Pearl Street Films, the production company that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon founded, will now use inclusion riders on future projects.
Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Pearl Street Films’ head of strategic outreach, confirmed that it would use inclusion riders and praised Michael B. Jordan, who announced last week that his own production company would now adopt the policy.
https://twitter.com/fanshen/status/973374277792739328
According to Cox DiGiovanni, Affleck and Damon will also ask studios who produce films they act in (but don’t necessarily produce) to also use inclusion riders.
https://twitter.com/fanshen/status/973502029766291456
While some are applauding Affleck and Damon pushing for more inclusivity on their own projects, others may give them the side eye for their own roles and past comments and alleged actions on inclusivity and sexual harassment. Actress Hilarie Burton and makeup artist Annamarie Tendler have said that Affleck has groped them, while Rose McGowan has said that Affleck was lying about not knowing about what she says Harvey Weinstein did to her. Damon’s tone-deaf comments on sexual harassment in Hollywood have been met with backlash on more than one occasion, leading him to apologize. A clip of Damon explaining diversity to producer Effie Brown on Project Greenlight went viral back in 2015.
The move follows Frances McDormand’s call at the Oscars for actors to demand more inclusivity in front of and behind the camera. While the concept of inclusion riders has been around since 2014, it didn’t start to get widespread attention until McDormand’s Oscar acceptance speech—and even McDormand said that she only found out what inclusion riders were a week before winning her Oscar.
“There has always been available, to everybody that does a negotiation on a film, an inclusion rider, which means that you can ask for and/or demand at least 50 percent diversity in not only the casting but also the crew,” McDormand explained to reporters on March 4. “And so the fact that I just learned that after 35 years of being in the film business… we’re not going back.”
H/T the Hollywood Reporter