Today in The Times, Joseph Fried contributes this mildly intriguing piece about the city’s push to notch up the film crew opportunities available to women and minorities in New York. I say mildly intriguing only because that’s how I would describe any such story springing from the Point A of “journalist’s ass” and landing on the Point B of “NYT Metro desk.”
Not that I would insist women and minorities are not underrepresented among New York film crews, though the half-dozen or so film sets I have visited over the last few months incline me to believe government intervention may signal a slight overreaction. The basic point is that, like Fried, I do not know, and, unlike Fried, I am not going to waste readers’ time with abstract, pre-masticated PR bromides from horse traders like Dan Doctoroff to convince you otherwise.
Oh, hell–why not:

[The Bloomberg administration] is putting together what it calls a working group that “will have a goal of developing specific recommendations in six months” for increasing job and training opportunities in the industry for minorities and women, said Daniel L. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding. The group is to include representatives from production companies and labor unions. …

Mr. Doctoroff, in an interview, said the Bloomberg administration saw the planned group as a “joint effort with the Council.” But he and Councilwoman Letitia James of Brooklyn, the chairwoman of the Council’s task force, said it was not clear whether the task force would continue or would be subsumed by the new group. …

Mr. Doctoroff said it was too early to guess what steps the group on film and television production might suggest. …

Mr. Doctoroff said that given a lack of demographic data on the industry’s production ranks in the city, “I don’t think we know for sure” whether minority groups and women are seriously underrepresented. “But we believe we can do better,” he said, especially in relation to the higher-paying jobs in the industry. …

But Ms. James, whose district includes Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, said she had often heard “complaints that when you go to film locations, you see a paucity of women and people of color” in the production ranks.

Ms. James recalled that at the hearings, she asked the companies’ representatives “what statistics they had on the employment of people of color and women” in production jobs. “They said they didn’t know; that they don’t keep those numbers,” she recalled. …

Now, of course, production companies are required to file the totals of women and minority crew members on their sets when applying for the city’s generous industry tax credits. Which would be fine and dandy if only the city could establish control over the ratio of qualified crew of any sex or color to veteran Teamsters idly speckling the set like so much back acne. To wit, in his story’s only useful interview (tacked on at the end, natch), Fried gets NY Production Alliance board member Sylvia Kinard-Thompson to equivocate brilliantly:

[Kinard-Thompson] said minorities and women “absolutely are” underrepresented in the production ranks. But she said she found the unions to be “pretty responsive” to recent calls for change.

Ms. Kinard-Thompson said the underrepresentation was a legacy of “how the industry evolved,” with many people having had a leg up on finding their first jobs because their “grandfathers were in the union and their fathers were.” And on small productions that do not use union members, she said, “it’s still who you know” that often determines who works on a film.

Come on–all that stuff doesn’t really matter in the end. Just ask Dan Doctoroff.

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