“For all the lip-service that Hollywood pays to diversity, a new video series demonstrates just how far the movie industry has to go.
In the above supercut entitled “Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in The Fault in Our Stars,” all of the dialogue from non-white characters in last year’s smash teen romance is spliced together. How long is the resulting montage? About 40 seconds and it consists entirely of scenes of Hazel’s physician Dr. Maria. The video is just the latest in a new series created by an actor and writer named Dylan Marron. The videos highlight the lack of meaningful dialogue said by people of color in multiple well-regarded films — including many that Marron himself quite enjoys. So far, he has edited hits like(500) Days of Summer, Frances Ha, and American Hustle. None of the videos last more than 55 seconds.
Ironically, it took the best run of success in Marron’s young career as an actor and writer for him to realize that, as a queer person of color, a fair shake would be extremely hard to attain. Marron, a 27-year-old biracial native of Venezuela who grew up in New York City, is a star of the uber-popular podcast Welcome to Night Vale, has a starring role in a national ad campaign for TD Bank, and was recently was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his play The Human Symphony. Marron spoke with Yahoo Movies about how he got the idea for the video series and what he hopes to accomplish with it.
So when and where did this idea originally come from?
About a year and a half ago — my theater group, the New York Neo Futurists, does a lot of short, short pieces. Our signature weekly piece is 30 plays in 60 minutes. I was on the plane coming back from a gig in LA, and I watched the movie Enough Said, and I was just like, “Wow, this is so unaware of itself. The only person of color in this movie is a maid, and the storyline is that her employer think she’s a bad maid.”
It’s just a very peripheral plot line. There’s no importance given to her, and this was so clearly written by someone who doesn’t interact with any people of color unless they’re staff..”
https://www.yahoo.com/movies/every-single-word-spoken-by-a-person-of-color-122760221847.html
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