DEI is Being Weaponized
You’re so right about the fear running this town. But this is the first time when I’ve been afraid to say anything about how DEI is being weaponized. I’ve been a liberal progressive my entire life, and a few of the Emmy-nominated shows I’ve worked on actively advanced the causes being fought for — but now it’s like I’m no longer wanted at the table solely because of my age, gender & skin color. Shutting anyone out for any of those reasons doesn’t feel like DEI but more like its opposite.
My 93-year-old father-in-law asked me if biracial marriage was as popular in real life as it is in TV commercials and series! I love it when I see diversity done right. Not the forced or self-conscious way we’re getting it on shows like Bridgerton that erase actual history and pretend black people were always members of royalist society. Or even in shows that depict current-day small-town America as being as racially mixed as Chicago or Cleveland. I read somewhere that TV depicts gay characters at a rate five times higher than population statistics. I worked in rooms with very few minorities or women in them for at least half of my career. And that was f****d up. But now, it’s starting to feel like the new paradigm isn’t about equality or equity — it’s about a complete reversal of the power dynamic. Maybe that’s a black matriarchy — I don’t know. But until a few years ago, writers’ rooms were getting more diverse every year I’ve been working in them. Only now, they’re getting less diverse! And I think storytelling is suffering because of it.
Norman Lear used to have Republican conservatives writing in his rooms! Nowadays, that would be impossible.
“…the new paradigm isn’t about equality or equity — it’s about a complete reversal of the power dynamic…”
I had a pretty great career — with a few jobs on shows I’d rather not remember. That was right up until all this DEI stuff took over. And then I stopped getting asked to join rooms run by white showrunners. They stopped being able to hire more than one or two other writers who looked like them. My last gig was for a minority showrunner and a stellar writer — someone who could hire me. In recent years I know I’ve lost gigs on shows that I would’ve been great for. Shows where the showrunner wanted me but where the corporate bosses nixed my hiring. The excuse is always, We needed a different “balance” in the room. Look, I get it. And I’m all for diversity in this business. But now, white guys are lucky to account for even 20 percent of a room. If that. I know that most showrunners are still white dudes. I know that. But for journeyman writers like myself, who have proven themselves on show after show, with experience running rooms, being on set, in casting and in editing — with experience working on some of the best shows in TV, it’s gotten very hard. But we’re not allowed to say anything to anyone about any of this. Because of our gender and skin color. We no longer check the right boxes. It’s like we’re supposed to just shut up and go away. But I have a family to feed, and I’m really good at my job. If any of this got out there — it could very easily end any hope I have to continue working in this business.
Here’s the thing. I know how to write a great show. I know that writing staffs who have to write an entire season of episodes in ten or twenty weeks have to commit to all of their earliest ideas — and then they’re out of a job. The showrunner and maybe one other writer have to push everything through production without the brain power of an entire room full of veteran writers. David Simon says no one would remember The Wire if he hadn’t had his entire writing brain trust available to him all the way through production. That’s the only way to make a good show great.
But this gig has been devalued and demonetized, and streamers don’t care if they have to hire a new young staff every season. It’s cheaper that way. No series gets to build continuity in its staff from season to season. And that’s a huge part of why you see so much crappy writing on TV today.
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Thanks Alan and Chris for delivering us the investigative journalism the trades have desperately failed in. Also thank you as well for your humor and informative/entertaining content pertaining to movies. Filmthreat has become a recurring highlight for me.
I have two questions. First, Why are white males paying to be a member of WGA if they are going to be discriminated against, it’s like they are paying for the privilege to cut their own throats. . Second, why aren’t white males filing discrimination lawsuits against the WGA, the last time I checked it’s illegal to base hiring decisions on race or sex.
What was the answer when you flipped it and asked why Blacks and Latinos stayed members during all the decades including this one in which we were discriminated against? For me, the answer is simple. Helen n Al Levitt. Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were murdered, yes. But you have to keep fighting for what you think is right. As you know from a prior post, I was attacked in the WGA building, shoved and locked in a room 15 feet from the board room with the assailant blocking the door and members ignoring my calls for help.
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Gee, and you are surprised this is happening? I am a conservative writer of nonfiction and fiction. I wrote Senator Harry Reid’s biography, of which the movie Casino if a small subset. I was told by literary agents not to bother submitting it because it was too controversial and wouldn’t be picked up by the liberal publishing universe.
My magnum opus, I’ve worked on for 30 years, predicted a Covid scenario and AI wars plus a civil war over wokeness. It has no chance unless I go Indy.
How is this legal? I thought hiring by race and gender…Especially on a scale this size….Was pretty much illegal.
The Free Press ran an article in January of 2022 called “Hollywood’s New Rules: The old boys club is dead. But a new one—with its own litmus tests and landmines—is rapidly replacing it. ‘This is all going to end in a giant class-action…”. I personally believe that massive class-action lawsuits are indeed are coming, which is going help rid Hollywood of this cancerous DEI.
If an 18 year old white heterosexual male from the mid-west with no connections to anyone in the entertainment industry whatsoever decided that he wanted pursue a career as filmmaker, I would advise him against it. Not because of lack of effort, talent or persistence, but because he would be denied any chance at making a career for himself in this new age of Hollywood. His work would go unread, un-watched and rejected before it would ever be judged on the merits or quality of the work itself. This also applies to the independent film world just as much, as financiers and distributors have also become just as guilty in participating with DEI.
The safest check box you can lie about is non-binary. If they accuse you of lying, just say to them “prove that I’m not non-binary.” No one can prove that they ARE non-binary. You could also lie about your race. It’s not like they’ll ask you to take an ancestry test.
This doesn’t seem isolated to the WGA. It feels like a form of communism has spread industry-wide. Using their counter-productive exemption, SAG allows producers to pay the actors less money if a percentage of cast falls under DEI. The only incentive in that seems to be to wipe out Caucasians from the zeitgeist of American stories, cinema, and culture. And this corporate idea of redesigning famous IP characters to form a new world looks awfully familiar to all those historical statues and monuments being removed and wiped out of existence. All of the above are communist constructs. I think Nerdrotic hit a target when he points out members are afraid of their own unions. And to think this is not affecting streaming and distribution yet is shortsighted.
I was dragged into a side room where the WGA board met, held captive, and harassed by a top WGA male exec. There was one female staffer present. Finally, he let me go and I ran from the building. The WGA Board of Directors blacklisted me because the guy was more important to negotiations than I was. He had me banned from WGA meetings to prevent me from talking to anyone. Because we were in the middle of negotiations, the board’s silence re the attack was more important than me. He recently retired rich.
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Male and pale is stale. And, on average, 30% of your audience.
I keep coming back to this too.
Making money can smooth over a lot of problems and they were able to coast for a while during the height of Marvel.
I just feel the bills are finally coming due and eventually they will have to make DRASTIC changes or risk completely sinking the ship
These letters are revealing of the cognitive dissonance of these writers. Almost to a one these writers proclaim being pro-diversity, progressive, and liberal–yet they somehow can’t connect the dots between that ideology and their own displacement in the industry. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in the culture war trenches understands the lunacy of the progressive cause and that it could (and does) only result in the disenfranchisement of the majority. “What did you think decolonization meant?” goes the refrain on twitter. “It’s like we’re supposed to just shut up and go away.” says one writer, and yes, that is precisely what the ascendant diverse coterie desires. They wish you starved, silenced, and consigned to the redacted annals of TV history. Had these writers, for a moment, considered themselves as having a collective interests in preventing the toxic DEI ideology from gaining traction the damage wrought might not have been so catastrophic. Make no mistake, the diversity commissars simply want ‘non-diverse” people to be utterly purged. The liberal, progressive, writers have handed them the keys to accomplish this.
Funny how, the powerful and power hungry in the entertainment industry, have so much in common with the Nazi Party. It must be a natural flow of those with no, to low self esteem, emotionally damaged egos, craving, needing/wanting attention from the world, desire power (especially power over others) above all else, have zero spiritual development, no relationship with their Creator, and are suffering from various mental illnesses, especially those related to gender dysphoria, to find themselves in goosestep with fascist ideals. Liberalism/Progressivism is a gateway drug to Communist/Fascist addiction, and those drugs have killed billions.
Female, gay, and Brown brings sales down
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