Markers of social progress, the struggle for greater equality and representation, can often seem tenuous and vague. As recent events have amply illustrated, backsliding can occur, wiping out years or even generations of advancement heretofore presumed permanent.

The 2022 Hollywood Diversity Report – compiled with financial support from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and fellow annual sponsors NBCUniversal, Hulu, Starz, and the Walt Disney Company, as well as leadership sponsors Netflix and the Latino Film Institute – aims to provide evidence of positive change. 

Recently released by UCLA’s School of Social Sciences, it is one of several studies aimed at bringing clear-eyed quantitative analysis to the American entertainment industry’s attempts to reflect diversity more adequately and accurately both onscreen and behind the camera — and holding the business to account.

Its findings from this past year, which told a story of solidified gains in many areas, present some welcome good news — if also room for continued improvement. “Following the significant advances for people of color and women in 2020, both groups overall made small gains or, at least, held their ground relative to their white and male counterparts in 2021. As a result, both groups enjoyed proportionate representation among film leads and top film roles for the second year in a row,” the report stated.

The report is co-authored by Dr. Darnell Hunt, Professor of Sociology and African American Studies and Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA, and Dr. Ana-Christina Ramón, Director of Research and Civic Engagement, Division of Social Sciences at UCLA. The annual survey studied the top 252 English-language movies released in 2021.

Among its determinations was the fact that films with more diverse casts, featuring 21 to 30 percent minority actors, succeeded at the box office. Despite the peddled conventional wisdom of yesteryear Hollywood, those movies traveled internationally too, with higher median global box office returns than films in any other comparative demographic tier.

In fact, it was audiences of color who helped keep the box office afloat. “What we argue is that the anomaly of 2020 and 2021 demonstrates what’s possible,” said Hunt in a recent conversation by phone. “The films that were immensely popular, audiences of color flocked to them. You look at household ratings by race of household and that type of thing, and it’s clear that those films are very popular. And we also know from our data that people of color are driving a lot of what’s happening at the box office as well. Particularly if you look at the top 10 theatrically released films by the global box office, people of color bought the majority of opening weekend domestic tickets for six of those top 10 films. People of color are 42.7 percent of the (U.S.) population now and growing every year. So, the big takeaway for us is that it’s no longer reasonable to talk about the diverse market. The entire market is diverse. That is clearly shown in the data. All of our indicators point in the same direction — diversity sells, and audiences want diverse content.”

For Hunt – a self-described adolescent amateur filmmaker who, as a kid, indulged in a passion for Super-8 home movies, not unlike Steven Spielberg – the connection to this type of work and research is highly personal. He attended the University of Southern California as an undergraduate, double majoring for a time in journalism and film and TV. “It was an eye-opening experience when I was at USC because I was, like, one of two or three African Americans in the entire program. That was alienating to me as a 20-year-old,” he said. “I didn’t really quite expect that.”

Graduating with a degree in journalism, Hunt took a job at a public relations firm in Los Angeles, where he had the similar experience of being the only African American professional in the office. He later applied to business school and attended Georgetown University, where he was selected as one of eight nationwide fellows for a management training program at NBC. As part of the program, Hunt worked his way across different departments, getting a bird’s eye view of the entire TV business.

“The last stop was the newsroom, where I really wanted to be,” he said. “Washington, D.C. during that period was a majority African American city, before it gentrified into the kind of what it is today. Most of the on-air anchors were African American, many of the reporters were, and I was surprised to learn that, when I got in the newsroom, the newsroom was almost entirely white. All the producers were white. Many of the writers were white. We’d have news-planning meetings in the morning where we’d read the Washington Post for the major stories and decide what the local news was going to cover that day. I was often the only Black person in those meetings. It was fascinating to hear my colleagues talk about potential news stories and about communities in the D.C. area – that were solidly professional, you know, doctors and lawyers, upper-middle-class black communities – describing them as if they were rough and dangerous areas. It kind of opened my eyes to the way that race potentially shapes the way that news gets framed, which is something they didn’t really teach us in journalism school.”

This illuminated perspective changed the trajectory of Hunt’s professional life. Becoming more interested in how race and media intersected, he turned down an NBC job and enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Los Angeles. “While I was here the L.A., uprisings of 1992 happened. It immediately became clear to me that that was my dissertation topic,” Hunt said. “I wanted to look at how news coverage was shaped by race and was shaping the ways that people talked about race, Rodney King’s beating, and so on.”

While doing research, Hunt happened to meet representatives from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who had been tasked with taking a look at Hollywood and trying to get a sense of what role media images may have played in exacerbating tensions between minority communities in Los Angeles. Needing a local guide, they tapped Hunt.

“They flew me back to Washington and they hired me and deputized me as a staff member. I spent a year-and-a-half following their attorneys all over Hollywood,” he said. “We went to every studio, every network, all the employment guilds. We went to advocacy groups like the NAACP, talked to individual actors. I helped staff the hearing they had in L.A. where they had testimony about diversity in Hollywood. So, from 1993 to the present I’ve been involved in research related to those topics.”

“I’ve done a lot of consulting for the industry,” Hunt continued. “I’ve done the Hollywood Writers Report for the Writers Guild of America for about 10 to 12 years. I did a study for SAG called the African American Television Report in 1999-2000. I’ve done reports for the NAACP and Color of Change. We started the Hollywood Diversity Report at UCLA in 2014 because, across all those years, I was working for all those advocacy groups and organizations. What became patently clear to me was that there was no definitive set of data on this. There were anecdotal studies here and there but there was no comprehensive view that would allow us to track, over time, whether things were actually getting better. So, we set out to do that, to be the definitive set of data that was consistent across time.”

That data, together with his broader work, have allowed Hunt to observe the wheels of change turning in ways that are concrete, if not always as fast as one might like. “What was reassuring was the degree of consistency we saw between the 2020 data and the 2021 data,” said Hunt. “That consistency is an outgrowth of the pandemic. It affected both years in similar ways. Theaters slowly began to reopen in 2021 but the year was clearly impacted by the pandemic.”

The 2022 Hollywood Diversity Report found that the percentage of leading roles played by persons of color in last year’s top 200 films has nearly quadrupled from a decade ago. Their share of writing credits has more than quadrupled. Their percentage of directing jobs has nearly tripled.

In terms of on-camera diversity, the report found Black talents were slightly overrepresented in leading roles, accounting for 15.5 percent of film leads, compared to a self-identified 13.4 percent of the U.S. population.

Multiracial persons were at proportionate representation, constituting 10.3 percent of film leads. Asian stars were slightly underrepresented, at 5.6 of film leads percent, compared to an actual representation of 6 percent.

Latinx stars (at 7.1 percent) remain extremely underrepresented when compared to their 18.7 percent make-up of the overall population. People of MENA descent (0 percent) and Native Americans (0.4 percent) remain virtually invisible in lead roles. (The latter designations attained 1.1 percent and 0.6 percent representation when all film roles were considered.)

The percentage of women in leading roles has nearly doubled over the last 10 years. Notably, their share of writing credits has more than doubled. The percentage of female directors has increased by more than fivefold over the past decade.

Still, in addition to Latinx underrepresentation, other systemic challenges remain. In terms of room for improvement, there’s still a considerable gap between onscreen diversity and greater opportunities for women and persons of color behind the camera. “Women have inched forward relative to their male counterparts among the directors of top Hollywood films,” the report stated. “Women claimed 21.8 percent of these critical positions in 2021, up just slightly from 20.5 percent in 2020. Women’s share of screenwriters in 2021 was more than double the 14.1 percent figure observed in 2011. Still, women would have to increase their 2021 share by nearly 20 percentage points to reach parity with men in this employment arena.”

For the full report, click here (https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/hollywood-diversity-report-2022/).