Black directors, in relation to racialized others. Investigating the level of African Americans’ inclusion in the film industry particularly necessitates an examination of their access to the facets of production from which they were formerly excluded—the movies and the positions at studios that are most central to film-industry operations. Accessing high-status positions provides financial remuneration that is important to understanding and alleviating racial income gaps—of course, notwithstanding the obvious and pervasive racial exclusion involved in who is permitted to manage large financial investments, own banks, and print and distribute currency.18 The state of Black inclusion in the contemporary film industry is best evaluated by assessing involvement in areas that are financially lucrative, are central to industry operations, and wield the greatest ideological power.
Beyond statistical numbers, the “deep texts” of production cultures reveal knowledge and power structures.19 Besides aggregating and tabulating box-office data, a more enhanced portrait of racial inequality in the film industry is achieved by incorporating Hollywood insiders’ own views about decision-making in cinematic production and considering directors’ perspectives of their work environment. Anonymized communications between Hollywood insiders from a major studio show how decision-makers frame discussions about Black movies and directors. These texts provide rare insight into how people with real power in Hollywood include race in their routine evaluations of popular movies’ economic potential and cultural appeal.
Knowledge of how directors, as industry practitioners, understand, make sense of, and explain their positions and practices is also vital to grasp the implications of racial inequality for individual experiences and livelihoods. Because directors’ perceptions of racial inequality in Hollywood give greater meaning to the revelations that emerge from the data, the book includes excerpts from press interviews of Black directors. Unlike interviews conducted behind closed doors, these press interviews are an example of “publicly disclosed deep texts,” accounts that are self-consciously created for the general public to consume.20 In exchange for promotion of directors’ films on blogs and websites, directors grant interviews to media outlets, which in turn publish these interviews to generate increased site traffic or user views of the web content. During the interviews, directors discuss their past and upcoming films and their work lives within Hollywood—which sometimes leads to conversations about race and gender challenges. These narratives help to properly situate the quantitative data on movies within the deeper qualitative context of directors’ experiences, in effect, enriching the complex story that is embedded in the data in order to illustrate how directors make sense of and even sometimes successfully navigate the Hollywood Jim Crow in the face of widespread inequality.
Overview of the Book
Central to understanding the Hollywood Jim Crow is discovering how film-industry workers create, reinforce, and reproduce racial patterns of difference over time. Undertaking an institutional analysis of race in the film industry, this book examines the plight of Black directors and their movies, highlighting the places that Black movies and directors occupy in Hollywood cinema and how other racial groups are treated in relation to their plight. The chapters that follow examine the quotidian practices and effects of racial inequality in the film industry, rituals that confine the production and circulation of movies directed by racial minorities.
Chapter 1 outlines various facets of representation—symbolic, numeric, civic, and hierarchical—that are important in cultural and cinematic production. Cinematic images are disseminated globally, carrying symbols of progress that hold value for underrepresented groups. Numeric representation embodies the quest for increased proportional representation via employment opportunities for workers from racially marginalized groups. Civic representation demands cultural citizenship and belonging in a nation’s popular cultural artifacts. This chapter also gives an overview of Black directors’ representation in Hollywood and considers concerns beyond numeric, civic, and symbolic representation. Racial hierarchies in cinema dictate what kinds of movies directors take on and where their career paths lead. Looking at hierarchies of representation provides a useful metric for grasping how racial divisions characterize labor in Hollywood and what steps can be taken toward achieving racial equality.
The next chapters detail the repressive institutional race politics that structures directors’ work in Hollywood. Each chapter is devoted to unfolding the multiple layers of the Hollywood Jim Crow: assumption of racial difference, marginalization, segregation, and stigmatization. The chapters disentangle (1) how Hollywood insiders create and rationalize racial inequality using cultural and economic frames, (2) how racial hierarchy penetrates the careers of directors and the production of movies, and (3) how racial inequality shapes the identity, self-presentation, and character of group progress.
Chapter 2 illustrates how Hollywood executives and insiders label Black films and directors unbankable at the box office, suggesting risk and uncertainty around their potential for profit, especially at the foreign box office. Ironically, the assumption that “Black is unbankable” goes against the conventional logic of creative industries that “all hits are flukes” and that “nobody knows” what creative products will succeed or fail.21 Armed with the “unbankable” mythology, Hollywood decision-makers devalue Black films and directors, for example, by attaching smaller budgets to Black-cast movies and attaching larger budgets to racially mixed and white-cast movies. Although films overperform and challenge the “unbankable” myth, perceptions that Black directors and films are unbankable trap them into limited trajectories. Overall, African Americans are employed and contained on the basis of this pretext of limitations on Black movies and directors.
Chapters 3 and 4 further highlight institutional efforts to disadvantage Black directors, through marginalization and segregation. Chapter 3 illustrates the ghettoization of Black directors outside of big-budget and major-studio distribution. Movies in these areas generally have white stories, ideologies, casts, actors, and directors.22 Some directors, such as Tyler Perry, do manage to find success directing a number of films. Still, they are usually limited to small or medium budgets due to their tendency to direct Black-cast films, which are undervalued in Hollywood. Even when directors such as Tim Story and Antoine Fuqua direct films with white or racially mixed casts, they still encounter racial ceilings, never approaching the level of whites’ inclusion. In contrast, studio executives give white directors the leeway to leap from small-budget projects to big-budget projects (or even to receive big budgets at the onset of their careers in cinema). However, this same leap of faith is rarely, if ever, granted to Black directors, due to their ghettoization in Hollywood. Moreover, white directors experience the privilege of bigger budgets when directing Black-cast movies compared to the budgets that Black directors of Black-cast movies receive. What is more, the fact that Black-directed movies typically get little to no distribution in foreign markets further exacerbates their marginality in the film industry.
Besides existing disparities between opportunities and resources for Black and white directors, gender also shapes women’s and men’s experiences in different ways. In the eyes of Hollywood decision-makers, race and gender doubly impact Black women’s perceived capabilities. Their representation is limited to only a sporadic presence behind the camera. The career trajectories of the few who have found some modicum of success give voice to the understudied population of Black women who work on major studio productions and to the constraints that hinder their advancement.
Segregation in genres, as discussed in chapter 4, is yet another factor that contributes to incomplete integration and distance from the inner circles of Hollywood. For Black directors, integration happens only in some areas of work and not others. In contemporary Hollywood films, Black directors are overrepresented in the music genre. Meanwhile, the music genre locates Black directors
