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      in Movies

      Study Finds Sustained Progress for Female Directors and Filmmakers of Color

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      But women of color are still not getting feature directing jobs in Hollywood, the annual report on top-grossing movies finds.For the first time in a long time, Dr. Stacy L. Smith is feeling optimistic. The director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has been studying the gender and race breakdown of Hollywood’s top-grossing directors since 2007, and finally has some good news to report. For the first time since her work began, Smith has seen sustained progress for women and people of color working behind the camera.Over the 15 years of the study, which analyzed 1,542 directors, only 5.4 percent were women. In 2020, that percentage rose to 15 percent and in 2021, it stood at 12.7 percent. Despite that recent drop, and despite the fact that the proportion is nowhere close to reflecting the American population, which is 51 percent female, Smith is encouraged that the numbers have stayed in the double digits for a sustained period of time.“I think that the people that are running these large companies that are largely responsible for about 90 percent of the market share are finally starting to diversify,” Smith said in a phone interview. “And we’re not only seeing this with gender, we’re also seeing big gains with race/ethnicity in the second year of the pandemic. Despite the uncertainty around the box office, there seems to be a concerted effort to correct the biases of the past.”The news comes the day after “The Power of the Dog” director Jane Campion made history, becoming the first woman to be nominated twice in the best director category for the Academy Awards. (She was previously nominated in 1994 for “The Piano.”)When it comes to underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, which includes Black and Latino filmmakers, the percentage of directors reached a 15-year high: 27.3 percent. The group with the least amount of traction directing features are women of color, who still make up only 2 percent of the total.“When Hollywood thinks of a woman director, they’re thinking of a Caucasian woman, and when they think of a person of color directing, they’re thinking about a male,” Smith said, pointing to the fact that female directors of color earn the highest reviews according to Metacritic yet most often are given lower production budgets and fewer marketing dollars from their studio beneficiaries.To address this disparity head on, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative is starting a $25,000 scholarship program for a woman of color during her senior year at an American film school. In addition to the financial aid, the winning student will be advised by a group of Hollywood executives and talent, including Donna Langley, the chairman of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, and Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, among others.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      in Theater

      Los Angeles Is Changing. Can a Flagship Theater Keep Up?

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      LOS ANGELES — For 55 years, the Center Theater Group has showcased theater in a city that has always been known for the movies. Its three stages have championed important new works — “Angels in America,” “Zoot Suit” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” to name three of its most acclaimed offerings — while importing big-ticket crowd pleasers from Broadway (coming this spring: “The Lehman Trilogy”).But this Los Angeles cultural institution is at a crossroads as it goes through its first leadership change in 17 years, and confronts questions about its mission, programming and appeal in a changing city, all amid a debilitating pandemic.Michael Ritchie, the organization’s artistic director, announced last summer that he would retire nearly 18 months before his contract ended in June 2023; he stepped down at the end of the December, citing the need for the organization to move in a new direction in response to social changes and debate about the theater’s future. The organization, which is a nonprofit, is using the transition to consider how to adjust to what is sure to be a very different post-Covid era — a sweeping discussion that theater administrators said would involve some 300 people, including its board of directors, staff, actors, director and contributors.“At the age of 50, you start to think about the next chapter,” said Meghan Pressman, the managing director of the Center Theater Group. “There’s so much happening now. Coming out of a pandemic. Coming out of a period of a racial crisis. Years of inequity.”“We are no longer your mother’s C.T.G. anymore,” she said.The obstacles are considerable.The Ahmanson Theater, in downtown Los Angeles, had to cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” in December.Ryan MillerLike theaters everywhere, Center Theater Group — the Ahmanson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center downtown, and the Kirk Douglas Theater 10 miles to the west in Culver City — is grappling with empty seats, declining revenues and the coronavirus. The Ahmanson cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” with Bradley Whitford in December, canceling 22 performances after positive coronavirus tests in the cast and crew at the height of what in a normal year would have been a holiday rush.The cancellation cost the Center Theater Group $1.5 million in lost revenues, including ticket returns. That came after the organization was forced to make millions of dollars in spending cuts over the course of the pandemic, cutting its staff to 140 this season from 185 and reducing its annual budget to $47 million for this fiscal year, $10 million less than the budget for the fiscal year before the pandemic.And the theater group is struggling to adjust to sweeping reassessments of tradition that have emerged from social unrest across the country over the past two years. It was reminded of this new terrain by the uproar that greeted the announcement of a 2021-22 season for the Taper and the Douglas, 10 plays that included just one by a woman and one by a transgender playwright. Jeremy O. Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” which was on the schedule, announced that he would withdraw his play from the season before agreeing to go forward only after the Taper pledged to program only “women-identifying or nonbinary playwrights” next season.The Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture since the Mark Taper Forum, above, and the Ahmanson opened in 1967 at the Los Angeles Music Center.Tom BonnerThe Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture for decades.It “is still the flagship theater company of L.A.,” said Stephen Sachs, the co-artistic director of the Fountain Theater, an influential small theater on the East Side of the city. “I think it’s at a moment of reckoning, like everything that is theater in Los Angeles. The C.T.G. is the bar that we compare ourselves to. They set a standard for L.A., not only for ourselves but for the country.”The Music Center, the sprawling midcentury arts complex on top of Bunker Hill, across from Frank Gehry’s billowing Walt Disney Concert Hall, is at the center of cultural, arts and society life in Los Angeles. The project was driven by Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the cultural leader who was the wife and mother of publishers of the Los Angeles Times, and also houses the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which was the site of the Academy Awards off and on from 1969 to 1999. “Before the Music Center, it was really a cultural wasteland,” Marylouise Oates, who was the society columnist for the Los Angeles Times in the late 1980s, said, referring to the city.Theaters across the country are struggling to find the balance between pleasing and challenging their audience as they confront declining ticket sales and the threat of competition in the form of a screen in a living room. Theater here has also long existed in the shadow of Hollywood, to the annoyance of those involved in what is by any measure a vibrant theater community.“I don’t see how anyone can say it’s not a theater town,” said Charles Dillingham, who was the managing director of the Center Theater Group from 1991 through 2011.The Kirk Douglas Theater, in a former movie palace in Culver City, opened in 2004.Craig SchwartzFor its first 40 years, the theater group’s personality — adventurous and daring more often than not — was forged by Gordon Davidson, who was recruited by Chandler to be the first artistic director at the Taper. He was of a generation of force-of-nature theater impresarios, like Joseph Papp in New York and Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis.“I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper. “I’ll never forget Gordon sitting down, taking out his buck slip and saying, ‘What do you need?’”The Taper opened with the “The Devils,” by the British dramatist John Whiting, about a Catholic priest in France accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun. The subject matter caused a rustle, but Chandler, who died in 1997, stood by Davidson.“She wasn’t always happy,” said Judi Davidson, who was married to Gordon Davidson, who died in 2016. “She said, ‘I’ll make a deal with you. You tell which plays I should come to and which plays I shouldn’t come to.’ ”The Taper staged “Zoot Suit,” by Luis Valdez, in 1978, a rare production of a work by a Latino writer, which went on to Broadway; as well as a full production of both parts of “Angels in America,” by Tony Kushner, in 1992, before it moved to Broadway. “I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper.Jay Thompson In recent years, the theater has come under criticism for too often catering to an older audience hungry for the comfort of familiar works. Still, under Ritchie, who declined a request for an interview, it presented the premieres of acclaimed works, including “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” which had its world premiere at the Douglas before moving to the Taper.Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” said the Center Theater Group had responded quickly when he objected to the overwhelmingly male lineup of writers. “When I raised my issues and pulled my play, they didn’t act defensively,” Harris said. “They acted. Other places would have let the play move on and figure out a way to blame me.”The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

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      in Theater

      Control of New York’s Stages Remains in White Hands, a Study Finds

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      The Asian American Performers Action Coalition is hoping for a season of change when theaters reopen.As New York’s theaters prepare to reopen following the twin crises of a pandemic and rising discontent over racial inequity, a new study which found that both power and money in the theater world have been disproportionately controlled by white people is calling for “a fundamental paradigm shift.”The study, by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition, found that at the 18 major nonprofit theaters examined by the group, 100 percent of artistic directors were white, as were 88 percent of board members. On Broadway, 94 percent of producers were white, as were 100 percent of general managers.The study offers a direct challenge, not only to theater leaders, but also to those who fund the institutions, saying, “it remains to be seen whether or not the multitude of antiracist solidarity statements and pledges to diversity will result in real action and systemic change.”“Our expanded leadership stats confirm that almost every gatekeeper, employer and decision maker in the NYC theater industry is white,” the coalition declares in a letter introducing the study.They examined the 2018-19 New York theater season — the last full season before the pandemic — looking at every Broadway show, as well as the work of the nonprofits.The coalition called particular attention to a dearth of shows about Asian Americans. “Even as the industry has made small gains in diversity in recent years, particularly at the nonprofits, our work at AAPAC has shown that Asian-focused narratives remain consistently minimized and overlooked,” the report says.Among the other findings:Using publicly available tax forms, the coalition calculated the public and private contributions to nonprofit theaters, and said that $150 million went to the 18 big nonprofits in the city that it referred to as “predominantly white institutions,” compared with $12.6 million to 28 theaters of color.At the theaters studied, 59 percent of roles went to white actors, compared to 29 percent for Black actors, 6 percent for Asian American actors and 5 percent for Latinos (the coalition uses the gender-neutral term Latinx).Creative teams were less diverse, with 81 percent of writers being white, along with 81 percent of directors and 77 percent of designers.The report gave grades to individual theaters, and declared the Public Theater to be the most diverse, and the Irish Repertory Theater to be least diverse.The intense focus nationally on diversity issues has prompted an increase in research about race, gender and disability within the theater industry. A coalition of groups doing such research, called Counting Together, formed in 2019, and this month introduced the CountingTogether.org website, hosted by the Dramatists Guild and the American Theater Wing, to make the research more readily available. More

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      in Music

      New Report Paints Bleak Picture of Diversity in the Music Industry

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      The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative examined 4,060 executives at six types of companies, and found 19.8 percent were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.A year ago, as protests spread across the country following the murder of George Floyd, the music industry promised to change.Major record labels, streaming platforms and broadcasters pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable donations. The diversity of the music industry itself — a business that relies heavily on the creative labor of Black artists — came under scrutiny, with calls to hire more people of color and to elevate women and minorities into management and decision-making positions.But how diverse is the music business? The answer, according to a new study: not very.A report by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, released Tuesday, examined the makeup of 4,060 executives, at the vice president level and above, at 119 companies of six types: corporate music groups, record labels, music publishers, radio broadcasters, streaming services and live music companies.Among those executives, 19.8 percent were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, including 7.5 percent who were Black. Women made up 35.3 percent of the total.Delving deeper into the numbers, the authors of the 25-page report, led by Stacy L. Smith and Carmen Lee, found that the representation of women and minorities seemed to shrink as they looked higher up music companies’ organization charts.After filtering out subsidiaries, the researchers looked at the uppermost leadership positions — chief executives, chairmen and presidents — in a subset of 70 major and independent companies, and found that 86.1 percent of those people were both white and male. The 10 people of color who held those positions were all at independents, and just two were women: Desiree Perez, a longtime associate of Jay-Z who leads his company Roc Nation, and Golnar Khosrowshahi, the founder of Reservoir, which owns music rights.The report includes some stark findings. For example, among the 4,060 people in the study’s sample, the researchers found 17.7 white male executives for every Black female one.“Underrepresented and Black artists are dominating the charts, but the C-suite is a ‘diversity desert,’” Dr. Smith said in a statement. “The profile of top artists may give some in the industry the illusion that music is an inclusive business, but the numbers at the top tell a different story.”Each year since 2018, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has tracked the artists, songwriters and producers behind the biggest hits. Again and again, it has found that women are far outnumbered by men, yet revealed some encouraging numbers for underrepresented groups: People of color have made up about 47 percent of the credited artists behind 900 top pop songs since 2012.Yet the group’s new report, called “Inclusion in the Music Business: Gender & Race/Ethnicity Across Executives, Artists & Talent Teams,” and sponsored by Universal Music Group, shows that women and people of color are poorly represented in the power structure of the industry itself.The variation across different job levels and industry sectors is notable. Black executives fared best within record labels, making up 14.4 percent of all positions, and 21.2 percent of artist-and-repertoire, or A&R, roles, which tend to work most closely with artists. Black people hold just 4 percent of executive jobs in radio, and 3.3 percent in live music.According to U.S. census data, 13.4 percent of Americans identify as Black.Women posted their highest executive numbers in the live music business, holding 39.1 percent of positions. But drilling down, the study found, most of those women were white. Even at record labels, where Black executives were best represented, Black women held only 5.3 percent of executive jobs.The U.S.C. report is one of a number of efforts underway to examine the music industry and evaluate its progress in reaching stated goals of diversity and inclusion. This week, the Black Music Action Coalition, a group of artist managers, lawyers and other insiders, is expected to release a “report card” on how well the industry has met its own commitments to change.Much of the data used in the U.S.C. report, the researchers said, came from publicly available sources, like company websites. The report suggests that a lack of participation in the study by music companies was a reason.“Companies were given the opportunity to participate and confirm information, especially of senior management teams,” the report says. “Roughly a dozen companies did so. The vast majority did not.”The authors of the report, who also include Marc Choueiti, Katherine Pieper, Zoe Moore, Dana Dinh and Artur Tofan, said they want to spur the industry toward change. The report recommends a number of steps that companies can take to make their executive ranks more diverse, including making career pathways more flexible and “fast tracking” leaders with support and mentoring.“Our hope,” Dr. Lee said, “is that the industry will come together to tackle this problem in a way that creates meaningful progress.” More

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      in Music

      Want More Diverse Conductors? Orchestras Should Look to Assistants.

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      At top American ensembles, young assistant conductors are a far more varied group than the reigning music directors. How can the next generation come to power?It is one of the indelible star-is-born moments in music history: Leonard Bernstein, the 25-year-old assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, fills in at short notice for an ailing maestro and leads the orchestra in a concert broadcast live over the radio, causing a sensation.“It’s a good American success story,” The New York Times wrote in an editorial, following a front-page review of the 1943 coup. “The warm, friendly triumph of it filled Carnegie Hall and spread over the airwaves.”Fifteen years later, Bernstein was the Philharmonic’s music director. And the dream of ascending from the assistantship of a major American orchestra to its leadership — like rising up a corporate ladder — was cemented in the popular imagination.There are still assistant conductors, bright, talented 20- and 30-somethings hired by orchestras for stints of a few years. Indeed, there are more of them than ever, and they go by a variety of titles: assistant, associate, fellow, resident. Almost every major orchestra has at least one, and they still fill the traditional duties of Bernstein’s time: sitting in the concert hall during rehearsals to check balances and mark up scores; conducting offstage groups of musicians for certain pieces; and, of course, being ready to take the podium in case of emergency. But it is rare to see them ascend to the top jobs.And that may be a missed opportunity. When Marin Alsop steps down from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra this summer, it will leave the top tier of American ensembles as it was before she took the post in 2007: without a single female music director. This group has had only one Black music director, and just a handful of leaders have been Latino or of Asian descent.Yue Bao, the conducting fellow at the Houston Symphony, will make her debut with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival this summer.Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York Times“It’s been a paternalistic industry to some degree for a long time,” Kim Noltemy, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s chief executive, said in an interview. “In the last 20 years it’s changed quite a bit, but there’s lag time for the top-level leadership, whether it’s management or conductors.”But it is a very different story when you look at the country’s assistants, a far more diverse group in which women and musicians of color have found success in recent years.Now there is a chance for those assistant conductors to become more than just another set of ears in a darkened auditorium. They provide an opportunity to fast-track greater diversity at historically slow-evolving institutions. The question now is how soon they will enter the topmost ranks — and whether, as major orchestras search for music directors in the coming years, they will look toward the crowd right under their noses.“It’s great to have a BIPOC assistant conductor,” said Jonathan Rush, the assistant conductor in Baltimore, who is Black, referring to the acronym for Black, Indigenous and people of color. “To have that in place is awesome. But there are still not many opportunities for you to be that person that a younger musician can look up to. Yes, I get education concerts, they’re awesome, but we would have greater impact if we were music directors.”As community engagement and outreach efforts have broadened nationwide, and become more central for leading orchestras, many assistants have added those activities to their portfolios, too. And during the coronavirus pandemic, when many artists abroad were grounded, some assistants took on new prominence. Vinay Parameswaran, the Cleveland Orchestra’s associate conductor, who had spent a few years mainly doing family concerts and leading the ensemble’s youth orchestra, unexpectedly found himself conducting multiple major programs on Cleveland’s subscription streaming platform.Vinay Parameswaran, the Cleveland Orchestra’s associate conductor, got higher-profile assignments during the pandemic. Gabriela Hasbun for The New York TimesThe differences between the assistant ranks of the top 25 American orchestras and those orchestras’ music directors can hardly be overstated. The Dallas Symphony, for example, has had three assistants since 2013, all women; one of them, Karina Canellakis, is now the chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic. Both of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s conducting apprentices since 2015 have been women. In that period, the Minnesota Orchestra’s assistants have been Roderick Cox, one of the few Black conductors appearing with leading orchestras and major opera houses, and Akiko Fujimoto, who became the music director of the small Mid-Texas Symphony in 2019.Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who was a conducting fellow and then an assistant conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has become a star, leading the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in England and making recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. Gemma New, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s resident conductor until last year, is now principal guest conductor in Dallas and led the New York Philharmonic’s Memorial Day concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.But there are still pervasive, sometimes pernicious assumptions about what a music director must look and act like — who can hobnob with donors, who can help sell tickets. And, Bernstein’s model aside, there is no clear pipeline from assistantships to directorships at top American orchestras, the way there are at many corporations.Of the current music directors in the top tier, only a handful started as assistants at the kind of orchestra they now lead. (And, in a sign of how insular this world is, two of that handful, Michael Stern, now in Kansas City, and Ken-David Masur, in Milwaukee, are the sons of musical royalty, the violinist Isaac Stern and the conductor Kurt Masur.)Andrés Orozco-Estrada, now the Houston Symphony’s music director, is the rare conductor to live the Bernstein dream, but he didn’t do it in the United States: He was an assistant at the Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna in the early 2000s, then rose a few years later to become its principal conductor. (European orchestras have trailed American ones in codifying assistant programs; the traditional conductor career path in Europe, especially German-speaking countries, goes through opera houses, not symphonies.)Stephanie Childress, the St. Louis Symphony’s assistant conductor, made her debut leading the orchestra in April.Dilip VishwanatThe experience paradox is part of the problem. Top orchestras demand their conductors be seasoned, particularly if they’re going to appear on prestigious subscription series. But if you don’t already have that experience, it’s hard to get it.“There are some people who are professional assistants, basically, or just they go from assistantship to assistantship,” Stephanie Childress, the St. Louis Symphony’s current assistant, said, pointing to the sense that some talented artists just cycle within those ranks without rising further.But orchestra officials insist that things are changing, accelerated by the jolt of the pandemic and the calls over the past year for greater racial and ethnic diversity.“The way it’s always been is all being rethought now,” Noltemy said, adding that resistance has been wearing down among players and listeners. “‘The orchestra won’t accept it; the audience won’t accept it’ — that has been completely deconstructed.”There are ways of increasing the chances of today’s assistants becoming tomorrow’s music directors. Orchestras could deepen their investments in their assistant programs, adding positions to broaden the pool of talent getting experience and exposure. There should be a greater commitment to giving assistants slots on subscription programs as part of their contracts; this is one Covid necessity that could fruitfully outlive the pandemic.Ensembles should make a point of looking to other organizations’ assistants when hiring for gigs. That does happen sometimes: Yue Bao, currently the conducting fellow at the Houston Symphony and a major presence in that orchestra’s streaming over the past year, will make her debut with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival this summer.Matías Tarnopolsky, the chief executive of the Philadelphia Orchestra, said he would like to see a kind of consortium program that could rotate assistants among several top institutions, giving them broader experience. “Could a conducting fellowship be multiensemble,” Tarnopolsky said, “either within the U.S. or around the world, bridging symphony and new-music ensemble? Then you really expand the learning.”The pandemic has transformed Jonathan Rush’s time as an assistant conductor. “It’s definitely been different,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have gotten as much podium time. I’ve gotten to conduct the orchestra every single week.”Nate Palmer for The New York TimesAnd if a young conductor has a success, let it snowball. In Baltimore, Rush appeared just before the pandemic as part of the orchestra’s Symphony in the City series, and was then asked to join its next assistant conductor audition, planned for June 2020.That audition was canceled as the virus spread, but in July, Rush got another call. “Hey, listen,” he recalled the orchestra saying, “the musicians keep raving about your work in February, and we would like to invite you to be assistant conductor for the 2020-21 season.”“It’s definitely been different,” Rush added of assisting during the pandemic, which has included regular work with the orchestra’s streaming programs. “But I wouldn’t have gotten as much podium time. I’ve gotten to conduct the orchestra every single week. ”Ensembles should have a plan for continuing relationships with their assistants as those young conductors move on. Marie-Hélène Bernard, the chief executive of the St. Louis Symphony, said the organization had made a commitment to invite Gemma New every season as a guest conductor now that her resident contract is over.“For her, we have a trusted relationship,” Bernard said. “She can step outside of her comfort level and take musical risks she might not take with other orchestras she hasn’t yet visited. Nurturing is not just for the time she’s here with us.”Ruth Reinhardt, an assistant conductor in Dallas, drew raves when she jumped in for an ailing maestro. “Hopefully as we get older,” she said, “we’ll move up the ranks.”Sylvia ElzafonThis is the work that can help turn the encouragingly diverse landscape of assistant conductors into the future of the country’s top music directorships. “Getting a replacement for Marin isn’t even a tipping point,” Noltemy said, referring to Alsop’s departure from Baltimore. “The tipping point would be a significant number of women in positions in the top orchestras in the U.S.”But the field will not get there without taking risks. Ruth Reinhardt had just started as an assistant in Dallas in 2016 when she was tapped to jump in for a subscription program, replacing a veteran conductor who’d suffered a stroke. Scott Cantrell, the Dallas Morning News critic, raved: “Few artistic experiences are as exciting as witnessing a brilliant debut by a young musician.”It worked for Bernstein; we’ll see if it works for this new generation. “When I started conducting 15 years ago or so,” Reinhardt said, “people would openly tell you that you couldn’t do this as a woman. And things are changing. The jobs are more available. Hopefully as we get older, we’ll move up the ranks.” More

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      in Movies

      Disney Creates a ‘Launchpad’ for Underrepresented Filmmakers

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      This collection of short films streaming on Disney+ shows promise, if the studio can follow through on its support.Can truly radical programming come from Disney? I was skeptical from the moment I heard about “Launchpad” (streaming on Disney+), the studio’s new initiative to support and uplift underrepresented filmmakers. Historically, Disney hasn’t had a strong track record for representation (well, which Hollywood studio has?). In fact, it recently added disclaimers about racist stereotypes in old films from its streaming library, including “Dumbo” and “Peter Pan.” Efforts for inclusivity only really ramped up in the last few years, and even so, they have not been without missteps — the live-action “Beauty and the Beast,” for example, hyped up Josh Gad’s Le Fou as Disney’s first gay character, only to make his queerness insultingly ambiguous and brief. More

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      in Music

      The Face of Solo Guitar Is Changing. It’s About Time.

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      Since the heyday of John Fahey, the genre has been seen as the province of white men. A new generation of diverse players is rapidly changing that.Before Yasmin Williams became a teenager, she found her perfect sport: “Guitar Hero,” the dizzying video game where aging rock staples enjoyed an unlikely second life through players wielding plastic controllers fashioned after vintage Gibsons.Williams’s parents purchased the game for her two older brothers, but the suburban D.C. family soon realized she was the household champion. “They would try to beat me,” Williams said on a recent afternoon in the sunroom of her grandmother Marsha’s home, near where she grew up. “But they couldn’t.”More than competition, “Guitar Hero” represented a revelation for Williams. Though she was often the only Black student in her public-school classes, she didn’t know the Beatles, let alone heavy metal, existed before the game. She cut her teeth on her father’s vintage go-go tapes and her brothers’ hip-hop CDs. Williams loved the clarinet, but she wondered if she could make more exciting music if she had an ax like her onscreen idols.“That guitar was the first thing I ever really begged for,” Williams said, and she received a red electric Epiphone SG. “Once I got it, I never played the game that much. The guitar took up all my time.”More than a decade later, Williams, 25, is one of the country’s most imaginative young solo guitarists. Released in January, her second album, “Urban Driftwood,” represents a clear break with the form’s stoic, folk-rooted mores. On her grandmother’s porch, she laid a gleaming acoustic guitar across her jean shorts and hammered out rhythms with her wrist while picking iridescent melodies with her fingers. Wearing a collared cotton shirt and matching bow tie so bright they conjured an exploded dashiki, she reached for a West African kora and beamed. The notes from its 21 strings floated like bird song.“Music should be enjoyable — at the end of the day, that’s what I really care about,” she said. “I want it to be something you can listen to, remember, hum.”Williams’s radiant sound and adventitious origins have made her a key figure in a diverse dawn for the solo guitar. Long dominated by much-mythologized white men like John Fahey, the form’s demographic is slowly broadening to include those who have often been omitted, including women, nonbinary instrumentalists and people of color. These musicians are paying little mind to the traditional godheads. They are, instead, expanding the fundamental influences within solo guitar, incorporating idioms sometimes deemed verboten in what was once a homogenized scene.These players are empowered by online access to fresh inspirations, compelled by current debates about equity and inclusivity and enabled by digital avenues of distribution that circumvent longtime gatekeepers. As this music moves beyond the realm of obscure collectors, its audience and attention have grown, prompted by the possibilities of players who sound as different as they look.“I always saw music as this democratic, horizontal realm, but 99.9 percent of the guitarists I saw were white dudes,” said Tashi Dorji.Clark Hodgin for The New York Times“It’s mostly young men who have been the market and the marketplace,” the Portland guitarist Marisa Anderson said recently. “But I am not going to spend my days focusing on masculinity and patriarchy. I am going to carry on, doing what I know how to do.”This enclave is teeming with new faces and novel ideas. In the Southern Appalachians, Sarah Louise uses her 12-string to shape mystical paeans to salamanders, floods and frogs. In Brooklyn, Kaki King — for two decades, one of the few popular solo guitarists who wasn’t a man — taps and slaps strings to make music as ornate as a healing crystal. In Madrid, Conrado Isasa embeds his acoustic hymns within romantic electronic hazes.Even avowed Fahey acolyte Gwenifer Raymond is compelled by the change. “My entire bloody career has been founded by dudes,” she said, guffawing in her apartment in England. “Representation matters — that’s just true. The music can only get more interesting.”SINCE THE START of Fahey’s record label, Takoma, in 1959, the history of solo guitar has been astonishingly pale.Fahey was the patriarch for a cadre of stylists — Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke, Sandy Bull — who assimilated the exotic-to-them styles of the Deep South, India and Africa into discursive instrumentals. Takoma released some albums by Black artists, and Fahey helped revive the careers of forgotten blues artists like Bukka White.But his career often mirrored that of Elvis in its unabashed exploitation of music that Black and rural people made as a way of life. A child of the suburbs, Fahey attributed portions of his first album to Blind Joe Death, as though from the Delta himself. He spun tall tales about learning the blues from a Black man he christened with a racial slur. And he brandished the marketing tag American Primitive, suggesting the folk styles he lifted were compelling if not sophisticated. It is the “noble savage” of acoustic guitar.Decades later, modern solo guitar labels often linger in such shadows. Since 2005, the label Tompkins Square has surveyed the landscape with an ongoing series of compilations titled “Imaginational Anthem”; released between 2005 and 2012, the first five volumes spotlighted less than 10 women or people of color despite featuring 60 players. (Recent editions have been decidedly more inclusive.) After almost three dozen titles, VDSQ has released just four titles not made by white men; the label’s owner Steve Lowenthal said that, after not receiving demos from women or people of color for half a decade, he’s finally getting them.“I’m so used to white men, it’s like wallpaper,” Raymond said. “When you do encounter another woman playing guitar like this, you want to hang out.”Before the modern music market existed, however, the guitar was far more inclusive. In 18th-century Europe, it was one of the few instruments deemed acceptable for women. In the United States near the end of the 19th century, the diminutive parlor guitar became a necessity for women entertaining guests. Born around then in North Carolina, Elizabeth Cotten — a Black woman who literally turned the guitar upside down — helped pioneer the slowly loping style that became Fahey’s calling card. A recent compendium in the globe-trotting series “The Secret Museum of Mankind” even juxtaposes century-old recordings from India, Italy, Greece and Ghana, reiterating how many traditions have shaped the guitar’s development.Tashi Dorji, however, knew nothing about this pan-cultural pedigree. Raised in Bhutan, the small Himalayan nation landlocked by China and India, he understood the instrument as the domain of “endless English and American men,” like Eric Clapton and Eddie Van Halen. Those were the licks he started to learn on the nylon-string guitar his mother purchased from a Swiss expatriate.After Dorji moved to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains in 2000 to attend college, he immersed himself in radical politics and bellicose metal. When he learned about free improvisation, he felt like he’d found an outlet for expressing these nascent ideals. He was stunned to discover, though, that an idiom rooted in rejecting conventions was dominated by people who resembled elected officials.“I always saw music as this democratic, horizontal realm, but 99.9 percent of the guitarists I saw were white dudes,” Dorji said from his home outside of Asheville, where he lives in a mountainside cluster of artists and activists.In his music, Dorji has found his rebellion; it grabs at melodic or rhythmic fragments only to grind them into dust. His 2020 debut for Drag City Records, “Stateless,” is a series of suites for improvised acoustic guitar that culminates with “Now,” a pair of frantic improvisations that steadily stabilize, as though Dorji has found his utopia. Released in September, it struck a clear chord during a season of upheaval, selling out of its first edition in less than a month.“I wanted to use the guitar to interrogate structures of oppression,” Dorji said. “I forced myself to think of it as an act of radical, anarchic expression.”“I don’t want my music to be limited by being the ‘Black guitarist,’ but somebody had to start doing something,” Williams said. “With all the horrible stuff in 2020, it seemed like it was time.”Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesRachika Nayar also found herself clutching a guitar while surrounded by a sea of whiteness. Raised by two Penn State professors who moved to the United States from India, Nayar was “pretty isolated, the only brown kid in a small town.” When she was 11, she picked up the guitar and spent hours in her bedroom every day, practice taking the place of solitary hobbies like whittling and rock collecting.She loved emo’s empathy and punk’s power, plus the “School of Rock” soundtrack. The imagination of jazz, though, spoke to her as a manifestation of oppressed individuality. She marveled at the way the self-taught guitarist Wes Montgomery used his thumb instead of a pick to create a distinct tone. “I realized how generative it is to lean into your idiosyncrasies,” Nayar said.Nayar released her first album, “Our Hands Against the Dusk,” in March. She wrote many of its eight instrumentals by finding a guitar phrase she liked, electronically mutating it and pitting the warped sound against the original. It feels as though the instrument is searching for its essence.When Nayar was a kid, the gadgetry to make such music might have been prohibitively expensive. Now, as a trans Indian American person, Nayar equates the ability to shape her music however she sees fit to her own self-discovery.“It’s a feeling of something rising up inside of me,” she said. “That’s a moment queer people can relate to, when you realize you don’t have to live a certain way.”For Anderson, the Portland musician, exploring the guitar mines a related sensation. She started learning classical guitar when she was 10, eventually gaining what she called an “athletic fluidity.” At 50, Anderson still loves practicing. But she didn’t release her solo debut until she was in her late 30s, so she’d abandoned any impulse to impress.“There is a flash of recognition, and then it is gone,” Anderson said, explaining how an emotionally resonant moment of music might spawn a piece. “It feels like something locking into place, like a cog in a wheel. I’ll obsessively try to get back to that place, where that sound made almost religious sense.”First reluctant to make records, Anderson realized that any label interested in her music would be small, with modest profits and demands. That would allow for “a healthy separation between my music and the marketplace,” she said, noting that her elliptical songs begin as private reflections.“I am not hiding from myself when I am playing alone at home,” Anderson said. “What comes, comes.”IN ENGLAND, RAYMOND does not shy from the impact Fahey had on her life.As a kid in Wales, she started writing blues instrumentals after Nirvana led her to Lead Belly. When her guitar teacher handed her a Fahey LP, she felt validated. Released on Tompkins Square, her 2020 album, “Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain,” is one of the most bracing recent bits of Fahey reappraisal, his grace supercharged by her punk-rock past. “He is almost, by definition, my mean uncle figure,” Raymond said.Raymond is also a video game programmer with a doctorate in astrophysics, so she is accustomed to fields dominated by men. But their historic grip on power is glacially loosening in all these realms, guitar included.“The fear of traditional roles is disappearing,” she said. “This is one effect.”Williams is beginning to accept her role in that deliberate revolution. At the start of her career, she ignored how different she looked from fellow artists and her audience. But she wrote and recorded much of “Urban Driftwood” amid Covid-19 lockdowns, while protests against racial violence roiled. After Williams marched in Washington last summer, she wrote the album’s finale, “After the Storm.” Darkness lingers at its edges, but the sun slinks through the center in the form of Williams’ chiming strings. The moment of respite recognizes how much work remains.“I don’t want my music to be limited by being the ‘Black guitarist,’ but somebody had to start doing something,” she said. “With all the horrible stuff in 2020, it seemed like it was time.”Since Williams released “Urban Driftwood,” nearly every interviewer has asked about Fahey’s formative influence. She proudly tells them she learned about him only recently and she has no guitar heroes. The guitarists she watched most as a kid played in the band of D.C. go-go god Chuck Brown, or maybe Jimi Hendrix.Williams picked up one of her 11 guitars — a harp guitar, where bass strings poke diagonally from the guitar’s small body. She put it on her lap and flew through a flurry of heavenly notes, each low throb lingering as her fingers licked the high strings. It wasn’t the proper technique, she explained, but it worked.“This is why I love the guitar,” she said, looking up to smile. “You can just do whatever you want.” More

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      U.S. Lawmakers Suggest 25 Movies About Latinos to the Film Registry

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyU.S. Lawmakers Suggest 25 Movies About Latinos to the Film RegistryBy diversifying the films added to the national registry, members of Congress hope that more opportunities will open up for Latinos in Hollywood.Salma Hayek during the shooting of “Frida“ (2002), which is on the list of the caucus’s nominees.Credit…Miramax FilmsMarch 8, 2021The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is continuing work it started in January, when it nominated the movie “Selena” for the National Film Registry, with a list of 25 more films it would like to see the registry add.The movies nominated by the caucus last week are from as early as 1982, and they also include films like “Spy Kids” (2001), a comedy featuring a Latino family, and “Frida” (2002), an Oscar-winning movie about the artist Frida Kahlo. The registry typically adds new movies in December.“It is essential that the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry reflect the true diversity of American culture,” the chairman of the caucus, Representative Raul Ruiz, a Democrat from California, said in a statement. “Including more Latino films in the National Film Registry will help elevate Latino stories, promote an inclusive media landscape, and empower Latino filmmakers and storytellers.”Established by Congress in 1988, the registry preserves films that it deems “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Each year, a committee selects 25 films to add.“The Library of Congress is grateful for the nominations from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and for their interest in the National Film Registry,” Brett Zongker, a spokesman for the Library of Congress, said in a statement, adding, “The registry seeks to ensure the preservation of films that showcase the range and diversity” of America’s film heritage.Latinos make up the largest minority group in the United States, at 18.5 percent of the population. But they continue to be underrepresented in films and on television. A 2019 study from the University of Southern California’s School for Communication and Journalism found that only 4.5 percent of all speaking characters across 1,200 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2018 were Latino.Of the nearly 800 films in the registry, at least 17 are examples of Latino stories. The number of Latino directors in the registry is tiny: There are 11. Of them, nine are men and two are women.Representative Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from Texas, led the move for nominations. Latino creators and their stories are often pushed away by gatekeepers of American culture, like Hollywood and the national registry, Castro has said. He added that Latinos are often portrayed negatively in all media — as gang members, drug dealers or hypersexualized women.In a letter to the Librarian of Congress, Castro and Ruiz wrote that such misconceptions and stereotyping in media are significant factors “motivating ongoing anti-Latino sentiment in American society,” affecting areas “from immigration law to the education system to the current public health crisis.”The caucus’s list was developed through feedback from constituents, and movies were also identified by, among others, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, the National Hispanic Foundation of the Arts, the National Hispanic Media Coalition and the Latinx House (which uses a gender-neutral term for Latinos).“Our stories have often been missing from American film, and even less often been recognized as important cultural pieces in American history,” Castro said in a phone interview. “This is an effort to change that.”The 25 films the caucus chose reflect stories from a variety of nationalities, including Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Colombian, Argentine, Salvadoran and Nicaraguan.The list speaks to many parts of the Latino experience, including people who are native to the United States and its territories and those who migrated to the country because of its politics and interventions in Latin America, Theresa Delgadillo, a Chicana and Latina studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview.“It is an important way to influence that diversity effort in an industry,” Delgadillo said about the caucus’s effort.She and other professors, though excited about the effort, were also critical of the list, because, they say, there were few stories about Latinas and L.G.B.T.Q. people. AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More