We teamed up with our friends from Potential Spoilers to give Kristen a research break. Kyla runs this episode, and with that responsibility comes the running of the Show Notes.

Fun Fact. Last year, Disney ticket sales accounted for 38% of box office revenue. Warner Bros was next at nearly 14%, so together, two studios were raking in over 50% of total domestic box office takings in the United States.

Welcome to Pullback! The show that makes everyone sad all the time.

Gender and Racial Disparity In-Front of and Behind the Camera

I started this part of the episode by plugging another podcast I love: The Bechdel Cast. If you’re looking for a fun feminist take on popular movies, I highly recommend this show. It’s taught me a lot about looking critically at the films I enjoy. In this episode, I mention loving The Princess and the Frog, and The Bechdel Cast recently put out an episode about it! So now I love it less. Dang it Disney, do better!

In September 2019, the USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s annual study looking at the inequality in popular films found that in the top 100 films of 2018, 33% of speaking roles were women, 12% had balanced casts, and 39 films depicted a female lead or co-lead. Of those leads and co leads, 11 were from underrepresented racial or ethnic groups, and 11 were 45 years old or older.

From that same study:

13-20 year old females were just as likely as 21-39 year olds to be shown in sexy attire with some nudity and to be referenced as attractive.
the percentage of white characters has decreased nearly 14%, but since the original number was 78%, that means nearly 64% of speaking characters are still white.
Since the study started in 2007, the percentage of white characters has decreased nearly 14%, but since the original number was 78%, that means nearly 64% of speaking characters are still white.
Out of 4387 speaking characters, only 58 were LGBTQI. And of those 58, nearly 64% were white.
The study found that only 1.6% of all speaking characters were depicted with a disability, and of those who were depicted, nearly 73% were men.
Behind the camera: out of 1135 content creators only 293 were women. That’s directors, producers, writers, and composers. 5 directors out of 112 were women, and only 1 was a woman of colour. 3 composers were women, compared to 109 men.

There is also a gender and racial pay gap. Underpaying and under representing women and minority groups in cinema is partly fed by this myth that different casting choices do badly at the box office, despite the fact that movies starring white dudes fail all the time, and movies starring diverse casts often do well. But when a movie starring someone else does badly, it appears to be felt by producers as “people don’t want to see films with diversity”, rather than “hmm, maybe we did a bad job with this film and made a bad movie”.

So women and minorities are still underrepresented in the film industry, and often still represented in stereotypical or negative ways. People often have higher self-esteem when they see themselves represented positively on screen, and negative portrayals can reinforce gender and racial biases in the general population. So there are lots of reasons to improve representation in the industry! I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but Nancy Wang Yuen’s book “Reel Inequality” looks like a great source for those looking to follow up on this further.

The #metoo movement is huge and still rolling in Hollywood. Things don’t get fixed overnight (although know that there have been improvements), so it’s important to remember that diversity behind the camera (or, even more broadly, in positions of high-level decision making, such as CEOs or government officials) helps shift power-dynamics.

We did a whole episode on the Black Lives Matter movement as the protests were going in the summer of 2020. Followed shortly after by an episode on Operation Breadbasket, one of the civil rights movement’s most successful boycott campaigns. Learning is caring!

Environmental Impact

Land Use: Filming on Location
Wildlife is disturbed, vegetation is trampled, and land is transformed. Game of Thrones got in trouble for trucking sand into a Maltese beach for Danaerys’s wedding in season 1, and Mad Max Fury Road received criticism for running roughshod over sensitive desert lands in Namibia. Not to mention the effects of over-tourism in places such as Maya Bay or Skellig Michael. Filming on location also causes sound and light pollution, which can disturb local wildlife (and people).

Waste and Carbon Emissions
Look, the film industry is hella wasteful. Plastic water bottles, food, paper, sets, costumes, props. And none of this accounts for merchandising: toys, clothing, collectibles etc.

Carbon emissions also aren’t great. Here’s a quote from a great Vice article:
“According to BAFTA, the British film organization, a single hour of television produced in the U.K.—fiction or nonfiction—produces 13 metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s nearly as much CO2 as an average American generates in a year. A 2006 UCLA study found that the California film and television industry created 8.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide; the number for the U.S. film and TV industry as a whole was 15 million tons.”

I found a really cool page on CreativeBC offering solutions on how to make productions greener, and anyone in the production industry should check it out for an awesome list of suggestions on how to be greener. It’s possible for movies to be greener, a notable example being the Amazing Spider Man 2.

Animal Welfare

Just like over-tourism affecting beautiful secluded areas, animals can become high demand pets after being featured in films. Some examples of this are owls in Indonesia, and clown fish worldwide. I don’t have much more to say about this, other than be considerate and thoughtful when buying pets; think about where they’re coming from, or if they should be pets at all.

Most folks know the familiar message at the end of credits, “no animals were harmed in the making of this film.” Welp. It turns out that’s super dubious.
The American Humane Association, or AHA, started monitoring movies in the 1940s, after a horse was killed in the 1939 film Jesse James. A stuntman and the horse were sent over a 70-foot cliff into a river. The stuntman was fine, but the horse broke it’s back and died. This caused a public outrage and people demanded there be some oversight.
When it was established, it was a good thing for the industry, and I’m sure it continues to do good work, but it’s not a perfect system. I had trouble finding anything super recent, and a lot of the information I could find was sourced from an article by the Hollywood Reporter from 2013, so I hope things are improving, but it’s been less than a decade since the big reports were out so it’s important to discuss.

Things to note about the AHA:

Films can still earn the tag, even if an animal was hurt or even killed as long as it was an accident, happened while cameras were not rolling, or proper procedures had been followed but the animal was hurt anyway.
From the article by the Hollywood reporter:
“For example, Disney's Eight Below was awarded the end credit despite a March 21, 2005, incident report that noted: "The hero dog seriously got into a fight with two other dogs. The trainer beat the dog harshly, which included five punches to its diaphragm. Our rep spoke to him about this, and he expressed that he had no choice. The office instructed [the rep] to pull the dog." In its statement to THR, the AHA says, "The trainer had to use force to break up the fight. As a result, the dogs were not injured." The AHA rep also asked for more trainers to be on set.”
Further from The Hollywood Reporter article: “On another Disney project, 2008's The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, horses repeatedly were pulled from production for lameness and injuries -- AHA internal database notes from June 23, 2007, show that 14 were out of commission at once -- with problems ranging from a sore tail and a sore back to a "wound on nose." Yet the production still received the "No Animals Were Harmed" disclaimer. According to AHA's statement to THR, the end credit was justified because "none of the injuries were serious and none were due to intentional harm."”
Sometimes films just put that disclaimer in their credits, even if the AHA wasn’t there. Usually the AHA will send a cease and desist if they’re made aware of this, but they also have a list of films on their website that did have oversight, so audience members can double check.
The oversight happens only while filming takes place and doesn’t account for how the animals were trained or how they’re treated off-screen. Also the American Humane Association, who is responsible for approving that message and overseeing the filming, is a non-profit and too small to look further into animal treatment or do much if they do see something wrong.

Child Actors

This episode focuses on Hollywood, but in my research I found few to no protections for kids bringing in money as entertainers on YouTube, which is worth mentioning.

As discussed in the first part of these notes, abuse within the industry is problematic. Corey Feldman has spoken out against this specifically regarding children. Most of what I found was anecdotal but I’ve heard enough to be uncomfortable and question the ethics of using kids in the television and film industries.

Modern media might be making it worse. Mara Wilson (Mrs Doubtfire and Matilda) wrote a lovely piece for Cracked about her time as a child actor, and she mentions having had her parents weed out the weirder fan mail she received. Kids don’t have that anymore, and are pressured to be constantly online and creating content. The kids from Stranger Things have great online presence, but it’s gotta be exhausting, speaking as someone who can barely post daily. And of course, there are fewer barriers between them and the weird shit people send to them via the internet.

Side Note: thank god the internet was a baby when I was young and all the weird stuff I did is gone forever.

Fun fact to end on: The kid from the shining is now a biology teacher, and the kid from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the one with Gene Wilder, not Johnny Depp) is now a vet.

What can Consumers do?

Don’t support bad movies! And don’t pirate films that are trying! Supporting smaller studios is important for showing the big studios we want to see better films, but it’s hard when over 50% of box office earnings are going to the two biggest studios. It can be hard to find fully independent films, as discussed at the end of our episode when we chat about our challenge: watch an independent film. But even if you can’t help but support the bigger studios (hey, I wanted to watch Toy Story 4 as badly as everyone else), it’s important to be cognizant of how you are consuming that media. Pay for movies that try!

If you want to do some more reading, this Cracked article covers a few of the points made in our episode. And here’s another Cracked piece with more wild Hollywood stories, just for fun.