Monessen grad McDormand asks for equity
Oscar speeches usually involve thanking everyone from their mom to their barber, but in the case of Frances McDormand, there must be multitudes ready to thank her.
The Monessen High graduate and star of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” walked away with her second Academy Award for best actress Sunday night. But before she left the stage at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre, Ms. McDormand added, “I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen: ‘inclusion rider.’”
Instantly, social media lit up, wondering if they heard that correctly, andif so, what exactly did that mean?
“I just found out about this last week,” Ms. McDormand told the media backstage. She went on to say that it “means that you can ask for and/or demand at least 50 percent diversity in not only the casting but also the crew.”
The inclusion rider is a contractual agreement or practice similar to the NFL’s “Rooney Rule,” so named for Steelers then-owner Dan Rooney, the former chairman of the league’s diversity committee. Mr. Rooney created it in reaction to firings of two minority head
coaches in 2002. The policy requires teams to interview minority candidates for head and senior football operation jobs.
Stacy Smith is the founder and director of the Media, Diversity and Social Change initiative at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She and Kalpana Kotagal, a civil rights and employment practices attorney in Washington, D.C., have been helping develop the inclusion rider concept for years.
An expert on the subject of under-representation in the entertainment industry, Ms. Smith gave a 2016 TED Talk that addressed what she called the “really depressing” data.
A study of 800 films made from 2007-15 cataloged speaking characters onscreen for gender, race, ethnicity, LGBT and disability.
Less than one-third of the roles went to females, a similar statistic to films from 194655, despite the fact that half the U.S. population is female.
A study of the top 100 films just from 2016, she said, revealed that 48 did not have one speaking role for black characters. Seventy had no speaking roles for Asian or Asian-American females. There were no characters with a disability in 84 of the 100, and 93 “were devoid of lesbian, bisexual or transgender female speaking characters.
“This is not under-representation. This is erasure, and I call this the ‘epidemic of invisibility,’" Ms. Smith said.
In her TED Talk, Ms. Smith explained various ways in which diversity could be achieved in the film industry. One: “An equity rider by an A-lister in their contract can stipulate that those roles reflect the world in which we actually live.
“Now, there’s no reason why a network, a studio or a production company cannot adopt the same contractual language in their negotiation processes.”
Seems Ms. McDormand is that A-lister.