In the early 90s, Wilson Cruz was introduced to America as "Ricky" on My So-Called Life, a young mixed-race man struggling with his sexuality and finding rejection at the hands of his family. For Cruz, it was a role that hit close to home, as the actor himself endured a similar experience before deciding, openly gay or not, to make a go of it in Hollywood.
It has been a tough road, which the 36-year-old Cruz acknowledged this weekend, as he accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Outfest Fusion Festival, a three-day program that ran March 11-13 at NBCUniversal and the American Cinematheque, housed at The Egyptian Theater.
"Outfest has been one of my greatest champions and sources of support. I have literally grown up on Outfest screens," said Cruz. "We have the strength to endure all the of the disappointments, the rejections, the budget shortfalls, the stretches of unemployment--all of the 'No's' we hear and the various reasons why."
Hollywood tends to unfairly get a bad rap on issues of race and sexuality. To be frank, it's not as if the industry does not employ minorities. From the top of Walt Disney Studios on down, there are minorities of every race and gay men and women working in every aspect of the business. Clearly, one's skin color and/or sexual orientation happens to be has no bearing on one's ability to do a particular job.
Except, notably, when it comes to the characters seen on television and at the cinema. But, again, the problem is not really that Hollywood has a problem with putting minorities, gays and lesbians on screen. A fact often overlooked is that the entertainment business is exactly that: a business, more about making money than the executives, artists and craftspeople who assemble each project would really care to admit. And that has generally meant that Hollywood's a pretty conservative place when it comes to the characters represented on television and in film. After all, each finished product has to have a market that will buy it and for the longest time, the largest market has been a fairly homogenous and conservative group of people located in between the coastal states.
That fact is changing. By 2050, in order for the United States to continue define the majority of the population as "white," the definition of what it means to be white will have to include white Hispanics. To some extent, that shift has already taken place, but even if it doesn't fully occur, the fact that white Americans will lose their status as the majority of the American population is significant: American cultural values in the market of the future will not be the same as your father's.
For some products, the selling strategy may not have to change much. But, by its nature, entertainment is different. When an audience watches a television program or film, it brings with it certain assumptions about the world that inform how they receive what they watch. The world on screen must either be believable, or in the case of some types of stories, convince an audience to suspend disbelief.
But whereas in the past, audiences could lose themselves in a world where only white people exist on screen, the lifetime of that particular illusion will have to come to a close if studios hope to profit from the products they sell past, say, 2050. For its part, USA Networks seems to have grasped this point, supporting a tolerance initiative called Characters Unite, which was advertised at Outfest Fusion; whether that translates to the network's executives requiring a greater number of roles for non-white and non-heterosexual characters remains debatable. But even if they don't, the shift in what it means to be white raises interesting questions for programmers to answer: will the white characters we see on screen have grown up speaking Spanish or English? Will they be gay or straight? Will their last names be Sanchez, instead of Smith?
And how will a more mixed audience be watching? A recent New York Times statistic stated that within 3 years, more than 60% of televisions will be connected to the Internet. Much has been made elsewhere about how this unleashed the potential for viewers to download high definition movies. After all, no one really wants to watch a movie on their laptop, the thinking goes, so why not marry the two and make it easier?
The potential threat to traditional programming should be fairly obvious: an Internet-connected television gives viewers the option to completely tune out film and television programming in favor of the limitless and diverse entertainment options available online. (Go ahead and try to pre-load software on an Internet-enabled television that tries to limit a viewer's options; the hack will be available--online--within a week.) After all, anyone can put anything on the Internet. With a little help from social media, an independent movie or web series could become the most popular thing to watch on TV.
Niche festivals like Outfest, and Outfest Fusion exist because there were no other outlets for the kinds of characters contained in the content they showcase. Now, there are niche networks--not just for gay and lesbian programming (LOGO and here!), but for African-American programming (BET), for foodies (Food Network), for those who love classic television (TV Land), for those who love surfing (Fuel), and even for Mormons (The LDS Mormon Network).
If in three years 60% of all televisions will be connected to the Internet, all of these networks will be competing for an audience against the Internet itself. As Sharon Lawrence told me in a recent interview, "networks won't be wise or ultimately satisfied with limiting their programming base based on a particular belief that their broadcast strategy can ignore any segment of their audience."
Film studios may go the same route. A good way to gauge the importance of a festival is to see who its sponsors are. HBO has been a longtime supporter of Outfest itself and was a presenting sponsor of Outfest Fusion. But to its credit, Outfest Fusion also attracted Paramount and NBCUniversal, neither of which were sponsors of last year's Outfest. NBCUniversal also partnered with Outfest Fusion to run Access LA, a series of free events and seminars hosted by industry professionals geared towards educating LGBT people of color about how to break into all aspects of the entertainment business. They will want to tell their stories, too, and as increasing the diversity of characters becomes a requirement for studios to be profitable, it's likely the studios will want them to.
And that means that, while it may not be your father's market, some of his investing advice is still probably fairly sound:
Always invest in a diverse portfolio.