Skin — the Movie and the Obstacle

"The “invisible art” of film distribution wields significant power when it comes to who and what we see in cinemas. And some believe that distributors are still reluctant when it comes to promoting black stars in leading roles in an industry lagging far behind television and theatre — with black women faring worst.

It isn’t easy being a distributor. Profits from cinema showings alone can be elusive — the average cinemagoer visits only 2.7 times a year — and predicting how a film will perform is risky. According to the Film Distributors Association (FDA), a quarter of all British cinema tickets are sold in London, a multicultural city where ethnic minority groups make up more than 30 per cent (compared with 13 per cent in England as a whole), according to 2006 projections from the National Office of Statistics. In an increasingly mixed society keen to break down barriers, shouldn’t there be more enthusiasm for diversity in film?

“You’ve got to look at the actor, what they’ve done and their bankability,” says a spokesman for Icon, a mainstream distributor. “It’s not about colour but quality of film for UK audiences. It’s just a shame there are not enough black stars; it would be great to see more. We don’t shy away from that. But we don’t make the films. The exhibitors simply want a product that’s going to sell. US imports like Will Smith and Denzel Washington — we don’t really have an equivalent. The closest we have is Noel Clarke with Kidulthood and Adulthood, which have done extremely well. But perhaps they are the exception.”

Marcia Williams, a former barrister-turned-head of diversity for the UK Film Council, says that all groups in the industry are guilty of what she terms “the cut-throat defence”: recognising that there is a problem but passing the blame elsewhere. “The script writers say ‘we write the characters and then we hope the casting director will engage’. Then the casting director says ‘it’s up to the director’,” she says. She adds that casting directors for Dirty Pretty Things, Stephen Frears’s 2002 film about the seedy underworld of illegal immigrants, were approached to change the main character (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, now one of the most bankable black actors in the UK) from Nigerian to Eastern European.

“All along the line we’re still having these tussles with the financiers,” Williams says. “There’s a climate that black characters and black talent won’t sell and ‘as financiers we’re constrained’. Distributors aren’t completely undiverse; there are still problems in the wider marketplace, people feeling like it’s harder to sell black talent.”

While black actors such as Ejiofor, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Paterson Joseph, Idris Elba and Adrian Lester continue to gain prominence and critical acclaim in television and theatre, some, such as Elba, have complained publicly about having to move to the US to find more diverse and leading roles. The industry is also accused of failing to publicise black actors, creating a vicious circle in which, less well-known to audiences, they become viewed as a harder sell."