I’m sure it’s not news to much of anyone here that Geena Davis has an idea for addressing the gender imbalance of characters, which is simply “cast more minor roles as women.” Not major ones, necessarily, though goodness knows more of those should be female characters, too. But, like, there’s no reason for Cop #3 to be male? Okay, make Cop #3 female. Or whatever. Obviously, the same could be done with ethnicity, disability, or whatever other group you’d like to have more representation. And then, as audiences get used to movie worlds that are populated with the same ratios as the real world, they’ll start wondering why the lead roles aren’t similarly apportioned, is the theory.
And that’s great, and I’m totally down with doing that. I don’t know if it’ll work the way she wants it to, but I think it’s a great idea. On the other hand, I think we can start at an even more basic level and really accomplish things. And that level is extras.
Obviously, you’d want to maintain a balance similar to whatever location you were setting your work in—around the Pacific Northwest, for example, that means fewer blacks and Hispanics and more Native Americans than it means back in LA. Though I’m fairly sure both places have fifty percent women, and the simple fact is that background groups in movies don’t. Apparently, audiences start feeling the women outnumber the men if the group is more than about thirty percent female, and that’s unsettling.
Yes, of course there are exceptions; yes, of course I’m not suggesting filling the background of a movie like The Shawshank Redemption with women and Hispanics and so forth. It’s set in a prison in Maine starting in the ’30s; I’ve always believed that it meant Morgan Freeman was miscast. (Though excellent, of course.) But honestly, how many movies does that excuse really fly with? A lot of movies have street scenes or other relatively neutral location shots. Start making the backgrounds really look like wherever-it-is. Women. Ethnic minorities. People of all ages. The occasional person in a wheelchair who isn’t Professor X. You can do this without changing anything else about your movie.
Will this work any more than the suggestion Geena Davis came up with? Who knows? I think there’s as much a problem with the ingrained culture as anything else. But it’s another one of those situations that’s a feedback loop. We expect things, and so they happen. And then we grow to expect them more. If you think a crowd should mostly be made up of white guys, something else would look weird to you, and the movie studios don’t want you thinking the background looks weird. They want you focusing on the film, though of course that can be a mistake! Still, about the only way to get a background scene that looks normal is to use real crowds, which has its own problems.
