Latino U.S. reps slam Hollywood’s lack of Latinos in film, citing new USC study – LA Daily News

E-Edition
Get the latest news delivered daily!

Get the latest news delivered daily!
E-Edition
Trending:
A new study from USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative confirms what Latino talent in Hollywood has been saying for years: Hispanics are extremely underrepresented both onscreen and in key creative positions in major movies.
And that’s got Latinos in Congress slamming the industry for not treating the issue as a priority.
“Latinos in Film: Erasure On Screen & Behind the Camera Across 1,200 Popular Movies,” which USC conducted in partnership with the National Association of Latino Independent Producers and Wise Entertainment, found that in the 100 top-grossing films of each year from 2007 to 2018, a mere 4.5% of all speaking characters were Latino.
That’s 13.8% below the U.S. Census. Not only that, but Latinos make up nearly a quarter of frequent moviegoers in this country. The USC report also notes that 77% of states and U.S. territories have higher Latino population percentages than Hollywood films do.
Behind the scenes, only 4% of the 1,200 films studied were Latino-directed, and the majority of those directors (71%) came from outside the country. Producers had an even lower percentage (three). And Latinas were even more severely underrepresented: Just one director out of 1,335 total, and only 19 producers on the 1,200 movies.
“The lack of Latino representation in the entertainment industry continues,” said U.S. Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Panorama City, in a statement released by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in response to the USC study. “It is clear by this report that Latino representation in Hollywood is not a priority. Hollywood executives must do better when it comes to casting and film crew hiring across the industry to ensure that there is real representation, not only of Latinos, but of all communities of color on their film sets. We need to encourage the next generation of entertainers and filmmakers that there is a place for them in every position of the industry and that success in Hollywood is not a distant dream.”
Others agreed with the idea of a lack of urgency in the industry.
“The Latino community has not been prioritized, and it is imperative that we shed light on the glaring reality of Latino representation in film,” Benjamin Lopez, executive director of NALIP, said in a press release accompanying the USC study.
Stacy Smith, who heads the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative for USC, noted the scope of the lack of inclusion in Hollywood.
“No matter which part of the film ecosystem we examined, Latinos were vastly underrepresented,” Smith said. “This community represents nearly half of Angelenos, 39% of Californians, and 18% of the U.S. population. At a time where Latinos in our country are facing intense concerns over their safety, we urgently need to see the Latino community authentically and accurately represented throughout entertainment.”
The report further revealed that only 3% of lead or co-lead actors were Latino across the films that were studied. These did not include 2019 releases such as “Miss Bala” and “Dora and the Lost City of Gold” (both featuring Latina leads and largely Latinx casts, but directed by non-Latinos), Robert Rodriguez’s “Alita: Battle Angel” starring Rosa Salazar and Ben Hernandez Bray’s “El Chicano,” and the Guillermo del Toro-produced “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” which co-stars Michael Garza as Ramon Morales.
In the films studied, 36% of all and 60% of top-billed roles played by Latinos had no culturally identifying characteristics as such (attendant to that, five of the 17 female leads the survey found were played by Cameron Diaz, and none of those characters was in a Latino community). Those that did had persistent percentages of being depcited as criminal, poor and other stereotypes.
In the top 100 movies of last year, 47 had no Latino characters and 70 no Latinas.
Mauricio Mota, co-president of Wise Entertainment and producer of the television series series “East Los High,” cast the lack of representation in film in terms of the dangers to come in a society filled with anti-Latino fervor.
“The erasure of the Latino community in film creates a void that has been allowed to be filled by hateful and violent rhetoric,” Mauricio Mota, co-president of Wise Entertainment and producer of the television series series “East Los High,” said in the statement. “It is imperative that the talented storytellers from our community are given opportunities to tell the diverse and vibrant narratives of the Latino audience.”
To read the full report, go to assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/aii-study-latinos-in-film-2019.pdf
 
Copyright © 2023 MediaNews Group

source

Leave a Comment

WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com