Patterns of Bias in Hollywood Movies

Sound Bite

It's pretty broadly recognized that Hollywood movies contain patterns of bias, but it's not just people of color or women who are hurt by this. Hollywood movies contain many patterns of bias, and this is readily seen if you look beyond specific movies and conduct a broader review of motion picture content. Certain populations in America's multi-cultural society are consistently portrayed in negative or stereotypical manner, and these one-dimensional stereotypes continue to be pumped out, despite decades of efforts to secure more balanced, more accurate portrayals.

About the Book

Many groups within our multi-cultural society have complained over the years about negative and stereotypical portrayals of their own group members in motion pictures produced or released through the Hollywood-based motion picture studios. Yet, as an expert on the U.S. film industry points out, such complaints have had little impact on these consistent patterns of bias in movies.

Thus, this book takes a broader look at the nature of such negative and stereotypical movie portrayals and tracks such movie portrayals over a longer period of time. As a result, the patterns of bias in movies and the source of the problem become more clear.

The problem appears to be that most of the people who have the authority to 'green-light' the production and/or distribution of a motion picture, in the Hollywood-based U.S. film industry, share a common ethnic/religious/cultural background.

Thus, the stories of all other ethnic, religious and/or cultural groups in the U.S. (whose members seldom achieve positions of power in Hollywood) are being filtered through the cultural sensibilities of a single group.

John Cones shows that this lack of diversity at the top in Hollywood results in long-standing patterns of bias in motion picture content, and suggests that one obvious solution would lie in increasing diversity at the highest levels in the U.S. film industry.

Introduction

This book is dedicated to all of the women, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans, Christians, Muslims, Arabs, white Anglo-Saxons, Southerners and others who have been victims of Hollywood patterns of bias for some 80 years.