repost.
There's been a few rounds of discussion about casting in shows. So I'm going to repost (for what, the third time?) a piece by an SG1 writer (from like, 2002) about
HOLLYWOOD WATCH #8: The People Writers Don't See
by Michael Cassutt
One of my all-time favorite SF titles is James Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See," a fascinating story that deliberately stars exactly what the title suggests: a woman who would usually be thought "invisible" in a world dominated by white males.
The Tiptree story dates from 1973, meaning that it was published within sight of the end of -- if not exactly at the end of -- the period of "relevance" in the SF world. That is, a time when writers made conscious attempts to expand storytelling choices and the casting (to use a word from film and television) of their fiction, to write about people other than the white males whose concerns were at the heart of most genre entertainment.
Now, while I wouldn't feel at home, say, on the roster of Baen Books, I am hardly the most politically correct person around, and never have been. Nevertheless, I saw this as a positive development, a welcome broadening of the field, blah blah blah, before finding issues other than diversity to think about for the next twenty-five years.
But lately I've been working on two spec television projects ? spec scripts being what you write when no one is hiring you -- and find myself wondering again about the people writers don't see. (Which means viewers don't get to see them, either.)
One project is a premise for an episode of an anthology show, while the other is a concept for a pilot and possible series. Now, developing SF script is a lot like developing concepts for novels and short stories. You spend your time thinking about the world you are creating, about the SF concept which shapes that world, and how it affects the people in it.
Only then can you really turn to the characters themselves. I mean, the captain of a starship is quite different from the captain of a sea-going warship of the Napoleonic Wars, right?
In both cases, the moment I started making the transition from idea and/or world to character, I found myself bumping up against television's equivalent of the third rail: the star is almost always a white male whose age is 32, plus or minus a few years. (In feature films, the age can be 42, if the white male is what you call "bankable".) He's Hercules or Fox Mulder or John Crichton (Farscape) or the B5 guy or Colonel Jack O'Neill on Stargate SG-1 or The Sentinel or Highlander.
Yes, ensemble shows, such as the Star Treks, have blurred the issue a bit. Yes, there is Buffy (spun off a feature film, however, so it's not quite one of those ideas generated for TV) and our gal Xena (from Hercules' rib, though, in TV terms), and, lately, the lead on Dark Angel (which comes from the writer-director of the most financially-successful feature film in history, who could have told Fox he was going to base a series on the adventures of a 75-year-old retired accountant and heard nothing more than a meek, "Whatever you say, Mr. Cameron!").
These are exceptions. By and large, the type of person most likely to be featured in a TV script is that same white male.
Not that there's anything wrong with them. I happen to be one of them, too.
But, still, you can feel a bit ashamed when you step back and consider just who you're not seeing:
People of color, for example. This is a gigantic problem for networks and studios, which they usually solve by casting a middle-aged African-American male as the judge/doctor/police chief (the approach favored by Aaron Spelling) or a younger African-American male in a supporting role as a computer hacker (the WB approach).
Hispanic males? Usually seen as gang members or boxers.
Asian males? See African-American males.
Women of color? You'll have to look even harder to find them. Yes, they are no longer restricted to roles as domestics... the younger ones now have the chance to be written and cast as prostitutes.
People with handicaps? People who are (how shall we phrase this?) overweight?
People who live in homes that cost less than half a million dollars?
People who are over age?
They're there -- but only on the edges.
These are just the faces you rarely see. What is even more restrictive is the way people live, the jobs they have. Even those omnipresent white males. For example, where are the people who get to work by bus? Where are the people who happen to live outside Manhattan and Los Angeles? Where are the people who run convenience stores? What about the folks answering the phones at your H.M.O.?
Where are the people who aren't lawyers, doctors or police officers?
Sidebar alert: I'm not including sitcoms in this survey, not that there are many with SF themes; their settings do have more variety than the dramas, but the settings are usually only frames for jokes by a diminishing pool of stand-up comics or former Saturday Night Live personalities. I mean, really, does The King of Queens (a very funny show, I might add) ever deal with the reality of being a UPS guy?
Sitcoms are so tightly restricted in their concepts that not too long ago NBC managed to air three consecutive half-hours that all dealt with -- in the words of actress Tea Leoni, who happened to be the star of one of the series -- "White chicks in publishing." Caroline in the City, Suddenly Susan, The Naked Truth. The mind reels.
The SF field can point with some pride to the original Star Trek, which did actually go where no white television programming man had gone before by featuring an African-American female and a Russian character. Even one of its three core white males was an alien. Everything that follows, however, has faced up to the same grim self-censorship which rules mass entertainment.... white males are the stars.
The justification is always this: these are the people people want to watch. Women, especially white women (who are the major targets for advertising and who easily outnumber men in network audiences), will happily watch white males. And white males won't watch anybody but white males, or maybe supermodels -- as long as they are secondary to a white male. Networks and studios have the advertising "facts" and focus groups and all kinds of research to support that opinion.
(Of course, with all their focus groups and research, they still can't manage to develop and air new programs that succeed more than twenty percent of the time, but let's not get into that issue today.)
So any attempt to break out of the 32-year-old-white-male-hero obviously faces a certain amount of resistance in the market place.
But what I see more often is self-censorship. We all tend to write about ourselves; at least our stories start with ourselves, our fantasies, our concerns, which are triggered by our daily collisions with life. Since something like seventy percent of the membership of the Writers Guild of
America consists of white males (though the age is quite a bit older than
32), stories about white males is pretty much what you're going to get.
Unless you push yourself. Networks and studios -- can anyone say Disney? -- sometimes delude themselves into thinking they can generate ideas and scripts, but if anyone is going to change the face or faces of television, it's going to have to be a writer. Which is to say, you. Or even me. Not only are we going to have to re-populate the television universe, we might as well start trying to tell stories that don't deal with lawyers, doctors or cops. (By the way, there's another reason why you still don't see many SF shows on television: our stuff rarely fits into one of these tired "franchises". Even X-Files, the most recent big success from the field, is at heart a cop show.)
We're going to have to spend the hours, make the bazillion false starts, and risk our careers in the process. (Oops, forget I said that.) Come on, how about a show of hands?
Even if there weren't some moral imperative to broaden the world seen on television -- did I actually write that about television? Excuse me, it's really time to lie down -- how about a practical one?
Do you realize how difficult it is to cast a good-looking, 32-year-old white male lead who can act? Who hasn't already been snapped up by features? Who is affordable? Who is willing to re-locate to some distant location like Toronto or Sydney for a month, or possibly three-to-five years? (Which sounds like a prison sentence, and in spite of the loveliness of both named locations, can often feel like a prison sentence to someone with a family.) Who won't try to take over the show in the second season? (Well, that may be asking the impossible....) Who is willing to put up with the killing schedule of 16-hour days in nasty weather, with no vacation to speak of? (It's this sort of insane production schedule that usually causes actors to take over the show.)
That talent pool is shallow and small. At any given time, there might be more than one person walking around who could meet the criteria. If that.
So why not make it easy on yourself as a writer-producer while doing good at the same time. Forget about 32-year-old white males for a while. See if you can't construct a story, or a whole series, that stars a middle-aged Asian woman, or a male immigrant from Bangalore. We're supposed to be science fiction and fantasy writers, aren't we? If we can come up with stories about methane-breathing creatures born on planets shaped like Jiffy Pop bags, you'd think we could meet this challenge.
Oh, you're asking what did I do to help the cause? I changed one white male to a white male-with-a-handicap -- excuse me, special needs -- and the other while male to a white Jewish male. How's that for diversity?
(I may be surly, but I'm not crazy.)
When Michael Cassutt calms down, he writes television scripts (most recently for Stargate SG-1), novels (Red Moon, Forge 2001) and even short stories. He lives and works in Los Angeles
lifted from http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/cassutt.html
I have a feeling that if a white male scriptwriter explains it, it will probably be more easily understandable for certain individuals. *
eta: james marsters on the same in buffy.
____________________________
*This isnt a statement of dislike of white men in general, of course. Some of my best friends are white people. And I dated a white guy once! And we're still friends. No really, honest.
I'm not lying! I really do have white friends! One of them is so close to me, I call her my yyytttt sister!
HOLLYWOOD WATCH #8: The People Writers Don't See
by Michael Cassutt
One of my all-time favorite SF titles is James Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See," a fascinating story that deliberately stars exactly what the title suggests: a woman who would usually be thought "invisible" in a world dominated by white males.
The Tiptree story dates from 1973, meaning that it was published within sight of the end of -- if not exactly at the end of -- the period of "relevance" in the SF world. That is, a time when writers made conscious attempts to expand storytelling choices and the casting (to use a word from film and television) of their fiction, to write about people other than the white males whose concerns were at the heart of most genre entertainment.
Now, while I wouldn't feel at home, say, on the roster of Baen Books, I am hardly the most politically correct person around, and never have been. Nevertheless, I saw this as a positive development, a welcome broadening of the field, blah blah blah, before finding issues other than diversity to think about for the next twenty-five years.
But lately I've been working on two spec television projects ? spec scripts being what you write when no one is hiring you -- and find myself wondering again about the people writers don't see. (Which means viewers don't get to see them, either.)
One project is a premise for an episode of an anthology show, while the other is a concept for a pilot and possible series. Now, developing SF script is a lot like developing concepts for novels and short stories. You spend your time thinking about the world you are creating, about the SF concept which shapes that world, and how it affects the people in it.
Only then can you really turn to the characters themselves. I mean, the captain of a starship is quite different from the captain of a sea-going warship of the Napoleonic Wars, right?
In both cases, the moment I started making the transition from idea and/or world to character, I found myself bumping up against television's equivalent of the third rail: the star is almost always a white male whose age is 32, plus or minus a few years. (In feature films, the age can be 42, if the white male is what you call "bankable".) He's Hercules or Fox Mulder or John Crichton (Farscape) or the B5 guy or Colonel Jack O'Neill on Stargate SG-1 or The Sentinel or Highlander.
Yes, ensemble shows, such as the Star Treks, have blurred the issue a bit. Yes, there is Buffy (spun off a feature film, however, so it's not quite one of those ideas generated for TV) and our gal Xena (from Hercules' rib, though, in TV terms), and, lately, the lead on Dark Angel (which comes from the writer-director of the most financially-successful feature film in history, who could have told Fox he was going to base a series on the adventures of a 75-year-old retired accountant and heard nothing more than a meek, "Whatever you say, Mr. Cameron!").
These are exceptions. By and large, the type of person most likely to be featured in a TV script is that same white male.
Not that there's anything wrong with them. I happen to be one of them, too.
But, still, you can feel a bit ashamed when you step back and consider just who you're not seeing:
People of color, for example. This is a gigantic problem for networks and studios, which they usually solve by casting a middle-aged African-American male as the judge/doctor/police chief (the approach favored by Aaron Spelling) or a younger African-American male in a supporting role as a computer hacker (the WB approach).
Hispanic males? Usually seen as gang members or boxers.
Asian males? See African-American males.
Women of color? You'll have to look even harder to find them. Yes, they are no longer restricted to roles as domestics... the younger ones now have the chance to be written and cast as prostitutes.
People with handicaps? People who are (how shall we phrase this?) overweight?
People who live in homes that cost less than half a million dollars?
People who are over age?
They're there -- but only on the edges.
These are just the faces you rarely see. What is even more restrictive is the way people live, the jobs they have. Even those omnipresent white males. For example, where are the people who get to work by bus? Where are the people who happen to live outside Manhattan and Los Angeles? Where are the people who run convenience stores? What about the folks answering the phones at your H.M.O.?
Where are the people who aren't lawyers, doctors or police officers?
Sidebar alert: I'm not including sitcoms in this survey, not that there are many with SF themes; their settings do have more variety than the dramas, but the settings are usually only frames for jokes by a diminishing pool of stand-up comics or former Saturday Night Live personalities. I mean, really, does The King of Queens (a very funny show, I might add) ever deal with the reality of being a UPS guy?
Sitcoms are so tightly restricted in their concepts that not too long ago NBC managed to air three consecutive half-hours that all dealt with -- in the words of actress Tea Leoni, who happened to be the star of one of the series -- "White chicks in publishing." Caroline in the City, Suddenly Susan, The Naked Truth. The mind reels.
The SF field can point with some pride to the original Star Trek, which did actually go where no white television programming man had gone before by featuring an African-American female and a Russian character. Even one of its three core white males was an alien. Everything that follows, however, has faced up to the same grim self-censorship which rules mass entertainment.... white males are the stars.
The justification is always this: these are the people people want to watch. Women, especially white women (who are the major targets for advertising and who easily outnumber men in network audiences), will happily watch white males. And white males won't watch anybody but white males, or maybe supermodels -- as long as they are secondary to a white male. Networks and studios have the advertising "facts" and focus groups and all kinds of research to support that opinion.
(Of course, with all their focus groups and research, they still can't manage to develop and air new programs that succeed more than twenty percent of the time, but let's not get into that issue today.)
So any attempt to break out of the 32-year-old-white-male-hero obviously faces a certain amount of resistance in the market place.
But what I see more often is self-censorship. We all tend to write about ourselves; at least our stories start with ourselves, our fantasies, our concerns, which are triggered by our daily collisions with life. Since something like seventy percent of the membership of the Writers Guild of
America consists of white males (though the age is quite a bit older than
32), stories about white males is pretty much what you're going to get.
Unless you push yourself. Networks and studios -- can anyone say Disney? -- sometimes delude themselves into thinking they can generate ideas and scripts, but if anyone is going to change the face or faces of television, it's going to have to be a writer. Which is to say, you. Or even me. Not only are we going to have to re-populate the television universe, we might as well start trying to tell stories that don't deal with lawyers, doctors or cops. (By the way, there's another reason why you still don't see many SF shows on television: our stuff rarely fits into one of these tired "franchises". Even X-Files, the most recent big success from the field, is at heart a cop show.)
We're going to have to spend the hours, make the bazillion false starts, and risk our careers in the process. (Oops, forget I said that.) Come on, how about a show of hands?
Even if there weren't some moral imperative to broaden the world seen on television -- did I actually write that about television? Excuse me, it's really time to lie down -- how about a practical one?
Do you realize how difficult it is to cast a good-looking, 32-year-old white male lead who can act? Who hasn't already been snapped up by features? Who is affordable? Who is willing to re-locate to some distant location like Toronto or Sydney for a month, or possibly three-to-five years? (Which sounds like a prison sentence, and in spite of the loveliness of both named locations, can often feel like a prison sentence to someone with a family.) Who won't try to take over the show in the second season? (Well, that may be asking the impossible....) Who is willing to put up with the killing schedule of 16-hour days in nasty weather, with no vacation to speak of? (It's this sort of insane production schedule that usually causes actors to take over the show.)
That talent pool is shallow and small. At any given time, there might be more than one person walking around who could meet the criteria. If that.
So why not make it easy on yourself as a writer-producer while doing good at the same time. Forget about 32-year-old white males for a while. See if you can't construct a story, or a whole series, that stars a middle-aged Asian woman, or a male immigrant from Bangalore. We're supposed to be science fiction and fantasy writers, aren't we? If we can come up with stories about methane-breathing creatures born on planets shaped like Jiffy Pop bags, you'd think we could meet this challenge.
Oh, you're asking what did I do to help the cause? I changed one white male to a white male-with-a-handicap -- excuse me, special needs -- and the other while male to a white Jewish male. How's that for diversity?
(I may be surly, but I'm not crazy.)
When Michael Cassutt calms down, he writes television scripts (most recently for Stargate SG-1), novels (Red Moon, Forge 2001) and even short stories. He lives and works in Los Angeles
lifted from http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/cassutt.html
I have a feeling that if a white male scriptwriter explains it, it will probably be more easily understandable for certain individuals. *
eta: james marsters on the same in buffy.
____________________________
*This isnt a statement of dislike of white men in general, of course. Some of my best friends are white people. And I dated a white guy once! And we're still friends. No really, honest.
I'm not lying! I really do have white friends! One of them is so close to me, I call her my yyytttt sister!