Chaz Ebert may have taken center stage at her South by Southwest panel today, but the topic was one of both national and global importance. Entitled “The Future of Film Criticism: Diversify or Die,” the discussion was not the same as when Roger was an early champion of the online community while other continued to embrace the print medium. Instead, panelists Justin Chang (chief film critic at Variety), Matt Zoller Seitz (editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com) and Rebecca Theodore-Vachon (an RE.com contributor) took aim at the continual divide between those making the decisions in Hollywood and how film critics can help to bridge that gap with audiences.
Beyond digital media, there are “so many different kinds of diversity in the world today” said Ebert citing “physical abilities, gender and sexual orientation.” Chaz then presented a clip of Roger verbally berating someone at Sundance for his “offensive and condescending” statement that Justin Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow” was “empty and amoral” in its depiction of Asian-Americans. Roger countered by saying “Asian-American characters have the right to be whoever they want to be” and not be forced into somehow representing an entire race. Chaz, a former attorney who represented a variation of races, genders and age, stressed the need for films to find a way to “put you right in the shoes of someone” and to create “empathy in audiences.”
Rebecca Theodore-Vachon presented a study from Dr. Darnell Hunt of UCLA who put together some, perhaps, unstartling statistics. 94% of all film studio heads were white and with the departure of Amy Pascal at Sony, now 100% were male. At talent agencies, minorities were underrepresented 2-to-1 while making up 40% of the U.S. population, that includes 2-to-1 of film leads and directors and 3-to-1 with writers. While 50.8% of the U.S. is female, writers are still 4-to-1 male and 8-to-1 amongst directors; this despite women comprising 52% of moviegoers consistently since 2009.
Justin Chang continued to express his disappointment over Ava DuVernay not receiving a Best Director nomination for “Selma.” (DuVernay was a SXSW keynote speaker earlier in the day.) “Film critics did ‘Selma’ justice,” Chang said of the film which put “black protagonists front and center and gives them agency over their own narrative and their own destiny.” The panelists agreed that it was good to have a diverse critical body looking at and analyzing films of all cultures. When Roger started his website in 2002 he noticed that 30% of its readership came from outside of the U.S. which gave rise to the Far-Flung Correspondents.
Matt Zoller Seitz discussed his time as a television critic and how it became a joke within the industry that shows which dealt with black themes or black casts were “ghettoized” to the WB or the UPN. TV executives “could have qualified for the U.S. Gymnastics team the way they jumped and rolled around this question,” Seitz said which led to an even more telling quote from one such exec. “I, myself, am not racist, but we are not running shows of color because the audience is racist.” Seitz said how some of the best critics writing in other venues have changed his mindset in regards to how he views diversity in film quoting the opening to Roger’s review of Spike Lee’s “School Daze” which he called “the first movie in a long time where the black characters seem to be relating to one another, instead of to a hypothetical white audience.”
Theodore-Vachon remarked how she was tired of hearing how “it should be the best person for the job” when it comes to casting decisions when actors like Jared Leto and Eddie Redmayne are given precedence over actual transgendered actors. Seitz joked about actors being singled out for their “bravery” when tackling the roles of the handicapped. “People are the gatekeepers and the decision makers are more comfortable opening the door for people who look like them.” It’s not necessarily racism, “just easier to let in a college buddy or someone they know while people of color and women don’t have that same sort of buddy system.” Seitz said that critics should share in that “responsibility in these casting decisions.” Pandering was not the answer according to Chaz. “If you think you’re going to broaden your audience, you will narrow it.”
When an audience member involved with independent cinema brought up the issue of foreign distribution, he said that sales estimates overseas to complete financing often leads to a dilemma for filmmakers who want to cast actors of color. In 2014, just on the studio front, Denzel Washington in “The Equalizer” brought in the most overseas revenue for a film headlined by an African-American with $90.8 million. The highest grossing film in the U.S. the same year featuring black leads was “Ride Along” which grossed $134.9 million here and a pithy $19.8 million elsewhere. A number of African-American themed films do not even get overseas distribution by their studios.
Chaz then answered about the pervading myth of why this is so. “The images they exported were so negative that people didn’t want to see it. As people get more used to them and comfortable it will bring them around and solve the problem.” She reminded the panel’s audience that they were not there to make them feel guilty. Discussing these matters were simply an offshoot of diversity in thinking. “I was married to one of the most evolved human beings on Earth. That was the way he was made.”
Photo credit: Natalia Oberti Noguera
