Who Gets To Sign The Checks?
In this era of protest black creatives in TV and film are making deals, but the gatekeepers haven't changed
There have been a lot of announcements of overall deals involving black talent in Hollywood post-Black Lives Matter street protest. TV and film deals for directors, producers, writers and actors are regularly announced in the trades. This guarantees these creatives access to streaming and studio dollars, but these deals don't guarantee that what they pitch will get made. It just means these entities are advancing them cash for the right of first refusal, for them to be able option material and to pay for staff. It also usually means that the studio can contract them to show run or staff projects the studio or streamer wants their help to launch or fix. These deals still mean the projects developed by black creatives have to be green lit by white executives and usually have white development executives supervising from the studio or streamer side. The proliferation of these deals is great. Definitely a sign of progress. But, with the exception of Alana Mayo's recent appointment as President of MGM's Orion, none of these deals gives any black folks green light power. She's working on the film side. On the TV side Tara Duncan, formerly of Netflix, was recently made President of Freeform, the Disney television network, so she’s an equivalent figure to Mayo. I know Tara from working on The Get Down and she’ll do a great job. Still, that two executives I can name off the top of my head, but most of the focus has been on creatives signing with corporations. The trumpeting of these production deals reminds me a bit of the days when record labels gave label or production deals to prominent producers and artists, which resulted in a lot of great music. Eventually, however, these deals all went sour and the smaller black music entity was often stripped of its top tier talent as the larger label signed the stars directly. It's not a perfect parallel to what's happening in the streaming era, but it does make one think. Despite all the incredible music made by black labels distributed by bigger white music corporations I only remember one major label ever being run by a black executive. The upper reaches of the records business remained white well into the digital era with one or two exceptions. Spike Lee has been yelling about the lack of black folks with green light power since the days of Do the Right Thing and it's still an issue today. It'll take time to see how all these overhead deals play out (unlike music TV and film projects can take years to develop), but we should keep an eye out on, not who's getting these deals, but who's making them. In other words who gets to sign the checks?