Watch the lines of striking writers walking with picket signs in New York and Los Angeles and you will not see many faces of color, revealing Hollywood's need to diversify the people who create the television shows we watch.
Click on the video below to watch the writers picketing outside TimeWarnerCenter in New York City on Thursday.
While more than 30 percent of the nation's population is not white and the younger the generation, the greater its diversity, black, Asian-American, Native American and Latino writers comprise less than 10 percent of employed television writers, according to statistics compiled by the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW).
Ethnic and racial demographics for the Writers Guild of America East were not available, although a spokesperson said they are probably similar to WGAW.
"These numbers will likely get worse before they get better because of the recent merger of UPN and the WB into the new CW Network, which resulted in the cancellation of several minority-themed situation comedies that employed a disproportionate share of minority television writers," reported the WGAW in its 2007 Hollywood Writers Report. "The situation is grimmer in film, where the minority share of employment has been stuck at 6 percent for years."
The WGAW's 2007 Hollywood Writers Report researched trends in hiring from 2000 to 2005. During that time, overall membership in the guild dropped from 9,056 to 7,969.
WGAW membership among writers of color actually increased during the same five-year period (from 543 to 581 members) with the greatest percentage gain occurring among Asian-American writers, 81.7 percent. Native American WGAW members experienced the second-largest increase of 19 percent, while the percentages of Latino and black WGAW members declined by 5.4 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively, according to the WGAW report.
"For writers of color [and] women writers, the issues are more urgent because we are underrepresented ... in the work force," says Gary Hardwick, a black writer whose film credits include "The Brothers" and "Deliver Us From Eva."
"Our numbers are always less than what the Writers Guild would like them to be," adds Hardwick. "When [a strike] happens, everyone is squeezed, but as they say, 'Stuff flows downstream.' For us, it's a matter of survival."
Hardwick, a successful industry veteran, could not say definitively why there are so few writers of color but he says nepotism runs rampant. Television show runners are the people who hire writers to write the shows. Often, show runners hire friends who came up in the industry with them. When Hardwick ran "In The House," a show that featured a majority-black cast, all of his writers were black.
"They were my friends. I had worked with them and knew them and hired them because they were good," says Hardwick. Too many writers from underrepresented groups remain underrepresented because they don't have those connections.
"It goes back to the show runners," says Alex Nogales, president and CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC). "The show runners are the ones who create, and if they've got a hit, no one will tell them what to do."
NHMC, under the guidance of Nogales, has influenced television networks to hire with an eye for diversity, especially through its annual report card on television diversity. This year's diversity report card shows that ABC made great gains in its representation of Latinos and to a smaller extent among other people of color. Nogales notes that Shonda Rhimes, the black writer-producer who created "Grey's Anatomy" and "Private Practice," not only hired a representative cast but also representative groups of writers. Those shows are considered two of ABC's flagships, as well as being two top-rated shows.
While Nogales places most of the blame for the lack of writers of color on show runners, he does not give a pass to the networks or the unions, such as the WGAW, the Screen Actors Guild or the Directors Guild. The network chiefs could demand that show runners hire more inclusive crews if they wanted to, although it would go against current industry culture. Also, the labor unions could include demands for greater diversity along with demands for better pay.
"Sometimes the network can insist that the show runner hire people of color ... the WGAW could do more," says Nogales. "But the unions have not traditionally been concerned with people of color. They could, right now, insist that diversity be something that producers stick with, but they're not doing that. That would take great courage to insist that diversity be a part of any new contract. Right now they want to get a contract for the current people working, and the current people working are mostly not people of color."
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