The Hollywood Jim Crow. Maryann Erigha
And having just been the contemporary, cool, popcorn movie to the Tombstones bleak, old fashioned movie—I don’t feel as excited about this as id like based on the fiscal layout.1
While Steve is a pseudonym for a Hollywood insider, his words and the concerns he voices are real. His momentary praise for the talents of Fuqua and Washington is immediately followed by skepticism for their possibility of success. In particular, he expresses uncertainty about the financial outlook of The Magnificent Seven for reasons that appear to be outwardly related to race. Believing that the audience for all western-genre movies skews Caucasian, Steve imagines a predominantly white audience for The Magnificent Seven. He reasons, therefore, that the cast and directing should also skew Caucasian in order to capitalize on this target audience, as he puts it, “to be sure that audience has the elements they need to buy tickets” and to be certain “the pedigree is the perfect fit for the lovers of the genre.” Here, the elements and the pedigree implicitly refer to the racial makeup of the cast and director with respect to imagined audience desires. Steve is unconvinced that the genre’s key audience (presumably Caucasian males) would “show up in a big enough way to make our number” for a Black actor and director. In other words, he supposes that the combination of a Black actor and director attached to the movie would not gel with white audiences in a way that would drive them in droves to the theaters for a big box-office return.
Figure I.1. Antoine Fuqua at the premiere of The Magnificent Seven, Toronto Film Festival, September 8, 2016. Photo by GabboT.
In a single breath, Steve manages to lump racial considerations with culture and economics in what he perceives to be a perfectly unbiased explanation of market and consumer behavior in a popular culture industry. If his concerns were merely a matter of individual taste, there would be little cause for alarm. However, this racial logic is not uncommon among Hollywood insiders—people who have some aspect of control, input, or voice in the processes of production, distribution, or exhibition of Hollywood movies. Clearly, race matters in Hollywood. On regular occasions, Hollywood insiders such as Steve intertwine race with expectations about profitability and concerns about dollars and cents. Race is a preeminent factor governing decisions about moviemaking, a factor that studio executives consider when determining who should star in or direct a movie and for how much. Likewise, race factors into discussions about where movies should play and to which audiences. Indeed, racial inequalities and hierarchies in the film industry are not simply natural artifacts based on objective assessments of box-office performance. As Steve’s remark indicates, race enters the conversation long before the box-office numbers roll in, oftentimes even before a movie script receives the green light for production.
Contemporary U.S. race politics shape film-industry organizations and practices. In the U.S. context, where racial boundaries play a significant role in society, race becomes an integral component for analyzing the organizational logics of the film industry. The Hollywood film industry is not one where race does not matter at all, which would be the case in a postracial society. Hollywood decision-makers embed racial logics in arguments about the economic behavior of markets. A box-office mentality determines scripts, development, green light, and production decisions. Steve’s suggestion that the race of the actor and director correlates with box-office returns attaches race to notions of box-office mentality; specifically, he invokes a stain of Blackness that devalues Black stars, directors, and movies and renders Black culture and people economic risks. Linking race to ideas about potential box-office performance happens even before a movie reaches theaters. Overall, movies with nonwhite lead actors and casts—the movies that nonwhites are predominantly hired to direct—are projected to perform poorly at the foreign box office. Therefore, Hollywood insiders justify decisions based on race under the logic that race is a factor that shapes box-office returns.
Making race a basis for hierarchy in Hollywood has direct implications for how people are integrated into film-industry work. The film industry’s racial hierarchy harks back to the Jim Crow days, in that one’s race marks an explicit criterion for social division. Just as in the Jim Crow days, when race structured daily life, race largely determines the opportunities and outcomes of working professionals in the film industry, from actors to directors. The use of race as grounds for difference has implications for employment opportunities and outcomes for members of different racial groups. For U.S. racial and ethnic minorities, invoking race in decisions about who should get work and in what capacity leads to marginalization, ghettoization, and stigmatization. Movies with racial minorities attached are devalued and deemed inferior cultural products, which has implications for which roles racial minorities occupy and how their careers progress or are hindered in Hollywood. For whites, the use of race in decision-making leads to unfettered privilege and unchallenged immunity from box-office flops. Yet unlike the Jim Crow era, when narratives about innate racial inferiority and superiority were the grounds for stratification, present-day Hollywood couches racial divisions in a market logic that is grounded in economic and cultural explanations for advantage and disadvantage. In effect, we are witnessing a “Hollywood Jim Crow” of sorts, where the communication of ideas about race and value informs inequality and hierarchy in the film industry.
The Hollywood Jim Crow illuminates the process by which racial inequality and hierarchy in Hollywood are socially constructed and outlines the implications for movies and directors. Race occupies a salient position in everyday conversations and business practices within the film industry. As gatekeepers, Hollywood decision-makers actively create and maintain racial hierarchy in how they discuss, conceptualize, package, produce, and distribute movies and in how they stratify movies, actors, and directors. Their actions and opinions shape unequal outcomes that affect the careers and identities of people trying to make a living while working in Hollywood.
Aim of the Book: Making Sense of Race in Hollywood
Every day, numerous press headlines indicate that racial inequality in Hollywood is a popular and reoccurring topic of discussion. Hollywood manufactures racial difference on a global scale, both in front of and behind the camera—though the racial politics of Hollywood, especially processes by which race is made deliberate and relevant in the production and circulation of popular movies, remains underexplored. The Hollywood Jim Crow aims to (1) illustrate how the making of racial inequality and hierarchy is a process that is explicitly and deliberately constructed by Hollywood insiders, (2) show how in the popular cinema industry, race and racial considerations are framed around beliefs about cultural and economic value, (3) emphasize the structural underpinnings of inequality and hierarchy in the film industry by forging connections to the Jim Crow system, and (4) demonstrate the impact of racism on Hollywood workers’ careers and identities.
Shining a questioning lens on industry culture, practices, and discourses, studies of film-industry production, distribution, and exhibition illuminate the mystique behind the organizing logics of the film industry to unearth answers to nagging issues such as how the industry functions, why decisions are made, and who benefits or loses out in the process. Such studies aim to better understand the inner workings of Hollywood through investigations of its operations, organizations, industrial settings, social relations, creative processes, and/or labor.2 The making of racial inequality is a process that is pervasive and deeply embedded in all phases of the culture-industry production process—from the production of cultural objects to the relations of labor to areas of financing, marketing, and distribution.
Critical media industry studies, in particular, take a critical look at popular culture, for example, to understand the contours of race and ethnicity in creative industries and cultural production by locating and analyzing national and global sites, discourses, and practices of making race, racial arrangements, racial inequality, and racism.3 Through Hollywood cinema, one can examine how racial inequality is made, how the racial order functions, how racial groups are stratified, and how race is embedded into everyday institutional practices in a major culture industry. Within the film industry, specific sites, discourses, and practices facilitate the production and reproduction of racial difference. Of paramount importance is understanding how whiteness operates in creative industries to contribute to racial difference and power.4 Moviemaking in Hollywood is a global project of establishing doctrines of whiteness and white supremacism. White