- Insider spoke with industry experts about the push for diversity in Hollywood.
Michael B. Jordan spoke about his decision to move into producing and championing underrepresented voices.- "You have to control your own destiny. You have to create. You have to own things," he said.
As protests spread globally after the police killing of George Floyd last year,
The US cinema's record on diversity and inclusion has improved over the past decade, with both people of color and women making huge strides on-screen; but movies still lag behind the population and other creative industries, specifically in its executive ranks.
As Spike Lee once joked, it's easier to elect a Black president than a Black Hollywood studio executive.
Creators of color are still largely voiceless in major decisions that directly affect their craft and livelihoods. And now, after the US sent its first woman of color to the White House, the spotlight is again on the big screen.
Spike Lee ushered in the modern Black cinema movement
The arrival of Spike Lee ushered in modern-day Black cinema and created the black new wave, which ran from the 1980s to the early '90s.
The acclaimed director was followed by a group of energetic filmmakers, including John Singleton ("Boyz n the Hood") and Mario Van Peebles ("New Jack City"), whose films shined a light on a variety of Black American experiences never seen on the big screen.
The new wave's influence was best illustrated in the July 1991 issue of New York Times Magazine, which ran a cover story on the filmmakers titled "They've Gotta Have Us: Hollywood's Black Directors."
But the most important ingredient to the new wave's success, as fleeting as it may have been, wasn't Hollywood's desire to address its racialized history, experts said.
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"It was about making money," Paula Massood, the chair of the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College, told Insider. "It wasn't at that point about representation in the same way that discussions now about BIPOC filmmakers are more about representation across the board."
"At that point it was, Spike Lee's here, he's making some films. We need to start thinking about how we can capitalize on that same sort of audience," Massood said.
The period ushered in a handful of Black films in the '90s, including "Friday," "Poetic Justice," "Juice," and "Menace II Society," all of which helped to dispel the pernicious Hollywood myth that diverse films simply didn't perform well at the box office.
A similar Black-filmmaker renaissance came 3 decades later
It would take more than 30 years to see a similar wave for Black creatives. And 2013 was particularly important, with many assuming that Barack Obama's election in 2008 was the spark that prompted an inclusive shift throughout the US that rubbed off in the cultural industries.
But seven years and one president later, it's clear these post-racial ideas are not only unhelpful but also inaccurate. They give too much credit to the Hollywood establishment.
In reality, the set of films released in 2013 were a result of creativity that had flourished independently, and their transition to the mainstream was a matter of timing.
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Take one of the most successful releases from the renaissance set: Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale Station," which swept the festival circuit and picked up awards at Sundance and Cannes.
The director, who'd go on to lead the "Black Panther" franchise, wrote the acclaimed drama based on the 2009 fatal shooting of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer. Coogler made the film independently in two weeks with the help of Forest Whitaker and Octavia Spencer, who stars as Grant's mother.
"That's where things really started to pick up for me," Michael B. Jordan, who portrayed Grant in the film, told Insider. "Grabbing attention, selling the movie, it showed that we could do it with limited resources, and that was a small telling of what we could do when we got more resources."
It's not enough to be on-screen. Black creatives must advocate behind the scenes, too, filmmakers say.
As things have blossomed for Jordan and other creators from the 2013 set, many have realized that the only way to create a long-lasting change in Hollywood is to have a strong presence beyond the red carpets.
"You have to control your own destiny. You have to create. You have to own things," Jordan said.
The 33-year-old actor launched his own production company, Outlier Society, with the goal of uplifting diverse stories and voices. It's a creative vision he's had since his start in the business.
"Being an actor of color, being a Black man in this industry, and putting on people and giving other people opportunities to win, for me it was something that I've always wanted to do," he said.
Coming off the historic 2018 success of Marvel's "Black Panther," where he reunited with Coogler, Jordan made what will perhaps turn out to be his most meaningful move by becoming the first major star to announce that he and his production company would adopt inclusion riders - a formal declaration of diverse hiring practices - as standard.
Jordan was also instrumental in pushing Warner Media to adopt a similar inclusive-hiring policy on all its productions, with the recent civil-rights drama "Just Mercy" being the first to implement them.
Inclusion riders are now pretty much a mainstay with the Oscars announcing its own inclusion policy last year. It requires all films competing for the best-picture gong to meet standards of diversity on set.
"This was one of the steps that I saw that could actually ensure that the productions and the projects that I'm a part of would honor the same values that I have for myself," Jordan said.
The pace of this trickle-down effect is undoubtedly a result of Jordan's star power.
"I didn't realize this until I had worked next to somebody who was a star, but people really want to be close to and, in Hollywood terms, in business with celebrity and talent," Alana Mayo, a former head of production at Outlier told Insider.
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Jordan "was in rooms that other people don't get to be in and really using that power and that privilege to push this, but also he was able to champion material," Mayo said.
There are now similar examples across the industry with filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay with Array, Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw Productions, and the Will and Jada Pinkett Smith-helmed Overbrook Entertainment. With so many cementing their places behind the camera, the shift toward inclusion has become less of a passing wave and more of a concrete change.
After taking the reins, Black creatives now want the power to tell their own stories
Despite big strides on-screen, there's been almost no change within senior leadership of the major Hollywood studios.
"Certainly not among the top decision-makers," Darnell Hunt, the coauthor of the University of California Los Angeles' "2020 Hollywood Diversity Report," told Insider.
UCLA's report found that among all senior studio executive positions, 93% percent were held by white people and 80% were men.
In August, MGM made one of the most substantial moves toward correcting this imbalance. The storied studio, which stretches back almost a century and is home to titles such as "The Wizard of Oz," "Thelma & Louise," and the James Bond franchise, relaunched its boutique label, Orion Pictures, and hired Mayo to lead the division with a focus on producing, developing, and acquiring films that amplify underrepresented voices in front of and behind the camera.
"The idea will be to make, ultimately, four to six films a year," said Mayo, who will have complete control over the creative direction at Orion, including leading the studio's all-female greenlight committee.
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"The soul of it, the reason for being," she added, "is to do that with the filmmakers behind the camera, the people on-screen, and the narrative content of the story, and the intended targeted audience, prioritizing exclusively BIPOC, women, and queer narratives."
Similar executive moves were made last year with the industry veteran Nicole Brown being named president of Sony's Tri-Star pictures and Vanessa Morrison taking over as the head of original films for Disney Plus.
But who will follow suit? It will perhaps be the test of Hollywood's investment in systematic change.
"I'm not as optimistic as Gandhi and MLK and Obama are," Alana told Insider. "However, you have to take a moment to sit there and say, 'OK, well, now we know it's possible, because it's been done.'"
This story is part of Insider's State of Hollywood digital series, which details how the $100 billion entertainment industry shifted in 2020. Click here to read more.