Litigators

Any Other Lawyer Pretend They Knew What Frances McDormand's 'Inclusion Rider' Was Last Night?

I played it cool at the Oscar party, but then I had to actually look up what the hell she was talking about.

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Frances McDormand gave the most inspiring speech by an actual crazy person when she accepted her best actress Oscar at the Academy Awards last night. At the end, she exhorted all of her colleagues to include an “inclusion rider” in their contracts.

Around non-lawyers, I pretended I knew what she was talking about. After all, I know what both “inclusion” and “rider” mean, and that’s not nothing. But, this morning I went searching for what specific rider McDormand was talking about.

The Washington Post solves the mystery:

An inclusion rider is a stipulation that the minor roles of a film reflect the demography of where the film takes place, including a proportionate number of women, minorities, LGBTQ individuals and people with disabilities. Big name actors who have leverage in negotiations could put this stipulation into their contracts and drastically change representation in film.

The idea was developed by Stacy Smith, founder and director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, and drafted with Kalpana Kotagal of the law firm Cohen Milstein and the producer and actor Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni.

Well, that sounds neat. I do think that Hollywood’s relentless representation of whiteness as the default race makes Americans think that America is whiter than it is. I always notice when “movie New York City” demographically looks like Worcester whilst actual New York City looks like the rave scene in the Matrix Reloaded.

Kalpanan Kotagal sounds like the only actual lawyer who helped write the model contract position, so we asked her how should got hooked up with these Hollywood types:

Anita Hill, who is Of Counsel at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, introduced me to Stacy because she knew that this was something about which we are both very passionate. Stacy and I, along with Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni at Pearl Street Studios, have been working on this for more than a year.

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Anita Hill is just out here living her best life, y’all.

Kotagal gave a full interview to the National Law Journal back in November about how the inclusion rider came to be.

I asked Kotagal about adoption rates of the rider:

Because much of the industry has only started to hear of this in the last few months, it’s too early to think of this in terms of adoption rate thus far. Obviously, the #MeToo and #TimesUp movement have generated a groundswell of support around this and we hope and expect that, over the next few months and beyond, it will become widely used.

Well, a shout-out in an Oscar acceptance speech should raise awareness of the provision even more.

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In other news, the Splash Reboot won for best picture.

What is an inclusion rider? Explaining Frances McDormand’s call to action at the Oscars. [Washington Post]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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