Paramount Pictures Corp. has been singled out by the National Hispanic Media Coalition for producing movies with few Hispanic actors, directors and writers.
The coalition announced July 31 that it’s targeting Paramount because the studio’s movies had the worst rate of Hispanic representation, according to a recently released UCLA study on Hollywood diversity. The coalition hopes Paramount will sign a memorandum of understanding that puts specific benchmarks in writing for the number of movies that are, for example, directed by Latinos.
The coalition, which is based in Pasadena, also alleged that Paramount refused to work with Hispanic media watchdog groups to increase Hispanic representation.
None of the studio’s 20 highest grossing films in 2017 and 2016 had Hispanic directors or writers, according to the UCLA study.
The National Hispanic Media Coalition said that Paramount backed away from signing a memorandum of understanding between the two parties.
Paramount last week issued a statement contending that it worked in good faith with the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and that the studio has made progress, “including ensuring representation in front of and behind the camera in upcoming films such as ‘Dora the Explorer,’ ‘Instant Family,’ and ‘Limited Partners.’”
The studio did not respond to follow-up questions about why it balked on an agreement with the Hispanic media coalition to increase the number of Latinos in its workforce.
Hollywood’s lack of diversity has been in the crosshairs of advocacy organizations for years, and a part of the state’s 2018 film tax credit renewal requires reporting of minority representation.
It is not clear if the coalition’s targeting will affect Viacom Inc.-owned Paramount’s bottom line – the coalition has not called for an outright boycott, or filed a lawsuit. But it is unique for one specific studio, as opposed to the industry overall, to be hit with criticism over a lack of minority representation.
The National Hispanic Media Coalition’s criticisms could also point to Paramount’s suboptimal financial performance in recent years. Of the 200 highest-grossing films of 2017 and 2016 in the global box office, just 20 were Paramount releases.
The studio has ranked last among the big six studios in box office sales each year since 2013, according to the Internet Movie Database’s Box Office Mojo.
A sale of Viacom to CBS Corp. looked imminent in the spring, but the deal has unraveled for now amid litigation between CBS and the family company of Sumner Redstone, who still owns a controlling stake in both CBS and Viacom.
Viacom closed trading Aug. 3 at $29.17 per share, a six percent drop from $30.66 at the same time last year.
Intersectional Movie Marketing
Paramount rival Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. announced a new position to market its movies to minority groups.
The Culver City studio unveiled Ellene Miles as its first ever, “Senior Vice-President of Intersectional Marketing.”
Miles’ position was announced to employees in a company memo later made public. She will be “working across all our marketing operations to establish holistic multicultural and inclusion-based strategies for all our firms,” according to the studio.
The memo billed Miles as an industry veteran who “has worked with virtually every major studio in Hollywood, executing comprehensive publicity and marketing campaigns.”
Sony Pictures declined to answer specific questions, but the concept of the new role looks different than the traditional minority marketing position.
Intersectionality was a term coined in 1989 by critical race theory founder and UCLA School of Law Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to study how interlocking institutions or concepts of power impact marginalized members of society.
The application of intersectionality has since expanded to the market.
A 2013 American Marketing Association journal article said that it has come to mean categories like income bracket, race, gender and sexuality cannot be separated, but instead are interlocking identities for advertisers to target.
Waiting for Bettman
If you build it – and announce hiring two multinational contractors – they will come.
That’s the thinking of Westwood-based Oak View Group and other investors looking to bring a National Hockey League team to Seattle. A group calling itself NHL Seattle put out a press release July 31 that it has hired general contractors to do a $660 million re-build of Seattle’s KeyArena.
The contractors include Los Angeles’s AECOM. Sweden-headquartered Skanska is the other main contractor.
A spokesman for NHL Seattle would not disclose how much Oak View and other arena investors, including film producer Jerry Bruckheimer, will pay the contractors. The contractors are expected to complete their work by fall 2020, the spokesman said.
The city of Seattle approved the arena revamp last year with the expectation that Oak View co-founder Tim Leiweke would deliver an NHL team to the Emerald City.
While some professional hockey observers view a Seattle hockey team as a fait accompli, an NHL Board of Governors meeting this summer came and went without an announcement. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has publicly stated he has no timetable on expanding the league to 32 teams.
“We continue to work with the NHL to follow their process,” the NHL Seattle spokesman said. “But we are confident that our fans made a resounding statement with more than 30,000 season ticket deposits put down in record time that Seattle is ready for hockey.”
Staff reporter Matthew Blake can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 556-8332.
