How Not to Prove Your Point

Vanity Fair has an article about the "staggering" inequality in Hollywood movies, as reported in a study from USC. But what is really staggering about this study is how extremely bad it is: it is riddled with errors and outright lies.

The claims are:

After seven years of collecting data from the 100 top-grossing fictional films from 2007 to 2014, the group has produced a report titled “Inequality in 700 Popular Films.” Here is just some of what they found:

• Gender: In the 700 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2014, only 30.2 percent of the 30,835 speaking characters were female. That means for every 2.3 guys with lines, you’ll only see one speaking woman. And while there’s no analysis of the quality of the lines given to women, the 2015 blockbusters don’t exactly paint a pretty picture.
• Age: Nestled inside the gender statistics is the fact that in the 100 top-grossing films of 2014, “no female actors over 45 years of age performed a lead or co lead role.” (Nope, not even Meryl Streep. As Manohla Dargis of The New York Times points out, in 2014 “the hardest-working woman in cinema had only supporting roles, including in the Disney musical Into the Woods.”) And outside of the lead roles the study notes that “only 19.9 percent of the middle-aged characters were female across the 100 top films.”
• Race and Ethnicity: Of the speaking characters in the 100 top films of 2014, 73.1 percent were “White,” 12.5 percent were “Black,” 5.3 percent were “Asian,” 4.9 percent were “Hispanic/Latino,” 2.9 percent were “Middle Eastern,” less than 1 percent were “American Indian/Alaskan Native or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander,” and 1.2 percent were from “other” racial and/or ethnic groupings. Given that statistic, the uproar over Emma Stone’s controversial casting in Aloha seems pretty justified. As the report points out, sadly, this represents no change “in the portrayal of apparent race/ethnicity” from the previous seven years.

First off, these statistics are not derived from all movies and therefore totally bogus. They're only from the top 100 grossing movies. That means these are the most popular movies, the ones that audiences pay to see over and over again. The demographics for typical repeat movie-goers skews young and it skews male. Any conclusions drawn say nothing about bias and inequality in Hollywood, and everything about the biases of movie-goers.

What these contrived statistics show is that young people don't want to spend their money to see character-driven movies about older people and women. They prefer to see action movies about younger men. Well, duh...

The claim that “no female actors over 45 years of age performed a lead or co lead role" is an outright lie. Sigourney Weaver starred in Avatar at age 59 -- which was the #1 grossing film in 2009. Sandra Bullock starred in Gravity, released in 2013 when she was 49 (sixth grossing film in 2013). Bullock was the only person on screen for about 95% of the film! Judi Dench starred in Philomena in 2013, which was the 80th grossing film in 2013. Dench's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was the 73rd grossing film in 2012.  Meryl Streep was in the The Iron Lady, which as the 100th grossing film in 2011. Michelle Pfeiffer starred in Dark Shadows (39th grossing film in 2012) at age 54. If you dig, I'm sure you will find dozens more examples.

The numbers on race are fairly close to reality: African Americans make up 12.6% of the population, while the numbers cited for the films is 12.5%, directly reflecting the U.S. population. Asians make up 4.8% of the population (vs. 5.3% in film). The complaint that less that 1% of actors are native American/Hawaiian is similar nonsense, because those ethnicities comprise only 1.1% of the American population in the first place. Ergo, not very far off.

Where popular films do diverge from the reality is in Latinos, who make up 16.4% of the US population (vs. 4.9% in films). But again, the stats derived in this study are bogus, because they come only from the most successful films, not from all films.

Now, I'm not claiming Hollywood is innocent. Do they cast young and attractive people in action flicks instead of old ladies and ethnic actors in sedate internal psychological dramas? Of course, that's what sells! Does Hollywood have an inequality problem, paying female actors less than their male costars? Yes! Is it a crime against nature that older male actors are always paired with love interests 20 or 30 years their junior? No question! Do they put more marketing dollars behind their loud, big-budget, action-filled, youth-oriented action flicks? They would be idiots if they didn't.

But cherry-picking the films for these statistics based on their success completely prevents making any conclusions about inherent bias in Hollywood. Hollywood definitely has a lot of terrible biases, but this is a totally bogus way to show it. This study only says what the preferences of audiences world-wide are.

Yes, Hollywood makes lots of movies about young men in action roles because that's what makes them the most money. They also produce movies that have Latinos, old ladies, old men, fat guys, fat girls, skinny guys, gays, lesbians and so on. And a lot of these movies even gross in the top 100!