By Justin Joseph Hall

Filmmaking like any art is a struggle.  Not just the struggle to find the money and time to get tens to hundreds to thousands of people together to tell one story for months or years.  But it is a struggle within an individual such as myself who is not just trying to make art for entertainment.  

Personally, I do not want to create art just for entertainment solely because I don’t think there is enough time.  Somehow we should be constantly learning and changing to make our society better.  Media influences culture.  Making stories reproducible has brought to many societies together to learn about how one lives in a different world, a different life.

Since the printing press, the people have created technology to propagate stories for mass consumption.  It is the most powerful way for humanity to come together as a whole.  We are always becoming better and have a long history with this form of communication.  Once we had the ability to take photographs and record of sound, we had film. The ability to experience a story with two of our senses.  That is an incredible power.

This power we have seen in the past has been (and still is) used the medium for propaganda and to consolidate power. We’ve seen it used in commercials to make a product or company a household name, making some people rich and successful. We’ve seen it used in film and television to create common stories watched by people all over the world.  It is a powerful, powerful thing to get professionals who want to tell stories to work on something together.

I say this especially because I did not come from money.  Growing up I always had a home.  I always had food.  But we were on food assistance from time to time.  My parents worked hard, we got by and I was fine to go to college.  I saved up to go to college but not nearly enough.  So, therefore, I started out the world educated and in debt.

During my education for film in college I learned about the history of media and how it was used to propagate social inequities, even when making films for entertaining the masses.  When we don’t pay attention to the content of the media we create, it can have adverse effects on the way we behave.

Just as we moved away from monarchies to republic and democratic nations, we must move who gets to tell stories away from just the wealthy few.  For so long, a few were able to choose what stories got told and created.  Because the medium of cinema is expensive, it was the rich who got to decide which stories were told.

Hollywood has denied  agency in storytelling from Black people, Asian Americans, women, Indigenous peoples, people of poverty, members of the LGBTQ community, and immigrants. This has created the harmful illusion that stories that rich white men want to create are the standard.

How can we prevent this in the future?  Well, we know that diversity (in every sense of the term) can make decision making more difficult, but in the end, it tends towards better solutions on complex problems such as these.  This I believe is because the difference in our brain and capabilities together is like a supercomputer.  We can problem-solve and execute thinking power just as bees work together to grab pollen.  We can think about solving female inequalities and the wage gap while solving the injustice of people being born into poverty, or any number of injustices.  Many of these problems are interrelated.

This is what makes the decisions under a democracy or a republic succeed better than a monarchy or dictatorship.  The way we think together is important.  If our most powerful communication tool is storytelling media such as cinema, then we must create the films together.  

It is impossible at the moment to create a single narrative with the whole world, so therefore we must use statistics to get a diverse mindset making decisions on how to tell the story.  There are so many jobs in creating films, Planning (Pre-Production), Producing (Shooting the film), Post-Production (putting together the audio and video), Finishing (Making the video and audio look and sound in a great way to experience the story).  Most movies have 1 to the almost 3,000 people who worked on the film (2,097 people were listed in Titanic’s credits).  This is an insignificant amount of the population of the United States which has approximately 330 million people in it, or even less significant of the 7.5 billion people who live in the world.

Because the film industry has a small number of people working in it in comparison to its reach, it is important to figure out how we can represent as many voices as possible.  If you’re working in the United States, the population in 2015 was projected to identify themselves at approximately 66% of people being white non-Hispanic, 17% of Hispanic, 13% Black, 5% Asian, and the rest are less than 5% in a race.  There are 51% of women vs. 49% of men.  There are only 35% of people with bachelor degrees.  About 13% of Americans are immigrants.  20% speak a foreign language, Spanish being nearly 13% of those who speak a foreign language.  As of 2013 The South has about 37% of the population, 23% of the population lives in the Pacific states, then the Midwest close behind near 21%, then the Northeast near 18%.

Now I could go on and on listing income, sexual orientation, family size, family make-up, divorce rates, etc.  But instead think back to the last project you worked on.  Did you have a cross-sectional of people working on the product that represented the United States as a whole?  How many of these categories did you miss?  We always say in film when creating to know your audience.  Who are you making the film for?  If you’re making films for Americans you should know and study these stats so you are familiar with the potential audience.

On top of that people talk about underrepresentation and untapped audiences.  They talk about it because it’s important, the American media has not known its audience for a long time.  We know in film history there are fewer female decision makers behind the camera (Warner Brothers only has 35% women executive directors) and fewer women on screen.  In 2017 the Latino representation in film was at 8%, only 6% of characters were black.

Then we think of the phenomenon of Black Panther, a Marvel movie centered around Black characters.  A popular genre that resonated so much through our society?  Why?  Because they created content for an underrepresented audience.  Blacksploitation films in the 1970s were the main concept.  The point here is not only is it what underrepresented communities say they want more of, but by creating films with diverse decision-makers, we’re going to miss fewer of these nuances that miss a large swath of the population.  1% of the United States population in 2020 is about 3.29 million people.  Representation of these demographics are missing by nearly 10 percentage points, which is ~32.9 million viewers who feel underrepresented in the Latino category alone.

So how can we change this within our industry?  I present three things filmmakers should always be thinking about:

#1 Always use test audiences and make them diverse.  Test audiences are an opportunity for you to hear issues that you may not see from your perspective in film.  It’s letting the audience help you see your blind spots in storytelling.  So when creating films, test your film on your target audience, and fringes of that target audience.  You never know if one decision in your filmmaking can turn off a whole bunch of potential audiences from just one decision.

#2 Hire and collaborate with diverse viewpoints.  Think of your own demographic.  I personally am a straight white American male multi-linguist, who has lived abroad, earned a bachelor’s degree, came from the Midwest, who came from the lower-middle class.

So, when hiring, think of your blind spots in your own demographic.  I wouldn’t want to hire straight white men from the Midwest.  It doesn’t add perspective in decision making.  I would want to hire more women to work on the film than men for example.  This would be especially important to counter my executive decision making as a director who has more power than a Production Assistant.

Finally, #3 in order to use the diverse staff you have hired, make sure you listen and decentralize decision-making roles.  You may disagree with notes, but always try to compromise and adjust to notes and suggestions.  People give their opinion on films because something doesn’t feel right.  The solution may not be exactly what someone suggests, but if someone gives a negative review they’re saying something wasn’t quite right.  It’s your job to adjust and try to bring your film to your target audience.

Following these three rules has helped my company create work that appeals to a larger audience.  The best example for Fourwind Films is Abuela’s Luck, a film created for a Dominican audience.  The film was written, directed, and produced by Ricky Rosario.  Ricky hired a diverse staff of mainly Latinx people, but also me as a white man, along with many Latinx women behind the camera and Black Americans working on set.  Ricky listened to not just mine, but all points of view from the people around him.  We shared cuts with Americans across the country, women, different Latinx audiences including Brazilians, Colombians, and incorporated their feedback.  The film in the end had a huge premiere and has yet to have a bad review, and was picked up by HBO Latino and is now streaming on HBO Max through September 2021.

Abuela's Luck

All of this is difficult.  We have our egos to battle.  However in the end, we want people to relate to our stories and our artwork.  By following Ricky Rosario’s example: defining your audience to an underrepresented amount of people, making sure that your audience is represented on set, decentralizing decision-making, then testing on a diverse set of your target audience, your film will have better success.  By democratizing your film and diversifying your decision making, each dollar you put in will be able to appeal to a larger audience.

References:

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/IPE120218

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/31/16790006/poc-black-latinx-history-film-diversity-representation

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2013/

https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/UCLA-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2018-2-27-18.pdf