Oscar’s boot camp all about being inclusive
Academy Gold internship program the antithesis of #OscarsSoWhite
Growing up in Chicago, Taty Garcia was a selfdescribed “Disney nerd.” She didn’t just love watching Disney movies — she wanted to understand how they were made. As a young Puerto Rican woman, the closest Garcia came to seeing someone who looked like her on the screen was Ugly
Betty star America Ferrera. Still, she dreamed of one day landing a job in Hollywood.
Even after studying film editing and post-production at Columbia College Chicago, though, Garcia wasn’t sure the industry would have a place for her.
“It could be a little discouraging coming to L.A. and trying to get a break, especially because I’m an inner-city Hispanic and a first-generation college grad,” says Garcia, 23. “I felt like there was just a stigma on me, and there’s not a lot of female editors.”
For Yousef Assabahi, who was raised in Yemen, Hollywood seemed even more remote. His country’s film industry was virtually nonexistent, and the often stereotypical images of Middle Easterners he saw in American movies and TV shows were nothing like the people he knew.
When Assabahi told fellow Yemenis he wanted to become a filmmaker, the typical response was bafflement.
“Expressing the idea in my community was always something funny,” says Assabahi, 23, who graduated this year from UCLA as a film major. “There is only one movie theatre in the entire country. The only sup- port I had was from my parents.”
On an afternoon in late July, Garcia, Assabahi and 20 other young people from diverse backgrounds gathered on a sound stage on the Warner Bros. studio lot to watch makeup artist Rick Baker conduct a master class. Participants in a recently created summer internship program called Academy Gold, the interns, who must be college students to qualify, listened with rapt attention as the retired seven-time Oscar winner shared stories of working on such films as Star Wars, An American Werewolf in London and Men in Black, and demonstrated some of the tools and tricks of his trade. “How many of you want to be directors?” Baker asked. Roughly half the interns, including Assabahi, raised their hands.
Launched last year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Academy Gold internship program aims to boost inclusion in the film industry by exposing young people from under-represented communities to various aspects of the film business through a range of workshops, panels and screenings that enable them to mix with established figures in the industry. At the conclusion of the internship, the students are paired for eight months with academy members who serve as mentors to help get their careers started.
In the program’s first year, the academy partnered with 20 companies across the industry — including all of the major studios as well as Creative Artists Agency, IMAX, HBO, Panavision, Annapurna Pictures and others — and enrolled 69 interns, 70 per cent of whom were female. In its second year, which concluded earlier this month, the program expanded to 26 partner companies and 107 interns. The Academy Gold program grew directly out of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, as the film industry’s most prestigious institution — facing blistering criticism over its historically white-and-male-dominated membership — looked for concrete ways to address the underlying inequities within the business, even as it began to dramatically alter the demographics of its own ranks.
“I think the academy was not the reason for #OscarsSoWhite, although I think we got the brunt of it,” says Bettina Fisher, the academy’s director of educational initiatives. “But I do see the academy coming forward to try to do something about that — and that’s why we have our Academy Gold program. We know there are a lot of diversity and inclusion programs out there, but we wanted to have a program that was going to move the needle. And if it wasn’t, we were going to try to figure out why.”
Getting that needle to budge won’t be easy. According to a recent study published by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, diversity of representation both in front of the camera and behind the scenes has remained essentially stagnant for the past decade. According to the report, more than 80 per cent of people working as directors, writers and producers on the top 100 releases of 2017 were men, while among 1,223 directors tracked over 11 years, only 5.2 per cent were Black or African American, 4.3 per cent were women and 3.1 per cent were of Asian descent.
Despite such stark statistics, Edgar Aguirre, who was hired in November 2016 as the academy’s director of talent development and inclusion, says the Academy Gold internship isn’t simply window dressing. He says the progress of the interns after their completion of the program is being tracked by an outside firm to gauge its effectiveness — and that the results so far are encouraging.
“From the data that we’ve been able to collect from the first year, over 50 per cent of our students can attribute that mentor relationship with helping them get another job, another internship or another key introduction that helped them move the ball further in their career,” Aguirre says. “I tell these kids, ‘Ideally, if we do our jobs right, five to 10 years from now you’ll be well on the pathway to be a potential academy member.’”