Search results for casting

We have posted in the past about the controversy surrounding the casting of the movie The Last Airbender. Many fans of the original series were upset that Asian characters were recast as White, with the main cast initially containing no non-White characters at all. This fits in with a more general lack of Asian main characters in Hollywood.

More recently, a different controversy about race and casting emerged when African American British actor Idris Elba was cast as the Norse god Heimdall in Thor, though this character was always White in the comic book series.

Anthony N. sent in a video by MovieBob at The Escapist that discusses concerns over race in casting Thor and why recasting a White character with a non-White actor doesn’t have the same implications as recasting a non-White character with a White actor does:

,/p>

“You can’t be taught the skills to model, because first and foremost, skill doesn’t matter.  It’s all in the jeans genes.”

So notes a shirtless man, a self-described “male mannequin” in commercials for Next Top Model in Vietnam:

My sociological knee-jerk reaction is to point to the ways in which models’ labor is deliberately rendered invisible, masking performance as mere appearance, in much the same way social categories are naturalized to appear like states of being instead of products of social organization — think gender, ethnicity, class, and yes, beauty.

As concerns the category of beauty, there is considerable work involved in pulling it off.  Like retail service workers, models do “aesthetic labor,” as documented by sociologists Elizabeth Wissinger and Joanne Entwistle and more recently by Christine Williams and Catherine Connell.  Aesthetic labor is the work of manipulating one’s physique and personality to embody a company brand.  In the modeling market, some people easily have that physique, as the shirtless guy claims to have, but most models have to fight for it, and they’re fighting against the clock of aging.  If they don’t have to work for cut abs and narrow hips, they most likely still feel compelled to work at it, given the rampant uncertainties facing them in their daily grinds of auditions and rejections.  All of this work gets carefully tucked behind the scenes of fashion and beauty images — a clandestine world NTM purports to expose for voyeuristic consumers around the world.

But instead of exposing it, the NTM franchise caricatures it.  In the American version, Tyra Banks insists that effort is everything, and she axes candidates left and right because they didn’t “want it badly enough.”  She just didn’t work hard at it, goes the usual dismissal, or she lacked the determination to keep smiling when Jay Manuel told her that her face is weird.  It’s not that you’ve got the wrong look, the show tells contestants, but that you didn’t put in the work to get the right one.  NTM sticks close to an individualistic ethos:  if you fail, it’s because you lacked the individual effort needed to succeed.

Success in any culture industry is a mix of both hard work and the luck of being the “right” contender at the right moment, which is somewhat arbitrarily decided in any given fashion season.  Saying that success is “all in the genes” renders the “look” into a natural state of being, when like all culture industries, modeling is a complex social production.

Saying it’s all in the jeans is also pretty funny.  Let’s not overlook this guy’s self-deprecating humor:  here’s a man surrendering himself (and his manhood) to the whims and preferences of fashion, an industry widely believed to be controlled by women and gay men.  In other ads he mocks his talent and wryly notes the biggest hazard in his line of work: wearing leopard print g-strings (to say nothing of occupational challenges like the precarious nature of freelance labor, the lack of health and retirement benefits, or the unpaid labor of castings and magazine shoots).  What’s most striking about this guy and his seductive black-and-white commercial is not the sociological back story, it’s his own silliness.  He’s playing on the ironic gap between social expectations of masculinity and the realities of being featured as a passive visual object.  We probably wouldn’t be so charmed if the commercial featured a young woman laughing about her job title: “I’m a professional model!”  We’d probably roll our eyes.  The source of that silliness—unequal cultural expectations about the display value of men and women—is as problematic as it is good fodder for comedy.

Ashley Mears is a former model and current Assistant Professor of sociology at Boston University who is doing fantastic work on the modeling industry.  In her book, Pricing Beauty: Value in the Fashion Modeling World (UC Berkeley Press), she examines the production of value in fashion modeling markets.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Sometimes we save up submissions on a particular topic so we can show several examples at once. And today, ladies and gents, I thought I’d present a few items that, to greater or lesser extent, glamorize brutality toward women or use images of dead women as props. Yes, I know — happy day!

On the less graphic end of the scale, way back in June 2010, Rei sent in these two trailers for the A&E show The Glades, where women exist just as props who manage to remain sexy, despite the deadness:

And some time ago Stefan Mesch, who writes for Die Zeit, let us know about the promotional website for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, Imperial Bedrooms. The website includes an interactive game where you’re a casting director and interact with a young woman who wants a part. From the homepage:

So theoretically, you have a choice — you can “exploit your position” or “do the right thing,” which presumably means not degrading or using a woman just because you can. But as Stefan explains, the options in the game are actually quite limited:

The game gives you options to talk to (and “encourage”) her, but they all lead to abuse, sexual harassment…The game rewards you for harassing the girl, and you’re supposed to drive up your personal score of “evil” by making her submit as much as possible.

Here are your first set of options:

I selected “encourage her.” The game then plays out a few seconds of dialogue and then leads to a second decision point, where I have these choices:

At least the first time I had one option to be a decent human being, other than not hiring her at all. I suppose that, in theory, giving someone booze might be a nice thing to do, but I think in this situation, probably nothing good can come of it. I selected that option; the director encourages her to drink when she doesn’t want to, and to drink more than she wants to. And then…

The “make her strip” option isn’t quite as bad as it might seem; when I chose it, she takes off her cardigan, but nothing else. At that point I felt like I’d pretty much gotten the point of the game, and wasn’t particularly interested in exploring how much of an asshole I could theoretically be, so I quit.

But both of those pale in comparison to our finale, readers. Dmitriy T.M. and Hope H. told us to check out Kanye West’s video for “Monster,” in which, among other things, Kanye casually rearranges the lifeless bodies of two women in bed with him:

Images of dead-looking women’s bodies appear throughout the video (which also features Jay Z and Nicki Minaj). I’m putting the rest of the images after the jump, as they might be particularly upsetting to some readers:
more...

On today’s SportsCenter, ESPN closed out showing their “This is SportsCenter” commercials. As described on ESPN’s official YouTube, “This is SportsCenter” channel:

This is SportsCenter is the name of a series of comical television commercials run by ESPN to promote their SportsCenter sports news show. The ads are presented in a deadpan mockumentary style, lampooning various aspects of sports, and sports broadcasting. The commercials debuted in 1994.

As of tonight (December 24, 2010), ESPN’s YouTube channel profiles 77 of these short videos. Not every “This is SportsCenter” commercial is profiled, but I’m just going with what is up on this page now as the sample data set. I generally enjoy these commercials. Many of them are witty, and they are all short (around 30 seconds). Here are a few examples:

As can be seen, the commercials typically profile a famous athlete and/or a SportsCenter anchor, and on occasion a non-sports-related celebrity (e.g., Richard Simmons). In examining what athletes the commercials profile on ESPN’s YouTube page, a highly predictable trend emerges. Here are the individual athletes the commercials profile (note: when no athletes are profiled and only anchors, gender of anchors profiled noted instead):

1. Dwight Freeney (football; male)
2. Derek Jeeter (baseball; male)
3. Floyd Mayweather (boxing; male)
4. Tim Lincecum (baseball; male)
5. Wayne Gretzky (hockey; male)
6. Dwight Howard (basketball; male)
7. David St. Hubbins (musician; male)
8. Arnold Palmer (golf; male)
9. Oregon Duck (football; gender neutral)
10. Usain Bolt (track & field; male)
11. Larry Fitzgerald (football; male)
12. Matt Ryan (football; male)
13. Brett Favre (football; male)
14. Adrian Peterson (football; male)
15. Joe Mauer (baseball; male)
16. Adrian Peterson (football; male)
17. Manny Ramierz (baseball; male)
18. Josh Hamilton (baseball; male)
19. SportsCenter Anchors (all male)
20. Jimmie Johnson (car racing; male)
21. SportsCenter Anchors (all male)
22. Manny Ramirez (baseball; male)
23. David Ortiz & Jorge Posada (baseball; male)
24. David Wright (baseball; male)
25. Chad Ochocinco (football; male)
26. Chad Ochocinco (football; male)
27. Ladanian Tomlinson (football; male)
28. Chad Ochocinco (football; male)
29. Tony Romo (football; male)
30. Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, & Ray Allen (basketball; male)
31. Michael Phelps (swimming; male)
32. Ladanian Tomlinson (football; male)
33. Jim Kelly (football; male)
34. Dale Earnhardt Jr. (car racing; male)
35. Chad Ochocinco (football; male)
36. Stephen King (writer; male)
37. Michael Phelps (swimming; male)
38. Jimmy Rollins (baseball; male)
39. Richard Simmons (fitness pro; male)
40. Maria Sharapova (tennis; female)
41. Steve Smith (football; male)
42. Jose Reyes (baseball; male)
43. Pat Summit (basketball; female)
44. Dale Earnhardt Jr. (car racing; male)
45. Carmelo Anthony (basketball; male)
46. Chris Paul (basketball; male)
47. Keyshawn Johnson (football; male) & Kobe Bryant (basketball; male)
48. “Moving the Franchise” (all male anchors)
49. “Yahtzee” (male anchors)
50. Kerri Strug (gymnastics; female)
51. “Talent Search” (male anchors)
52. Globetrotters (basketball; male)
53. Dan O’Brien (track & field; male)
54. “Journalistic Integrity” (male anchors)
55. “Sportscaster Celebrities” (male anchors)
56. “Live on the Set” (predominantly male anchors; female anchor at end)
57. Michael Andretti (car racing; male)
58. Gordie Howe (hockey; male)
59. “Reading Lips” (all male anchors)
60. “Makeup Buddies” (all male anchors)
61. “Athletes Bribing” (multiple male athletes from different sports)
62. George Mikan (basketball; male)
63. Mary Lou Retton (gymnastics; female)
64. “Tour” (all male anchors)
65. “One Track Mind” (predominanty male anchors; female anchor at start)
66. “Shoot” (female anchor)
67. “Paws” (all male anchors)
68. “Serious Journalism” (all male anchors)
69. “Write Your Own Stuff” (all male anchors)
70. “Sweet Science” (predominantly male anchor; short appearances by a female anchor)
71. “Potty Talk” (male anchor)
72. “Memories” (all male anchors)
73. Keshawn Johnson (football; male) & Kobe Bryant (basketball; male)
74. Glenn Robinson (basketball; male)
75. Barry Melrose (hockey; male)
76. Landon Donovan (soccer; male)
77. Jimmie Johnson (car racing; male)

When going through the data set, we find that out of the 77 commercials, women only appear 8 times (10.4%), in some cases in relatively peripheral roles. When looking specifically at athletes, only 3 female athletes are profiled, all 3 of whom represent historically “acceptibly feminine” sports: Mary Lou Retton and Kerri Strug (both gymnasts) and Maria Sharapova (tennis). One commercial profiles Pat Summit, the famous women’s basketball coach from the University of Tennessee. All other commercials featuring athletes have males.

Examining the content of the commercials is also important. For instance, the commercial with Sharapova clearly relies on Sharapova’s status as a femininized beauty figure in athletics. And while all the commercials are “presented in deadpan mockumentary style,” the humor clearly calls upon dominant notions of heterosexual masculinity — take for example the commercials that mock femininity among males, such as those in which the male anchors share makeup and mock Richard Simmons as a conditioning coach.

The trends shown here are highly predictable. It is hardly surprising that males are over-represented numerically in the commercials, both as athletes and anchors. Likewise, it is unsurprising that the humor utilized in these commercials so often mocks femininity among males in the sporting world or uses female athletes as sexualized figures.

What we see here in ESPN’s “This is SportsCenter” commercials is the typical way that gender is constructed in sport — patriarchy is reified within an institution historically reserved for heterosexual males.

———————————–

David Mayeda is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at Hawaii Pacific University.  His recent book publications include Celluloid Dreams: How Film Shapes America and Fighting for Acceptance: Mixed Martial Artists and Violence in American Society.  He also blogs at The Grumpy Sociologist.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Latoya Petersen at Racialicious highlighted an interesting campaign ad. Funded by Citizens Against Government Waste, it features a future in which China has succeeded the United States as the world’s super power. It is supposed to frighten the reader by forecasting a world in which China rules America (cue ominous music and satisfied evil chuckling).

What is interesting to me is the assumption that drives the commercial: that the U.S. should be a super power, that it is naturally so (so long as it sticks to its founding principles), and that it would be wrong for China to be more powerful than the U.S.   The idea that self-satisfied Asian people would be in charge adds racist oomph to the threat.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Please welcome Guest Blogger Ashley Mears.  Mears is a model-turned-sociologist who is doing fantastic work on the modeling industry.  In her forthcoming book, Pricing Beauty: Value in the Fashion Modeling World (UC Berkeley Press), she examines the production of value in fashion modeling markets.  When Osocio‘s Tom Megginson forwarded us a link to a trailer for a new documentary on the topic, Picture Me, we turned immediately to our resident expert.  We’re so pleased that she agreed to share her thoughts.

———————————

Picture Me documents ex-model Sara Ziff’s 4-year rise and exit through the fashion modeling industry.  It sets out to expose the grit behind the glamour, chronicling models’ exhausting work and travel schedules, warped body images (include hints of anorexic and bulimic practices), debt to agencies, innocent youth and the attendant vulnerability to sexual predatory clients.  It is a long, wandering complaint of the industry, and in the end, Ziff equates all bodywork with exploitation and dismisses modelling work as cheap thrills—albeit emotionally costly ones.

While critical of the industry, the film glamorizes what it supposedly condemns, most insidiously by portraying Ziff’s meteoric success as normal for a model.  Twice the camera zooms in on the many digits of her paychecks.  As her co-filmmaker/boyfriend Ole Schell wryly notes, “It’s not everyday you see a check for $112,000.”  This is especially the case, they should add, for most working fashion models.  As a winner-take-all market, modelling is extremely unequal; very few women reach this kind of success.  At any given modelling agency, in fact, dozens of women owe significant debt, an issue far more complex—and exploitive—than the moments it gets in Picture Me.  Models accrue debt for start-up costs advanced by their agencies, from plane tickets and visas to pocket money and apartment rent in an agency-owned apartment (to the tune of about $250 per week to stay regardless of how full or vacant its state).  They are charged anywhere from $5 to $50 for bike messengers to deliver their portfolios across town daily.  These costs are not negotiable or traceable; they are deducted automatically from her future earnings.  And they add up; at one New York agency I studied, a model was in the hole up to $18,000 even before stepping foot into her first casting audition.  To recoup their losses, agencies count on the top 5% of their models who bill more than $100,000 annually, people like Ziff who are statistical anomalies in their field.

A model who leaves an agency with a debt is legally bound by contract to repay it, though accountants will tell you that they don’t bother to pursue these debts, since indebted models are an unlikely source from whom to recoup losses.  Instead, agencies write off negative accounts as business expenses.  However, models’ negative accounts will by law transfer to their next agencies should they attempt to work elsewhere, which is unlikely as agencies are hesitant to represent models with existing negative balances from prior agencies.  In other words, once in debt, everywhere in debt.  It is an independent contractor status designed to alleviate the organization’s responsibility for its worker, pushing all market risks onto the freelancer in a work relationship that can resemble indentured servitude.  Thus, Ziff sits at the top of the pile, nonchalantly waving a wad of cash in her hand that masks a precarious career structure in which, for every Sara Ziff, there are thousands of women struggling to make ends meet.

———————————

Another telling omission in the film is men.  Ziff’s accusations of systemic sexual abuse are distressing, and something I heard all too commonly in interviews with models—male models, that is.  I found women were far less likely than men to recount ordeals of sexual advances by clients.  There are a couple of explanations for this discrepancy.  First, it is likely that female models may not report or even recognize as report-worthy sexual advances by men, given the ubiquity of sexual harassment women are likely to face on any job.  Second, the filmmakers seem to have encouraged their subjects to recount their ordeals in confessional-style video diaries, a technique quite different from open-ended interviewing.

Also likely, I think male models do experience more unwanted come-ons than female models.  In an industry over-represented with gay men in decision-making positions, male models report feeling pressure to flirt with men in order to book jobs.  Male models earn considerably less than their female peers, making each job more important to them, and their agents often instruct them to charm important clients.  It’s referred to jokingly in the industry as going “gay for pay,” similar to male porn actors who do gay sex scenes to boost their earnings.  Male models do not as a population identify as gay, but it’s widespread and openly acknowledged that straight men must flirt shamelessly with gay clients to get work.  As one male model told me, “Everyone has to play his cards.”

But it’s not a game to the men I interviewed who told horror stories of such performances turning into threatening situations.  Men reported being “felt up” by stylists while dressing, told to wear revealing clothes, or no clothes at all, and being kissed and hugged by prestigious clients at parties.  One model described how, on a shoot with a male photographer, he was asked to make himself semi-erect.  This is not to downplay women’s encounters with sexual harassment in the industry, but to note that all models are relatively powerless in this market, and given the sex composition of those in power, male models are especially vulnerable.

Picture Me revolves around shocking personal narratives, and as a biting (and I think unfair) NY Times review notes, the filmmakers go straight for the easy critiques at the expense of their social context.  It’s hard to contextualize economics, gender and sexuality, and a complicated career structure in a 75-minute documentary, especially when stomach-turning confessionals and eye-catching runway pictures are so readily available.  And this is what sociologists are for anyway.

For more of Mear’s insights on the modeling industry, see our posts on the contrasting aesthetics of high end and commercial modeling, the ugly other side of the model search, and control and thinness.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Deepa D. sent in an interesting post from Racebending about the race/ethnicity and gender of stars who get top billing in Paramount movies. Three volunteers at Racebending analyzed relevant data on movies produced or distributed by Paramount Pictures since 2000, as well as those currently in development. They focused on top billing — that is, which stars are most frequently highlighted in promotional materials, whose names appear highest in the credits, and so on. This both reflects power and status in Hollywood (the more prestige you have, the higher you’re likely to be credited compared to lower-status stars with similar screen time) and contributes to it (higher billing leads to more exposure and attention. Racebending explains:

Various types of Credit include Main Title Credit (before the movie starts), End Title Credit (after the movie is over), Paid Advertising Credit (mention during commercials and publicity), Above-the-Title Credit (name shows up on top of the movie name in promos and on screen), and Billing Block Credit (the block of text on posters and trailers.)

Their methodology:

For our review, we simply looked at which actor is listed first on imdb.com. Even if several actors have received top billing or above the title billing, someone is always listed first…

Our review of actors in top billing was necessarily subjective, but the cultural ethnicity and gender of most of Paramount’s top-billed actors like John Travolta, Angelina Jolie, and Samuel L. Jackson are well established in the public sphere. For animated characters like Shrek the Ogre, Spongebob Squarepants, and Eliza Thornberry we looked to the gender and ethnicity of the voice actor. We simply tallied the first actor billed, (for example: Malin Ackerman in Watchmen, Chris Pine in Star Trek, Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears, Jamie Foxx in The Soloist, Noah Ringer in The Last Airbender.)

The analysis found that the vast majority of top-billed stars in Paramount films from 2000 to 2009 are male, while movie audiences are about 45% male:

An even higher proportion — 86% — of top-billed stars are White (the green bars show each groups percent of the overall U.S. population):

The category White there specifically includes White non-Hispanics. No Latinos had top billing in Paramount movies during this time period. Also,

Out of 133 movies either produced or distributed, 17 had a black lead actor and only one had an Asian actor–Parry Shen in the film Better Luck Tomorrow (2002). However, Paramount did not produce Better Luck Tomorrow, the company distributed the film to theaters after the film made the independent film circuit.

When the data are broken down by race/ethnicity and gender, we see that the vast majority of top-billed stars who are non-White are men. Non-White women are almost entirely shut out:

The chart on the right represents films currently under development. While Whites predominate in the starring roles in these projects, notice that White women make up only 6% of top-billed stars, and non-White men make up about twice that proportion.

This is, of course, just one studio. If you have links to similar data on other studios, or on movies more generally, send them in!

Related posts: the Bechdel test, the real stars of Glee, underrepresenting women in Hollywood, the Smurfette principle, whitening Heroes, White actors in yellowface, casting cheat sheet, Hollywood’s discomfort with Asian lead characters, race in Transformers II, gender in Pixar films, racist Disney characters, and the gender hierarchy in Bee Movie.

Dmitriy T.M. reminded me of this classic performance of the song “America” from a classic American musical, West Side Story (1961; it won 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture).  The song features white New Yorkers and Puerto Rican immigrants debating about the benefits of living in America.  The “streets paved with gold” mythology is articulated by the women at the same time that the white men remind them that they face racism and poverty.

Also, Rita Moreno is awesome:

UPDATE: Commenter Jesse W. says,

…as a theater nerd, I wanted to point out it’s not a debate between white New Yorkers and Puerto Ricans, I think you just get that impression from the bad casting. They’re all supposed to be Puerto Rican; it’s more of a battle of the sexes between the men who wanted to stay in the old country and the women who wanted to come to America.

And Laura says,

…the women are arguing with the men that America is great, and they prefer it to Puerto Rico, and the men are arguing that America is racist and oppressive.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.