{"id":169249,"date":"2021-02-19T07:15:31","date_gmt":"2021-02-19T12:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=169249"},"modified":"2023-06-27T12:05:38","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T16:05:38","slug":"black-voices-in-hollywood-debuts-dmd-speaker-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2021\/02\/black-voices-in-hollywood-debuts-dmd-speaker-series\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Amplifying Black Voices in Hollywood’ Debuts DMD Speaker Series"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

UConn’s Digital Media & Design Department will host the inaugural event in its Diverse Perspectives in Digital Media & Design: 2021 Speaker Series<\/a> with \u201cAmplifying Black Voices in Hollywood\u201d on Friday, Feb. 19 from 1 to 8 p.m., via Jorgensen Digital Stage.

The one-day summit will feature conversations with Black leaders from various sectors of the film industry, and will examine its changing landscape by exploring efforts to increase diversity in all aspects of Hollywood including screenwriting, development and production, producing and directing, and visual effects and post-production.

Participants will include:

\u2022 Romany Malco, actor\/director of \u201cTijuana Jackson: Purpose Over Prison\u201d on \u201cFighting for Equity in Hollywood.\u201d
\u2022 Kristen Marston, culture and entertainment advocacy director at Color of Change Hollywood, on \u201cHow the TV Crime Genre Normalizes Injustice.\u201d
\u2022 Alan Mayo, president of Orion Pictures, on \u201cAuthentic Storytelling at the Studio Level.\u201d
\u2022 Numa Perrier, director of \u201cJezebel,\u201d on \u201cCreating Content for underrepresented Voices in Digital Media.\u201d
\u2022 Chris White, visual effects supervisor at WETA Digital, on \u201cThe Value of Inclusion in Visual Effects.\u201d

Last year, Color of Change Hollywood released its second major study on how the paucity of people of color writing scripts and in leadership roles in the film and television industries contributes to miseducation about the criminal justice system and makes racial injustice acceptable. The report, \u201cNormalizing Injustice,\u201d examined 26 different scripted series focused on crime from the 2017-2018 season broadcast on both networks and streaming platforms.<\/p>\r\n

\"\"
Producers of \u201cThe Rookie\u201d have implemented suggestions based on recommendations in the \u201cNormalizing Injustice\u201d report from Color of Change Hollywood. (ABC.com Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

The 2020 report found more than 80% of the producers, known as showrunners, as well as at least 81% of writers were white, while only 9% were Black. In three of the series, all of the writers were white. The data was similar to the organization\u2019s 2017 study of television and film writers, \u201cRace in the Writer\u2019s Room,\u201d which examined all episodes from all 234 original scripted comedy and drama series on 18 broadcast, cable, and digital platforms from the 2016-2017 season. That study found two-thirds of shows had no Black writers and more than 90% of all shows had white showrunners.

\u201cWe are working in an industry that has not been built for Black people and people of color and so essentially it’s functioning as it was intended to function,\u201d says Marston. \u201cThere’s a lot of people who are working in the industry who are continuing to do things the way that they’ve always done things because that’s what’s worked for them. Hopefully we’ll see a bit of change in this coming year, given everything that’s happened in the past year.\u201d

Marston says events similar to the UConn summit can contribute to creating change because, even if people are not in the entertainment field, consumers hold \u201ca significant amount of power,\u201d and can use their knowledge about industry issues to hold industry leaders accountable to improve their practices.

\u201cNormalizing Injustice\u201d examined for the first time how crime shows can problematically affect viewers because more crime shows — more than 60% of prime time programs — were on the list of the Top 100 most watched shows than shows from any other genre, and had a higher total viewership than any other type of program. Among the concerns identified in the study, crime shows often:

\u2022 Make heroes of people who violate our rights
\u2022 Present the powerless as those who actually manipulate the system most
\u2022 Present momentary flash of remorse about killing or wrongly jailing as all the accountability that\u2019s need
\u2022 Turn racism into a joke, a prompt for eye-rolling
\u2022 Frame objections to illegal and immoral behavior as laughable ignorance of the na\u00efve who don’t know \u201chow things really work on the streets.\u201d

\u201cWe know that Americans\u2019 perceptions of crime are very much at odds with the reality of crime in America,\u201d the report says. \u201cAs just one example, while the crime rate has dropped precipitously over the last 20 years, the number of people who say that there is \u2018more crime in the U.S. than a year ago\u2019 has steadily risen.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Marston says an example of the report resulting in change can already be seen in programs like “The Rookie,” whose creative team worked with Color of Change Hollywood to adjust its season.<\/p>\r\n

“There have been a lot of creators who have really understood what we were trying to do,” she says. “We’re not trying to tell them how to do their work or tell them what stories to write. We’re just there to be a solution oriented partner along the way.”

Upcoming programs in the Diverse Perspectives in Digital Media & Design: 2021 Speaker Series will include \u201cBl(x)ck Rhizomes: A Digital Public History Praxis,\u201d on Feb. 22; \u201cWomen in Animation\u201d on Feb. 26, and \u201cRepresentations of Religion in Film\u201d on March 5 with other programs being scheduled.\u00a0

\u201cAmplifying Black Voices in Hollywood\u201d is presented by UConn\u2019s Department of Digital Media & Design, in partnership with Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts and the H. Fred Simons African American Cultural Center

This summit is free and open to the public, but RSVP is required. To register and for more event details, visit the DMD Diverse Perspectives site<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A focus on topics ranging from lack of Black representation on writing staffs to the distorted perspectives of TV crime dramas. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":169361,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1711,1914,2235,2225,2306],"tags":[2069],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1918],"class_list":["post-169249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-culture","category-sfa","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-storrs","category-uconn-voices","tag-arts"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-28 05:24:21","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169249"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169386,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169249\/revisions\/169386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/169361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169249"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=169249"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=169249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}