The Hollywood Jim Crow. Maryann Erigha

the Hollywood Jim Crow’s sphere of influence is deceptively larger than meets the eye. Although it is true that the Hollywood Jim Crow does not instigate racial hierarchies among non-Hollywood workers, the ability or inability of workers from various racial groups to navigate Hollywood shapes the quality and content of movies. Besides the relatively few privileged workers who attain opportunities to direct Hollywood movies, global audiences that watch movies are indirectly affected by the film industry’s racial marginalization. Representation in the production of cinema allows groups not only to produce movies but also to create and disseminate their own meaning systems for audience consumption. More than mere vehicles for profit, movies are powerful tools for shaping consciousness.13 Cinema is a forceful piston of an ideological engine that builds consensus around public and social issues. Cinematic messages influence people’s views about ideas, social issues, and groups in society; hence inequality in the production and dissemination of movies causes reverberations that echo beyond their origins. Though the racial stratification of Hollywood workers might not affect our lives directly, it shapes our lives indirectly by influencing what images and ideologies are available for consumption and what images and ideologies are withheld from our view. Withholding multiple perspectives from the mass dissemination of cinematic narratives and images facilitates a cultural imperialism—even within the same nation—in which one racial group’s perspective dominates cinema.14 Meanwhile, marginalized groups are denied full citizenship, unable to fully include their worldviews in popular American cultural artifacts. In spite of departures from previous systems of racial hierarchy, the Jim Crow structure still provides a useful framework for thinking about how racial inequality pervades Hollywood, shapes experiences in film-industry work, and, more broadly, conditions our encounters with popular movies. Examining and critiquing racial patterns of inequality in Hollywood, this book attempts to better understand the film industry using the Jim Crow framework in order to make sense of and challenge the film industry’s status quo of perpetuating racial myths and disparities.

      Approach of the Book

      How do industry gatekeepers create and maintain racial inequality? How does inequality affect career outcomes and identities of cultural workers—namely, directors? The Hollywood Jim Crow situates the study of racial disparities in Hollywood within a general process to show how inequality in the film industry is embedded into everyday studio operations and practices that facilitate an unequal distribution of rewards.

      Who makes movies and the constraints they face in the film industry matter, because movies are so intimately embedded into our daily lives. While other books focus more on independent cinema production and distribution or emerging digital media, this book focuses on the mainstream film industry, commonly known as “Hollywood.” Since the early 1990s, the contemporary film industry has been dominated by major global media corporations, which the film scholar Thomas Schatz calls “Conglomerate Hollywood.”15 In 2011, for instance, the major studios controlled 88 percent of market share and grossed over $8 billion in revenue, twice as much as the next 140 studios combined. Movies produced and distributed by the major studios and a handful of large independents hold power and sway over the movie industry with their expansive reach and dominant position in national and global production, distribution, and exhibition of popular culture. A vital component of racial inclusion is the level to which out-groups can access once-exclusionary central institutions and operations.

      In particular, this book takes a close look at how racial inequality and hierarchy structure the employment of directors and the distribution of movies in the twenty-first century. Both directors and distributors are central to film-business operations and can provide meaningful insight into Hollywood’s racial division of labor and everyday practices. On film projects, directors occupy a central and indispensable role. Though many highly skilled individuals come together to complete a movie, the director occupies arguably the most central role on a film project. The director envisions the final product and is intimately involved with carrying out that vision through preproduction, production, and postproduction.16 It is common practice that audiences, critics, historians, and academic scholars alike perceive a movie not only as a collaborative enterprise but also as the brainchild of the director’s vision—a gesture that acknowledges the director’s sizable contribution to the final film, over other cast and crew. Directors’ adequate representation in Hollywood holds significance for many reasons. Besides impacting on-screen images, representation for directors results in tangible employment gains. Black Americans’ employment in prominent positions of control, for instance, as producers or directors, significantly increases the number of opportunities for Black talent in other positions.17 Therefore, the absence, underrepresentation, and/or marginalization of directors is troubling in a role that is deemed so vital to the operation of the movie industry. Using the occupation of film directing, this book illustrates contemporary patterns of racial inequality in a major popular-culture industry. It makes strides toward investigating racial barriers in the occupation of film directing and the racial implications of breaking into film’s elite ranks.

      This story of unequal racial outcomes in Hollywood is told through statistical records, communications between Hollywood insiders, and perceptions of working directors. The book (1) draws on comprehensive industry data on the directors, distributors, genres, production budgets, and box-office receipts of more than a thousand contemporary movies, (2) examines trends in directors’ employment on different movies, (3) demonstrates how opportunities, resources, and outcomes in Hollywood are structured by race, and (4) shows how racial inequality is made in the production, distribution, financing, and marketing of movies and in the hiring of labor. Systematic attention to the organizing logics of the film industry reveals a racial division of labor; this book is the first to provide a detailed and systematic analysis of racial divisions of labor in work among Hollywood directors. Furthermore, the twenty-first-century period permits a timely discussion of the state of racial disparities in Hollywood during a post-civil-rights era that has been marked by growing postracial and colorblind discourses. Hollywood’s racial politics illustrate how race continues to matter despite public discourses that suggest otherwise.

      Specifically, the book compares the career paths of Black directors to other racialized groups in twenty-first-century Hollywood. Out of all U.S. racial minority groups, African Americans have the most representation as Hollywood directors. Therefore, the book focuses on one marginalized racial group in Hollywood, Black directors, in relation to racialized others. Investigating the level of African Americans’ inclusion in the film industry particularly necessitates an examination of their access to the facets of production from which they were formerly excluded—the movies and the positions at studios that are most central to film-industry operations. Accessing high-status positions provides financial remuneration that is important to understanding and alleviating racial income gaps—of course, notwithstanding the obvious and pervasive racial exclusion involved in who is permitted to manage large financial investments, own banks, and print and distribute currency.18 The state of Black inclusion in the contemporary film industry is best evaluated by assessing involvement in areas that are financially lucrative, are central to industry operations, and wield the greatest ideological power.

      Beyond statistical numbers, the “deep texts” of production cultures reveal knowledge and power structures.19 Besides aggregating and tabulating box-office data, a more enhanced portrait of racial inequality in the film industry is achieved by incorporating Hollywood insiders’ own views about decision-making in cinematic production and considering directors’ perspectives of their work environment. Anonymized communications between Hollywood insiders from a major studio show how decision-makers frame discussions about Black movies and directors. These texts provide rare insight into how people with real power in Hollywood include race in their routine evaluations of popular movies’ economic potential and cultural appeal.

      Knowledge of how directors, as industry practitioners, understand, make sense of, and explain their positions and practices is also vital to grasp the implications of racial inequality for individual experiences and livelihoods. Because directors’ perceptions of racial inequality in Hollywood give greater meaning to the revelations that emerge from the data, the book includes excerpts from press interviews of Black directors. Unlike interviews conducted behind closed doors, these press interviews are an example of “publicly disclosed deep texts,” accounts that are self-consciously created