News Martin-Green: Star Trek And Diversity

Why not just have completely open casting for every role and hire the best actor for the job?

 

Rolls are more of a stuntman thing.

 

FWIW, that was one of the main characteristics of TOS. Still, there are limits, and notably because it's entertainment.

 

Your word in God's ear.

Good entertainment means dollars.

There is no ambiguity in what I wrote. But we all misunderstand some things from time to time. No reason to dwell on this.

 

Would that it were so simple.

Just to clarify, great entertainment has always meant dollars, even before diversity was a thing. What the studios are now learning is that a diverse cast can actually increase profits, not too mention that movies with all, or majority, minority, or female, casts can also be profitable.

 

As a liberal I hate to say it but in this case you really are seeing that old cliche of "Free Market solutions" actually working because diversity is profitable. Of course the other way of looking at is rich people getting rich off even richer people so what works in Hollywood will not influence issues in the rest of society. Somehow I don't think "Burger Kings" profits are going to go up or down on how diverse it's work staff is or whether or not the store manager might happen to be a creep.

Jason

 

Well, most people aren't going to notice the diversity level of the workers who make their food any more than they notice the child slavery behind their cheap clothes.

But a creepy manager definitely could hurt profits. Unless they're only ever creepy to the staff, that is.

 

That's what I meant. I mean I doubt most customer's ever really meet the store manager and even if you do it's just something your not going to focus on that much because you basically going to be in and out in 10 minutes and at worst you might think" The guy seemed like a asshole" and then you go about the rest of your day not thinking about it and that doesn't even deal with the fact that I suspect most people go through the drive-through nowadays anyways.

Jason

 

What are you talking about? Over the last several years, there have been multiple instances of diversity driving a movies' profits. You're naive if you think that studios don't consider how everything affects a movie or TV show's bottom line, including the gender and racial make up of the cast. If diversity wasn't also profitable, we would certainly not be seeing the same advances we're currently seeing.

Not sure of what any of this means or how it's germane to the topic at hand. We're discussing the entertainment industry, not the hamburger business.

 

I do agree that diversity is more profitable. I'm kind of confused. Did you think I said it was unprofitable? I was only saying that the quote of "free market solutions" isn't true for the most part of society. In Hollywood though it seems to work and I suspect it's because it's dealing with rich people dealing with other rich people.

As for the hamburger stuff that is a example though of the bigger issue that goes beyond Hollywood. I guess it's kind of off topic but I do find it interesting in looking at the issue of diversity in how impacts both the regular world as oposed to just the movie and tv business. Rich people really do live in a different world than everyone else and even when they face some of the same problems the way the deal with them are different from how everyone else in the world deals with them.

Jason

 

Because there's really no such thing as "the best actor for the job", at least not in a way that is unconnected to who the actor is. The best actor for the job is a reflection of what you want the character to be in the first place.

Personally I don't care if they cast people who are black, female, blue, or striped yellow and green, male, female or anything in between.

What bothers me when it comes to Discovery is that whatever the writing and casting process was, we wound up with a lead who frankly isn't very good actress playing a character who is terribly unlikeable. But that could have happened whatever the gender or colour was.

 

I think SMG is a good actor who is doing a okay job. A important thing to consider though is she wasn't the first choice. They wanted Rosario Dawson and nobody can deny they wouldn't have loved to seen that, happen. Then again the big star choice doesn't always work out. I thought Scott Bakula was going to be awesome on "Enterprise."
Name actors though is another factor in how blind casting can't always work because you will always have shows that want stars to bring in viewers and then you have creators who have actors they have worked with in the past and they want to work with them again. At this point is their a J.J Abrams project that hasn't had Greg Grunberg in it?

Jason

 

I couldn't disagree more.

Hmm. I'm in two minds about it. I think she would have been a better actress than SMG, though.

I never really saw him as a good choice. He has a very quiet "aw shucks" kind of personality which really doesn't work for a serious leadership role with me. A Starfleet Captain should have some personal charisma and dynamism to him/her/it.

But I always wrote that off as "Archer is the first Captain and Starfleet didn't really know what a Captain should be yet". A feature, not a bug!

Star casting is a double edged sword - you get a known quantity and an audience draw, but you pay a bigger wage bill to begin with.

I find it quite notable that Trek has generally avoided going for well known names in their crews. I think that's wise, and it's generally worked out well. Bakula was a mixed choice, and SMG is awful, though.

 

Actually they have gone for a name actor at times but I notice that many times they are the ones they put in alien makeup like Odo,Neelix,Phlox. Even Burton had the visor. I think only Picardo and and Bakula and Brooks were the ones who got to look human.

Jason

 

How do you know Tilly isn't bisexual? How do you know Lorca wasn't born a woman?

 

That is a somewhat valid point and it also shows that even though I am a liberal I still assume that everyone whose sexuality or gender identity is not explicitly stated is hetero or cis.

That being said these are not real people but rather fictional characters in a fictional universe and everything that is part of that universe was thought of and decided by the writers. Considering that Stamets' sexuality was already "revealed" by the writers before the show premiered and they didn't mention any other lgbt main characters it can reasonably assumed that (at least at this point in the creative process) there aren't any. Of course that does not mean that the writers might later change Tilly's currently only assumed sexuality or give us information on Lorca's childhood revealing that he is trans but I unfortunately doubt that will happen.

 

Because it's not on the screen.

A work should be judged on what is in it. To judge any work on the basis of what you imagine might be in it is absurd.

 

Why would a character's birth gender be of concern in the future? The trans person I knowingly know hasn't mentioned it for a decade, why would it come up in about 1 hour of dialog - most of which is war related?

 

I'm not saying it would be. What I'm saying is that if it's not mentioned or referenced in some way on screen, then it is unreasonable to assume that it is true of the work.

I mean, I could speculate that every member of the crew is a secret member of the Nazi party, and they're all just keeping it quiet. There is exactly as much evidence for that as there is that Lorca is trans, right?

 

A trans person's identity could be worked into a story organically and other stories have done it. It also doesn't need to have anything to do with how they are born since it's only cis people who are obsessed with any changes or what they were like at birth. Most trans people prefer to not refer to how they were before because many find it be a traumatic experience and it brings up painful memories. The quickest way to piss off a trans person is to ask about surgeries, their genitals or how they were born a man or woman. Transition is a brief period in their lives and doesn't really need to ever come up. But given the media's obsession with it, it's all that the general public seems to understand since it's an alien experience. For trans people, they were always the gender they identify as. But no one believed them. Saying "birth gender" is a meaningless phrase since we were already born our correct gender, only our body and people's view of us was wrong.

Also pretending a character is trans without any mention of it is still erasure since until we hear otherwise everyone just assumes they're cis. You might as well say Lorca could be a Cylon since he hasn't said he wasn't a Cylon. It's idiotic and insulting. "Look they could be trans. But we don't want to ever mention it because we have some bullshit explanation based on it being in the future." Imagine if Geordi didn't have the VISOR and we were never told he was blind or that Data was an android since he looked and behaved like any other human. We'd lose a lot of stories.

Just because you can't understand how to do a story doesn't make it impossible. Because I can think of several possibilities.