racial troubles and the racial problems that emerged from slavery, Jim Crow segregation, or even the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration. Fundamentally these prior racial regimes were entrenched on the basis of legal codes and enforced by the federal government—through law, politics, and policing. Slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and mass incarceration were wide-scale systems of social control that were rooted in the everyday lives of all citizens and directly impacted everyone in the nation. The Hollywood Jim Crow, in comparison, might appear to exert only a small sphere of oppression. All (or even most) people do not aspire to become Hollywood workers and, hence, do not experience a revocation of their rights to produce or direct a feature film. Notably, the direct constraints of the Hollywood Jim Crow only apply to creative personnel working in Hollywood and not to the entire nation.
At first glance, the scope of the Hollywood Jim Crow appears to encompass only a narrow, privileged sector of the population—middle- or upper-class professional artisans, many of whom are highly educated. Most Hollywood up-and-comers have relatively privileged and connected lives, though it is unknown whether this is also the case for Black Americans. Apparent financial barriers exist to breaking into film directing. To this point, Spike Lee’s grandmother Zimmie Shelton helped fund his first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It (1986). Robert Townsend put $100,000 on a credit card to fund his first film, Hollywood Shuffle (1987), which illustrates the substantial sum of money required even for a small independent movie. Class, capital, and socioeconomic standing play a role in who can access lucrative Hollywood work. Obviously, denying one’s rights to be represented fully in Hollywood is by no means equivalent to denying one’s rights to use a public restroom or to experience life outside prison walls. In this way, Jim Crow inequality facing the poor, destitute, or otherwise vulnerable and truly disadvantaged populations is qualitatively different in circumstance compared to the inequality that relatively privileged folks encounter.
Nevertheless, the Hollywood Jim Crow’s sphere of influence is deceptively larger than meets the eye. Although it is true that the Hollywood Jim Crow does not instigate racial hierarchies among non-Hollywood workers, the ability or inability of workers from various racial groups to navigate Hollywood shapes the quality and content of movies. Besides the relatively few privileged workers who attain opportunities to direct Hollywood movies, global audiences that watch movies are indirectly affected by the film industry’s racial marginalization. Representation in the production of cinema allows groups not only to produce movies but also to create and disseminate their own meaning systems for audience consumption. More than mere vehicles for profit, movies are powerful tools for shaping consciousness.13 Cinema is a forceful piston of an ideological engine that builds consensus around public and social issues. Cinematic messages influence people’s views about ideas, social issues, and groups in society; hence inequality in the production and dissemination of movies causes reverberations that echo beyond their origins. Though the racial stratification of Hollywood workers might not affect our lives directly, it shapes our lives indirectly by influencing what images and ideologies are available for consumption and what images and ideologies are withheld from our view. Withholding multiple perspectives from the mass dissemination of cinematic narratives and images facilitates a cultural imperialism—even within the same nation—in which one racial group’s perspective dominates cinema.14 Meanwhile, marginalized groups are denied full citizenship, unable to fully include their worldviews in popular American cultural artifacts. In spite of departures from previous systems of racial hierarchy, the Jim Crow structure still provides a useful framework for thinking about how racial inequality pervades Hollywood, shapes experiences in film-industry work, and, more broadly, conditions our encounters with popular movies. Examining and critiquing racial patterns of inequality in Hollywood, this book attempts to better understand the film industry using the Jim Crow framework in order to make sense of and challenge the film industry’s status quo of perpetuating racial myths and disparities.
Approach of the Book
How do industry gatekeepers create and maintain racial inequality? How does inequality affect career outcomes and identities of cultural workers—namely, directors? The Hollywood Jim Crow situates the study of racial disparities in Hollywood within a general process to show how inequality in the film industry is embedded into everyday studio operations and practices that facilitate an unequal distribution of rewards.
Who makes movies and the constraints they face in the film industry matter, because movies are so intimately embedded into our daily lives. While other books focus more on independent cinema production and distribution or emerging digital media, this book focuses on the mainstream film industry, commonly known as “Hollywood.” Since the early 1990s, the contemporary film industry has been dominated by major global media corporations, which the film scholar Thomas Schatz calls “Conglomerate Hollywood.”15 In 2011, for instance, the major studios controlled 88 percent of market share and grossed over $8 billion in revenue, twice as much as the next 140 studios combined. Movies produced and distributed by the major studios and a handful of large independents hold power and sway over the movie industry with their expansive reach and dominant position in national and global production, distribution, and exhibition of popular culture. A vital component of racial inclusion is the level to which out-groups can access once-exclusionary central institutions and operations.
In particular, this book takes a close look at how racial inequality and hierarchy structure the employment of directors and the distribution of movies in the twenty-first century. Both directors and distributors are central to film-business operations and can provide meaningful insight into Hollywood’s racial division of labor and everyday practices. On film projects, directors occupy a central and indispensable role. Though many highly skilled individuals come together to complete a movie, the director occupies arguably the most central role on a film project. The director envisions the final product and is intimately involved with carrying out that vision through preproduction, production, and postproduction.16 It is common practice that audiences, critics, historians, and academic scholars alike perceive a movie not only as a collaborative enterprise but also as the brainchild of the director’s vision—a gesture that acknowledges the director’s sizable contribution to the final film, over other cast and crew. Directors’ adequate representation in Hollywood holds significance for many reasons. Besides impacting on-screen images, representation for directors results in tangible employment gains. Black Americans’ employment in prominent positions of control, for instance, as producers or directors, significantly increases the number of opportunities for Black talent in other positions.17 Therefore, the absence, underrepresentation, and/or marginalization of directors is troubling in a role that is deemed so vital to the operation of the movie industry. Using the occupation of film directing, this book illustrates contemporary patterns of racial inequality in a major popular-culture industry. It makes strides toward investigating racial barriers in the occupation of film directing and the racial implications of breaking into film’s elite ranks.
This story of unequal racial outcomes in Hollywood is told through statistical records, communications between Hollywood insiders, and perceptions of working directors. The book (1) draws on comprehensive industry data on the directors, distributors, genres, production budgets, and box-office receipts of more than a thousand contemporary movies, (2) examines trends in directors’ employment on different movies, (3) demonstrates how opportunities, resources, and outcomes in Hollywood are structured by race, and (4) shows how racial inequality is made in the production, distribution, financing, and marketing of movies and in the hiring of labor. Systematic attention to the organizing logics of the film industry reveals a racial division of labor; this book is the first to provide a detailed and systematic analysis of racial divisions of labor in work among Hollywood directors. Furthermore, the twenty-first-century period permits a timely discussion of the state of racial disparities in Hollywood during a post-civil-rights era that has been marked by growing postracial and colorblind discourses. Hollywood’s racial politics illustrate how race continues to matter despite public discourses that suggest otherwise.
Specifically, the book compares the career paths of Black directors to other racialized groups in twenty-first-century Hollywood. Out of all U.S. racial minority groups, African Americans have the most representation as Hollywood directors. Therefore,
