The
Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) has released the Executive
Summary of the 2011 Hollywood Writers Report:
Recession and Regression. The study examines
writers' employment and earnings by ethnicity, gender, and age from
2008 through 2009 in the motion picture and television industry. As
in previous years, diverse writers face significant obstacles to
employment in Hollywood.
According to
the report's author Darnell Hunt, Ph.D., director of the Ralph J.
Bunche Center for African American Studies and professor of
sociology at UCLA, "From the initial project pitch to project
completion, each phase of the production pipeline has the potential
to serve as a barrier to or facilitator of increased diversity
among industry writers. The WGAW is committed to working with the
rest of the industry to ensure that the production pipeline is
shaped less by the former and more by the latter. Diversity is not
a luxury, not even in tough times. The Hollywood industry, in the
final analysis, depends on increasingly diverse audiences and on
the stories to which they can relate."
Read
more here.