Diversity
Speakers: Producers Guild and Writers Guild
Primetime Summit 2

Transcript of Proceedings
June 17, 2000

JIM GIGGANS: This panel is called Keeping It Together but that is assuming that it was gotten together in the first place. [LAUGHTER] So what we have to find out is why it happened in the first place, that it was the same old thing, the same old shows, with the same old concoction of faces, if you will, racially.

Now, Montezuma Esperanza has to leave early, so why don't we start with him and then we'll hear from all the rest. Montezuma?

MONTEZUMA ESPERANZA: Well, if the question is why did it happen, I think that is a sociological historical question that, of course, has to look at how did this country came to be and the history of this country. There are two forces that have, in my opinion, shaped this country. Extraordinary ideals are reflected in the Bill Of Rights and in the Constitution. They were the writings of thinkers who saw the value of human beings and the value of the individual but who, at the same time didn't see anyone who wasn't of their own color as human.
So you have these two forces: the inherent prejudice and the blindness to the humanity of other people, in the founding fathers. And that legacy reaches us today. That is the justification for the Western Movement, for the dispossession of the Native American, for the Mexican American War which took one-half of Mexico and, in a war of aggression and imperialism, created the Western half of the United States, and, of course the war with Spain which created a colony out of Puerto Rico and colonies out of the Philippines for a short while. And which justified the slavery and the importation of millions of millions of Africans into this country.

So, that's the foundation for the social fabric. These extraordinary ideals work against that prejudice, work against that evil, and have, over time, been winning. That is the beautiful part of the country. That over time we can see that there has been the individual spirit and humanity being recognized as a quality that transcends skin color or culture. And that is what keeps me inspired and in love with this country and very, very optimistic about the future.

JIM GIGGANS: Tom Mount had a lot of experience heading Universal and has so much television experience. Why do you think it would be that as much as Friends is a great show, none of those friends have African-American friends or Asian friends or Hispanic friends. Yet in the writing for the new season, there were shows that were trying to copy Friends with all white casts.

THOM MOUNT: I'm not sure I can answer that intelligently but I'm going to take a shot here. For 11 years of my life I worked for MCA Universal and ran the movie division for most of that time. My start at MCA Universal was that I was told to create what we then called the black film unit. And you may have noticed that I'm not African-American. It is astonishing to me that no one blinked at the notion that a kid, a young executive, would be grabbed and told to put together a black film unit, make a bunch of films. The instructions were very simple. Win the NAACP image award for this company, don't spend much money doing it, and don't screw it up. That started around '76, another lifetime ago. That unit made 11 or 12 African-American motion pictures of various kinds, many of them street comedies. And indeed we won the NAACP image award more than once with the unit. I considered it both an incredible opportunity and a tragedy and I feel personally that companies, like studios and networks as they have moved into a merger mania generation, have lost the kind of individual emotional center that used to make social progress possible in the companies.

My own view of social progress has become somewhat cynical, I'm sorry to say, especially of late. I feel that networks and studios in their multi-layered vertical corporate context, adhere to the idea of social progress only to the extent that it keeps the government off their back, only to the extent that it keeps the picket away from the front gate and that the rest of it is largely ignored. I look around the landscape of Hollywood and, frankly, I see fewer minority executives than I saw 20 years ago. I see fewer women in positions of real power than I saw 20 years ago. I see African-American filmmakers ghettoized economically in a staggering way. And my own sense of this is I searched what's left of my soul after 30 years in this business, and I have to say I don't come up feeling extremely happy about this. In fact, I find myself personally feeling angrier about it today than I felt 20 years ago.

JIM GIGGANS: So, if you want the government off your backs, then do what you should do.

THOM MOUNT: Well, the point's well taken. Let me say inside a studio, inside a network, the attitude is extraordinarily cynical these days. I think executives in general feel like they can comply in the shallowest way for the shortest term with whatever the pressure is, and the minute it's gone it's business as usual. What I fail to see is any significant change in the actual consciousness of the people who run the organizations and I fail to see, further than that, any effort to carry an increased consciousness on behalf of the organization. I think the politics and sociology of these organizations is becoming more, not less, bankrupt.

JIM GIGGANS: Now, Ms. Jones, you worked for Spike Lee Productions right?

LORETHA JONES: I did.

JIM GIGGANS: In light of what Tom has said, what do we have to do?

LORETHA JONES: My thoughts about this are somewhat controversial because I'm from New York and I have a tendency, in the circumstances it's ironic, to call a spade a spade. I think one of the biggest problems that I see around this whole issue is that to a certain extent, Hollywood is almost too liberal and there are too many liberal people in positions. And I say that as a liberal democrat. But the problem is it's almost like an episode of Charlie Brown where the kids are talking and you can understand what they're saying but then the adults start talking and it all sounds like wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. The people who are in positions of power consider themselves so liberal and therefore not necessarily responsible for the situation. I don't believe that they're really listening. What the NAACP says, what anyone else says, applies to someone other than him or her.

Use Friends as an example. I am sure that Kauffman, Bright, and Krane do not consider themselves racist. They do not consider the situation that they've created on Friends or any of their other shows, whether it's Jesse or something else, a thing done by racist people. To me, that is the most dangerous form of racism--when you can look at yourself and not see that it applies to you. And I don't think anything is going to change in this industry until we can all look in the mirror and recognize the part that we all play in this problem as opposed to thinking isn't it terrible what they're doing to those people.

JIM GIGGANS: Now Vince has the best name ever for a production company. I think your partner is Hispanic. It's called Rice And Beans Productions. Asian, Hispanic together. It's wonderful, your comments.

VINCE CHEUNG: Yeah, we are a comedy writing team. I started at NBC and I was a Production Executive, I was a Development Executive at ITC Productions where we made a lot of T.V. movies. So I have a real checkered past. And Ben and I got into doing this and we've worked on all kinds of shows. We started on Growing Pains, we worked on Night Court, Married With Children, ROCK, Steve Harvey Show, and we're Consulting Producers right now on the Steve Harvey Show.

It's kind of interesting because Loretha, Montezuma, and I were on a panel together about 10 years ago and a lot of the same things were said, and it is a shame that we've kind of taken a step backwards. At the same time through the last decade, Ben and I have been a working writing team amidst all of this. We've worked in shows where we were the only people of color. We'd walk in there on a staff where we were it. We've worked on black shows where the show runner was white. There'd be some black writers on the show and we were the other people of color.

This last year, for many of the sitcoms, there was maybe one non-white writer on a white show, the other writers of color were all on black shows. It's unfortunate. Any Day Now, of course, is an exception. Our show, The Steve Harvey Show, has a very diverse staff. It is a primarily an African-American show but we have other characters on the show that are from other ethnic groups and our staff is very much mixed. Winifred Hervey runs the show, I've worked with her on other shows and her staffs have always been mixed.

When Ben and I got into this we called each other Rice And Beans Productions. It was a little bit of a self-parody, a little bit of a stab at the racial make up. It was also an effort to show that, first and foremost, we're writers who happen to be of different ethnic backgrounds. You can see it works on a show like Any Day Now and certainly on our show it works in that regard. We have been fortunate enough to work consistently on a wide spectrum of shows and it can work.

I'm trying to be a little optimistic. I hope that we are an example that it's not quite as bleak as it is often looked at. I hope that we continue to work and, by just by our existence, bring other people into this world. A couple friends of mine on the WGA Board, told me that they look down the list of working Asian sit-com writers and I'm it. And I was joking with Sonny Fox earlier if I was standing outside here and there was a drive by then the list would fall to zero, you know.

JIM GIGGANS: Michael Mahern, if you agree that there's been a step backward, why?

MICHAEL MAHERN: I don't think there's been a step backwards. I think there's never been a step forward to begin with. What you're talking about with the network television schedules is really a problem created by writers. Television is a writer's medium, the bosses, 90 percent of them are writers, and this has been a problem that's grown up and become a political problem within our Guild. We have a growing group of African-American writers and what happened is that of African-American writers, probably 80 percent have gotten into The Guild, writing on half hour shows with primarily African-American casts. What happened was that there were some changes at a couple of the net-lets, particularly at WB, and the number of jobs for African-American sit com writers fell by about 25 percent between 1998 and 1999. And this got people upset and active. They realized that they had a real grievance here. As a political leader in The Guild, I sat down with some of these writers and I asked what's the nature of the problem. Break it down for me because my career has primarily been in features. And they told us look, our problem is that the black shows have writing staffs that are diverse, while the white shows have only white writers on them. You can't go from writing for The Steve Harvey Show to writing for Friends, it just doesn't happen.

So I asked The Guild staff to give me the statistical breakdown on each individual show, with the ethnic background of all the staff members. And I got these lists and I sat down about a year ago with a legal pad and I categorized the shows in the half hour area, the shows with primarily minority casts, and those with primarily white casts. The shows with minority casts employed about 120 writers, about 60 of them were African-American. The shows with primarily white casts employed, if I can remember correctly, it was about 500 writers, zero of whom were African-American. It was absolute total segregation in writing staffs. And I said no wonder people are upset, there's a real problem here. And it was even worse in the half hour area then the hour area. So what we decided we had to do was involve the labor union, which has some power with its members. It doesn't have the power to hire and fire, but certainly we have a responsibility to try to raise people's consciousness.

What we've been trying to do is, particularly in the half- hour area, is to try to get people together and to talk about this.

It's interesting, we had a meeting of a number of prominent show runners at The Guild, this was about six months ago. One person, a very prominent show runner, the minute the meeting started, became very defensive. She said, when I read a writing sample, I don't know what color that person is and blah, blah, blah. And then there was some more discussion and about 15 minutes later she chimed back in and she said, "you know, I've always made a point when I hire a staff to make sure that there are women on that staff. And she said and I now realize that what I have to do in the future is that I have to make sure that there are people of color on that staff."

When you're doing this sort of thing, when you're trying to change people's minds, change how people view the world. What you want to see happen, is where you don't have to tell the person but they suddenly see it on his or her own. Immediately after she said that, a male show runner said, last year an agent sent me three writing samples and told me these are all writing samples from African-American writers and I regarded that as a negative thing. At this point I said, glory hallelujah, because people were talking about the way they really feel, and they're talking about this in front of other writers, in front of their contemporaries.

You know, I wish I could say that we've created a revolution of consciousness, I know we haven't, but I think we're starting to get a little bit down that line. I'm cautiously hopeful that if we keep our shoulders to the wheel consistently over the next five or six years, that we may be able to get to the point just like the '70s and '80s with women writers, where guys did not feel comfortable without at least one woman in the writing room.

And I think my minimum goal where they don't feel comfortable unless there's at least one non-white person in the writing room. It's a ridiculously modest goal but it's so far beyond where we've been to date. We've got to keep in mind that we're talking about, the people who, to a large extent, are the creators of the American popular culture. In American popular culture there has been very little social integration over the last 30 years, but there's been a lot of workplace integration, which has affected Hollywood almost not at all.

So a situation has evolved where the people who are creating America's popular culture have less experience with people of other ethnic groups, than the average. Much less because they live on the West Side and they work essentially only with other white people. You can't create television programming for an audience that is, as of today about 33 percent non-white, with only white people. From a business stand point it doesn't make sense.

JIM GIGGANS: Some of the most popular shows on television are very diverse. ER is very diverse. The Practice is very diverse. Shows that are making a lot of money for their companies. Now how do you make shows like that happen?

THOM MOUNT: Well, my view about the place that change has to take, Jim, is that it starts with individuals at the highest level in these companies. I don't think it starts in writing staffs. My own view, at least from my own experience in corporate context, is that leadership is everything.

JIM GIGGANS: So if you were a studio executive you could make it happen? You could say I want this.

THOM MOUNT: You can more than make it happen. You can make it happen by example in the executive ranks, which is the place to start. If there's diversity in the executive ranks there will be diversity in the product. It will trickle down, it is a viable social phenomena. Diversity breeds diversity, it is a very healthy snowball to start rolling down the hill. There are several problems. One of them is that in a world or merger-mania, we have very unstable leadership at the top of these companies. People don't last longer than two or three years at the most and then they're gone to a producing deal or another company. They don't have time to figure out who they are as humans, what their responsibilities are, outside the boundaries of the quarterly report. We have no mechanism in the community for self-criticism. You know, Hollywood's unique among allegedly creative environments in the world. If you're a novelist, if you're a painter, if you're a dancer, if in fact you work in theater in New York, if you do almost any other kind of creative pursuit, there's a moment where there's a tremendous amount of critique among your peers. I've been doing this for a long time, I've never heard a group of filmmakers or those in television or in theatrical features, sit down and critique intelligently the work any one of them has done among a group. I've just not ever had that experience.

JIM GIGGANS: Well, the critique for them is money, isn't it? It's how much money the film makes or if it's number one or number two in terms of course, the Nielsen's isn't it?

THOM MOUNT: Jim your point is well taken. It is a larger issue because we live in a culture in which the weekend box office has become the only viable headline on Monday morning about our industry. What does that say about who we are? What does that say about where our values are, anyway?

JIM GIGGANS: Montezuma?

MONTEZUMA ESPERANZA: You know, I've been debating whether or not to raise the next issue in my mind. Our goal as Latinos in the industry is to get ghettoized the way African-Americans are. [BACKGROUND LAUGH] And to be mentioned in the same breath by everyone else instead of just the NAACP, or African-Americans. The paradigm in the country is still Black/White. And, there's still a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done there, which I am very supportive of. At the same time, the paradigm needs to shift to reflect the reality of who we are as a people in this country and that 30 percent of the people in the United States are not of northern European ancestry.

I completely agree with what everyone else has said on the panel in terms of what the problem. I think that part of the discussion has to occur on a broad societal level as to who we want to be as a country and what our hopes and dreams are for this country. We need to create a consciousness about what our country needs to do, but here we are talking to ourselves. We need to reach out and create the social context of Thom Mount's peers, and he has done good work in his life. I acknowledge that they should be actually forced into a situation where they must endure peer criticism about their social responsibilities as human beings and that the executives are held to task by more than just the activists in the room.

JIM GIGGANS: Vince Cheung. Held to task how? I mean, you're writing, obviously and you're pitching stories and you're pitching your career, if you will, but taken to task? How would you do it?

VINCE CHEUNG: Well, I think consciousness is really what it's all about. You know, we're talking about 1976. Thom Mount is talking about creating a Black film uni--and that was not mandated by any government program. Of course, that was in the days of affirmative action. There was a different consciousness then. That was also a time of only three networks, but you had shows like All In The Family. You had MASH. You had a lot of shows that were edgy and anti-establishment. In those days, it was, yeah, stick it to the man. And it was so everybody would come out already with that kind of spirit on television and film. Those were my formative years, and there was a lot more awareness, but there may have been a kind of self-critique in those days because it was hip to have black folk on your set.

And we have slipped from that. And economics have driven us to that. Just from my own experience of going into a room at a network and pitching a show that is a quote, ethnic show, and it's one of those words that I really hate, because who isn't ethnic, you know? I mean, a white person is ethnic. Everybody is ethnic. But, to pitch a non-white show, let's say, you're pitching to an executive who, most likely, is not going to be a person who is African-American, who is not Asian or Latino. And you're expecting that person to get the little nuances that you're pitching. You know that if I have a Chinese character who is like my mom. Oh, I spend all day at track, you know, that's okay. And you bring me money because you number one son and you work hard. So those things are little things that are funny. Yeah, the outrageous accent is funny. My mom does kind of speak like that. But, there are little things there that you may not entirely get if you're hearing this as a pitch.

But sometimes you have to take a flyer. You have to say, "okay, I don't get this. I know there's something there, and I have to trust the writer, or the show creator." Of course I absolutely agree with Thom Mount, having worked for a number of years at NBC. You had a movies department, you had the comedy development department, and I am white and I have a black development executive, I may not get it, but that person will.

JIM GIGGANS: But for some time though, ethnic comedies where they could laugh at us, if you will, have done well. I missed the '70s because I wasn't here. ABC News, when I was very young, convinced me to go to Saigon. For some reason, I didn't get that. And I got there and people were shooting at me and trying to kill me.

VINCE CHEUNG: Yeah, you owe my uncle $20. [LAUGH] I come to pick up now.

JIM GIGGANS: During the '70s, there were a lot of very successful ethnic shows. One of them was All In The Family and another was The Jeffersons. I think what we're talking about now are the shows, for example, a drama which would either be ethnic or have African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, included in the fabric of that drama. And that is what so often, it seems to me, is missing. Thom Mount has said, perhaps you have to force them to do it. It seems obvious that you get a lot of people off your back, you get a lot of people applauding, and you can also make some money by just doing it.

VINCE CHEUNG: You know, it's very baffling to me. This is such a simple thing. You look around this room. My wife is from Idaho and she is white. And I have all these in-laws up in Idaho. I get all the militia jokes and all that stuff. I took a wrong turn off the interstate, and that's where I met her. And I go up there and everyone is cool. And actually there is a huge growing Latino community up there because of farming. Of course, you're going to get migrant farm workers and people settle over years. And it isn't quite our perception here in the rarefied air of Hollywood of what other parts of the country are like.

I think, here in Hollywood, we need to break our prejudices, our preconceptions of what the rest of the country is like. I find their viewing choices and their tastes in entertainment are just not as black and white as we here perceive them to be. And I think a really good example of that is what a lot of the Saturday morning shows have done. For example, the Peter Engel shows. It blows my mind that you can watch Saved By The Bell or One World, which are not by nature issue shows, like Any Day Now. They are made simply to entertain a very specific demographic, to make them laugh, have a little kind of warm, fuzzy moral in it, and that's it. And they're integrated. They do a far better job than we do in prime time.

JIM GIGGANS: And the children's shows. My daughter is nine and my son is seven and now I watch Nickelodeon and I'm stunned. Nickelodeon is totally integrated.

VINCE CHEUNG: Absolutely. And I don't now why as adults we carry these learned responses of fear and prejudice and bigotry and all that stuff with us, and we carry it into the shows that we make up. It just blows my mind.

JIM GIGGANS: So, how do we force it? I think the question is, back to Thom Mount's. How do you force it?

THOM MOUNT: Well, I'm not sure there is a way to force it, but you're doing a terrific job of eliminating this problem. My hat's off to you. I remember, a few years ago, talking to a network head who was based in New York, working part time in an unnamed alphabet network in Los Angeles. She said, "yes, I'm going back and forth all the time. We're talking about pitching a show, we're talking about the potential viewers," and she said, "oh, you mean the fly-over people?" This defines a lot of attitude. Indeed, it's either New York or it's Los Angeles, or it's the fly-over people. Who are those anonymous fly-over people who actually represent more than three quarters, maybe as much as seven eighths of our population.

Secondly, I want to say that I actually see some optimism in certain quarters. One of the places, from the Producers' Guild point of view, is that we see a lot of inspiring activity these days is among young film makers in low budget and independent film making. People who are a generation younger than the so-called slacker generation and are beginning to make $2 million, $3 million, $4 million, $5 million films, those young men and women seem to have a kind of blissful ignorance of the level of prejudice that has prevailed prior to their emergence. And so we're very excited about that, and we see a lot of cool product and interesting themes and an absolute unwillingness to engage in the politics of older generations.

The second thing is television is becoming more diverse as a buyer's market. I'll give you a good example. November, a year ago, we executive produced a special award ceremony for Richard Pryor from the Kennedy Center. We were negotiating with NBC to sell them that special. NBC made an offer. We got an offer from Comedy Central that exceeded NBC's offer by $400,000. It caused me to have to rethink television because I suddenly realized that Comedy Central is a more effective buyer of certain kinds of product than NBC is. Well, okay, new world. Then the issue was how would they promote that show because Richard Pryor has all kinds of iconographic issues associated with him. And Comedy Central did, I must say, an astonishingly smart job of broadly promoting and cross-promoting the show in ways that spoke to every conceivable kind of social dynamic and ethnicity, much more rangy than a network would have approached it. So, I think in the emergence of cable systems and direct broadcast satellite, and with the coming wireless revolution and with Internet streaming, we have an opportunity. I think we have an opportunity in all those areas. As programming becomes more niche-like, the knee-jerk reaction that we have to somehow pander to the fly-over people as an anonymous mass can disappear. Anyway, it gives me some hope.

JIM GIGGANS: With that, I think we'll open it to questions First question. Yes.

AUDIENCE: This first question is to Mr. Mount. You had mentioned before about minority filmmakers as being economically ghettoized. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. Most of the time those minority filmmakers and makers of television are actually placed on a different economic level if they sell to these cable systems.

THOM MOUNT: That's correct. And the reaction is still the same in studios, certainly on the theatrical feature front. Unless the film stars a breakaway, crossover star, and there are only two or three in the minority world, one runs an economic model at a studio that says this film will have, for instance, an African-American base. An African-American base in this country today represents about $18 million in rentals, not box office, box office is much bigger, but in return to the studio, the rentals numbers they can count on, about $18 million.

This is true at all studios throughout the community. They say, okay, if this thing can't get us back, the full measure of the African-American community, we won't take the risk on it. And they advertise and promote the film in an African-American context that means that the buy is smaller, which means that the spread is smaller, which means that you're more likely to have the film booked at the Magic Johnson Theater chain than at the Winnetka 14. And all of those things contribute to a kind of economic ghetto-ization that I think puts an artificial ceiling on the performance of the product.

I think that's the essence. And studio executives will argue with you that these are just facts. These films, statistically over time just don't perform any other way. My argument is marketing is half the battle. And I think it works both directions. My wife Katrina and I went to see a picture called Black And White recently, a Jim Toback movie, which I found odd and disturbing. And what interested me about that film, more than the content of the film because at the end of the day I thought it was boring, was the marketing approach. They attempted to sell this film to the African-American community. And I thought, this is great. I haven't seen a car wreck of this size in a long time. Whoa, these guys are going to throw $10 million or $20 million at marketing to the African-American community, a film that at its core rests on racist principles. What's going on here? Who are these guys? How did they get to that decision? So much of the problem is fueled by an absolute failure to communicate, you know.

JIM GIGGANS: Well, this lady knows of what she speaks because she worked with Spike Lee.

LORETHA JONES: That was a long time ago. Now, I've worked in film and television and music. What's really interesting is how egotistical the conversation becomes when you talk about television people defining popular culture, because I really think a huge lesson can be learned from the music industry. The music industry has managed to infiltrate popular culture across the board on a racial basis.

Look at the expansion of rap music in Middle America. I've been in the fly-over places in Minneapolis and some smaller places, and I've walked down the street, and I've seen white kids dressed just like black kids that I had left in L.A. or in New York. And they are trying to talk the talk. They're listening to the music. They're doing all that sort of stuff. And black music is extremely successful because the thing that always gets lost in this discussion of social consciousness and the right thing to do is that it's really about money.

And if you're talking about money, then you should look at the areas where the social experiment has really worked financially successfully. Whether you look at African-American, whether you look at the present explosion of Latino music, the bottom line is to a certain extent, the decision makers, especially in the television area, make an assumption about what racist things middle America will or will not buy. And they assume that we will not welcome into our homes people who look differently. Yet we're welcoming in the music. We're welcoming in all sorts of other cultural icons to the tunes of millions and millions of dollars. And I think, to a certain extent, those television executives would look at it, film executives are starting to look at it, even though those ceilings and parameters still exist. It's very hard right now to plan a successful white film that doesn't somehow either try to incorporate African-American or Latino music or find that black comedian that they want as the buddy in the project. Because they know if they want that project to cross over, it's going to do well.

The barometer of success in television is measured by Nielsen ratings. And, there's a major issue that a lot of people of color have about where those Nielsen boxes are placed and how far across this country they infiltrate communities of color. Years ago we used to make jokes that they were afraid to bring the boxes into our community. [LAUGH] Consequently, we weren't being counted. Now the boxes are getting there, but you'd be amazed at some of the large urban centers that have significant populations of color that are not really being monitored by the Nielsen's. So, consequently, this perception that we aren't watching certain shows and not doing certain things, I think also is miscalculated because our buying power is tremendous, as reflected in these other areas.

JIM GIGGANS: I think Michael has something to add.

MICHAEL MAHERN: Yes. About your point about the recording industry, which is absolutely correct, I think because the capital costs are less than they are in the film and television industry, the recording industry tends to be way ahead of Hollywood. Even more so in the advertising industry.

If you look at any youth publication, look at the Calvin Klein ads. You no longer see a majority of white models and the one black model. Now you see a minority of white models and a multicultural hue. These people are out there selling. They know what they're doing. I realized how far behind Hollywood was when I opened up the Sunday paper and out fell a flier for Target. And you can't get more middle American than Target. And here in this Target ad there was a teenage white girl standing there being kissed on one cheek by a black guy and the other cheek by a Latino guy. And this is Target. And Hollywood is about 30 years behind that.

As an example of how Hollywood doesn't get it but then certain places it does, is what happened at New Line. They had a movie called Friday. And it came out about four years ago, was sold strictly as an African-American film. It grossed about $28 million. Then, New Line, which has a young, edgy and very marketing perspective, noticed that this movie was a huge hit on videocassette with white kids. The White kids were really into this movie, whose humor style was really very black and very self-consciously ghetto. When they decided to do a sequel to the movie they sold it to a mass youth audience. And instead of grossing $28 million, it grossed $58 million--as a sequel.

You know, there are people out there who do have their ears to the ground and frankly, I think they're the people who over the next 10 years are going to be moving to the forefront of leadership in the business. Simply because that has been a hugely profitable movie. And that's how you get your career advanced in Hollywood--you make the movie that doesn't cost that much money to make and grosses a lot of money, and then suddenly Mike DeLuca is a hot executive.

VINCE CHEUNG: Well, let's not forget this is entertainment. Ultimately, we make a product that is a luxury item. It's not clothes, it's not shelter, and it's not food. This is something that entertains us. We cry, we laugh or we think about and it's a wonderful menu that we can offer. We can do all those things. We can do Friday, which is a really funny movie, and its sequel, and we can do shows like Any Day Now. You know we need to offer it all. The executive that does the T.V. movie or does Any Day Now can, in his or her next job, or within the same company, cross the hall and work on sitcoms. Now, you have that awareness and then you go over here, and all of a sudden all that is gone. That just doesn't make sense. Why does it work on advertising and yet somehow all of that consciousness gets put aside when it comes to other shows? I absolutely don't understand.

Music is a great example. Back to my wife who's from Idaho. I have nephews-in-law who live in this little town of a thousand people. You can't get more lily White than that. And they say, hey, what's up? And they're in their hip-hop clothes. And they're listening to hip hop music. And, they're absolutely into it. And rap music is great in that it has been very pervasive. And now, with a Jackie Chan movie, Shanghai Noon, I was shocked to see that Uncle Cracker, who is the Kid Rock, produced this country rap song. I was at work at Steve Harvey. I was telling some of my fellow writers I saw this country rap, and they're going, oh my God. It's like now the white folk, [LAUGH] the crackers have really gotten rap now. So, it's pervasive. It's that pervasive. And it's a great example. If anything, that should give us optimism because, well, God, it's like the same people who are flying stars and bars are now doing rap.

So this goes back to my point of the perceptions we have in Hollywood that we are our own worst enemy. It's that simple.

JIM GIGGANS: When I think back to when I was younger, I remember Ozzie And Harriet and all of those shows and this housewife who was in pearls and high heels in the kitchen. When you look back on it, it is amazing.

VINCE CHEUNG: No, white folk are like that

JIM GIGGANS: But it seemed to me as if television was wanting us to be the way it wanted us to be. Some executives somewhere decided that this was the perception that they wanted of America. And to a certain extent, that seems to continue now. Unreal, but what they would like it to be.

THOM MOUNT: I think that's true. The other thing I just caution everyone about here is that some years ago I was privileged to participate in the development and financing and distribution of a picture called Car Wash. Car Wash was, for Universal at that time, a big crossover hit. The African-American community embraced the picture and the young white urban community embraced the picture. And Norman Whitfield, who composed the music for the film, did a wonderful job of capitalizing on his R & B background and blending it with the then emerging disco craze. And on the back of that music, the picture crossed to the culture.
I look at hip-hop today, which is certainly pervasive. Katrina and I have a 10-year-old son who is convinced that he will grow up to be Will Smith. There is no question. Robbie is on that Will Smith track. I now know more about Tommy clothes and stuff like that than I ever wanted to know. But question I have is, to what extent is hip-hop going to end up being disco? To what extent are African-American or minority-inspired musical movements cyclical? And how do we then seize this moment when that music movement is pervasive and does have social clout and use it to educate and use it to reinforce diversity. I am reminded of Napoleon's quote about the Bourbons in which he said, roughly paraphrased, they remember everything and learn nothing. And I worry for our system that it learns nothing from these moments.

MICHAEL MAHERN: The '60s and '70s was a period of a certain amount of interracial idealism. So baby boomers had this experience really only as an ideal. Generation X, in large part because of African-Americans moving to the suburbs, generally went to schools that were at least nominally integrated, but it was a generation where the kids all mixed together in elementary school. Once they hit age 13 and puberty started, they totally segregated themselves. With Generation Y, there are indications that it is not happening. There are indications that for the first time, kids are not re-segregating themselves when they're hitting puberty. I'm actually fairly optimistic that it's a permanent change. Because once that unnatural barrier is broken down, we don't expect it to grow up again. I think that's one of the reasons why we're seeing some really profound cultural changes.

JIM GIGGINS: This is another question to Thom Mount. Who decides, for example, on a show like 3rd Watch, which is successful, to have it integrated with African-American, Hispanic, and White people. I'm sorry these are all NBC shows, this is not on purpose [LAUGH], but on West Wing, I mean here you've got this black kid who's kissing the President's daughter, who decides that?

THOM MOUNT: Well, the writer producer staff at that level makes that decision.

JIM GIGGINS: Makes a conscious decision that it will be that way.

THOM MOUNT: That's right.

LORETHA JONES: Yes. And remember West Wing was a reaction to that. That show started out totally white. Even President Clinton spoke out and said "I don't know what White House this reflects, but it looks nothing like mine." So then Duel was added to the cast, and then that relationship became an on-going part, but it was only after there was uproar about that.

MICHAEL MAHERN: I want to cite this as an example of why people should always complain. [LAUGH] Take the case of 3rd Watch and E.R., another highly integrated show. The reason those shows are as they are, is that a number of years ago, back before E.R., John Wells, who's a good friend of mine, was running this show, and he had a black woman who was a cast member of the show. She said, "John, you're a racist." And John was shocked. And John said "why do you say that?" And she said, "let's walk around the set and I'll show you." And they walked around, and the crew was all white, and the writers were all white, and John said it was a real wake-up call. He said, I wasn't going to put myself in a position, where anybody could ever do that to me again. It's because somebody pulled the chain of somebody who is very well intentioned, personally liberal, etc. A good guy. But even if he is a good guy, you have to pull his chain when he's acting as part of this system that's blocking things.

JOE GIGGINS: Loretha was talking earlier about the liberals.

LORETHA JONES: It's interesting, because the last television series that I did was a show called The Parent Hood on the WB, and over the course of that show's life, it was on for four and a half years and it went into syndication last fall, I got to see a very interesting transition within the context of that network. When that network started, the idea was that it was going to be very hard for it to compete against the other mainstream networks. They wanted to go for core audience that historically had been loyal. They would search wherever they had to search to find some show that reflected itself. So WB developed a great deal of programming centered around African-Americans.
When we began it was very interesting, because the executives at that network had a very specific idea of what they thought the African-American audience wanted to see, and how they wanted that reflected. And a lot of our early battles were between outrageous, far out black comedies and something that was a little more dramatic, or more realistic to us, a story that anyone could relate to and happened to star black people. We had a lot of discussions about that, and one of my favorite quotes is to have an white executive tell me, a black person wouldn't say that.

MICHAEL MAHERN: A white executive.

LORETHA JONES: Yeah, a white executive to tell you what a black person wouldn't say, and you go through that. Years ago, someone wrote a very funny book that was a list of all these quotes and notes that you get from executives called 'A Martian Wouldn't Say That' [LAUGH]. And I was like how the hell do you know? [LAUGH]. You constantly want to say that back to them. Well, how do you know? And that battle went on. About midway through our show's run, the network began to want to expand, and they started doing white teen one-hour dramas.

As that began to happen, the type of notes that we began to get changed drastically. Before, if we wanted to have a white guest cast person, they said "oh, that's not really realistic. How would somebody pass through the neighborhood to sort of be in that show." We suddenly started getting notes that said, well can you maybe bring in, not Britney Spears, but someone like that who goes to school with the kids. Until eventually, they went from having shows week long to essentially designating one night, which became black night, where they would just put their ethnic comedies. And the evolution process has been very interesting. Now you're still there, Vince, so it should be interesting.

VINCE CHUENG: Yeah, it's interesting because the Steve Harvey Show has become more or less an anchor for the network but this show is going to be moving to Sunday night, where it originally began. And it's going to be another black night with the PJs and other similar shows. The show has really stayed true to itself through the years. We're talking about a show that's now farther along in the process. Down the road from what this gentleman is talking about, which is the focus group part, which really comes into play. This takes place after you get a show sold, and you get the first six episodes ordered and they get the pilot. They're showing that to the focus groups, and it's like saying racism is the same for all groups. My experience with that is different from your experience, it is different from anybody, from a Jewish person's experience, etc. And it's like saying we have to get out of our heads at the networks, and that all executives are the same, because they aren't the same. Every network has a different identity. The personalities are different. There are some times where focus groups and research really come into play. It just depends on whom you're doing business with. It is a maddening thing--a white executive saying a black person wouldn't say that. I've heard notes about a character who has a newborn baby that go like this: so what's the baby's motivation? [LAUGH] I mean,come on, it's a prop [LAUGH].

JOE GIGGINS: Another question.

AUDIENCE: Is there a way to make film students sensitive to these kinds of issues? Would teaching them about these issues be effective and possibly make a difference?

MICHAEL MAHERN: I think it can be a productive thing. The only difficulty there is that most writers in television, and even in the feature business, don't come out of film school. And most of the people who go through film school do not end up working in the business. Anything you can do to raise people's consciousness is helpful. Frankly I think that people who are in film school now are not going to be the problem, because I think they're from this younger generation. The problem is really the Baby Boomers and the Gen X-ers who are already establishing positions of power. Teen programs in Hollywood are written by people in their 30s. And the Gen X-ers are going to be writing these programs for the next 10 years. The problem is that people write out of their own teen experience, not out of today's teen experience, and these things tend to trail behind.

And I think what's going to happen is that sometime over the next four or five years, somebody who's out of this younger generation is going to come along and create a program, and it's going to be a big hit. Then all of a sudden the Gen X-ers are going to be scrambling to learn about this so they can imitate.

LORETHA JONES: Whenever I've been lucky enough to do a panel, I've always said the following. To me, this is the most effective thing that's going to come out of this.

Someone in here knows someone who writes on a show or works at a network or works somewhere. Ask that person, have you thought about the diversity issue, have you thought about whether or not you're doing what little bit you can to try and change and make a difference. And just like anything else that's impacted this country on a big level, it really has to start on a small level, and it has to start with many people taking that small step. That's the biggest thing that I ask of you. When you leave this room, whoever you do know in this business, ask them if they've thought about it, pull their coattails, because it's going to be rare that you're gonna get a chance to pull the coattails of the person at the top. But you can start at the bottom. And that's where we'll start to make a difference.

JIM GIGGINS: I think I would get back to what Ms. Jones was saying, well I'm liberal, all Hollywood is peopled by liberals. Yet, there is the inaction, as you say.

LORETHA JONES: Yeah, it's a sin of omission. I spent a good deal of time in Switzerland and in Europe. And I used to have major arguments with my friends, about what that country did, by their sin of omission. By their tacit cooperation, whether it was by taking the money, whether it was by not speaking up. To me, one crime is obviously worse than another, but it doesn't mean that the other is not a crime. Or that it's not an issue that we should take some responsibility for.

JIM GIGGINS: Way in the back.

AUDIENCE: What about decision-makers who are minorities?

JIM GIGGINS: Well Thom is a decision maker.

THOM MOUNT: Yeah, I'm afraid to tell you that I don't see, in large corporations, many decision makers who are minorities. I just don't. I see token hires. The flip side is that among small young growing independent companies, both motion picture and television companies, I see a tremendous amount of diversity. And these young men and women are learning how to use a changing market, to control their destinies. They're learning how to sell internationally themselves. They're learning how to be dependent on the traditional deficit financing that either networks or network affiliated companies provided, that shaped the course of television over the last 20 years. I think there's a really good chance that we can make some progress. I don't see a lot of immediate decision makers who are minorities.

JIM GIGGINS: That will have to be the last word. Thank you so much for coming.