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USC report slams Hollywood for lack of diversity in film

Daily News - 8/1/2018

July 31--Things haven't changed much -- female, minority, LGBTQ and handicapped representation-wise -- in big movies over the past 11 years, according to a study released by USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released Tuesday.

After surveying the top 100 films of each year from 2007 to 2017, the report -- titled "Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT & Disability" -- found that female speaking roles averaged out to 30.6 percent of the 48,757 total. Last year, women and girls were allowed to talk in 31.8 percent (up .3 percent from 2016 and down from the highest percentages in the survey's history, 32.8 in both 2008 an '09).

Additionally, 70.7 of the characters in last year's films were white, only 2.5 percent were depicted with a disability and 81 of the top 100 movies had no LGB characters.

"Those expecting a banner year for inclusion will be disappointed," Stacy L. Smith, founding director of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, said in a press release accompanying the report. "Hollywood has yet to move from talking about inclusion to meaningfully increasing on-screen representation for women, people of color, the LGBT community, or individuals with disabilities."

As for directors, despite Patty Jenkins having made "Wonder Woman," the biggest hit ever helmed by a woman last year, the report found only 43 of those 1,100 movies were directed by women. Jordan Peele's huge 2017 success with "Get Out" notwithstanding, of the 1,223 total directors over the 11 years (some films had more than one), only 5.2 percent were black and Asians made up 3.1 percent.

"The lack of inclusion on screen is matched and exceeded by the exclusion behind the camera," Smith said in the USC release.

As the report ends with 2017, this year's record-breaking, black-and-female-inclusive "Black Panther" did not figure into the calculations.

The study comes out at a time when a number of mostly independent, critically acclaimed African-American films are being released ("Sorry to Bother You," "Blindspotting," Spike Lee's upcoming "BlacKkKlansman") and several Asian-American movies ("Crazy Rich Asians," "Searching," "MDMA") are scheduled for the next several months.

"I hope it's not a moment, I hope it becomes the norm," "Searching" star John Cho recently told the Southern California News Group about the current uptick in Asian-American films. "I hope these films are a success and it indicates that we should make more of these, that it becomes normalized and there's no need to note it."

The most successful producer in Hollywood, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, also touted his company's recent hiring of a diverse slate of directors for "Black Panther," "Thor: Ragnarok" and the upcoming "Captain Marvel," the studio's first movie with a woman in the director's chair, co-helmer Anna Boden.

"She will just be the first of many," Feige told SCNG in June. "You'll begin to see directors of all kinds in the next 10 years of Marvel Studios."

The folks at USC are waiting to be impressed by such talk. In that press release accompanying its inclusion study, Annenberg stated: "The rhetoric in Hollywood may be changing when it comes to inclusion, but the numbers are not, says a new study out today on diversity in popular films. As [this week's female-driven comedy] 'The Spy Who Dumped Me' and 'Crazy Rich Asians' gear up for their box office launch, the investigation suggests that these films are a departure from the film industry's status quo."

For much more detail and drilled-down statistics, you can read the full report at http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inequality-in-1100-popular-films.pdf .

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