Hollywood actress Geena Davis is pioneering software that will monitor and rate films and TV show for their diversity content.
The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media is collaborating with Google and the University of Southern California School of Engineering to screen how much women and people of color are represented on film. The new software, which is being launched later this month, will scan content and scripts to supply diversity scores for movies and TV shows.
The diversity ranking system, reports Fusion, is comparable to the Human Rights Council’s Consumer Equality Index. The software will be trialed at the 2017 Bentonville Film Festival, run by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which openly seeks to increase diversity in film.
Films selected for Davis’s Bentonville Film festival will be those which have a high diversity ranking according to the software. Officials with the festival will analyze whether the more diverse films fare better with judges and audiences, and hope to make the point that diversity on film can be good business.
Davis was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars two decades ago following performances in Thelma and Louise, The Fly and A League of Their Own. But her career slumped following flops such as Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight. She played the first female president on TV in ABC’s 2005 drama Commander in Chief, but the show never got a second series.
In the last few years, Davis has devoted herself to the issue of diversity. In addition to her institute and film festival, she currently is producing a documentary on what she believes is rampant gender inequality in Hollywood.
Trevor Drinkwater, the director of ARC Entertainment which pioneered the software with Davis’s institute and co-founded the festival, said: “This tool will allow us to automatically take a movie or TV show and automatically spit out how many men and women are in the film in speaking roles.”
“Our point of view is that the more gender-balanced and diverse your content is, the more commercial it will be…our approach is to provide information to decision makers. We hope this will influence people to create better content,” Drinkwater told Fusion.
Fusion also reports that caveats are already dogging the project. The software is said to be unable to analyze off-screen diversity like who directed, produced or wrote a film or show.
Or indeed who monitors a film…