Oh man, have I been there. I've never stretched my category in the hopes that I’d be given a chance by people who despised me, but I've definitely considered it. Ultimately, I decided against it. Maybe we both knew it was ultimately futile.
Back in the mid-2010s, when I still thought getting a job in academia was a distant possibility, my gf told me to check the gay box. After several years of sending applications into the void, she told me to check the non-binary box too.
I couldn't do it. Nothing wrong with being gay or non-binary, I just don't think I should have to pretend to be just to be given a chance.
It's insane that the social justice quota activists point to established baby boomers in industries, most of whom are senior citizens, as proof of preference toward the dreaded cis het white male category, and use that to keep out younger dudes looking for their first chance. Good for these dudes for bypassing that shit entirely. As an audience member, I can't wait to see Backrooms.
Thank you for writing this. Your points are well taken for someone (me) who can either wait out an agent wanting to rep my novel and a publisher who wants it - a process that could take another year to two if it succeeds - or can upload my novel and trailer, and and control my own destiny. It’s helpful to read not only success stories, but brave stories.
I really liked your other article presenting the idea of ‘poorface’ as a way of discussing class more openly, but reading through this piece, I was honestly just really disappointed.
There have been so, so many verified studies completed and published in every trade magazine regarding how much white men still garner many more opportunities in Hollywood than any other demographic. That is just an objective reality. I don’t want to get into a whole back and forth about it in your comments, I’m just kind of bummed.
If you’re curious at all, I’ve written a couple of pieces on here about my personal experiences working in Hollywood. No pressure obviously, but just to say that we actually probably have more in common than you think.
I took this to heart and softened some of the language in the piece. The core idea still stands though; the nonprofits and festivals are massively overselecting for certain diverse populations to counteract a generational imbalance from a more discriminatory era in which more white heterosexual men were able to build careers and become established.
Transparency runs a lot of ways. Thanks for the feedback.
I really appreciate you doing so, and also for the follow.
The one thing I would add, is just that using the word discriminatory toward white men feels tricky. I did notice that you describe diversity stuff at the lab/festival level to be a sort of course-correction, even if you feel it was an over-correction, so we do agree on that.
But it’s akin to the expression of ‘reverse racism,’ which I think probably was intentional on your part, but is a misuse and/or misunderstanding of how power works that just makes me really sad.
Discrimination (racism, and all the isms) describe a power imbalance. A group that has historically had more power than another group is using their power to get whatever they want. The opposite of that is just, basically, self-defense. It isn’t a form of discrimination, because you don’t have enough power to yield.
The perverse thing about this era we’re living through (sigh) is that actual power structures have divided and conquered, once again. Meaning, they have convinced for example working class straight white men that women and people of color and queer people and so forth are weaponizing their identity specifically against them. When many of us would actually want nothing more than to just be actual allies.
But we would never say that a working class person fighting a rich gatekeeper is being discriminatory. We would never say it is reverse classism. Why don’t we do that? How is that different?
I get the points you’re making, but one of the problems in hollywood right now is that we’re told that uplifting the Chloé Zhaos is social justice. The oroginal hollywood creators, while all white men, were of very diverse class backgrounds, often poor immigrants, iterating and hustling.
The institutions do heavily discriminate in favor of certain groups (see my hollywood, feminized series, part 1 for data). Reverse racism is polemic, but again, if you select against certain population for identity traits, it’s discrimination. If you say it explicitly in your materials, it’s discrimination.
I;m not a Trump supporter, but the NYTimes and other places seem to have forgotten that discrimination law protects everyone, as it should. We forget that, because historical racism has been so bad.
I don’t believe anymore that discrimination, especially at the level these institutions have been practicing it, is fair or productive. At the very least , they could program based on demographic shares of the population, which would still be discriminating based on submission numbers (since white men are still so overrepresented in submissions).
These kinds of policies are broadly unpopular, with nearly every demographic in the US, and I fear it’s given the republicans a lot of easy wins.
But on an even broader fairness level, if they’re actively discriminating against a group, regardless of their identity, that group should know. People, including poor white men, don’t have infinite money and time. I think it would be far more preferable, for example, to close nondiverse submissions, than to accept them and take the money, knowing you’re choosing against those people at to a rate of around 9 to 1.
The latest post on my profile — ‘Hollywood is a (Nepo Bab) Monarchy, and It’s Crumbling’ — is my sort of deep dive into what I think trumps all the isms in Hollywood, which is the infrastructure around nepo babies. I specifically break down my thoughts on an older (not wealthy) white guy who was recently profiled and I found a bit frustrating, but still insist that ‘canceling’ him and others like him are not the solution. I argue that dehumanizing nepo babies isn’t the solution either, but also that we can’t solve a problem we aren’t willing to name. It is me dipping my toe into more think piece territory, but still personalized.
‘Hair Appointments with Jimmy’ is a personal essay about how Hollywood can literally feel like Jim Crowe. I’m not using the reference as a means to perform wokeness or provoke engagement or whatever (clearly it didn’t work lol), but because I really do think it is that bad.
My first essay is an excerpt from a Memoir I’m writing: ‘Prince Harry, to the Rescue — of a 40 Year Old Virgin.’ It isn’t explicitly about the industry, but I think it does relay my ideas about what allyship really can look like.
Ok, and finally, because I do like to get into back and forths with readers, I would love to see the studies and data that you’re basing these assertions on. A lot of Annenberg and UCLA studies are activist-driven and remarkably thin when you actually look at them, as I’ve written about elsewhere in posts, but not a full essay yet.
For some reason Substack isn’t allowing me to add links here, but I think that’s sort of besides the point.
I suspect that we fundamentally speak different languages — you examine through a lens of data, I look at things through a much more I guess human level — but I really do appreciate your openness to this conversation, and so here is what I would add:
Data tells a story, but the human interpretation of it is always going to inherently limit the scope of that story. Searching for some ‘neutral’ set of data points is futile. And all data that is publicly available was financed by someone, who needed that data to match the narrative they wanted it to present. Abi Awomosu (‘How Not To Use AI’ is her book and her handle on Substack) is a data scientist who writes extensively about how data has to be cleaned before it is even interpreted — I feel like it might be up your alley.
The UCLA study had a whole thing for a while, where they were just barely hanging on and almost shut down, because they just couldn’t get anyone to finance it. The woman running it is a regular degular professor who does not have the bandwidth to be doing it, but is pushing herself anyway because no one else is doing it. And why should Hollywood finance this kind of research? Why would they encourage the narrative that all the money they are throwing at faux-diversity efforts aren’t working?
The data you present supports the idea that you have about white heterosexual men now being overlooked. And honestly, there is nothing wrong with that. It is how you feel, and you want to find empirical evidence to support it. But it doesn’t make your interpretation any more accurate than what UCLA was able to do, and debating the points on it I think is pointless and just kind of irrelevant.
The real goal, imho, is to be having actual conversations like this, instead of all the yelling and snark and so on that usually traverses most of the internet …
And to add one final layer: Studying only public facing data is never going to be totally structurally sound, because Hollywood functions on relationships that you cannot quantify (and are explicitly not visible to the public). The success of many (I would argue, most) white men in the industry has been because someone that you’ll never read about made a phone call for them and it drastically altered the entire trajectory of their ‘success’ (including box office returns) which was then attributed to their talent, perseverance, and inevitability.
I appreciate the comversation, and agree that we speak different languages, but data matters. If the gosl is to increase diversity, these studies have failed, and I think it’s pretty obvious why. Sniping outcomes isn’t the same thing as understanding the underlying causality. If thse studies spent more time analyzing real interventions, and which are more effective than others, in supporting these populations. Right now we get a shallow identitarianism that ends up supporting the Zhaos instead of the white dudes it did before.
The problem is if you drive down the numbers of men and feminize the industry it will also drive down overall wages, which is the argument I make in the third part of my hollywood, feminized series. The demographic shift is going to be a collapse in a key weakthy population that drives jobs. It’s a two sided collapse: less men are joining at the beginning, and more are leaving st the end. I can’t articulate it as clearly here without links etc. as in the piece.
It also likely harms the perceived quality of films to discriminate so heavily against the majority of submissions for at least 12 years, while thise same institutiomns select for certain traits that don’t resinate with broad audiences, further driving down the economic relevance of the industry.
Here’s part of my critique of UCLA’s study from another discussion I’m having on X. To summarize briefly: it’s flawed, doesn’t say what people think it does, and doesn’t offer ways to hell that seem meaningful and effective.
This would take several thousand words to address properly (I’ll do it later in a proper substack), and I’m assuming you’re working off the Annenberg studym which says 78%.
I’m also assuming that you mean that these numbers are solely from current, active discrimination, as you seem to be implying.
really important to note that this study you appear to be citing only focuses on the top 100 grossing films by year. That is the very end of the pipeline, not the entire profession.
A few pushbacks:
1. Age and career-length effects
Directing major studio films is one of the oldest-skewing professions in entertainment.
Many directors do not get their first major studio feature until their 40s or 50s. If women and minorities were underrepresented 20–30 years ago, today’s top-grossing director pool will still reflect that historical imbalance.
A disparity at the top in 2026 does not necessarily tell us what barriers exist in 2026.
2. Parenthood and career interruptions
Directing often requires relocation, extended travel, months away from home, and long periods of employment uncertainty.
Any group that disproportionately bears family-care responsibilities may be less represented in careers that demand that level of availability. Cinematography is often cited as having similar issues because of the travel and lifestyle demands involved.
That does not mean discrimination is absent. It means there may be multiple contributing factors.
3. The baseline problem
Suppose 78% of top-grossing directors are white men.
The immediate question is: compared to what?
Compared to the U.S. population?
Film-school graduates?
Working directors?
Directors with previous studio features?
Directors who have already directed a $100M+ film?
Different baselines can produce radically different interpretations.
A disparity by itself does not identify the cause of that disparity.
4. Selection versus discrimination
If Group A represents 78% of outcomes and Group B represents 22%, there are several possible explanations:
Different preferences and career choices.
Different experience or qualification distributions.
Different treatment by decision-makers.
A disparity tells us that at least one of those factors may be operating.
It does not tell us which one.
This is where many advocacy studies become vulnerable. They move from:
“There is a disparity”
to
“The disparity is evidence of discrimination”
without fully ruling out alternative explanations.
5. The winner-take-most nature of blockbuster directing
Blockbuster directing is not a normal labor market.
Once a director successfully handles a $200 million franchise film, studios become much more likely to hire that person again. A relatively small number of directors end up directing a disproportionate share of major studio projects.
That means even a modest imbalance at earlier stages can compound over decades into a much larger imbalance at the very top.
6. Access to the pipeline
Filmmaking is an unusually elite profession. Successful directors are disproportionately drawn from people with access to higher education, industry networks, major media markets, family financial support, and the ability to tolerate years of low or uncertain income.
If different demographic groups have unequal access to those resources, we would expect differences in representation at the highest levels of the profession even before any hiring decision takes place.
That does not rule out discrimination as a factor. It simply means that disparities at the end of the pipeline cannot automatically be attributed to discrimination at the end of the pipeline.
7. The study measures outcomes, not causes
More fundamentally, the statistic itself does not establish causation.
The fact that 78% of the directors of the top 100 grossing films are white men is an observation. The much harder question is determining how much of that observation is explained by current discrimination, historical discrimination, career choices, family constraints, experience distributions, access to the pipeline, risk aversion by studios, or the winner-take-most dynamics of the blockbuster business.
The statistic alone cannot answer that question.
In other words, “78% of top-grossing directors are white men” may be evidence of a disparity. It is not, by itself, evidence of the cause of that disparity.
That requires a much more rigorous analysis than simply pointing to the number.
Curious to hear whatyou think. I a\gree tha\t dt\a is imperfect, but it’s the only relatively clear tool we have.
I respect that this is the language that you feel most comfortable using (data), and that you clearly have so much passion in the way that you write this newsletter.
But I don’t think we’re having the same conversation anymore. Debating data points just isn’t my thing (I’m sorry). I don’t see data as being neutral in the way that I think you do. And I don’t think you really are interested in engaging in many of the other things I brought up (which is fine!). Two ships passing in the night, as it were.
I actually just finished reading the UCLA study which, to be honest, is kind of a mess. The annenberg one is easier to read, but it makes a lot of bizarre assumptions both in its datasets and chronology etc. i’ll write a piece on it later.
I don’t think data is neutral either; everybody uses it to a degree politically, which is why I’m trying to unpack it.
What seems to happen right now is; people read the numbers, go that’s shitty, then kind of throw their hands up.
But if we were able to better understand how these processes work, and what out goals are, and what interventions are effective, we might actually be able to increase say, the number of top grossing female directors.
Having dug into it heavily, a lot of it is intuitive; people whi succeed at blockbusters tend to be older and demonstrate commercial instincts and success over several films. Female millenial blockbuster directors who struggled are often chosen younger, and from the prestige circuit. Men seem to have this problem less.
Basically I think a lot of the data is not very well constructed, and it seems to have no clear goal.
I’m a very big admirer of Geoffrey Canada, who founded the Harlem Children’s Zone, a program that took inner city black kids and got 95% of them to go to college. There’s a great book about it called whatever it takes.
He tried several interventions over and over, a lot like season four of the wire.
A lot of what the industry seems to do is go; this is a problem, but we don’t know why, and we don’t understand what.
That’s what I’m trying to figure out right now; what are the broad factors that contribute to these disparities, and what would possible solutions be?
It’s fair to claim that white men have more opportunity in Hollywood outside of the institutional/nonprofit power structures.
If you look carefully at my other pieces, in particular the hollywood, feminized series, and the work of Jacob Savage, for example, my argument centers on the fact that young white men, in particular, are undesirable for the festival/labs/nonprofit structures, which are placed in an awkward position between an overwhelmingly white male Gen X and Boomer generation, who are established and working and necessary for these institutions’ business models.
You can’t take all of the James Grays, who has a bunch of movie stars, and also maintain the minimum number of diverse candidates.
I am trying to be transparent about how extreme these programs and festivals have gotten. Even among diverse populations, they seem to be selecting for wealthy people who fit their political narratives rather than people, of all populations, who can connect with audiences.
Ryan Coogler is the exception that proves the rule; he had the institutional support, made the Sundance-y movie (Fruitvale Station), then transitioned into actually popular entertainment. Would he have been able to do so without pandering a bit to the Sundance powers that be? Reinaldo Marcus Green is another fascinating filmmaker who made a beautiful short that premiered at Cannes and shot in Africa, then switched into a classic social justice movie for his first feature.
They understood the incentives, and responded to them.
I’m trying to avoid people of all races and backgrounds being frustrated by not understanding how the system works. If Sundance only wants to take diverse applicants, they should, but they should be transparent about it.
Heterodox writing will invariably appeal to some people on some issues and offend others on others.
I actually do hear what you’re saying here about the shift in public facing stated preferences on the part of the festivals and labs, but I think your argument misses the forrest for the trees a bit (respectfully):
What has happened now is sort of an expansion of the ‘non-profit industrial complex’ where there is the illusion of doors being opened to new populations of filmmakers, when actually it has just reasserted control of the pipeline (or, at least, tried to).
What I mean by this, is that the sort of mythology around the the young new wonderboy filmmaker has not changed. The fact that he is always white (as in, the examples of the recent breakout stars on youtube) is always considered in a neutral sort of coincidental way. The work just ‘speaks for itself’ and so on. Even creators who do manage to make a dent in garnering an audience and are also trying to bypass the ridiculous film school / festival / labs pipeline, are still not being plucked by Hollywood gatekeepers that are still needed to get a deal with Focus.
What I mean by the forrest is: The vast majority of filmmakers who play the game of checking all the boxes at the festival/labs level never reach the commercial level. I cannot state this emphatically enough. So, focusing on this ‘empirical’ evidence feels a bit misleading.
Ryan Coogler was a fluke who only just barely scraped through because he played the game, and then was excoriated by the Sinners press cycle when he asserted a message that the industry found threatening. Chloe Zhao, as you allude to in your other essay, had to play the game too for a while, EVEN THOUGH she is probably as wealthy as you suggest. A white guy with her wealth would never need to, and frankly, would never pander to that level of gatekeeping. Because he wouldn’t need to.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that the challenge for filmmakers who check any of the boxes that make you ‘diverse’ is so much vaster than just getting your film financed and distributed. It is that you have to do so much EXPLAINING about why you’re the one to do it, why it is ‘authentic’ (even to your own audiences you may garner online), why your character’s make any of their choices, and so on. It is like being on trial before you even get to the courtroom.
If you do the traditional pipeline, it is a lot like going through all of the work to apply for a job you saw on LinkedIn, when really the HR department already hired someone internally but threw it up for optics. They will let you jump through all the hoops, but never had any intention of actually letting you in. The exceptions tend to be someone who is telling a story that reflects the way gatekeepers already see you (ex. Fruitvale Station). If you try to go the online route (which I’m writing about in an upcoming post), you are just dealing with a new gatekeeper, which is the algorithm. And that algorithm has all the same biases as all the human gatekeepers, because it was literally trained on what humans have done in the past, and not in what could be possible in the future. Plus all of the crap that comes with it, which is a lot of bots playing devil’s advocate to drain your energy, etc.
No one ever asked this of Damien Chazelle, Stephen Spielberg, James Cameron, and on and on and on. Their authority was always implicit.
Cory Barker never had to prove to anyone why he was the one to tell a story about a woman being obsessive and crazy, because the film was from the POV of a white guy who wanted to date her and that perspective was a) inherently understood (by gatekeepers online and IRL), and b) very much part of the manosphere zietgist (propelled by said algorithms). I have a hard time imagining that it would be getting this kind of traction if the exact same story had been presented from the POV of the girlfriend who is tired of men assuming she is obsessive, etc.
Anyway, my overarching point is that you can always be a straight white guy and come out of nowhere and be an ‘over night’ success. Even if you have to bypass the labs (which maybe is a privilege in itself?). You can be of any class background, as long as you can find a way to sustain yourself on the way up, because once you do get a break your inherent capabilities and vision will never be questioned before you even step in the door.
You can just sort of .. do it.
And because the doors are open for you in that way, it’s very difficult to conceptualize that the rest of us aren’t just imagining these very real barriers, in traditional Hollywood and even in online platforms.
Oh man, have I been there. I've never stretched my category in the hopes that I’d be given a chance by people who despised me, but I've definitely considered it. Ultimately, I decided against it. Maybe we both knew it was ultimately futile.
Back in the mid-2010s, when I still thought getting a job in academia was a distant possibility, my gf told me to check the gay box. After several years of sending applications into the void, she told me to check the non-binary box too.
I couldn't do it. Nothing wrong with being gay or non-binary, I just don't think I should have to pretend to be just to be given a chance.
It's insane that the social justice quota activists point to established baby boomers in industries, most of whom are senior citizens, as proof of preference toward the dreaded cis het white male category, and use that to keep out younger dudes looking for their first chance. Good for these dudes for bypassing that shit entirely. As an audience member, I can't wait to see Backrooms.
I’ve been there sir. Have an ex who went nonbinary, which I think she hoped would help her in the arts. I simply can’t, it’s too cynical for me.
Thank you for writing this. Your points are well taken for someone (me) who can either wait out an agent wanting to rep my novel and a publisher who wants it - a process that could take another year to two if it succeeds - or can upload my novel and trailer, and and control my own destiny. It’s helpful to read not only success stories, but brave stories.
Build it. They will come. I plan to be the first filmmaker to build their audience on Substack.
I really liked your other article presenting the idea of ‘poorface’ as a way of discussing class more openly, but reading through this piece, I was honestly just really disappointed.
There have been so, so many verified studies completed and published in every trade magazine regarding how much white men still garner many more opportunities in Hollywood than any other demographic. That is just an objective reality. I don’t want to get into a whole back and forth about it in your comments, I’m just kind of bummed.
If you’re curious at all, I’ve written a couple of pieces on here about my personal experiences working in Hollywood. No pressure obviously, but just to say that we actually probably have more in common than you think.
I took this to heart and softened some of the language in the piece. The core idea still stands though; the nonprofits and festivals are massively overselecting for certain diverse populations to counteract a generational imbalance from a more discriminatory era in which more white heterosexual men were able to build careers and become established.
Transparency runs a lot of ways. Thanks for the feedback.
I really appreciate you doing so, and also for the follow.
The one thing I would add, is just that using the word discriminatory toward white men feels tricky. I did notice that you describe diversity stuff at the lab/festival level to be a sort of course-correction, even if you feel it was an over-correction, so we do agree on that.
But it’s akin to the expression of ‘reverse racism,’ which I think probably was intentional on your part, but is a misuse and/or misunderstanding of how power works that just makes me really sad.
Discrimination (racism, and all the isms) describe a power imbalance. A group that has historically had more power than another group is using their power to get whatever they want. The opposite of that is just, basically, self-defense. It isn’t a form of discrimination, because you don’t have enough power to yield.
The perverse thing about this era we’re living through (sigh) is that actual power structures have divided and conquered, once again. Meaning, they have convinced for example working class straight white men that women and people of color and queer people and so forth are weaponizing their identity specifically against them. When many of us would actually want nothing more than to just be actual allies.
But we would never say that a working class person fighting a rich gatekeeper is being discriminatory. We would never say it is reverse classism. Why don’t we do that? How is that different?
I get the points you’re making, but one of the problems in hollywood right now is that we’re told that uplifting the Chloé Zhaos is social justice. The oroginal hollywood creators, while all white men, were of very diverse class backgrounds, often poor immigrants, iterating and hustling.
The institutions do heavily discriminate in favor of certain groups (see my hollywood, feminized series, part 1 for data). Reverse racism is polemic, but again, if you select against certain population for identity traits, it’s discrimination. If you say it explicitly in your materials, it’s discrimination.
I;m not a Trump supporter, but the NYTimes and other places seem to have forgotten that discrimination law protects everyone, as it should. We forget that, because historical racism has been so bad.
I don’t believe anymore that discrimination, especially at the level these institutions have been practicing it, is fair or productive. At the very least , they could program based on demographic shares of the population, which would still be discriminating based on submission numbers (since white men are still so overrepresented in submissions).
These kinds of policies are broadly unpopular, with nearly every demographic in the US, and I fear it’s given the republicans a lot of easy wins.
But on an even broader fairness level, if they’re actively discriminating against a group, regardless of their identity, that group should know. People, including poor white men, don’t have infinite money and time. I think it would be far more preferable, for example, to close nondiverse submissions, than to accept them and take the money, knowing you’re choosing against those people at to a rate of around 9 to 1.
I would love to read your pieces, please share them!
Thank you!
Since I’m not able to link:
The latest post on my profile — ‘Hollywood is a (Nepo Bab) Monarchy, and It’s Crumbling’ — is my sort of deep dive into what I think trumps all the isms in Hollywood, which is the infrastructure around nepo babies. I specifically break down my thoughts on an older (not wealthy) white guy who was recently profiled and I found a bit frustrating, but still insist that ‘canceling’ him and others like him are not the solution. I argue that dehumanizing nepo babies isn’t the solution either, but also that we can’t solve a problem we aren’t willing to name. It is me dipping my toe into more think piece territory, but still personalized.
‘Hair Appointments with Jimmy’ is a personal essay about how Hollywood can literally feel like Jim Crowe. I’m not using the reference as a means to perform wokeness or provoke engagement or whatever (clearly it didn’t work lol), but because I really do think it is that bad.
My first essay is an excerpt from a Memoir I’m writing: ‘Prince Harry, to the Rescue — of a 40 Year Old Virgin.’ It isn’t explicitly about the industry, but I think it does relay my ideas about what allyship really can look like.
Ok, and finally, because I do like to get into back and forths with readers, I would love to see the studies and data that you’re basing these assertions on. A lot of Annenberg and UCLA studies are activist-driven and remarkably thin when you actually look at them, as I’ve written about elsewhere in posts, but not a full essay yet.
For some reason Substack isn’t allowing me to add links here, but I think that’s sort of besides the point.
I suspect that we fundamentally speak different languages — you examine through a lens of data, I look at things through a much more I guess human level — but I really do appreciate your openness to this conversation, and so here is what I would add:
Data tells a story, but the human interpretation of it is always going to inherently limit the scope of that story. Searching for some ‘neutral’ set of data points is futile. And all data that is publicly available was financed by someone, who needed that data to match the narrative they wanted it to present. Abi Awomosu (‘How Not To Use AI’ is her book and her handle on Substack) is a data scientist who writes extensively about how data has to be cleaned before it is even interpreted — I feel like it might be up your alley.
The UCLA study had a whole thing for a while, where they were just barely hanging on and almost shut down, because they just couldn’t get anyone to finance it. The woman running it is a regular degular professor who does not have the bandwidth to be doing it, but is pushing herself anyway because no one else is doing it. And why should Hollywood finance this kind of research? Why would they encourage the narrative that all the money they are throwing at faux-diversity efforts aren’t working?
The data you present supports the idea that you have about white heterosexual men now being overlooked. And honestly, there is nothing wrong with that. It is how you feel, and you want to find empirical evidence to support it. But it doesn’t make your interpretation any more accurate than what UCLA was able to do, and debating the points on it I think is pointless and just kind of irrelevant.
The real goal, imho, is to be having actual conversations like this, instead of all the yelling and snark and so on that usually traverses most of the internet …
And to add one final layer: Studying only public facing data is never going to be totally structurally sound, because Hollywood functions on relationships that you cannot quantify (and are explicitly not visible to the public). The success of many (I would argue, most) white men in the industry has been because someone that you’ll never read about made a phone call for them and it drastically altered the entire trajectory of their ‘success’ (including box office returns) which was then attributed to their talent, perseverance, and inevitability.
And sorry for the data bomb!
I appreciate the comversation, and agree that we speak different languages, but data matters. If the gosl is to increase diversity, these studies have failed, and I think it’s pretty obvious why. Sniping outcomes isn’t the same thing as understanding the underlying causality. If thse studies spent more time analyzing real interventions, and which are more effective than others, in supporting these populations. Right now we get a shallow identitarianism that ends up supporting the Zhaos instead of the white dudes it did before.
The problem is if you drive down the numbers of men and feminize the industry it will also drive down overall wages, which is the argument I make in the third part of my hollywood, feminized series. The demographic shift is going to be a collapse in a key weakthy population that drives jobs. It’s a two sided collapse: less men are joining at the beginning, and more are leaving st the end. I can’t articulate it as clearly here without links etc. as in the piece.
It also likely harms the perceived quality of films to discriminate so heavily against the majority of submissions for at least 12 years, while thise same institutiomns select for certain traits that don’t resinate with broad audiences, further driving down the economic relevance of the industry.
Here’s part of my critique of UCLA’s study from another discussion I’m having on X. To summarize briefly: it’s flawed, doesn’t say what people think it does, and doesn’t offer ways to hell that seem meaningful and effective.
This would take several thousand words to address properly (I’ll do it later in a proper substack), and I’m assuming you’re working off the Annenberg studym which says 78%.
I’m also assuming that you mean that these numbers are solely from current, active discrimination, as you seem to be implying.
really important to note that this study you appear to be citing only focuses on the top 100 grossing films by year. That is the very end of the pipeline, not the entire profession.
A few pushbacks:
1. Age and career-length effects
Directing major studio films is one of the oldest-skewing professions in entertainment.
Many directors do not get their first major studio feature until their 40s or 50s. If women and minorities were underrepresented 20–30 years ago, today’s top-grossing director pool will still reflect that historical imbalance.
A disparity at the top in 2026 does not necessarily tell us what barriers exist in 2026.
2. Parenthood and career interruptions
Directing often requires relocation, extended travel, months away from home, and long periods of employment uncertainty.
Any group that disproportionately bears family-care responsibilities may be less represented in careers that demand that level of availability. Cinematography is often cited as having similar issues because of the travel and lifestyle demands involved.
That does not mean discrimination is absent. It means there may be multiple contributing factors.
3. The baseline problem
Suppose 78% of top-grossing directors are white men.
The immediate question is: compared to what?
Compared to the U.S. population?
Film-school graduates?
Working directors?
Directors with previous studio features?
Directors who have already directed a $100M+ film?
Different baselines can produce radically different interpretations.
A disparity by itself does not identify the cause of that disparity.
4. Selection versus discrimination
If Group A represents 78% of outcomes and Group B represents 22%, there are several possible explanations:
Different preferences and career choices.
Different experience or qualification distributions.
Different treatment by decision-makers.
A disparity tells us that at least one of those factors may be operating.
It does not tell us which one.
This is where many advocacy studies become vulnerable. They move from:
“There is a disparity”
to
“The disparity is evidence of discrimination”
without fully ruling out alternative explanations.
5. The winner-take-most nature of blockbuster directing
Blockbuster directing is not a normal labor market.
Once a director successfully handles a $200 million franchise film, studios become much more likely to hire that person again. A relatively small number of directors end up directing a disproportionate share of major studio projects.
That means even a modest imbalance at earlier stages can compound over decades into a much larger imbalance at the very top.
6. Access to the pipeline
Filmmaking is an unusually elite profession. Successful directors are disproportionately drawn from people with access to higher education, industry networks, major media markets, family financial support, and the ability to tolerate years of low or uncertain income.
If different demographic groups have unequal access to those resources, we would expect differences in representation at the highest levels of the profession even before any hiring decision takes place.
That does not rule out discrimination as a factor. It simply means that disparities at the end of the pipeline cannot automatically be attributed to discrimination at the end of the pipeline.
7. The study measures outcomes, not causes
More fundamentally, the statistic itself does not establish causation.
The fact that 78% of the directors of the top 100 grossing films are white men is an observation. The much harder question is determining how much of that observation is explained by current discrimination, historical discrimination, career choices, family constraints, experience distributions, access to the pipeline, risk aversion by studios, or the winner-take-most dynamics of the blockbuster business.
The statistic alone cannot answer that question.
In other words, “78% of top-grossing directors are white men” may be evidence of a disparity. It is not, by itself, evidence of the cause of that disparity.
That requires a much more rigorous analysis than simply pointing to the number.
Curious to hear whatyou think. I a\gree tha\t dt\a is imperfect, but it’s the only relatively clear tool we have.
Enjoying this discussion with you.
Well.
I will say this.
I respect that this is the language that you feel most comfortable using (data), and that you clearly have so much passion in the way that you write this newsletter.
But I don’t think we’re having the same conversation anymore. Debating data points just isn’t my thing (I’m sorry). I don’t see data as being neutral in the way that I think you do. And I don’t think you really are interested in engaging in many of the other things I brought up (which is fine!). Two ships passing in the night, as it were.
Wishing you the best (genuinely).
Hey no worries,
I actually just finished reading the UCLA study which, to be honest, is kind of a mess. The annenberg one is easier to read, but it makes a lot of bizarre assumptions both in its datasets and chronology etc. i’ll write a piece on it later.
I don’t think data is neutral either; everybody uses it to a degree politically, which is why I’m trying to unpack it.
What seems to happen right now is; people read the numbers, go that’s shitty, then kind of throw their hands up.
But if we were able to better understand how these processes work, and what out goals are, and what interventions are effective, we might actually be able to increase say, the number of top grossing female directors.
Having dug into it heavily, a lot of it is intuitive; people whi succeed at blockbusters tend to be older and demonstrate commercial instincts and success over several films. Female millenial blockbuster directors who struggled are often chosen younger, and from the prestige circuit. Men seem to have this problem less.
Basically I think a lot of the data is not very well constructed, and it seems to have no clear goal.
I’m a very big admirer of Geoffrey Canada, who founded the Harlem Children’s Zone, a program that took inner city black kids and got 95% of them to go to college. There’s a great book about it called whatever it takes.
He tried several interventions over and over, a lot like season four of the wire.
A lot of what the industry seems to do is go; this is a problem, but we don’t know why, and we don’t understand what.
That’s what I’m trying to figure out right now; what are the broad factors that contribute to these disparities, and what would possible solutions be?
Also wishing you the best!
It’s fair to claim that white men have more opportunity in Hollywood outside of the institutional/nonprofit power structures.
If you look carefully at my other pieces, in particular the hollywood, feminized series, and the work of Jacob Savage, for example, my argument centers on the fact that young white men, in particular, are undesirable for the festival/labs/nonprofit structures, which are placed in an awkward position between an overwhelmingly white male Gen X and Boomer generation, who are established and working and necessary for these institutions’ business models.
You can’t take all of the James Grays, who has a bunch of movie stars, and also maintain the minimum number of diverse candidates.
I am trying to be transparent about how extreme these programs and festivals have gotten. Even among diverse populations, they seem to be selecting for wealthy people who fit their political narratives rather than people, of all populations, who can connect with audiences.
Ryan Coogler is the exception that proves the rule; he had the institutional support, made the Sundance-y movie (Fruitvale Station), then transitioned into actually popular entertainment. Would he have been able to do so without pandering a bit to the Sundance powers that be? Reinaldo Marcus Green is another fascinating filmmaker who made a beautiful short that premiered at Cannes and shot in Africa, then switched into a classic social justice movie for his first feature.
They understood the incentives, and responded to them.
I’m trying to avoid people of all races and backgrounds being frustrated by not understanding how the system works. If Sundance only wants to take diverse applicants, they should, but they should be transparent about it.
Heterodox writing will invariably appeal to some people on some issues and offend others on others.
I actually do hear what you’re saying here about the shift in public facing stated preferences on the part of the festivals and labs, but I think your argument misses the forrest for the trees a bit (respectfully):
What has happened now is sort of an expansion of the ‘non-profit industrial complex’ where there is the illusion of doors being opened to new populations of filmmakers, when actually it has just reasserted control of the pipeline (or, at least, tried to).
What I mean by this, is that the sort of mythology around the the young new wonderboy filmmaker has not changed. The fact that he is always white (as in, the examples of the recent breakout stars on youtube) is always considered in a neutral sort of coincidental way. The work just ‘speaks for itself’ and so on. Even creators who do manage to make a dent in garnering an audience and are also trying to bypass the ridiculous film school / festival / labs pipeline, are still not being plucked by Hollywood gatekeepers that are still needed to get a deal with Focus.
What I mean by the forrest is: The vast majority of filmmakers who play the game of checking all the boxes at the festival/labs level never reach the commercial level. I cannot state this emphatically enough. So, focusing on this ‘empirical’ evidence feels a bit misleading.
Ryan Coogler was a fluke who only just barely scraped through because he played the game, and then was excoriated by the Sinners press cycle when he asserted a message that the industry found threatening. Chloe Zhao, as you allude to in your other essay, had to play the game too for a while, EVEN THOUGH she is probably as wealthy as you suggest. A white guy with her wealth would never need to, and frankly, would never pander to that level of gatekeeping. Because he wouldn’t need to.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that the challenge for filmmakers who check any of the boxes that make you ‘diverse’ is so much vaster than just getting your film financed and distributed. It is that you have to do so much EXPLAINING about why you’re the one to do it, why it is ‘authentic’ (even to your own audiences you may garner online), why your character’s make any of their choices, and so on. It is like being on trial before you even get to the courtroom.
If you do the traditional pipeline, it is a lot like going through all of the work to apply for a job you saw on LinkedIn, when really the HR department already hired someone internally but threw it up for optics. They will let you jump through all the hoops, but never had any intention of actually letting you in. The exceptions tend to be someone who is telling a story that reflects the way gatekeepers already see you (ex. Fruitvale Station). If you try to go the online route (which I’m writing about in an upcoming post), you are just dealing with a new gatekeeper, which is the algorithm. And that algorithm has all the same biases as all the human gatekeepers, because it was literally trained on what humans have done in the past, and not in what could be possible in the future. Plus all of the crap that comes with it, which is a lot of bots playing devil’s advocate to drain your energy, etc.
No one ever asked this of Damien Chazelle, Stephen Spielberg, James Cameron, and on and on and on. Their authority was always implicit.
Cory Barker never had to prove to anyone why he was the one to tell a story about a woman being obsessive and crazy, because the film was from the POV of a white guy who wanted to date her and that perspective was a) inherently understood (by gatekeepers online and IRL), and b) very much part of the manosphere zietgist (propelled by said algorithms). I have a hard time imagining that it would be getting this kind of traction if the exact same story had been presented from the POV of the girlfriend who is tired of men assuming she is obsessive, etc.
Anyway, my overarching point is that you can always be a straight white guy and come out of nowhere and be an ‘over night’ success. Even if you have to bypass the labs (which maybe is a privilege in itself?). You can be of any class background, as long as you can find a way to sustain yourself on the way up, because once you do get a break your inherent capabilities and vision will never be questioned before you even step in the door.
You can just sort of .. do it.
And because the doors are open for you in that way, it’s very difficult to conceptualize that the rest of us aren’t just imagining these very real barriers, in traditional Hollywood and even in online platforms.