Diversity Seen as the Ticket to Boost Movie Attendance

Movie ticket sales are at their lowest point since 1976, and part of what makes films less commercially appealing is “too many white people and too many men running the (film) industry . . . who are not representing what’s going on in the country,” said Nina Jacobson, vice president of production at Universal Pictures.

Jacobson and other top industry executives discussed the roles of women, people over 40 and minorities in film production and debated ways films might better represent the diversity of the country on a panel at the Writer’s Guild Thursday night.

“If the creative group was a closer reflection in terms of the world we live in, in terms of race and gender, we would have more commercial movies,” said Jacobson, who has been involved in the development of the films “Beethoven” and “Dragon.”

“It’s about tapping into the marketplace, and you can only understand what’s in your realm of experience,” she said. “Many of the people making movies now have a narrow realm of experience.”

Moderator Nancy Weems, co-chair of the Woman’s Committee of the Guild, said a report to be released next week by the Writer’s Guild documents the low number of women, people over 40 and minorities working in production companies.

“It’s grim,” she said. “There are some major production companies that have no people of color working for them at all. Could it be that the people who are not included could help revive the industry?”

John Burnham, senior vice president and co-head of the motion picture department at the William Morris Agency, acknowledged that actresses are “put out of the business at 40,” but said it is not because of blatant industry ageism or sexism, but because of society’s biases. “People want to see a young guy or young woman in a movie,” he said.

“It’s always been that way,” agreed Mike Medavoy, chairman of TriStar Pictures. Medavoy, who has produced 280 films, including “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Annie Hall,” “Dances With Wolves” and “Rocky,” attributed the lower number of female directors and directors of color to a relatively recent interest in film careers by those groups.

“There are some discriminatory policies,” he said. “There is not a doubt in my mind that the business was set up by boy’s clubs, it’s been a boy’s club, and that’s breaking down. But the truth is, perhaps many women didn’t think of this as a career prior to the last 10 or 20 years. People didn’t know about it--now they know, and more will emerge.”

The “freshest and best” films to come out of Hollywood today, Medavoy said, are those done by black filmmakers. “They are doing things that are real, they shoot reality. I’m discouraged by the (lack of) quality, ingenuity, inventiveness, and content of scripts now. The studio scripts we see are all derivative stuff.”