we couldn’t pay our bills. And meanwhile here we are with the biggest studios and networks in the world, helping them tell stories that were hits. And I said this doesn’t make sense.”

In 2018, she created the GLAAD Media Institute — if the networks or studios wanted any help in the future, they’d have to become a paying member of the institute.

Initially, there was some pushback but the networks and studios would eventually come around. In 2018, there were zero members of the GLAAD Media Institute. By the end of 2021, that number had swelled to 58, with nearly every major studio and network in Hollywood now a paying member.

Scott Turner Schofield, who has spent some time working as a consultant for GLAAD, has also been advising networks and studios on how to accurately depict transgender people for years. But he said the work had increased so significantly in recent years that he was brought on board as an executive producer for a forthcoming horror movie produced by Blumhouse.

“I’ve gone from someone who was a part-time consultant — barely eking by — to being an executive producer,” he said.

Those interviewed said that it was a win-win arrangement between the consultancies and the studios.

“The studios at the end of the day, they want to produce content but they want to make money,” said Rashad Robinson, the president of the advocacy organization Color of Change. “Making money can be impeded because of poor decisions and not having the right people at the table. So the studios are going to want to seek that.”

He did caution, however, that simply bringing on consultants was not an adequate substitute for the structural change that many advocates want to see in Hollywood.

“This doesn’t change the rules with who gets to produce content and who gets to make the final decisions of what gets on the air,” he said. “It’s fine to bring folks in from the outside but that in the end is insufficient to the fact that across the entertainment industry there is still a problem in terms of not enough Black and brown people with power in the executive ranks.”

Still, the burgeoning field of cultural consultancy work may be here to stay. Ms. Twigg, who helped found Culture House with Raeshem Nijhon and Nicole Galovski, said that the volume of requests she was getting was “illustrative of how seriously it’s being taken, and how comprehensively it’s being brought into the fabric of doing business.”

“From a business standpoint, it’s a way for us to capitalize on the expertise that we have gathered as people of color who have been alive in America for 30 or 40 years,” she said.

Source: Helping Hollywood Avoid Claims of Bias Is Now a Growing Business

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Define American Releases Best Practices Guide on Immigrant Representation in Film and TV 

2021/11/06 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Define American has released “Telling Authentic Immigrant Stories: A Reference Guide for the Entertainment Industry,” a best practices’ guide in telling immigrant stories, with a focus on film and television.

The guide is aimed at individual content creators, as well as production companies and studios at large, and it features detailed descriptions, definitions, historical timelines and dates, and other resources about specific communities. There is an emphasis on such still-evolving topics as DACA and, in partnership with Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and International Refugee Assistance Project, global climate displacement.

“Our research shows that immigrants continue to be underrepresented on screen. As such, Hollywood has a unique opportunity, a unique power, and a unique responsibility to meet the moment and make meaningful cultural change by authentically and accurately telling the disparate stories of our country,” said Jose Antonio Vargas, founder, Define American. “We are making great strides forward with more diverse and equitable hiring in front of and behind the camera, more inclusive stories, more immigrant writers, but we still have much work to do. We encourage content creators at every level to use this guide as a starting point in that journey.”

The new guide centers six key things for those creating and/or greenlighting new content to consider. First among them is hiring more immigrants in the writers’ room and on the crew and casting them too so their perspectives can be heard and considered for the storytelling. Additionally, the guide suggests engaging with immigrant communities to get an even wider and deeper range of perspectives, seeking expert opinions, focusing stories on universal themes, being sensitive to risk and privacy and empowering immigrant characters to control their own narratives (rather than telling tales of white saviorism, for example).

The new guide also points out that not all immigrants are Latine, incorporating data and key findings from the organization’s 2020 television impact study, titled “Change the Narrative, Change the World” and published with USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center, to support this point. Through new partnerships with Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) and The UndocuBlack Network, the guide puts a spotlight on AAPI and Black immigrants, noting they are still grossly underrepresented on TV at the moment. AAPI immigrants, for example, comprise 12% of immigrants on TV even though the study shows they represent 26% of the U.S. immigrant population.

It also dives into preferred terms, such as “undocumented immigrant” or “unauthorized immigrant” and offers arguments for moving away from stereotypes such as “the good immigrant,” “the marriage miracle” or only telling fear-based stories (such as immigrant characters worrying they will be deported). The guide includes a timeline of immigration law’s history and some other government and geography-based facts important pieces of the immigration narrative.

Define American is a media advocacy and culture change organization that has consulted on more than 100 film and television projects, including ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” the CW’s “Roswell, New Mexico” and the former NBC sitcom “Superstore.” The organization releases studies and guides periodically and also provides grants that prioritize undocumented and formerly undocumented artists.

Source: Define American Releases Best Practices Guide on Immigrant Representation in Film and TV (EXCLUSIVE)

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Hollywood reaps the rewards of becoming more diverse

2021/08/05 Leave a comment

Of note:

HATTIE MCDANIEL was the first black person to win an Oscar, in 1940. She received her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of “Mammy”, a house slave in “Gone With the Wind”. Although critics allege that the film romanticised slavery in the antebellum South, McDaniel thought that her Oscar represented a watershed moment for America. “My own people were especially happy. They felt that in honouring me, Hollywood had honoured the entire race,” she wrote in the Hollywood Reporter in 1947.

Racial minorities have made significant gains in Hollywood in the 80 years since. Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón of the University of California, Los Angeles, have tracked the diversity of film roles for the top 200 films (ranked by box-office revenues and viewers’ ratings) released in cinemas and on streaming platforms since 2011. They found that 2020 was the most diverse year yet. Actors from racial minorities were cast in 40% of leading roles last year, compared with an average of 27% for 2018-19. Women’s representation in leading roles increased towards parity, too (see centre chart).

Although racial minorities as a whole and women nearly match their shares of the American population in acting roles, they remain under-represented behind the camera. They made up about one-fifth to one-quarter of the directors and writers of the top 200 films last year. And in front of the camera some races are more present than others: Latinos, who make up 19% of America’s population, were cast in 5.7% of all acting roles last year (see right-hand chart).

The report also found that films with the most diverse casts tended to do better at the box office. Among the ten most successful films released in cinemas in 2020, eight had casts of which at least 30% were non-white. By a similar measure, the dozen poorest-performing films last year also had the least diverse casts. Although the covid-19 pandemic disrupted theatrical releases last year a similar pattern emerges among movies released through streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+. Six of the top ten rated films released online had casts that were at least 40% non-white.

Although audiences appear to be favouring a handful of blockbusters with more diversity, the most diverse films tend to have smaller budgets, on average. Nearly three-quarters of films with a minority leading actor had a budget of less than $20m, compared with 58% of films with white leading actors. A similar disparity exists between female- and male-led films. This may be because these films are also more likely to be directed by minorities or women, who are given smaller budgets and, in turn, cast actors who are female or from minority races.

The study also finds that films with the best chance of winning an Oscar in recent years have had the least diverse cast of actors. Since 2016 the social-media hashtag #OscarsSoWhite has brought attention to the lack of diversity among Academy Award nominees. Efforts have since been made to grapple with the problem. At the Academy Awards in April, half of the nominees for leading roles were racial minorities. Daniel Kaluuya, a British actor born to Ugandan parents, won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in “Judas and the Black Messiah”—the first film with an all-black production team to be nominated for Best Picture. Youn Yuh-jung, of South Korea, won Best Supporting Actress, and Chloé Zhao, a film-maker born in China, won Best Director. More change is under way. From 2024 the Academy Awards will screen out films that do not meet strict diversity thresholds. What McDaniel started may at last be bearing fruit.

Source: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/30/hollywood-reaps-the-rewards-of-becoming-more-diverse?utm_campaign=data-newsletter&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2021-08-03&utm_content=data-nl-article-link-4&etear=data_nl_4

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This group is working behind the scenes to change the stories you see on TV

2020/10/13 Leave a comment

Of interest and importance:

ICE agents raid a big-box store, racing down the aisles to apprehend an employee. A DACA recipient who’s a doctor frets over her future. And a family separated by deportation struggles to connect on the phone.

These scenes on TV shows aren’t just quick plot twists ripped from the headlines in the age-old tradition of primetime television. They’re part of a deeper effort behind the scenes to shape new immigrant characters and storylines.
And an advocacy group known as Define American is leading the charge.
Their hope: That changing the conversations in Hollywood’s writers’ rooms will pave the way for immigration policy changes in Washington, too.
“This is long-term work,” says Jose Antonio Vargas, Define American’s founder. “This is not like, ‘How do we pass a bill next month?’ This is, ‘How do we create a culture in which we see immigrants as people deserving of dignity?’ These policies don’t make sense if we don’t see immigrants as people.”
Vargas knows the power of TV to shape stories and change minds. After revealing he was an undocumented immigrant in a 2011 New York Times magazine piece, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist became a high-profile advocate and filmmaker whose documentaries appeared on MTV and CNN.
When he first arrived in the United States from the Philippines in the 1990s, Vargas says that he — like many immigrants — got to know his new home by watching TV.
“When we get to this country, our most effective teacher is the television screen. … The way that I talk is because of all the TV and all the popular culture that I consumed,” he says. “For me, the most effective way of becoming American was being exposed to the media.”
Now the organization he founded is flipping that idea on its head.
So far, Vargas says, Define American has consulted on 75 film and TV projects across 22 networks.
The organization says stories it’s shaped have appeared on NBC’s “Superstore,” ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” OWN’s “Queen Sugar” and CW’s “Roswell, New Mexico.” And they hope the list will grow.
Just as “Frasier,” “The Golden Girls” and “Will ​& Grace” helped him learn about American slang and society, Vargas says a new generation of TV shows can be a bridge, too — this time helping Americans better understand immigrants’ stories.

The view from inside the writers’ room

The first time she spoke with writers from “Superstore,” Elizabeth Grizzle Voorhees felt like she had to break some difficult news.
A season into the NBC sitcom, which portrays life for workers inside a big-box store, the writers had taken the plot ​arc of one prominent character in a direction they hadn’t anticipated when the show began: Mateo, who’s gay, fiercely competitive and proud of his Filipino heritage, discovered he was undocumented.
And the show’s writers were trying to sort out what to do next.
“They had a ton of questions,” says Voorhees, a former reality TV showrunner who’s now Define American’s ​chief strategy officer. Their top concern: “How do we get him citizenship?”
That day, she says, Define American’s team explained that the writers’ top question may be impossible to answer for Mateo, just as it is for millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States.
“That it might not be possible to resolve that storyline within a season, within a few episodes, or even within multiple seasons,” Voorhees says.
“I wouldn’t want to tell a story where say, Mateo does find this funny way that totally works and makes him a citizen. And none of that is true. I don’t think it’s good for society that we’re spreading a wrong message,” says Spitzer, now an executive producer of the show.
“I think as a viewer, if I’m watching something and even one time, I see them say something is possible that I know is impossible, that show has largely lost me.”
Instead, he says, Define American’s guidance — along with insights from immigration lawyers and even someone who worked at ICE — helped the writers shape stories rooted in reality.
Define American would bring panels of undocumented immigrants into the writers’ room, he says, sparking ideas for entire episodes with each conversation.
“It became this amazing resource for us. … Organizations like this are great. They can answer questions, but by just sitting around and talking, we can come up with stories we never even dreamed of before,” he says.
One example: an episode in the show’s second season when Mateo, desperate for a solution to his immigration woes, tries to get people in the store to assault him so he can be eligible for a visa for crime victims.
​The sixth season of “Superstore” is set to premiere on NBC later this month. Mateo still isn’t a citizen.

Awareness is growing

Today’s TV landscape is dotted with immigrant storylines.
“The Transplant” on NBC features a Syrian doctor who flees his war-torn country and starts over as a medical resident. Shows streaming on Netflix like “Never Have I Ever” and “Kim’s Convenience” portray immigrant parents with comedy and heart. “One Day at a Time,” scheduled to start airing this month on CBS, features Rita Moreno as the immigrant matriarch of a Cuban-American family. On Cinemax, “Warrior” tells tales of Chinese immigrant life in 19th-century San Francisco.
Popular shows that recently ended their run, like “Orange is the New Black” or “Jane the Virgin,” were lauded for the immigrant storylines they incorporated into their final seasons.
And these days, conversations about race and representation once relegated to obscurity are playing a far more prominent role. Lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee recently grilled experts about diversity in Hollywood.
“There is greater awareness than we’ve probably ever seen before. … People are interested in telling diverse stories. They’re interested in telling stories that haven’t been told before that really can hit home,” Voorhees says.
But shows with more nuanced portrayals of immigrants like “Superstore,” “One Day at a Time” or “Warrior” still aren’t the norm, says Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociologist and author of “Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism.”
“We’re not telling good immigrant stories. … There’s groups that we are just not talking about because of our stereotypes of who the undocumented immigrants are,” she says.

How immigrants on TV differ from reality

That’s something Define American’s leaders say they’ve found in their research as well.
In a study released last month with the Norman Lear Center’s ​Media Impact Project at the University of Southern California, researchers found notable gaps between reality and the ways immigrant stories are portrayed in TV shows.
Their analysis of 129 immigrant characters in 59 scripted shows from the 2018-2019 TV season found that half the immigrant characters on TV were Latinx, a figure roughly in line with reality. But they also found that proportionally, Middle Eastern immigrants were over-represented on television, making up around 10% of the immigrant characters on TV while comprising just 4% of the US immigrant population. About 12% of immigrants on TV are Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants, but that group is estimated to make up about 26% of the US immigrant population.
And that season, the study found there were no undocumented Black immigrants on television, even though it’s estimated there are around 600,000 living in the United States.
“The storyline right now, in the last couple years, in the minds of Hollywood — and I think the larger United States — is that undocumented immigrants equals Latinx,” Yuen says. “The reality is there are also Asian and African undocumented migrants who are also vulnerable and need advocacy.”
Correcting imbalances like these, Vargas says, is something Define American tries to do in its work.
“We need different stories,” Vargas says, “so that we can get to a point where the narrative has been created that this is an issue that impacts all races and ethnicities.”
And that, he says, could have an impact far beyond the screen where any show is streaming.

Why the shows we see matter

Do the shows we watch on TV influence what we do in real life?
For Vargas and others at Define American, that’s a key question.
And they say a recent survey they conducted as part of their study revealed promising findings.
“What about people who have no contact with immigrants whatsoever?” Sarah Lowe, Define American’s head of research asked at a recent event presenting the study to writers in Hollywood. “Our findings show that your work can actually make a difference to those people, too.
“Just like the impact that ‘Will & Grace’ had with the LGBT movement, for regular viewers of ‘Superstore,’ Mateo feels like their friend. They feel like they know him, even if they don’t know any other immigrants in their daily life.”
And the study found that the “Superstore” viewers who felt that sense of friendship with Mateo, but had little or no real-life contact with immigrants, were more likely to support an increase in immigrants coming to the U.S.
For Vargas, Define American’s recent analysis of the “Superstore” character’s impact sends an important message.
“The images we see in media are often immigrants crying, immigrants sad, immigrants tragic, as if we have this veil of tragedy all around us, when in reality, the study showed, when you actually present an immigrant in a three-dimensional way as a person, people are moved to action, to tell another friend, to post something on social media,” he says.
And that’s a big reason Define American will keep pushing behind the scenes.

Source: This group is working behind the scenes to change the stories you see on TV

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Multicultural Film Fund AUM Group Is Here to Empower Creatives of Color and Save Hollywood From Itself

2020/02/28 Leave a comment

Of note:

For creators of color, one of the biggest challenges is securing the funding needed to bring our dreams to life. That’s why producer Nina Yang Bongiovi (Fruitvale Station, Dope, Sorry to Bother You) has assembled a super team of film and tech heavyweights to launch the multicultural film fund AUM Group.

Comprised of Bongiovi, Gold House Chairman Bing Che, Twitch Co-Founder Kevin Lin, XRM Media’s Michael Y. Chow, MNM Creative’s Michael K. Shen, and Silicon Valley vets Jason A. Lin and Maggie Hsu, AUM Group will develop and acquire creative IP, finance multicultural motion pictures, and invest in the next generation of storytellers.

“Forest Whitaker and I have been backed by my Asian-American partners in leading the financing on every Significant Productions’ project since Fruitvale Station through Sorry to Bother You when no one else in the marketplace was willing to take the initial risk,” Bongiovi told The Root. “Partnering with an all-star team of business leaders in AUM Group is the next natural evolution in continuing to shift culture, amplify important dialogue, and elevate commercial opportunities.”

AUM Group led the financing of the upcoming suspense-thriller Passing, which stars fan-favorite Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga and Andre Holland and navigates the complicated intersection of race, class and culture. It’s an adaptation based on the Nella Larsen novel published during the Harlem Renaissance.

For an industry in dire need of more people of color in positions of power in order to exert more control over the content being created, AUM Group is a welcome breath of fresh air. Just last month I wrote about UCLA’s latest Hollywood Diversity Report and…its findings were a bit concerning, to say the least.

But with its producer-led approach and Bongivoi’s track record of launching the careers of several noteworthy filmmakers, AUM Group could create a much-needed paradigm shift in entertainment.

Creatives, get your pitches ready.

Source: Multicultural Film Fund AUM Group Is Here to Empower Creatives of Color and Save Hollywood From Itself

And a related article:

With Asian and Asian American actors and filmmakers gaining prominence in Hollywood — the latest example: Parasite and The Farewell winning top honors at the Oscars and Spirit Awards — their counterparts in the executive suites are stepping up as well.

Nina Yang Bongiovi, who runs Forest Whitaker’s Significant Productions, revealed Feb. 24 that she has teamed with a coalition of film and tech veterans including Bing Chen, chairman of the Asian American nonprofit Gold House, and Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin to launch the film fund AUM Group. Although founded by Asian Americans, the fund will back an array of multicultural film projects, starting with Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, Passing. Now shooting, the drama is an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel about the evolving relationship between light-skinned black women (played by Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga).

AUM Group’s announcement came four days after Mary Lee, most recently head of film at Justin Lin’s Perfect Storm Entertainment, unveiled her own banner, A-Major Media, which will focus on producing Asian American film and TV content. The company is backed by a non-exclusive majority investment from The Hollywood Reporter parent Valence Media, meaning that Lee is free to shop her projects to various production partners. Financial terms for A-Major and AUM Group were not disclosed.

Yang Bongiovi will continue to run Significant (Sorry to Bother You, Dope, Fruitvale Station), whose future projects will be supported by AUM Group, as could films from other companies — such as A-Major’s. “I’m excited about the fact that Mary could have support from AUM Group,” Yang Bongiovi tells THR. “We’re here to complement each other on our growth and presence in the business.”

A-Major already has a handful of projects on its slate, including an untitled film set up at New Line produced by John Cho and a TV series produced by Gemma Chan and Franklin Leonard. The company also is developing an adaptation of the 2015 YA novel I Believe in a Thing Called Love, about a teenage girl using K-drama techniques to woo her crush; an autobiographical film from Fresh Off the Boat co-executive producer Kourtney Kang about her high school experiences; and We Stan, a comedy about K-pop fans and friends from Atypical scribe Lauren Moon.

Yang Bongiovi and Lee cited 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians as a watershed moment that sparked faith to start their ventures. There have been Asian American studio toppers (including current DC Films chief Walter Hamada) and artists with their own shingles (Daniel Dae Kim’s 3AD), but few producer-driven companies like Dan Lin’s Rideback. That’s changing, Lee says: “[The presence of Asian Americans] has been good on the talent side, but it’s very important to be on the executive side as well. There have to be people in positions of power to champion these stories.”

Source: Asian American Producers Gain New Backing In Hollywood

 

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How John Legend’s Get Lifted Became a Major Production House for Multicultural Storytelling

2020/02/05 Leave a comment

Given the overall lack of diversity in the industry as exemplified in the various awards, worth noting:

In the eight years since Get Lifted Film Co.’s start, the partnership launched by John Legend, Mike Jackson and Ty Stiklorius has grown to become an industry player. Launched in 2012, Get Lifted has delivered one thunderclap after another, from WGN America’s record-setting sensation “Underground,” to the Oscar winning “La La Land,” for which the company served as executive producer. On the stage, Get Lifted produced a 2017 Broadway production of August Wilson’s “Jitney,” for which its founders won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

The trio has built a successful and influential independent production house without much fanfare, and have largely avoided any vanity press. They have more recently started to discuss the company, and all three founders sat with IndieWire last month for a lengthy and candid conversation about the origins of the company and its vision for the future.

“Hollywood has changed over the years, for women and people of color, because it was hard when we started,” Jackson said. “’12 Years a Slave’ hadn’t won an Oscar. And so we would pitch projects like a black historic biopic for example, and executives would scoff. So it’s been revealing to have been there before, and then to now see so much more openness and interest in the kind of stories we wanted to tell, but couldn’t.”

For many, Get Lifted is principally known as Legend’s company, but the company’s aspirations go far beyond his own musical and acting ambitions. (Its catchphrase: “Smart, Elevated, Commercial.”) The company’s most groundbreaking project to date is “Underground.” A critical success that also broke viewership records for WGN America in its first season in 2016, the series was a bold, refreshing take on the slave narrative, unfolding more like a fast-paced action-drama, than anything TV audiences had seen before it. And it caught on quickly: Slave narratives weren’t quite the same again after that, with last year’s Harriet Tubman biopic, “Harriet,” taking a similar approach.

“That really represented who we are and the types of chance-taking stories we wanted to be at the forefront of,” said Jackson. The project was a real breakthrough for the company. “It was something that came to us already pretty much baked, but we ensured that our DNA was in the show.”

They also tout the critical success of their new sketch series “Sherman’s Showcase,” which premiered on IFC last fall to raves. Created by Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle, the series is hosted by Sherman McDaniel (Salahuddin) as he takes viewers through time via music and comedy drawn from the 40-year library of a legendary (but fictitious) musical variety show.

“It’s very smart, probably the best-reviewed thing I’ve ever been part of in my life,” said Legend. “There’s been this assumption that there isn’t an audience for intelligent black content, but we’re proving that it’s obviously not true.” The series will return with a one-hour “Black History Month Spectacular,” this summer, not in February.

Get Lifted’s latest offering, the Netflix hip-hop competition series “Rhythm + Flow,” was released in October 2019, also to raves.  In the series, which the company developed internally, hip hop artists Cardi B, Chance The Rapper, and Tip “T.I.” Harris critique and judge unsigned rappers, who are competing to win a $250,000 prize.

As usual, Netflix hasn’t released viewership data on the series, but its contestants have become stars virtually overnight, with the winner, a 34-year-old rapper named D Smoke, seeing his Instagram follower count skyrocket from around 7,000 to over 1.3 million in a matter weeks.

“Rhythm + Flow” is the first original music competition program for Netflix, which was the most sensible home for it, Legend said. “It was hard to try to make it at a regular network because of the language,” he said. “And there’s so many things that would sand off the edge of the show if it were sanitized, and hip hop needs edge. And we’re so happy to partner with Netflix because they allowed us to do exactly what we wanted to do.”

It’s a long way from when they first launched Get Lifted, and had to prove themselves. Some didn’t take them seriously: Legend’s celebrity was seen as a handicap, and they were treated like a vanity company. However, the founders that only made them more inclined to take risks.

“We had almost nothing to lose at that point,” Stiklorius said. “And so, looking back on those years when a lot of people were saying things like, ‘You’ll never make it in this town,’ it’s great that we’ve built a strong reputation for having great taste and great work ethic.”

As the company has grown, they haven’t lost that nerve — whether it’s with a wholly original program like an IFC sketch variety show that’s unlike anything before it, or NBC’s “Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert,” which Legend starred in.

A lot of people balked at that last one. “The three of us talked and decided, John being the black Jesus? We’ve got to do this,” Stiklorius said. “We exec produced it, and then we won the Emmy for it. But everything about how we live our lives, and what we’ve done to get to this point, is about going against the norm, doing the work and believing in ourselves.”

The three founders have been friends for many years. Stiklorius and Jackson grew up together in Philadelphia. Legend met Stiklorius in college, at the University of Pennsylvania, in the mid-1990s, where they sang in an a capella group. She would eventually introduce Legend to Jackson, who became the singer’s first manager, after graduating from Penn in 1999.

Legend’s music career took off when his debut studio album, “Get Lifted,” was released in 2004 by Columbia Records. Music eventually brought him into the world of film and television, and he never looked back, becoming increasingly more influential as his celebrity grew. Get Lifted Film Co. was born not long after that. They sold over two dozen shows almost immediately, but quickly realized that getting those projects on the air was a whole separate challenge.

“We would pitch and they would buy it in the room, and we were thinking, ‘This is easy’,” Stiklorius said. “The frustrating part was getting all the way to the finish line with any project. But we knew that we had really great ideas, because they were at least buying into them.”

Get Lifted landed its first overall deal from Universal about nine months after it launched, which kept the company afloat as its ambitions grew. It took another three to four years before its first TV show actually made it to series — “Underground,” in 2016 — and it was a big year for the company, which had a hit TV series and two feature film releases: the young Obama romance, “Southside with You,” and “La La Land.” Following its Sundance premiere, “Southside With You” was praised by critics, and was a mild box office hit; and “La La Land” received a record-tying 14 nominations at the 89th Academy Awards, winning in six categories.

More deals would come, including a multi-year overall production pact signed in early 2017 with independent studio Critical Content to create unscripted television and digital media content. A few months later, the company inked a first-look deal with Sony Pictures Television, and in 2019, signed a three-year overall deal with ABC Studios after a multiple-studio bidding war.

Now, Get Lifted is benefited from changes to the industry climate, from the rise of streamers to increased pressure to diversify. The founders said they have more outlets for their projects, but like anyone else, faced more competition than ever before. One advantage: Legend’s starpower and social media reach, which includes over 13 million followers on Twitter, and close to 12 million on Instagram.

The company has a lot in the pipeline, but the project they expressed particular enthusiasm for upcoming Netflix musical “Jingle Jangle,” written and directed by David E. Talbert. Get Lifted’s biggest and most expensive project to date, it stars Forest Whitaker and Madalen Mills in the story of a toymaker and his granddaughter who construct a magical invention which, if they can get it to work in time for the holidays, could change their lives forever. Jackson called it “black ‘Willy Wonka.’”

Talbert had been trying to get off the ground for nearly two decades when Netflix bought the pitch in 2017, and Get Lifted came onboard as producers the following year. “It’s amazing to be part of something that’s really this huge, with this budget, for original content by a black writer and director, with an all black cast, and black producers,” said Legend. (Netflix is targeting a fall release.)

So what does Get Lifted envision for the future? “World domination,” Jackson joked, but noted the company has developed an international footprint with unscripted shows like “Rhythm + Flow.” The team is are also having broader conversations about how to expand the brand, and the potential of owning their own distribution channels so they can operate on multiple platforms.

“We’re pretty ambitious and have smartly taken our time and built our business slowly and systematically,” Legend said. “Now we’re at that point where we can expand it globally, and really make a dent, without ever losing our identity and without compromise.”

Source: How John Legend’s Get Lifted Became a Major Production House for Multicultural Storytelling

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