Actress Eva Longoria lamented that a white man can direct a major blockbuster flop and still get another picture while women like her cannot.
The former Desperate Housewives star made her pronouncement during her Kering Women in Motion talk at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. She had been reflecting on her experience directing the movie Flamin’ Hot, an American dream story about the Frito-Lay janitor who invented the popular Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
“We don’t get a lot of bites at the apple,” Longoria told Variety chief correspondent Elizabeth Wagmeister. “My movie wasn’t low budget by any means — it wasn’t $100 million, but it wasn’t $2 million. When was the last Latina-directed studio film? It was like 20 years ago. We can’t get a movie every 20 years.”
“The problem is if this movie fails, people go, ‘Oh Latino stories don’t work…female directors really don’t cut it.’ We don’t get a lot of at-bats. A white male can direct a $200 million film, fail and get another one. That’s the problem. I get one at-bat, one chance, work twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as cheap,” she added. “You really carry the generational traumas with you into the making of the film. For me, it fueled me. I was determined.”
Longoria had been joined by USC Annenberg professor and researcher Dr. Stacy L. Smith, who praised the actress-turned-director for pushing diversity in entertainment and “walking the walk.”
“This was a collaborative effort to reward folks that are doing well on-screen when it comes to representation across multiple categories: gender, race, ethnicity, LGBTQ+ as well as people with disabilities and over the age of 65,” Smith said. “Are we showing the stories that aren’t told? And then who is working behind the camera?”
“The metric in which you measure success is important,” Longoria responded, adding that studios will make tiny gestures like adding more women behind the camera.
“They’ve gone from one to two. And you’re like, ‘Okay, technically, you did, but you still only hired two women.’ So, how you measure success is really important. And inclusion being that metric is so awesome because you can applaud the people who are doing it right,” she said.
Longoria concluded with a call for Hollywood to aim for the Latino audience more.
“28% of ticket buyers at the box office are Latino,” she said. “Your film will not succeed if you don’t have the Latino audience. Do you know how many Latinos showed up for ‘Crazy Rich Asians’? Do you know how many Latinos bought a ticket for ‘Fast and the Furious’? We over-index at moviegoing, so why shouldn’t there be content for us if we are the ticket buyers? If we are the viewers? … For me, I take great pride in throwing around that buying-power weight. If you don’t speak to us, we may not buy that movie ticket.”
“We’re still underrepresented in front of the camera, we’re still underrepresented behind the camera, we’re still not tapping into the females of the Latino community,” Longoria added. “We were at 7% in TV and film, now we’re at 5%, so the myth that Hollywood is so progressive is a myth when you look at the data.”
Longoria’s lamentation about white men getting to direct a blockbuster following a flop echoes sentiments that were expressed after director Ava DuVernay’s disastrous A Wrinkle in Time bombed in the box office.
“It’s important to note the ludicrously unfair burden that Wrinkle was saddled with as soon as DuVernay signed on and turned protagonist Meg into a biracial girl: It had to be both artistically dazzling and a commercial hit in order for it to be considered any kind of success. Grossly put, the ‘system’ was rigged against it,” wrote Inkoo Kang of The Hollywood Reporter (THR) at the time.
Paul Roland Bois joined Breitbart News in 2021. He also directed the award-winning feature film, EXEMPLUM, which can be viewed on Tubi, Google Play, YouTube Movies, or Vimeo on Demand. Follow him on Twitter @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.