For the first time, the WGA West published an open letter from its membership — a call from its Committee of Black Writers for change in Hollywood.
This is the first time the union has released a letter from one of its committees; the Writers Guild of America West Board of Directors said in a statement that"[we] felt strongly that we wanted to amplify [the CBW’s] message.”
Hollywood companies, led by Netflix and followed by others including Walt Disney’s Hulu, CBS and Warner Bros., have shared messages of support for the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of protests over the killing of George Floyd. But the writers said more needs to be done to address financial inequities and lack of access that prevent Black creators not only from stepping onto the ladder in Hollywood but progressing through the ranks.
“We Black writers who have ‘made it’ in Hollywood have still been denied jobs at all levels, passed over for opportunities we were qualified for, rejected from writers’ rooms because of a ‘lack of experience,’ unsupported when seeking to create content specifically for Black audiences, critically underpaid and mistreated compared to white counterparts, and historically ignored during awards season,” the CBW wrote in the letter.
The letter describes the long legacy of Hollywood productions and systems that exclude Black writers and other creators of color, recalling how contemporary cinema was launched a century ago with the film “The Birth of a Nation.” The D.W. Griffith movie, written by two white men, “validated violently racist stereotypes of Black people,” the CBW wrote, as well as
. The 1915 silent epic is widely acknowledged as having fueled the rebirth of the Klan in the early 1920s.
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