SAG report finds there's still plenty of
room left for diversity SAG report finds there's still plenty of
room left for diversity
By Peter Kiefer
Tuesday August 14 12:53 AM EDT
LOS ANGELES (The Hollywood Reporter) --- Despite promising gains made in the number of television and theatrical roles allotted to minority actors, Hollywood remains an overwhelmingly white town, with more than three-quarters of all roles going to white performers, according to the Screen Actors Guild 2000 Employment Statistics Report, which was released Monday.
Although the number of roles for SAG members jumped 7% last year over 1999, the increase was due in large part to the strike-fear-driven increased studio and network production levels in the final two quarters of 2000. Of the 53,134 roles signed to guild contracts last year, 22.9% went to performers of color, a 1.7% increase from the previous year and the highest percentage since the guild began collecting these statistics in 1992.
Black performers received 14.8% of all roles -- up from 14.1% in 1999 -- the largest representation to date. Roles cast for Latinos/Hispanics jumped a half a percentage point since last year to 4.9%, which also is a new high. American Indians received only 0.3% of the roles cast, up 0.1% from the year earlier. SAG's annual report was based on all television and theatrical productions reported to the guild through the Casting Data Report. (As is the case with SAG contracts, the report does not include daytime television, game or reality shows, animated programs and most nonprimetime programming).
"We are delighted to see gains for all ethnicities on the large and small screen,"
SAG president William Daniels said. "But there's no question (that) there's
still plenty of room for growth in diversity in the television and film world."
Anne-Marie Johnson, who chairs SAG's affirmative action department, was especially
encouraged by the improvements made by black performers. Johnson credited a
coalition of minority groups that have publicly challenged the networks and
studios to diversify or face a consumer backlash and have threatened a boycott.
In May, the National Latino Media Council, the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition and American Indians in Film and Television issued a report card evaluating the major television networks efforts to increase the representation of minorities, in front of and behind the cameras. The grades would have made even a delinquent blush: ABC received a D-, CBS a D+, Fox a C- and NBC a C. The reported 7% increase in overall available jobs is not without a qualifier, however.
The ramped-up production schedules in the third and fourth quarters of 2000 -- all in anticipation of feared writers and actors strikes -- likely skewed those numbers. According to a SAG spokesman, without the third- and fourth-quarter spikes, actor employment last year would have been on a par with 1999. Since 1996, the total number of jobs available to SAG performers remained relatively static until 1999, when available work plummeted by 12.4% from 1998.
The nosedive in 1999, according to SAG, was because of film and television producers choosing to shoot in foreign countries to take advantage of tax incentives and subsidies. Ageism and sexism still run rampant in Hollywood casting circles, the report said. Despite more women than men in the United States, men received 62% of the roles cast last year.
"Men had almost twice as many roles and worked more than twice as many days as women in roles cast for TV/theatrical projects in 2000," the report said. If you were a performer under the age of 40, you were twice as likely to find work in 2000 than those over the 40-year-old threshold, according to the report. Americans over 40 comprise 42% of the American population.
Older women again received the blunt end of the entertainment industries' Holy Grail mentality: They were cast in only 26.2% of the roles for women, compared with 72.3% of the roles cast for their younger counterparts. Leading women over 40 comprised only about 20% of the roles for women last year. "We are very concerned with the lack of movement with regard to seniors," Johnson said, arguing that with the aging of the baby boomer generation over the next five years, "the companies need to realize that there is going to be a drastic change in the what the majority of the viewership wants to watch."
In addition to SAG's talent directories aimed at promoting employment access to its minority members, various commissioned reports (the "African American Television Report" and "Missing in Action: Latinos In and Out of Hollywood"), numerous entertainment industry roundtables and a dialogue-driven series titled "From Inception to Completion: Diversity at Work in Hollywood," Johnson also credits the producers. Johnson, a member of SAG/AFTRA's negotiating committee, was encouraged and acknowledged the willingness of the producers to add stronger nondiscriminatory language to the recently negotiated contract.
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